Maya waved him off with a laugh. “Go fix Becky’s truck.”
After she’d closed the door behind him, Maya barely had time to dash upstairs, rinse off an afternoon of sweat, and grab a sandwich for dinner before Rowan arrived with their latest recordings. Maya set her plate on the table in the warehouse and offered Rowan one of the icy sodas before dragging the new files down to her computer.
Across from her, Rowan settled on a stool and took a sip from the glass bottle. Their hair was a bright teal now, shaved high up their head in the back with chunky bangs framing their face. Teal and bronze eyeshadow completed the dramatic look, complementing Rowan’s green eyes and golden skin.
“I like the new style,” Maya told them as she pulled up the first track. “Did you do your own hair?”
“I wish I had this skill.” Rowan rolled the bottle back and forth between their hands. “There’s a new place on the perimeter. They have these heat wands. No dye, no mess. Just … boom. Teal hair.”
“Cool. I should see if we can get one of those.” Maya waggled her eyebrows. “Dani would love to have instant disguises.”
“Lord save us all.” Rowan made a show of crossing themself, then inclined their head toward Maya’s computer. “This is my first recording with the new soundproof room. Should make your job way easier.”
A few taps, and the first strains of violin drifted from the cleverly hidden speakers Maya had installed around the warehouse. The new song started slowly, each note piercingly clear as Rowan wove them together in a melody so yearning that Maya’s bones ached with it.
In past recordings, Maya had struggled to strip out the background noise. This one was close to clean, with nothing to distract from the haunting refrain as the song began to pick up speed. It built to a crescendo, and Maya’s breath caught as a low bass beat erupted beneath it. The violin split off and wove itself around the new rhythm, the notes dancing higher and faster as the accompanying beat gained in complexity.
Goose bumps rose on Maya’s arms, and she closed her eyes, savoring the pristine beauty of it. It was the opposite of the empty AI-generated pop she loved to listen to, overflowing with passion, with fire, with … life. Maya fell into it, bespelled by the sheer beauty the same way she sometimes felt ensnared by Gray’s voice. Like a sailor on the ancient seas, steering her boat straight to the rocks because the siren sounded just that good.
Why not? There were worse ways to drown than slipping beneath the waves of pure bliss.
“Maya?” Rowan’s voice was concerned. “You okay?”
Heart racing, Maya forced her eyes open and realized they stung with unshed tears. The warehouse had fallen silent, but the cutting beauty of Rowan’s music still wound through her memory, every bit as vivid. She swiped at her eyes and pinned Rowan with a glare. “Fuck you for being this good.”
Rowan’s worry melted into a cocky grin. “I can’t help it. Some people are just naturally talented.”
Rowan was more than talented. In a different time—a better one—they might have been famous. Wealthy. Showered with adoration for the way they could pick up an instrument and transport you to an altered state of being. Rowan should be selling out massive auditoriums and rolling in the credits. Instead, they performed neighborhood concerts for tips and struggled to book gigs at clubs that would rather pump mindless auto-generated noise through the speakers at maximum volume.
Maya had been fighting to help change that. A few judicious leaks on the Net—and a few far more subtle lures on the GhostNet—had begun to build a following. Most people in Atlanta had minimal disposable income, but credits had trickled in through Rowan’s netBusk account, enough to build the recording studio and keep food on the table.
It wasn’t enough, but it was something. Maya shook off her melancholy and moved the files to her priority queue. “It may take me a few days to turn these around, since I’m handling things on my own right now, but I’ll get them ready for upload. Have you thought about Conall’s suggestion?”
“The music videos?” Rowan ran a nervous hand over their hair, smoothing the bright strands into place. “That’s part of why I’m trying out the new style. I might be warming to the idea.”
Conall had become obsessed with Rowan’s music, convinced there was an untapped market there. His latest pitch had been to use his surveillance drones to film footage of Rowan playing music in various cinematic locations, complete with apocalyptic squalor and the Hill looming ominously in the background. “He knows what makes the stiffs up on the Hill spend credits,” Maya acknowledged. “But don’t go balancing on any collapsing overpasses for him unless you want to.”
“Deal.” Rowan slid off the stool with a wide grin. “I gotta bounce. I have an actual gig tonight. It’s paying real credits and everything.”
“Oooh, fancy.” Maya waved them away. “Go get rich. I’ll send you a message when the files are ready.”
“Thanks, Maya. You’re the best.”
It was a refrain she heard all evening. From people who needed books, or tools, or supplies, or just help. She heard it at maximum volume after a harried waitress showed up from Clem’s, begging her to fix the air-conditioning before the drunks rioted in the stifling Atlanta humidity.
That was the first thing she’d done after she realized how easy it was to listen to a product manual or mechanical guide and just … fix things. Maya had loaded her brain up with information on air conditioners and heaters—the two things people needed desperately when sweltering through the summer or shivering through the winter—and somehow all the disjointed data fell into her brain in neat, actionable rows. She could put down her earbuds and pick up a wrench and fix things.
Of course, the patrons at Clementine’s bar didn’t know that. They just thought she was a mechanical genius. And hell, maybe she was. The AC took twenty minutes to fix, and the first blast of cold air from the vents overhead resulted in cheers. Even guys she’d previously hustled at pool were so grateful they tried to cajole her into staying for a beer. One even offered to pay for it.
It was a tempting offer. Her home echoed with unnerving silence without Dani and Nina there. The gentle sounds of their daily routines were imprinted in her memory, and their absence grated in ways she hadn’t expected.
But knowing Gray was alone in the other warehouse forced her to demur. He might be fine for the moment, but she felt better being close.
Sleep, however, was out of the question. Adrenaline still buzzed over her skin, so Maya locked all the doors and retreated back to the warehouse, to the far corner, where her prize sat.
The 3D scanner was next-next-generation. Another of Ava’s guilt-assuaging gifts, it had probably cost as much as a reasonably well-off support staffer up on the Hill might clear in a couple of years. It could scan up to a thousand pages in under thirty seconds using terahertz radiation to process the interior layer by layer, and Maya had finessed the built-in optical character recognition process until the digital files it produced were nearly error-free. She’d even built a program to extract visible and extrapolate inferred metadata, an adventure that had involved learning two new computer languages during a sleepless week spent in a programming frenzy.