Soundcheck

The laminate has your face on it, and it's a terrible photo.

"It's the one from your passport," Daria says, sliding the lanyard over your head before you can stop her. Her fingers don't linger. You notice that they don't. "You hate every photo of yourself. I went with the one where you look least like you're being arrested."

"Thanks."

"Velvet Static, all access, thirty cities." She taps the plastic with one short nail. "Welcome to the big leagues, Ethan."

The loading dock of the Moorage Ballroom smells like diesel, rain and someone's burnt coffee. Seattle is doing its gray thing. Behind Daria, two tour buses idle nose to tail, and the second one, the sleek black one, has HOLLOW SAINTS in tasteful silver on the side, because of course it does.

Daria Rosewarne has her auburn hair in the same braid she wore every show day of the three years you were together. Clipboard on her hip. Pen behind her ear. She looks rested, which is new, and unfairly beautiful, which isn't.

"You okay with this?" she asks, quieter. "Me. Here. I told your manager I'd step back if it was weird."

"It's not weird."

"It's a little weird."

"It's a little weird," you admit, and she laughs, and for one second it's easy. Then her radio crackles about a missing power drop, and she's gone, already walking, already fixing something.

Ksenia appears at your elbow with her guitar case and her bleached buzzcut and her eyebrows somewhere near the ceiling.

"So that's going to be fine," she says.

"It's fine."

"You said 'fine' like a man reading his own ransom note, Ethan."

Haruto walks past with a snare drum under each arm. "Load in," he says, which for Haruto is a speech.

You've never played a room this big. The Moorage holds eighteen hundred people, and right now it holds about forty: lighting techs on ladders, a guy vacuuming the balcony, two women from Hollow Saints' crew taping a setlist to a monitor that isn't yours.

You plug in. The stage tech gives you a thumbs up from the side. You thumb the low E and let it ring, and the floor answers.

You play the opening of "Night Bus," the song that got you this tour, the bassline you wrote on an actual night bus at an actual 2 a.m. Haruto comes in under you. Ksenia leans into her mic and says "check, check, check, I'm a goddess, check."

Then a voice comes through a vocal mic from somewhere above you. Bored. Amused. Amplified to the size of the building.

"Bass player. Is that a tone or a cry for help?"

Half the crew laughs.

You don't look up right away. You finish the bar. You let the last note hang until it buzzes in your back teeth, and only then do you tilt your head.

He's draped over the balcony rail like he owns the building, which, for the next seven weeks, he kind of does. Black hair falling into his eyes. Silver rings on every finger, catching the work lights. A leather jacket with the elbows worn soft. He's holding a wireless mic loosely, like a cigarette.

And his face. That face is on a billboard over the I-5 that you drove past at nine this morning. That face has been on a magazine cover in every airport you've walked through this year. Two of the lighting techs have stopped working to look at it, and they work for him.

Ravn Drummore. Frontman of Hollow Saints. Voice of "Ferris Wheel, 4 A.M.," the song that has been playing in every grocery store, bar and Uber in America for twelve straight months.

You know that face better than the billboards do.

Two years ago, at Driftwood Festival on the Oregon coast, a storm rolled in off the ocean and stopped the Ferris wheel with the two of you in the top car. Two hours. Rain sideways. Lightning walking across the water. He told you his name was Ravn and his band didn't have a name yet. You told him you were a hired bass player who'd never been this high off the ground on purpose, and you counted the bolts in the car's frame out loud so you wouldn't look down, and he counted them with you. When the power came back at four in the morning, the sun was coming up pink behind the stage, and he kissed you, or you kissed him. You've never been sure which. You fell asleep on his shoulder in the shuttle line. When you woke up, he was gone.

You had a first name. That was all.

A year later he was on a billboard, singing a song about a girl.

Now he looks down at you from the balcony like you're a stain on the stage.

"Do you need me to fix it for you?" you call up. "The tone. I could come up there. Show you where the low end lives."

The crew goes "ooooh." Ksenia makes a noise like a kettle.

Ravn's mouth does something. It isn't a smile, exactly. It's the beginning of one, killed before it gets anywhere.

"Cute," he says into the mic. "Opener's got opinions."

"Opener's got a soundcheck. You're standing in it."

He holds your eyes a second longer than he has to. There's no recognition in his. None. Just gray-green and bored and very far away.

Then he hands the mic to a tech and disappears from the rail.

You play the rest of the check with your jaw so tight it aches.

The show is a blur in the best way. Eighteen hundred people who came for someone else, and by the third song, half of them are moving. By "Night Bus," a girl in the front row is screaming the chorus she apparently learned in the last four minutes. Ksenia ends the set on her knees.

You come off the stage drenched and shaking and grinning so hard your face hurts.

Daria is waiting at the side of the stage with three bottles of water and a towel. She hands you one of each.

"That," she says, "was the best set you've ever played."

"You've seen every set I've ever played."

"I know." She smiles. "That's why I'm allowed to say it."

You need air. Real air, not the hot breath of a crowd waiting for the headliner. The stage tech told you the roof access is up the back stairwell, behind a door with a sign that says NO ROOF ACCESS. You take the stairs two at a time while Hollow Saints' intro tape shakes the walls.

The door sticks, then gives.

Seattle at night is wet and glittering and cold enough to hurt your lungs in a good way. The city runs down toward the water in gold lines. You can feel the bass of the headliner through the soles of your boots.

You're not alone.

He's sitting on the ledge with his back to the city, one knee up, the leather jacket on, his hair wet from the drizzle. Hollow Saints don't go on for another twenty minutes. He's not looking at the view.

He's looking at something small in his fingers, turning it over and over. A guitar pick. Tortoiseshell. Worn pale in the middle.

When he flips it, the street light catches the tiny star scratched into the corner, the way you scratch a star into every pick you've ever owned.

The one you pressed into his palm at the top of a Ferris wheel, two years ago, so he'd have something to hold.

He looks up, and this time there's no boredom in his face at all.

"Took you long enough," Ravn says.