Luna Basswood's Arc

Chapter 13 of 14

Susie's song landed clean on the E, and the crowd held. Luna played the line Susie had written, eyes on the neck of her own fish-shaped bass pinned under the seal. The second song was doing its work. Then a gust cut across the deck. The mic stand rocked. Thorne's black bass, hung on the base as a weight, slid off the hook and dropped over the front lip of the stage into a puddle at the foot of the boards. Luna heard it hit before she saw it. A flat wet slap. The body lay face down in brown water, cable coiled around the neck, one tuner half-buried in mud. She could not step to it. Her hands were on her song, her feet were inside the seal, and Thorne had lent her that bass on one condition: return it untouched. She kept playing. Her mind ran the deal forward. If she pulled the bass out after the set with a warped neck and a soaked pickup, Thorne would tell every player in the field that Luna borrowed and broke. The headliner slot would stay on paper. Her name would not. She cut her eyes to the singer at stage right, baritone slung low, red hair wet against her jaw. Luna tipped her head toward the puddle. The singer looked. Her mouth tightened. She stepped off her mark, crossed in front of Luna, and knelt at the front lip of the deck in full view of the crowd. She lifted the black bass out of the puddle by its strap. She wiped the body against her own sleeve, tuner side up, and set it flat on the deck behind the monitors, out of the rain line. Then she walked back to her mark and picked her baritone back up on the next bar. She had missed four bars of harmony. The song felt thin where her voice should have been. Susie caught Luna's eye across the seal. "You owe her now too," Susie said, flat. "I know." "Neck's warped. I saw it bend." Luna kept the bassline moving. She did not look at the black bass again. The song finished on its written last note. The crowd clapped, wet and loud. Twenty-four minutes still to go. The blonde bass player was standing at the rail below stage right, arms crossed, watching. She had told Luna in the practice space that she would take the headliner slot if Luna wasn't ready. She had not taken it. She was here to see what Luna did with it. Luna turned to her mic. Thorne's bass sat behind the monitors with a bent neck and a soaked pickup. The singer had covered the puddle but left a hole in the song. Luna had three songs left, a warped debt drying on her stage, and no harmony line for the next one.