They Stole My Songs

Chapter 4

The name on the file was mine. Author: MREED, my old staff login from my first months at Sterling, when the help could still touch the studio machines. Noah closed the window without saving anything and told me, very quietly, to forget I'd seen it until he knew who else was watching. Two days later Studio B's drive was wiped in a "routine update," and the file was gone. I went back to answering phones.

Rehearsal was in the arena, house lights up, twenty thousand empty seats. The new song was "Glass Halo," the one I had written in the demo room at 5:40 in the morning, and its bridge climbed like a staircase. Scarlett treated it like an elevator. She stood at the bottom and waited for it to come down to her. It didn't.

"Again," Dylan said from the sound desk, over the talkback.

The second time she went sharp, as if volume could stand in for altitude. The band, eight musicians who had played with everybody, traded the look musicians trade when the check is good and the music isn't.

"Again."

The third time, her voice cracked on the turn, and the c***k rolled around the empty seats and came back. Scarlett ripped out her in-ear monitor. "The arrangement is wrong," she announced to the rigging. "The key is wrong. Whoever wrote this doesn't understand my instrument."

I was standing at the side of the stage with a garment steamer in one hand and her backup shoes in the other, and I kept my face blank and my eyes on the floor.

Dylan came down the aisle with his tablet, already solving the problem the way Sterling Records solved everything, by making the truth unnecessary. He didn't look at her. He looked up at the rigging, and then he gave the room its orders.

"Full playback," he said. "She lips the verses, the track carries the choruses. And we put a live guide under it. A real singer, offstage, riding the hard parts, so if anything drops out, the room still hears a voice." His eyes found me. "Maya. Side booth. You know the song."

The booth was a converted storage room off stage left. No window. A folding chair, a music stand, a microphone on a short stand, headphones with one ear cushion torn, and a cable that ran from the microphone up through the ceiling and out into the arena. My voice would fill twenty thousand seats. My name would appear nowhere, not in the program, not in the credits.

"Guide vocal," Dylan said, in front of the band, the techs, two dancers changing by the amp racks. "Don't perform. Just be underneath her."

"Don't worry," I said. "I'm good at underneath."

One of the techs coughed, which at Sterling passed for a laugh. Dylan was already walking away.

At soundcheck I sang the bridge alone, to test the line. I could have sung it safe and flat, just enough to set the levels. I didn't. If the room was going to hear me once before opening night, it was going to hear the song done right. My voice came back off the empty seats bigger than I had ever heard it, every rung of the climb where it belonged.

Down on the floor, two of the lighting crew stopped working and looked up into the dark, trying to find the source. There was nothing to find. That was the design.

"Levels are perfect, Maya," Noah said in my headphones, very quietly.

That night, the night before opening night in Los Angeles, Scarlett finally said no out loud.

I heard it through her dressing-room door, where I was kneeling with a needle, re-sewing a strap that a salaried stylist had been too busy to fix.

"I am not a karaoke machine, Dylan." Her voice came through the wood, high and shaking. "I am not standing in front of twenty thousand people moving my mouth while the receptionist sings my tour."

"Your tour," Dylan said, "is forty cities of sold-out—"

"Then cancel the first one. I don't care."

The door opened before I could stand up. Victor Sterling stood in the frame of it.

I had seen Victor in the building perhaps a dozen times in three years. He had the kind of face that made rooms behave. He looked at Scarlett with a small, patient frown, as if she were a billing error he was looking forward to correcting.

"Darling," he said, almost gently. "A cancelled tour is a breach. A breach is the penalty clause. The penalty clause is more money than you will earn in the rest of your life, and I will spend the rest of mine collecting it, because it will amuse me." He straightened a cuff. "You will sing. Or you will appear to sing. From where I sit, those have always been the same product."

She folded. The fold arrived before the decision did. I watched it happen in her shoulders first, then her mouth, and then she was nodding at the floor.

She cried after he left, real crying, ugly and young, her forehead against the mirror. For one second I saw the girl who had signed her own stack of papers at nineteen, and I almost pitied her. Then she caught my reflection behind her, needle in hand, and the girl was gone.

"Don't look at me," she said. "Get out. Get OUT."

I tied off the thread, snipped it, smoothed the strap flat, and set it on the chair where she would see it. Then I got out.

In the corridor, Noah was coiling cable beside Ferreira, the technical director, an old road dog who was glaring at the stage-left junction box like it owed him money.

"These feed lines are older than the building's insurance," Ferreira said, to nobody in particular. "And the backing tracks are on one drive. One. I told them in March: make a second backup. You know what they bought instead? A fountain. For the lobby."

Noah looked at me, at the headphones around my neck, at the little black door off stage left. Whatever he was thinking, he kept it behind his careful face.

"We'll be fine," he said.

"What happens if that one drive dies?" I asked.

Ferreira snorted. "Show stops, sweetheart. Twenty thousand people sitting in the quiet, no track, no net, nothing." He jerked his chin at the booth door. "The only backup in this building is whoever's standing in that booth."

Opening night was tomorrow, and I was the only backup in the building.