by H. A. Swain
“Who cares,” Veronica says as we pull up alongside the Strip. “I’m starving!”
“But wait!” I grab Jolene before she can get up. “What was his name?”
Jolene takes one last glance at her screen as everyone pours out of the tram. “Orpheus Chanson.”
* * *
After scarfing down a big bowl of slightly slimy grubworm-meal noodles with reconstituted microshrimp and spinocoli sprouts, I slip out of the Strip, leaving Veronica and her friends scream-singing along with Ios’s latest LiveStream. I take the shortcut I found yesterday through the middle of the PODPlexes toward the river path. I need to get back to my Cicada, still safely hidden beneath the tree, where I can find out more about my supposed death. Do my parents really think I crashed or did one of them plant the story to up their Buzz? Either way, the shower, new clothes, and place to live will have to wait until tomorrow, my first day off since I arrived.
As I hurry past the SQEWL where RoboNannies patrol the perimeter of a big dirt patch, I hear sirens. All the kids inside the Y.A.R.D. run to the fence to watch five black-and-white security cars scream around the corner and I panic. Have I been located? Are they after me? Did someone realize I’m alive and well? I look around for a place to hide but there’s nowhere to go; the buildings are all locked. Guards spill out of the cars, hands on Taser holsters as they run for the SQEWL. Their HandHelds crackle and I hear one say, “Bomb threat! Evacuate the children.” RoboNannies quickly corral the kids into straight lines and usher them out of the Y.A.R.D., away from the buildings. In the chaos, I bolt, not stopping until I hit the river path.
Usually by now everyone is either at the Strip or in the warehouse working second shift, but tonight there are people all along the path. They walk in small groups, twos and threes, everyone heading in the same direction, toward the willow tree where I’m going, which makes me nervous. Has someone found my Cicada? Is there a reward for my safe return?
I follow along far enough behind that no one notices me, but when we get to the bend in the river where Zimri ran me down on her bike yesterday, the others scramble over the side of the embankment. I stand back in the shadow of the trees, trying to imagine where they could all be going. A secret party? Bonfire by the river? Down for a swim? Or does this have something to do with the emergency at the SQEWL? Whatever it is, it’s drawing a lot of people because more and more come along the path and climb over the edge. After several minutes of watching, I decide to find out for myself what’s going on.
It’s getting dark and the moon is behind some clouds, so I can’t see where I’m going once I get over the crest of the hill. I’m afraid I’ll fall into the river, but when I come to the bottom, I find flat smooth ground and another smaller path looping back toward a dim light. I follow the voices and as my eyes adjust, I can make out a door that seems to be carved in the side of the riverbank. As I get closer, I see a sign that says, “WELCOME TO NOWHERE.”
Another person comes up behind me. “What is this place?” I ask. The girl, whom I’ve never seen before, ignores my question as she pulls a black mask over her face and pushes past me. I stand aside as more people slip silently through the door with masks in place. I debate about what to do. The whole thing is creepy. Could it be some sort of secret society that planted a bomb in the SQEWL? Have I stumbled on the nefarious part of Complex life? I think about running away, but then I realize that whatever’s going on can’t be all that secretive or someone would have asked me what I’m doing here. Plus, everyone who comes over the embankment looks excited as they hurry toward the door.
I peek inside. The space is small and cramped, just a dugout really, but it’s packed from wall to wall with people holding cups and chatting as if it’s nothing out of the ordinary to stand around wearing black masks. The whole thing is pretty freaky but I’m intrigued and, since nobody tries to stop me, I walk right in.
At the makeshift bar, a masked person says, “Cash only,” and points to a wooden box sitting on a counter made from two wobbly boards propped up on old sawhorses.
“Cash?” I say. “What for?”
He points to a handwritten sign that says For Layla Robinson.
“Layla Robinson!” I blink back my disbelief.
“She needs it more than you do right now, bub,” the guy says.
Other people, also in masks, push me aside and shove wads of bills into the box, then grab cups from the rickety counter and join the crowd forming by a stage at the back of the room. Several of them look at me like they know me but since their faces are hidden, I have no idea who they are. Finally, I tap a girl on the shoulder and ask, “What’s with the masks?”
“Just a precaution,” she says with a shrug. “And it’s kind of cool, right? I mean the whole anonymity thing. We are all Nobody from Nowhere when we’re here.”
“Like the song?” I ask, more confused.
“Duh,” she says and moves away.
Then someone yells, “Here they come!”
I get pushed aside by everyone jostling forward, trying to get a better view. I stand on tiptoe and crane my neck, but I still can’t see over all the bodies in front of me. Then I hear someone smacking sticks together. The crowd erupts as a drummer breaks into a driving beat with bass drum, snare, hi-hat, and ride cymbal. Whoever’s up there can really play. Then some backing tracks come in. I hear a fuzzy electric guitar, probably vintage, dirtied up with age and probably worth thousands of dollars. An electric bass with a fat, warm sound, strings boinging beneath nimble fingers. Even an analog keyboard! People yell and clap along. Everyone starts dancing. I push and worm my way forward, looking for any path so I can see what’s happening on stage, but I can’t get close enough because the crowd is packed in too tight. Finally, I turn around and head back toward the bar.
Slowly and carefully, I climb up on the bar, afraid the whole thing will collapse, but it holds my weight and as soon as I stand, I catch a glimpse of a singer strutting onto stage. She is tall and sinewy, all muscle and tendon beneath her pitch-black clothes. Her face is covered with a black mask like everyone else, but her unmistakable hair gives her away. When she breaks into song, I stumble and almost fall because I know that voice. It has tunneled inside of me and echoed through my mind. I’ve heard her on the radio waves. I’ve heard her by the river. At that moment it comes together and I understand.
“Zimri!” I shout but my voice gets lost in the roar of the crowd. “Zimri! Zimri!” I keep shouting as I hop down.
It takes me three songs to push my way to the front, but I’m determined to get closer. Her voice is amazing. Better than the muddy recording I’ve heard on the waves. On every song, she hits the notes in a two-octave range. By the time I fight my way to the front, Zimri is in the center of the stage.
“Should we really stick it to them?” she yells at the audience. “Show everyone what real music sounds like?” The crowd roars. She lifts up her left hand and I see what looks like a crude ExoScreen glove with a strange camera eye on her palm.
“Do you know who’s on the LiveStream tonight?” she taunts as the guy behind her keeps the beat. “Ios,” she says, then breaks into a parody of “(Quark) Charmed, I’m Sure,” strutting around and shaking her booty just like Ios does. Zimri’s done this impression for me before, during our breaks by the river, and every time it makes me laugh.
The crowd around me hisses and boos for fun. I can’t believe how much they dislike Ios. What if I told them what she did at summer camp in Malta?
Then Zimri says, “Should we give her the Geoff Joffrey treatment?” Everybody screams. The drummer crashes the cymbals. “Should my eyes shoot right through her Live-Stream … like a laser beam?” she sings, mocking Geoff’s song. The crowd stomps and claps and eggs her on as the drums continue. “Do you dare me to do it?” she demands, working the crowd into a frenzy. She laughs, haughty and full of mischief, and my chest swells.
I hear myself yelling, too. Cheering her on like everyone else around me. At this moment I want
more than anything for every person on the planet to see and hear Zimri sing because this show in the jam-packed dugout is better than any concert I’ve ever seen in a Chanson Industries Arena.
“Here we go!” Zimri yells and the drummer smacks out a beat, the backing tracks swell up, and the crowd joins in, clapping overhead as Zimri turns the palm camera on herself and counts, “One, two, a one-two-three-and!” Then breaks into, “I am Nobody from Nowhere, a speck upon your screen,” with everyone singing along.
I nearly lose my mind. I can’t believe I’m right there in front of her and she’s singing the song that has become my anthem and everyone else’s. People jump and scream and punch their fists into the air while she stomps past us onstage. I reach out. I shout her name. I want her to know that I am here and that she’s amazing. More than that, I want the world to know. I want everyone to hear what a true musical genius sounds like.
“Zimri!” I shout over and over until finally she looks my way. We lock eyes. Hers through the mask, mine exposed. “It’s me!” I shout.
Her voice falters. She backs away and stumbles, her hands held out in front of her body as if to stop me, the camera eye pointing straight at me. “Oh, no! Oh, no!” she says into the mic and then I realize what I’ve done. Zimri is the hijacker. Not Calliope. Zimri is the one my father’s after.
“No!” I shout. “No, no, no!”
But the drummer is off his stool in a flash yelling, “Raid! Raid!”
The crowd moves backward as if an undertow is pulling them from the room. Then an older guy with long dreadlocks jumps up on stage just as Zimri and the drummer scramble behind the canvas curtain. “That’s it!” the older guy shouts, waving his arms. “Show’s over. Everybody out!”
I’m pulled along with the deluge of black-masked people pushing through the door. I try to push back through the tide to reach Zimri and tell her how sorry I am. Confess everything. Tell her I’ll do anything to help her. But by the time I make it back to Nowhere, the door is closed and locked tight. I bang and bang, but no one answers. All around me, people scramble up the hill and run away. I search for another entrance, but the place is like a fortress. Finally after ten minutes, I give up, assuming Zimri made it out. I slink back to my Cicada, sick over what I’ve done.
ZIMRI
Dorian sits beside me on the edge of the stage with his arm around my shoulders. I can’t stop shaking.
“What was that guy from the warehouse doing here?” He spits the words. “He’s the one who said he heard us on the waves, right? No mask on his dumb face. Yelling your name. Was he trying to get us all arrested?”
“I don’t know.” I bury my face in my hands. When I saw Aimery at the edge of the stage, I was sure he was there to bust us. That I’d been duped and he’d been a spy all along, only not for Corp X but for Smythe and Beauregarde and whoever hired them. But then, after Marley pulled the plug and everybody left, nothing happened. We hid in back behind the secret panels for fifteen minutes, but no security ever came.
“I can’t believe you would put yourself at risk like this!” Marley shouts as he paces in front of us. “And not just you! Everybody who was here tonight could have been arrested. Is this a camera?” He holds Tati’s latest invention in his clenched fist. “Are you kidding me? Did you record it? Are you planning to distribute it? Do you have any idea how much trouble you could get in? How could you be so reckless?”
“Please don’t be mad at Dorian,” I say. “He tried to stop me but I insisted on playing tonight. I told him I would do it alone, but he wouldn’t let me. He was trying to be a good friend.”
“You lied,” Marley shouts, uninterested in my explanation. “Both of you. To our faces. Nonda asked you and you said—”
“But we were doing it for Nonda,” Dorian argues.
“Doesn’t matter why you think you’re doing it!” Marley yells.
“It’s all my fault,” I say. “I needed money to keep Nonda at the MediPlex so they could run more tests.”
Marley stops, hands on hips and looks sharply at me. “Is that true?”
I nod.
He looks up at the ceiling. “Why didn’t you come to me if you needed money?”
“No offense,” I say, “but why would you have that much money? Why would any of us have that much? And then I’d owe you money that I’d never be able to repay. That’s the whole problem. No one person has more than enough to just get by. That’s why we do these shows, so that everybody can pitch in what little extra they have to truly help one another.”
Marley’s face screws up. “Who else have you raised money for?” he asks, clearly skeptical.
“Levon when his son Luka got hit by a Plute car and the justice brokers claimed it was the kid’s fault for riding on a private road. Captain Jack when he lost his arm in the box smasher at the warehouse and the justice brokers decided he had to pay for the broken machinery. Billie Jean when her newborn, that sweet baby James, was in the MediPlex for two months because the RoboNurse went haywire and nearly suffocated him, which Corp X called an act of god—as if Robots answer to a higher power than their CPUs. There’s more if you want to know.”
Marley sighs and comes to sit beside us. “I didn’t know that’s what you’d been doing.”
I lean away from him. “What else would we be doing?”
“I don’t know. Sticking it to the man? Making money off of music? Showing the world that art isn’t a commodity to be controlled by the rich?”
“All that sounds nice, but mostly it’s just because the justice brokers and Arbiters always screw the Plebes, so somebody has to help.”
“And what about this?” He shakes the camera glove at me.
I grimace. “Yeah, that … Well, that was a terrible idea.”
“Did it go out?” Dorian asks. He looks a little sick to his stomach.
“Go out?” Marley asks.
I cringe and shrink back. “Last time, we accidentally hijacked a LiveStream,” I tell him meekly and Marley groans. “We didn’t mean to. And the video feed might not have gone out at all tonight. We’ll just have to wait and see.”
“But if it did go out…” Dorian says.
The image of Aimery shouting my name floats up in my mind and my stomach turns over. How long will I be able to deny that it was me? Could I claim a case of mistaken identity? I turn to Dorian and put my hand on his leg. “Even if it got out and they come for me, you know I’d never, ever, not in a million years tell them it was you on stage.” I cut my eyes toward Marley, but he won’t meet my gaze. “I’ll take the blame and the full brunt of whatever they want to do—”
“Stop.” Dorian lays his hand on top of mine. “Nothing bad is going to happen.” He doesn’t sound half as confident as he’s trying to look. “It probably didn’t even go out. Or if it did the room was so loud and…” He trails off. I can tell that he’s nervous by the way he keeps glancing at the door, as if he’s expecting Medgers and ten private security guards to bust in at any minute.
Marley lies back on the stage with one arm slung over his eyes; he can’t bear to look at us anymore. “God, the world’s gotten messed up, hasn’t it?” he moans. “All these years I kept thinking things would go back to normal. I thought someday, someone would come along and take that guy Chanson down a few pegs.” He laughs but it sounds sad. “Calliope’s trying, but she won’t get very far. She underestimates the greed in the world. How much money feeds the beast. And the bigger it gets, the more money it takes to keep it going. It’s vicious. Every year the whole situation gets worse and worse.” Then he laughs. Then he groans again. “Ah, well, you can’t relive your past.”
Dorian and I look at each other, wondering whether his dad is losing it, until Marley sits up and says, “Look, it’s great that you’ve been using these shows to help other people, but it’s also dumb and risky and in the end, you’ll be the ones to get hurt. So…” He gets to his feet. “I should have done this a long time ago. I’m shutting this place down. Getting rid o
f the gear. Boarding up the door.” He levels his gaze at me. “Like I should have done five years ago.”
“This place isn’t yours to shut down,” I tell him.
He stands up taller so he’s looking down on me. “I’m the one who built it!”
I get to my feet and stand nearly eye to eye with him. “With my mother.”
“Fat lot of good it did her, too! This place ruined her and ruined your childhood. Someone has to be the grown-up here and stop you from ruining the rest of your life, too!”
“Nowhere didn’t ruin my life,” I say.
“This is the reason your mother got caught and then your father…” Marley trails off.
I’ve had so many questions about my mother all these years but as I get older, one thing seems more and more clear to me. “Come on, Marley,” I say. “The trouble she got in was just an excuse for her to leave, but we both know it wasn’t the real reason she took off.”
Marley looks stunned.
“It couldn’t have been easy with my father. He was sick. Unstable. And they both had to work jobs they hated. And then to be told, on top of that, you can’t do the one thing in life that makes you the happiest. Making music? She said it herself. If she’d accepted the ruling after you guys got caught, she would have been trading one prison for another. Of course I wish she’d never left, but at least I hope she’s somewhere she can make music when she wants.”
Marley puts his hands on his hips and looks at the floor as if he’s trying to gather himself. “She loved you, Zim.” He peers up at me. “She loved you very much.”
“Not more than she loved making music,” I say.
Marley looks defeated. “Rainey was flawed. We all are.”
“Stop,” I tell him. “I don’t blame her. I might have done the same thing in her shoes.”
“No,” Marley says. “Rainey was selfish about her art. She did it for herself no matter what the cost. But you…” He looks around Nowhere as if he’s sad to let it go. “You’re different, Zimri. You did this for other people. You used your art for good. I’m just sorry that we live in a world where that’s not valued anymore.”
