Luna Basswood's Arc

Chapter 12 of 14

The first sustained note held under the seal, but Luna felt the crowd shift before her second bar. Wet faces below the deck. Arms crossed. A slow drone was not what forty minutes of rain-soaked people wanted at the top of a headliner set. She had eight minutes of sustained tone before Susie's song landed. If she played it flat, the crowd would leave before the second song hit. She glanced down. The fish-shaped bass sat pinned to the deck under her hands. She could not lift it. She could not walk the stage. She could not throw her body into the opening the way another headliner would. The plan she wrote in the tent assumed a quiet field. The field was not quiet. It was cold, loud with rain, and losing patience. Susie stepped closer to the edge of the seal, hood dripping. She had watched Luna write the opener blind and had not offered a note. Now she spoke. "They need a face. Give them one." "I can't move." "Don't move. Sing over it." Luna shook her head. "There's no vocal in the opener. It's just tone." "Then write one. Four bars. Now." Luna held the note with her left hand and looked at the mic. Thorne's black bass hung on the stand's base, dead weight, watching her like a debt. The red-haired singer stood two steps back, baritone low, waiting for the cue that was still seven minutes away. Luna leaned to the mic. She did not have a lyric. She had the field hum in her chest and the crack of rain on the seal above her head. She opened her mouth on the sustained note and matched it, one syllable, held. Then she called the singer forward with two fingers. "Take the harmony. Third above. Hold it with me." The singer stepped in without a word and set her voice a third over Luna's. Two voices on one note, over the drone of the bass, over the drone of the field. The front row lifted their heads. A woman near the rail stopped wiping her face. Luna moved the note a half-step. The singer followed. They walked the drone up in slow degrees, no words, just two throats and one string, until the sustained tone had a body the crowd could watch. By the fourth minute, no one in the front was leaving. By the sixth, they were still. Luna bent the final note up to E on the beat she had rehearsed. The singer cut. Susie stepped to her mark. The high A landed clean on top of the E. The opener had worked. Luna stood tethered to one spot, thirty-two minutes still ahead of her, and she had already spent the last card she was holding: her singer, her voice, her opener. She had nothing left to trade if the next song broke.