Stronger

Eleven dates became forty. Forty became a bus.

That was how it went, and later, when people asked him what it had been like, the year the girl on the poster turned into the girl on the side of the bus, he'd say: fast. It went fast. You didn't notice the rooms getting bigger because you were looking at the floor. Five hundred people, 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 and he stood in the wings feeling for it like a man on a boat feeling for the shore. Then a room in Chicago that held three thousand and he thought this is the biggest room in the world, and it wasn't, 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 she did, 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.

And every night, in every room, third row or fifth or fortieth, something old. Not always. Not even often. But often enough that he learned the taste of it, the way you learn a city by its smells: the slow, worn ones that had stayed for the music and wanted nothing; the sharper ones that had stayed for something else; once, in Detroit, one that didn't have 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, and she said, "Ilse's people have him. Dance," and he danced.

He told her what he felt that she hadn't seen. It wasn't much. It was, some nights, nothing. But it was always the same 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 and a boy who felt one thing she couldn't, and a lie between them that 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, and under it: SHE GOT IT SHE GOT IT SHE GOT IT, and then, a minute later, you should call her.

He was in a hotel in Cleveland with the floor soft under him and the noise of the loading crew coming up through it, and he looked at the photo for a long time, and he didn't call her.

He told himself it was late. He told himself he'd call in the morning, and in the morning there was a soundcheck, and then there was 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 had been very patient about it, arrived.

Stadiums. That was the thing. Halcyon was stadiums, sixty thousand people, a stage with a runway that went out into the crowd like a pier, and Noor was going to be on it, not in the back, not in the third line, Noor was going to be 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, he understood, entirely his own doing, and that didn't help at all.

He called her 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 looked at the ceiling of the hotel room. 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." And she hung up, not hard, just exactly, and he lay on the bed and felt the floor and it was soft and it was his fault.

···

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

"Easy."

"And what is hard?"

"Standing there."

"So stand there. She has a stadium and you have a soft floor and a lie, and you think that means she got the big thing. Menino, your sister has three degrees and a chair at a table nobody offered me, and last week she asked me what you thought about the floor, because she trusts your feet over her books." A sound of chewing. "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. Call her back when you can say I'm proud of you and mean the whole sentence. Until then, work."

So he worked.

It was Ilse, in the end, who taught him what the work was. She turned up in St. Louis with a paper cup she didn't drink from and took 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 the one at Grand Central, 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. He was bigger, and 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 in it, 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, and he came up behind it and put one clawed hand, almost gently, on the smear of writing, and thought about water.

Not fire. Water. Vovô had said get inside the writing and he'd never understood it, and now he did, with his hand on the wet stone, feeling the beat of it through his palm the way he felt floors through his feet: the writing was the beat. It was a drum somebody had wound up a hundred and forty years ago and forgotten. And 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. It was the first leg of Halcyon and she was in a hotel in Atlanta 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 who 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 somehow 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 it was almost the last, because there was so little else to notice. Middle height. Middle everything. A face that had been asked for directions its whole life. Headphones round his neck that he never seemed to put on. He was called XO, just that, 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, in the voice she used when the small quick knot happened 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.

And there was nothing there.

Not the ordinary nothing of a new building or a young person. He'd learned the taste of those. This was the basement's own old, wood and damp and the beat of a hundred years of Lower East Side, all present and correct, and in the middle of it, where a man in a cardigan was pulling up a chair, a blank. A place the drum didn't reach. Not a hole like Detroit. A hole is something. This was the absence of the question. His feet reached for it and came down on nothing, the way a foot comes down where a stair used to be.

He must have made a face, because the man in the cardigan looked up, mild, and said, "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," she said.

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

She sang it. Ricky stood by the door with his feet on the oldest floor in Manhattan and a blank in the middle of it, 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. It was a small song. It was about someone leaving a room and the room noticing. The man in the cardigan didn't say anything while she sang, and when she stopped he didn't say anything either, for a while, and then he took the headphones off his neck and put them, for the first time, on, and listened back to it, and nodded once, and said, "Yes. That's the one. No biggi."

···

Broken Off came out on a Friday. By Sunday it was everywhere in 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, it went up where nobody expected it to and stayed there. By the end of the month there was a second bus, and then there was no bus, there was a plane. Teo, who stood between her and doors, had four people under him now. There was a woman called Marguerite whose job was Rose's calendar and who spoke to Ilse Varga 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 through the floor, 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. That was what Ilse had meant, in the small studio, about rooms where a person can see the whole crowd. The crowd was the whole world now. And she could see all of it.

They announced the tour in March. Nineteen countries. The poster was just her face and one word, and it was on the side of every bus in every city he'd ever been in, and Dash sent him 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 a rule, it's the only rule I've got." The small quick knot. "This one's further. Months. I can't see what, I just—it's 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. He'd stopped being able to tell, lately, whether it was getting softer or whether he was getting heavier.

"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. The floor." He said it. He'd promised Ilse and he said it anyway, up there on the roof with the tour posters on every bus in the world below them. "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 it was, for the first time, a thing he watched her do on purpose, for him, so that 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."