Stronger

Eleven dates became forty. Forty became a bus.

Later, when people asked what that year had been like, the year the girl on the poster turned into the girl on the side of the bus, he'd say: fast. You didn't notice the rooms getting bigger because you were looking down. Five hundred, then eight hundred, then a theatre in Philadelphia with a balcony, where for the first time the crowd was above him as well as in front. Then Chicago, three thousand, and he thought this is the biggest room in the world. It wasn't close.

She got the sunglasses somewhere around Chicago. He never saw her buy them. One day she didn't have them and the next day they were pushed up in her hair, and the ponytail had been on a magazine, and there was a man called Teo whose whole job was to stand between her and doors.

"What does he do when there isn't a door?"

"Finds one," said Rose.

And in every room, third row or fifth or fortieth, something old. Not always. But often enough that he learned the taste of it, the way you learn a city by its smells: the slow worn ones who'd stayed for the music and wanted nothing; the sharper ones who'd stayed for something else; once, in Detroit, one that wasn't a beat so much as a hole, and Rose's hand came down flat on his shoulder from behind before he'd finished feeling it.

"Ilse's people have him. Dance."

He danced.

He told her what he felt that she hadn't seen. It wasn't much. But there was always the one thing, and he never said it, and she always knew he wasn't saying it, and that was the shape of them: a girl who saw two days out, a boy who felt one thing she couldn't, and a lie between them they both stepped around like a lamp on the floor.

···

Noor got Halcyon.

Of course she did. Dash sent the photo at two in the morning: Noor in the corridor at Varga's holding a piece of paper with both hands like it might get away from her. Under it, SHE GOT IT SHE GOT IT SHE GOT IT, and a minute later, you should call her.

He was in a hotel in Cleveland with the loading crew coming up through the floor. He looked at the photo for a long time and didn't call her.

It was late, he told himself. In the morning there was a soundcheck, and then a night, and then it had been three days, and then the thing that had been tightening under his ribs since the casting, that had known the way to jealousy and been very patient about it, arrived.

Stadiums. Halcyon was stadiums, sixty thousand people, a runway going out into the crowd like a pier, and Noor was going to be on it. One of six, behind a person whose name was on the tickets. And he was in a three-thousand-seat theatre in Cleveland behind someone who was not big yet, doing a job he couldn't describe, for a woman with walnut eyes who paid him in cash, and it was entirely his own doing. That didn't help at all.

He called on the fifth day. She picked up on the first ring, which meant she'd been waiting, which made it worse.

"Hey," said Noor.

"Hey. I heard. That's—" He'd had it ready. It came out wrong anyway. "That's the one you wanted."

A pause. Noor was never cruel. She was just exact.

"You didn't want it?"

"I didn't get it. That's different."

"You stopped, Ricky. In the middle. I've thought about it every day since. You never stop. And then you went off with Ilse and you won't say what it is, and you're on a bus with a girl I used to watch in the changing room, and you're doing, what? What are you doing?"

He thought about the golem laughing, and the lamp on the floor, and the hole in Detroit.

"Dancing," he said.

"Okay," said Noor. "Well. Me too."

She hung up. Not hard. Just exactly. He lay on the bed and felt the floor and it was soft, and for once that was the smaller problem.

···

"Ricardo," said Vovô, on the phone, eating. "What did I tell you the fire was?"

"Easy."

"And what is hard?"

"Standing there."

"So stand there. She has a stadium, you have a soft floor and a lie, and you think that means she got the big thing." Chewing. "Menino, your sister has three degrees and a chair at a table nobody offered me. Last week she asked me what you thought about the floor. Because she trusts your feet over her books."

"She didn't say that."

"She didn't have to, she asked. You are nineteen and a dragon and you are angry at your friend for being good at what she does. This is not a problem. This is Tuesday." More chewing. "Call her back when you can say I'm proud of you and mean the whole sentence. Until then, work."

"What's the work?"

"Somebody will tell you," said Vovô, and hung up to eat properly.

Somebody was Ilse. She turned up in St. Louis with a paper cup she didn't drink from and walked him, between soundcheck and doors, to a car park behind the venue, where something had been living in the storm drain for a hundred and forty years and had recently, for no reason anyone could name, woken up. Wet stone. A smear of writing. Smaller than Grand Central's, and angrier, the way small things are.

"No fire," said Ilse.

"I know."

"Then show me you know."

He was a dragon for the eleventh time in his life and the first time on purpose. It hurt less. It was still not nothing. The car park tilted, and the golem came at him out of the drain with the asphalt coming with it, and he didn't breathe on it. He got low. He found the ginga, the sway that says I am not where you think I am, and he wasn't, and the golem swung through the place he'd been. He came up behind it and put one clawed hand, almost gently, on the smear of writing, and thought about water.

Vovô had said get inside the writing and he'd never understood it. Now, with his palm on the wet stone, he did. The writing was a drum somebody had wound up a hundred and forty years ago and forgotten. You didn't put a drum out. You put your hand on the skin and let it stop.

It stopped. It was a rock.

"Hm," said Ilse Varga, which was the most he'd ever heard her give anyone. "Doors in forty minutes. Wash your hands."

···

He called Noor from Denver. She was in a hotel in Atlanta, first leg of Halcyon, and she picked up on the fourth ring, which meant she hadn't been waiting, which he deserved.

"I'm proud of you," he said. "The whole sentence. I've been trying to get there for six weeks and I'm there."

Quiet on the line. Then, small, not exact at all: "It's so big, Ricky."

"I know."

"No, you don't. Sixty thousand people and none of them are looking at you. Not one. You could be anyone. You are anyone. I stood on that runway last night and I thought, I've wanted this since I was six, and it turns out what I wanted was for someone to see it, and there's a girl in front of me they see, and behind her there's just weather." A breath. "Is that stupid?"

"No."

"Dash says you're doing something with Ilse that you can't talk about and I should stop asking."

"Dash is right."

"Dash is never right. That's how I know it's serious." A pause, and then, almost the old voice: "Is she good? The girl on the bus?"

He thought about the third row, and the lamp, and a step taken to the left mid-verse without looking round.

"She's going to be the biggest thing in the world," he said. "And it's going to cost her something, and I don't know what yet."

"Then stand there," said Noor, who had never met his grandfather and had just quoted him. "Okay? Stand there. I'll see you in New York."

···

The studio was in a basement on the Lower East Side, under a shop that sold lamps, and the man who owned it wore a cardigan.

That was the first thing Ricky noticed and nearly the last, because there was so little else. Middle height. Middle everything. A face that had been asked for directions its whole life. Headphones round his neck he never seemed to put on. He was called XO, two letters, the way she was Rose, and he'd made a beat on a laptop that Rose had heard once, in a car, and had said, with the small quick knot in her hand: "That one. Him. Now."

"Ariana," said the man in the cardigan, shaking her hand as if they were meeting at a bank. "Or Rose. I've heard both. I'll use whichever one you're being today."

"Rose, in here."

"Rose. Good. Sit anywhere. Not that chair, that chair has opinions."

Ricky, by the door, out of habit, felt the floor.

Nothing.

Not the ordinary nothing of a new building or a young person. The basement's own old was all there, wood and damp and a hundred years of Lower East Side, and in the middle of it, where a man in a cardigan was pulling up a chair, a blank. Not a hole like Detroit. A hole is something. This was the absence of the question. His feet came down on it the way a foot comes down where a stair used to be.

He must have made a face, because the man looked up, mild.

"You're feeling for it. That's fine. Everyone does. Nothing there, I'm afraid. I'm very boring." He turned back to the laptop. "Okay. Rose. This one's called Broken Off, at the moment, though titles are lies. Sing it like you've already seen how it ends."

She looked at him for a long moment, over the sunglasses.

"I usually have."

"I know. That's why I asked."

She sang it. It was a small song, about someone leaving a room and the room noticing. Ricky stood by the door and listened to a girl he'd watched in a church in Brooklyn become, in a basement under a lamp shop, something the world was going to have to make room for. The man in the cardigan said nothing while she sang, and nothing for a while after. Then he took the headphones off his neck and put them, for the first time, on, and listened back, and nodded once.

"Yes. That's the one. No biggi."

···

Broken Off came out on a Friday. By Sunday it was everywhere the way the first song had been everywhere for three weeks, except it didn't stop after three weeks. It didn't stop at all. By the end of the month there was a second bus, and then there was no bus, there was a plane. Teo had four people under him. There was a woman called Marguerite whose job was Rose's calendar and who spoke to Ilse on the phone in a language Ricky didn't recognise and decided not to ask about. There were people on the crew who were, he could feel it, not entirely people, and who nodded to him in corridors the way the elves' mother would have nodded to Vovô: we know what you are, and you're one of ours.

The Alliance had got bigger around her, the way a river gets bigger around a boat. The crowd was the whole world now. She could see all of it.

They announced the tour in March. Nineteen countries. The poster was her face and one word, and it was on the side of every bus in every city he'd ever been in. Dash sent a photo of one on Canal Street, outside the laundromat, with Vovô standing next to it holding a paper bag and not smiling, in a way that was, for Vovô, a parade.

She found him on the roof of the rehearsal space the night before they flew. Sunglasses up. Hoodie, still, under everything, the tent-sized one.

"I've seen something," Rose said.

"You've always seen something."

"Not like this. Two days out is what I get. Always. It's the only rule I've got." The small quick knot. "This one's further. Months. I can't see what, it's just there, at the end of the tour, like a wall at the end of a corridor, and I keep walking and it's not getting closer. It's just getting clearer." She looked at him. "And you're not in it."

"What does that mean?"

"I don't know. I don't get pictures. It means when I look at the wall, I don't feel you leaning." She pulled the hoodie tighter. "Ilse wants you in New York. There's a job. Two girls, Bushwick, something's after them, she wants your feet on it. The last three dates of the leg, you're not on them. I said yes."

"You're sending me away."

"I'm sending you where Ilse asked. It's not the same thing." A pause. "It's not entirely the same thing."

Below them, the city. Somewhere under it, the board that was missing.

"Rose."

"Don't."

"You told me to tell you what I feel that you didn't see."

"I know what I said."

"The thing I haven't been telling you. For a year." He'd promised Ilse, and he said it anyway, up there with her face on every bus in the world below them. "The floor. It's soft. All of it. Everywhere. Since the night before I met you. Like a board's been taken out from under the whole world and nobody can find which one. That's the lie. That's the only lie."

Rose was quiet for a long time.

"I know," she said at last. "I've always known you were lying about the floor. I just didn't know it was that."

She stood up. She put the sunglasses down and became the person on the poster, and for the first time it was a thing he watched her do on purpose, for him, so he wouldn't see her face.

"Okay. New York. Stand on it. Tell me what you feel."

"And you?"

"I'll be lucky," said Rose. "I'm always lucky. Right up until the day I'm not."