FORTY-FIVE
AFTER GRIFF WALKED CHARITY TO HER CAR, THOMAS DEMANDED he return to the basement.
Seven missed calls. Texts marked URGENT.
“Hello?” Griff asked, opening the wooden door. “Rats!”
He tried to startle them, watching his feet for furry escapees.
“Finally!” Thomas bellowed.
“It’s after midnight,” Griff said. He shut the door and moved toward the blue glow of Thomas’s workstation.
“Who can sleep?” Thomas said. “What took you idiots so long? You were out there for an hour.”
“Just talking,” he said.
Curb dancing in a light drizzle. The first time they’d talked in so long. Time slipped. Gotta go, should go, circled and echoed meaningless and maybe they’d been talking ten minutes, or maybe the sun was about to come up. But Thomas just kept calling. And calling.
“Talking,” Thomas snorted. “At a time like this.”
Thomas sat ensconced in mission control. Three curved monitors, piled-up speakers, stacked sound decks, and his trusty board. Laptops on a table behind him.
“How many computers do you have?”
“Three things to share with you” Thomas said, ignoring him. “First, look at this.”
He nudged the computer screens awake. On each of the five screens, a separate musical search engine.
“You found the Band?”
An anxious twist in Griff’s throat. Was the mystery solved?
“No,” Thomas said. “Much better than that. I didn’t find anything.”
Thomas played the tape, a great guitar riff—a moment of exceptional vocal clarity—
—sun drenched you and me too, you know the moon’s our oldest friend away we go—
He went from engine to engine, pressing GO and START and SEEK. Verdicts came quickly. NO RESULTS. PLEASE TRY AGAIN. NO INITIAL MATCHES.
“Wow,” Griff said.
“These programs use a time-frequency spectrogram,” Thomas said. “Like a musical fingerprint. Between them, we have access to over twenty million songs, and these don’t match any of them.”
“Why is that good?”
“Because it’s on purpose,” Thomas said. He rewound the tape, ejected it, and carefully moved it to the deck near his sound board and monitor.
“They don’t exist, on purpose. Listen. Discovery two.”
The voice:
“NO RECORDING. NO PRESERVING.”
On the analog decibel dial, golden needles did sharp, arcing leaps. On another monitor, horizontal lines like old video game life meters stretched green to yellow to red. Thomas ran it back. Again and again.
“NO RECORDING. NO PRESERVING. NO RECORDING. NO PRESERVING.”
“Great,” Griff said. “We’re cursed. Nightmares for everyone. What am I looking at?”
“The levels,” Thomas said. “Aren’t you seeing this? Right when the band starts?”
There was a shift. Golden needles pulled back, the life meters stopped pinging into red.
“It’s not as loud?”
“Don’t just look at the decibels, you student.”
Thomas grabbed Griff’s chin, turned his head toward a display he hadn’t noticed, a digital sound board with sixteen additional monitors—PAN, EQ, BASS, AUX, abbreviations Griff did not know or understand, but the next time the audio shifted between DJ and music, he noticed the change. Colored bars jerked in new configurations. A sudden leap in the levels. A whole different organism.
“See,” Thomas said. “He’s got his own setup. The DJ. He’s not necessarily in the same place as the band.”
“Is that good?”
“It means they know what they’re doing. It’s interesting,” Thomas said. “Mostly because—well.” He stopped. “I really brought you down here for revelation number three.”
He was staring at Griff. Unsteady energy rippled through Thomas. A shaky look, like he was biting down on an electric toothbrush. Griff was just beginning to sense the enormity of this, a slow-building atomic reaction—
“What is it?”
Thomas fast-forwarded the tape, watching a digital counter. Glanced down at his gridded notebook. He stood and tapped the counter backward.
“This tape is full of clues, Griff,” Thomas said. “Leo knew that.”
He grabbed Griff’s shoulders. Bounced on him like a human pogo stick.
“Ready?” Thomas said. “Ready?”
“Yes, get off me.”
Griff swatted him and Thomas went back to the board. Hovered his finger over the PLAY button. Licked his lips.
“Everything we need, in five seconds,” Thomas said.
He pressed PLAY. A guitar solo tore through the room, wild and dreamy, and the roaring crowd cut off with click.
“Hear it?” Thomas said.
“Guitar?”
“Listen again. That sound in the back.”
Thomas got on the board. Suppressed guitar. Muddied the crowd. He played the tape back in slow motion. A sound became distinct. Like a slowly torn sheet of paper.
“Airplane?”
“Jet,” Thomas said. He swiveled to another computer. Played the sound again. This time, clean. No background noise.
“The same jet,” Griffin said.
“Yes,” Thomas said. “Exactly the same jet. That, my friend, is the sound of an MQ-4C Triton, flying across the desert.”
“And.”
“According to what I can dig up—the MQ Triton is currently being tested near Nevada’s western border. And it wasn’t invented until last year.”
“So—”
“Griff,” Thomas said. “The show is happening live.”
“In the middle of Death Valley.”
“And it’s happening again,” Thomas said. He crossed the room at a gallop, drummed his hands on the pegboard. Tore off one great sheet. Another. The old calendar. With a thick black Sharpie, he mocked up a new calendar, looked at his phone, drew a giant black circle in July.
“Right there!” Thomas said, stabbing Saturday, July 13.
Thomas inked his familiar Sharpie stick figures, a microphone, faces.
“We’ve got to find them,” Griff said.
“We’ll need at least three days in the desert,” Thomas said. He nodded to the copper SubWatch poles. “And we’ll need those.”
“And Charity,” Griff said.
“Of course,” Thomas said.
“Three days away from home, out of state? Impossible.”
“No,” Thomas said. “If these assholes can put on a giant live show in the most inhospitable place on the planet, I find it increasingly difficult to believe anything is impossible.”
Thomas lifted a bag of chips. Salt and vinegar.
“Oh shit. The S and Vs.”
Thomas reserved salt and vinegar chips for only the most massive undertakings. All-night study sessions, project deadlines. He’d been doing this since seventh grade. Thomas tore open the bag and made the same joke—always.
“Crunch time,” Thomas said. He ate the first chip.
“We’re really doing this?”
“Are you kidding? It’s the greatest mystery of our lives—like, the one thing we’ll remember as we pass into our shitty adulthood and thankless jobs and sad addictions and broken families. Or maybe we die sooner. The nukes drop, or Juan de Fuca finally drowns this town like a mercy killing—but let’s be real. For once—we have the luxury of a real fucking mission. That’s a rare and precious gift. You think Fawcett turned back from the Amazon? You think Shackleton said, oh no—no Antarctic for me—I might get grounded?”
Thomas shook his head, ate chips.
“Okay,” Griff said. “So what’s your plan?”
“I’ve got two.” Thomas chewed on his lip. “The first is possibly illegal and requires the people in our life to be slightly dumber than they actually are.”
“Okay,” Griff said. “How about plan B?”
“Plan B is 100 percent illegal.” He smiled. “And—”
“What?”
“Might scare the rats,” Thomas said. His smile fled. “And we won’t ever come back home.”