a larger good, so be it—all the better to justify the deed.
Tonight the stage featured an even more eclectic mix of instruments than it had the night before. Here, amid the drum kit, keyboards, turntables, bass, and guitars were a fiddle, dulcimer, Dobro, and a washtub bass—all affixed with pickups and jacked in to the main system. The musicians were mostly men, but it was a dreadlocked woman at the turntables who addressed the crowd through an ear-clip microphone. “How we feeling tonight?”
The crowd answered: cheers, clapping, a whistle from somewhere in the back. I heard it all clearly through my earplugs. The little foam cones were designed to suppress high-powered ballistics. They did not block sound. The woman’s voice came through clear but muted.
“You ready to bring out Bobbie?”
More cheers.
“All right, then! Let’s do it with this.” The LED lamp on her headband cut a streak in the air as she looked around. Then she dropped a needle onto a rhythm track, a slice of vintage rock ’n’ roll with a driving backbeat. One bar, and the band joined in, laying the foundation for Quicksilver’s arrival.
Holding my position, I felt the bass in the trembling catwalk. And there was something else, fainter but undeniable. I felt Quicksilver. He was close.
I braced myself, resisted the music’s power, trying not to get caught up in the pulsing mix. I admired it but remained detached, locked in position, focused on my craft until a new sound welled beneath the rhythm.
It came on first as a swirling chant beneath the music, rising between the punching riffs. Suddenly he was crouching in the lights, grinning at the crowd. He wore the same silver-white clothes he’d had on the night before, spotless and glowing, cutting tracers in the air as he leaped into a dervish spin. And all the while he sang, improvising over the band’s foundation, taking the jam to a place so perfect that I couldn’t believe it hadn’t been planned.
The crowed danced, and in my mind—despite my efforts to remain aloof—I danced with them. My body remained as before, but my emotions soared.
Unlike the roar of the band, Quicksilver’s words passed undimmed through my earplugs . . . or maybe they weren’t passing through my ears at all. Maybe they were from someplace deeper, from inside me—as if his thoughts were singing directly into mine. The words were simple, but within them lay a coded story—an allegory of opposing entities: one intent on bringing people together, the other set on driving them apart. They weren’t metaphysical forces, though they were often depicted that way. Instead, they were physical—living things that hid in plain sight. One worked by twisting perceptions through the power of sound. The other was a shape shifter, constantly altering its form but never its intentions.
Quicksilver looked up, eyes catching the light. For a moment I thought he was looking at me, but then his focus veered back to the crowd.
Shape shifter!
My mind flashed to the previous night, to details that hadn’t quite fit together. But they did now. Now I understood.
I knew what I had to do.
I fired.
The music stopped.
I ran.
She stood outside the car, first looking toward the mill and the growing murmmer of the crowd, then toward me as I raced along the access road. “You did it!” Her voice sounded stronger than before. “I feel safer already.”
I opened the trunk, tore down the rifle, closed the case.
She took my arm. Her touch felt warm, somehow alluring. Suddenly, in the valley below us, the music started again.
She turned, momentarily confused.
I could imagine what she was thinking. If I had shot Quicksilver, stopped his song, and left his true form lying in the spotlight—why would the band be playing again, picking up right where it had left off?
“Lorcan?”
I froze, suddenly certain I had made the wrong choice. But then Quicksilver’s voice came welling from the valley, filling me with the conviction I had felt while lying on the catwalk.
“The power line,” I said, watching her face. “I shot the power line.”
Her face paled in the moonlight.
“I cut their power, but those people . . . they’re good with their hands. They must have spliced it back together.”
The color bled from her face, and with it went the wounds and swelling. Something new emerged, sharp and pale. Her grip moved from my shoulder to my neck, but my hand was already on my knife. I pulled it out and brought it up hard, driving it under her ribs, into