Jake hazardapple wanted one song to end it. One perfect song that would shut the desert ghosts up for good. He sat alone in the dark club and pressed his pick to the strings. The purple neon buzzed over the broken windows. His enchanted guitar glowed along its runes, warm under his hands. He found a melody. He held it three seconds. Then the ghosts answered. They came through the walls as voices. Low ones, high ones, a sound like wind trapped in a jar. They took his melody and bent it into their own song. Every note he played, they sang back louder. He tried a different key. They followed and drowned it. He pressed harder on the strings until his fingers ached. The guitar's runes flared, but the ghost song swallowed the sound whole. He could not hear his own playing. He could not write over them. He stopped. His hands shook. The ghosts kept singing without him now, filling the room. "You're fighting them," said a voice behind him. May Timapple stood in the doorway. She ran the ghost band in the old studio at the edge of town. She knew the dead better than anyone living. Her denim jacket hung open, boots planted wide. She did not come in to comfort him. She came in to correct him. "You can't write louder than the dead. Nobody can." "Then what," Jake said. "You stop writing at them." She stepped past him and set a reel player on the floor. Its two round reels caught the neon light. "Record them. Let their song be the song. You play under it, not over it." Jake stared at the machine. He had spent months trying to silence the ghosts with his own voice. She was telling him to give them his. A third figure came through the door. Mac Lanapple. He wrote the heaviest songs in town and trusted no praise for them. He carried a cable coiled in one fist. He looked at Jake, then at the singing air. "She's right," Mac said. "Honor the thing. Then it stops." Jake thought of the melody he'd lost. He let it go. He threaded the reel and hit record. The ghost voices poured onto the tape. Then he lifted the guitar and played beneath them, slow and plain, following where they led. He stopped trying to win. The room changed. The voices did not grow louder. They grew gentle. One by one they thinned out, as if the tape had finally held them. When the last voice faded, the reels still turned. On the tape was a full song. Theirs and his, together. May nodded once. "That's the first one." Jake looked at the spinning reels. He had his method now. But the tape held a dozen ghosts, and the desert held hundreds more. One song would never be enough.