Chapter 1: Blackout

Hollis’s phone buzzed against his hip and he checked it without thinking. Second song into the set.

[The kid on bass is going to be a star. Calling it now.]

He had three seconds to roll his eyes at that. Then the lights went out.

Not dim. Not a flicker. Dead. The bass went first — the low thrum that had been holding the floor together, snuffed mid-note. Then the monitors. Then the green dots on the wristbands, the ones that lit up when you cast a vote, every last one of them going dark at once, all across the room, like a gust had come through a field of candles.

For a second nobody said anything. Four hundred people holding the same breath, the quiet pulled tight around them like a shell.

Then it cracked.

“The hell—“

“Power’s out?”

“Is it the whole set?”

“Check your wristband. Is it still—“

Hollis pressed his. Nothing. He pressed it twice more, like an idiot, and the dot stayed dead. So did the board on the back wall, the one that had been counting all night — a blank rectangle now, like a TV with the cord pulled.

Around him the room split. Half of them wanted their votes back. The other half wanted to be done with it.

“Does it still count? If the power comes back—“

“Will it come back?”

“And if it doesn’t? We get three votes for this whole round, and I still owe mine to somebody.”

“Then we don’t revote. Tough luck for them.”

Hollis would think about the message later. Three seconds between the compliment and the blackout. If that was a jinx, it hadn’t come from him — he’d only been standing close enough to catch it.

Atmosphere was everything at a live show. Put the fire out and the feeling goes with it, and once it’s gone, no act of God gets the room back. The lights would come back. Somebody would find the breaker, the board would blink on, and in a week nobody in this room would remember the dark. But the power wasn’t what had just been killed up on that stage. Their shot was.

Up on stage, the other two were coming apart. Hollis could hear it — the guitarist retuning a string that was already in tune, twang, twang, twang, and the drummer tapping his rim in a nervous patter that matched nothing at all. Somebody down by the monitor was hissing at the sound guy. The sound guy was hissing back.

The bassist wasn’t doing any of it.

Hollis could just make him out through the dark. One hand loose on the neck of his bass, the other flat on the mic stand — and his fingers were moving. Tapping, soft and even, against the metal. In time. Like the song was still playing somewhere only he could hear.

A flashlight swung up from the side of the stage. A tech doing his rounds. The beam cut across the band at an angle and never reached a face. It caught the shape of him for a second, hip to shoulder, and turned him into a silhouette worth looking at.

Everyone looked.

Hollis had been watching those hands all night. The guy hadn’t said two words between songs, and he hadn’t needed to. The hands did the talking.

One other person had ever carried a stage like that. Quin, before. Quin with the voice and the hands and the trick of making a room go quiet before he opened his mouth. Then a few things went wrong in a row, the way they do, and the timing went with them. Now Quin taught music theory to kids at an after-school place and wouldn’t say the word band out loud for love or money.

This kid had the same weight. Different face, different everything else. Just the way he stood up there like he’d never once had to think about where to put his hands.

He was good. He might be better than good, and none of it was going to matter if the votes stayed at zero.

The hand came off the mic stand.

Slow. Deliberate. The fingers uncurled toward the crowd — a wave, maybe, or a greeting, or something that was neither.

Hollis tracked it. So did everyone near him. The hand swept the rail, the first two rows, and stopped.

It was pointing. Not at Hollis. Near Hollis — at something at the edge of his vision, close enough that if he turned his head he’d see it.

Nobody turned to look. Four hundred faces lifted toward a hand hanging in the dark, and the fingers stayed there, half-curled, unfinished.