Chapter Text
The coffee at the Velharrow Dome was an insult.
Sandrone knew this before she tasted it, because the machine in the crew canteen was a Bruxa 300 series with a scaled boiler and a pump that whined at the wrong frequency, and any drink born from that thing came out pre-humiliated. She drank it anyway. All of it. Then she crushed the paper cup one-handed and got back under the stage.
Six technicians on payroll. Six. And not one of them thought to check the solenoid before calling an outside contractor at triple rate. Bless their useless hearts. Keep breaking things, morons. Buy me my workshop one blown fuse at a time.
The work order was taped to the lift housing, where somebody had apparently decided paperwork lived now.
┌───────────────────────────┐
VELHARROW DOME · MAINTENANCE REQ
#4471
CONTRACTOR: S. Sandrone (freelance)
ISSUE: Stage lift B dead. Show TONIGHT.
NOTES: PLEASE HURRY. PLEASE.
The "please" is underlined twice. - P. Osk
└───────────────────────────┘
"Please," Sandrone said to the paper, and snorted.
She wiped her palms on her gray overalls, top half unbuttoned and tied off at the waist, black crop top already smeared silver along one rib where she'd leaned into a greased rail. Her white headband had done its one job so far, which was to keep her hair out of the hydraulics. She rolled her shoulders, popped the access panel, and shone her light in.
Mechanically, the lift was pristine. Somebody had simply cut off its food: the board dead, the supply line flat, every part waiting politely for power that never came.
"Oh, you're joking," she said. "You called me for a supply fault."
The stage manager's voice arrived before the man did. Pemmi Osk was a narrow person with a lanyard collection heavy enough to count as body armor, and he skidded to a stop at the edge of the trapdoor above her with his radio still going in his fist.
"-copy that, doors at seven, doors at seven-" He clicked it off. "Is it fixed? Tell me it's fixed."
"It's not fixed."
"Oh gods."
"Because it's not broken." Sandrone hauled herself up out of the pit in one motion, and Pemmi took a step back, which she enjoyed. She was a head shorter than him and twice as wide through the shoulders and people always did the math on that fast. "Your lift is fine. Your power isn't. Something upstream is eating this whole circuit. What else is on line fourteen?"
"I don't. Um. Know what a line fourteen is."
"Of course you don't." She was already walking. "Panel room?"
"Corridor C, but that's the talent side, you can't just-she's HERE already, she came early, nobody goes on that side when"
"Then your lift stays dead and your star sings in a hole. Corridor C."
She. Her. Everyone in this building says 'she' in the same voice churchgoers use. Not my problem. Some singer. I'll be gone before the glitter cannon loads.
Sandrone had done the responsible thing that morning, which was to spend zero minutes learning whose concert this was. The name on the marquee was COLUMBINA in letters taller than a bus, and there were posters in every corridor of a pale woman with black plaits and her eyes closed, and none of that told Sandrone anything except that the tour had money and the woman had never seen a stage light in her life, apparently, since she performed blind. Gimmick. Fine. Gimmicks paid invoices.
The breaker panel in Corridor C told a very simple story. Line fourteen was tripped, and it was tripped because somewhere down its run, something was pulling load the schematic had never heard of.
She reset it. It held for four seconds and tripped again.
"Cute," Sandrone said. "Where are you, then."
The line ran along the ceiling in old conduit, and she followed it the way she followed everything, chin up, flashlight tracing, boots loud, until the conduit turned a corner and dove through a wall into a door with a silver star on it and a printed sign underneath.
╔══════════════════════════╗
✦ COLUMBINA ✦
ABSOLUTELY NO ENTRY
(Yes, this means you, Pemmi)
╚══════════════════════════╝
Sandrone read the sign. Sandrone considered the sign. Sandrone knocked twice, waited a professional negative-one seconds, and opened the door.
The smell hit her first. Green. Wet soil and crushed stems and something sweet under it, and the reason was that the dressing room had been buried alive in flowers. Buckets of them, vases of them, a long trestle table sagging under them, white and blue blooms banked up the walls the way snow banks against a fence. And plugged into the wall socket, daisy-chained through two adapters that made Sandrone's eye twitch on sight, were four humidifiers, three grow-lamps, a heated water basin, and what appeared to be, no, what genuinely was, a full-sized commercial refrigerator with the door propped open by a watering can.
"There you are," Sandrone said to the outlet, with real warmth. "You absolute crime scene."
"Are you talking to the wall?"
Sandrone turned around.
The woman from the posters was sitting cross-legged on the makeup counter, up among the mirror bulbs, barefoot, in a white slip of a dress, with a bowl of berries in her lap. Her plaits fell over both shoulders, ribboned in white. Her eyes were closed. Not sleepy-closed. Sealed, serene, and aimed directly at Sandrone with an accuracy that closed eyes had no business managing.
"The wall started it," Sandrone said.
"Mm. It does that." The woman ate a berry. "Hello. You're very loud. I heard your boots from the loading dock. Stomp, stomp, stomp. I thought a horse had gotten in."
A horse.
A horse.
"You," Sandrone said, "have plugged a refrigerator, three lamps, four humidifiers, and a heated birdbath into a single fifteen-amp wall socket through two adapters I wouldn't trust to charge a toothbrush. You've killed the stage lift. The stage lift, which lifts the stage, which you stand on, tonight, in front of thousands of paying idiots."
"Oh, is that what happened?" The woman tilted her head. "The lights blinked earlier and one of my humidifiers made a sad little noise and stopped. I petted it, but it didn't help."
"You petted it."
"Machines like being acknowledged."
"Machines like CORRECT AMPERAGE."
"You'd know," the woman said, pleasant as morning. "You smell absolutely soaked in machine oil. Is that a perfume, or do you drink it?"
The room went quiet. One of the humidifiers gurgled.
She asked me. If I drink. Oil.
"Do I. Do I DRINK it. Listen here, you berry-eating windowsill ornament, I have been elbow-deep in your venue's guts since seven this morning fixing problems that YOUR flower hoard caused, I have had one cup of coffee and it was BAD, and you sit up there on your little perch asking me if I drink OIL? You are sooo stupid, oh my gods, you are genuinely, catastrophically, professionally stupid, they should charge admission, forget the concert, sell tickets to THIS-"
The woman had started laughing somewhere around "windowsill ornament," and by "sell tickets to THIS" she had tipped over sideways onto the counter, berries scattering, plaits everywhere, laughing in bright unguarded hiccups with one hand pressed flat over her own mouth doing nothing at all to stop it.
"You," she wheezed, "you're wonderful. Do it again."
"I will NOT do it again."
"Say the part about the windowsill."
"NO."
"Everyone here talks to me the way you talk to funerals." The woman righted herself, gathered a stray berry off the counter, and ate it off the countertop, which, hygiene aside, Sandrone filed away with horror. "Soft and slow and terrified. You called me stupid. To my face. With detail. Do you know how long it's been since anyone gave me detail?"
"I could not possibly care less. Get your fridge off my line."
"It's not your line. It's the wall's line."
"IT'S MY LINE NOW. I ADOPTED IT."
Why am I still shouting. Why is she smiling. Why do her flowers look. Hm.
Sandrone's eyes had snagged, mid-fury, on the trestle table. She would have sworn on her toolbag that the blooms banked along the near edge had been white when she walked in. They were pink now. Blushing, up their petals, in a slow tide moving away from the counter where the woman sat, the way dye moves through water.
"Your flowers are changing color," Sandrone said.
"Are they?" The woman didn't turn to look. Her mouth curled. "They do that when the room gets interesting."
"Flowers don't do that."
"These do."
"Flowers. Don't. Do that. What are they, thermochromic petals? Injected dye reservoir in the stems? That'd be a nice trick, actually, if the delivery rate-" Sandrone had crossed the room without deciding to and had a pink bloom cupped in one grease-lined palm, turning it, hunting the stem for a seam or a tube. Nothing. Just a flower, warm somehow, and pink to its heart.
"You touch things very gently," the woman said, "for someone who screams."
Sandrone put the flower down fast.
"I don't scream. I project. Occupational necessity. Now." She jabbed a thumb at the socket. "Fridge goes. Or the fridge stays and I run you a dedicated line from the panel, properly, with a breaker of its own, so your petting zoo can slurp all the power it wants without murdering my lift. Twenty minutes of work. Your venue pays for it either way, and trust me, I bill beautifully."
"The second one." No hesitation at all. "Do the second one. And do it in here, so I can watch."
"You watch things? With those?" Sandrone waved two fingers at the closed eyes.
"I see everything," the woman said, serene. "I saw you crush your coffee cup in the canteen. Left hand. Though you'd rather use your right, wouldn't you. You're the both-handed sort."
Whatever Sandrone had loaded up to say, she put it back down unfired.
There's no window between the canteen and this room. There's no camera in the canteen, I checked the ceilings out of habit, I always check the ceilings.
Lucky guess. Cold reading. Popstars are basically carnival psychics with a lighting budget.
"There are cameras," Sandrone said.
"If that helps you," the woman said, and smiled with such untroubled sweetness that Sandrone wanted to throw a wrench at her, or possibly to sit down, one of the two.
Running the dedicated line took thirty-five minutes instead of twenty, because Pemmi Osk found them eleven minutes in.
He opened the door on the scene of Sandrone flat on her back under the makeup counter with a spool of cable across her stomach and Columbina lying on the countertop directly above her, chin propped on both fists, narrating.
"Now she's stripping the little wire's coat off. With her teeth. That can't be sanctioned."
"It's not, and I'll deny it," Sandrone said around the wire.
"PLEASE tell me," Pemmi said, in the voice of a man watching his career leave without him, "that I am hallucinating. From stress. Miss Columbina, I am so, SO sorry, this contractor was told, EXPLICITLY told, the talent side is--Sandrone, out, out, OUT"
"She stays," Columbina said.
"She-what?"
"She stays. She's mine now. I adopted her." Columbina pointed down through the counter at Sandrone, roughly accurate despite the plywood in the way. "Like she adopted the line. That's how it works, I'm told."
"That is NOT how it works," Sandrone said from the floor.
"She fixed the lift problem, Pemmi. She found what all six of yours couldn't. She yelled at me. Real yelling. It was marvelous, I nearly cried."
"She YELLED at" Pemmi's hand rose to his chest lanyard-ward, seeking comfort in laminate.
"He's turning gray," Columbina reported downward. "Grayer. Now sort of a lavender."
"Breathe, string bean," Sandrone said. "Your lift will run by six. Your star is intact. Slightly stupider than when I arrived, but that's ambient loss, I can't bill for it."
Pemmi's radio crackled against his hip.
『 kzzht-Osk, come in, catering wants to know if the rider said four hundred flowers or four hundred MORE flowers, over-kzzht 』
『 -also doors moved to seven-fifteen, spread the word- 』
『 -has anyone seen the contractor? The scary one? Doss says the lift just powered up by itself and he's frightened- 』
"That's not by itself, that's ME, tell Doss to keep his mitts off my breaker," Sandrone barked at the radio, which was not how radios worked, and Pemmi fled to relay it anyway.
Above her, Columbina laughed again, quieter this time, pleased down into her bones about something.
"Four hundred more flowers," she said. "Obviously."
The new line went in clean. Sandrone did the last torque on the socket screws, thumbed the breaker, and the refrigerator sighed into life alongside all four humidifiers with the smug contentment of appliances that would never know how close they'd come.
"There." She stood, cracked her back, and started coiling the leftover cable across her elbow. "Dedicated fifteen amps of flower life support. Congratulations. It's the dumbest thing I've built all year and I once built a self-stirring soup pot for a man with two working hands."
"Why did he want it?"
"He said stirring was 'a lot right now.'"
"I understand him completely," Columbina said.
"You would."
Columbina had migrated to the flower table during the cleanup and was rethreading a white ribbon through one plait, fingers quick and absent. The blooms nearest her had gone soft gold at the edges. Sandrone had decided, for sanity's sake, to stop cataloguing that.
"You'll stay for the show," Columbina said.
"I will absolutely not. I have a bath at home with my name on it and a coffee machine that respects me."
"Extra-strong, no milk, and you complain if the crema's thin."
Sandrone's hands stopped on the cable coil.
"...The canteen has cameras too, does it."
"Mm," Columbina said, and ate a berry.
Right. Fine. She's got the whole building wired, or she's the luckiest guesser on the continent, or.
There's no or. I don't do or. I do amperage.
"Stay for one song," Columbina said. "Soundcheck's in an hour. You can stand wherever you hate the crowd least. You spent your whole day making my stage go up and down. Don't you want to see what it's for?"
"It's for money."
"Mine's for something else." Columbina's face did something new then, a small tilt away, mouth going quiet. "Nobody backstage ever actually listens, you know. They monitor. Levels and cues and doors-at-seven. And out front they scream so loud I could sing the shipping forecast." She shrugged, and the gold at the flowers' edges paled off toward white. "One song. Then go home to the bath and the machine that respects you."
Say no. Say no, take the invoice to Pemmi, gouge him on the emergency rate, go home. This woman is a walking code violation with a camera fetish and a florist problem. Say no.
"One," Sandrone said. "And I'm invoicing for the hour."
The flowers went gold again, all at once, all the way to the walls.
She stood in the wings at soundcheck with her arms crossed and her toolbag at her feet, prepared, professionally and personally, to be unimpressed.
The house was empty. Forty thousand seats of nothing. A few crew ghosts drifted the aisles with clipboards, and Doss the rigger sat on a road case eating a sandwich with the reverence of a man on his first break in nine hours. The stage lift, her lift, raised Columbina up through the floor into a single white spot, barefoot still, eyes still closed, and Sandrone allowed herself one flat second of pride at the smoothness of the travel. Buttery. You're welcome, everyone.
Then Columbina sang.
♪ I was silver before they named me,
hollow before the crown,
I poured myself out the window
and I lit the whole way down ♪
Sandrone's arms came uncrossed on their own.
The voice had no business coming out of that berry-eating menace. It went up through the empty dome and filled it, every seat, the rafters, the girders Sandrone had been crawling around all day, and it wasn't loud. That was the thing. It carried without pushing, the way current carries, silent until you're the one completing the circuit.
♪ So call me by whatever,
I'll answer, I don't mind,
every name they gave me
was somebody else's shrine ♪
Oh, Sandrone thought, with the specific dread of a diagnostician recognizing a fault in her own housing. Oh no.
On the last note, Columbina's face turned toward the wings. Toward her, exactly, through closed eyes, at forty meters, and one corner of her mouth went up.
"Sound's good," Columbina said into the mic, to the booth, ostensibly. "This venue's running beautifully tonight. Somebody give the contractor a season pass."
『 booth: uh. we don't have season passes. it's a one-night engagement 』
"Then make some," said the voice of the woman four hundred flowers deep, and the lift, Sandrone's lift, lowered her smoothly away.
Sandrone picked up her toolbag. Put it down. Picked it up.
In its open top pocket, tucked between her wire strippers and her torque driver, sat a single white feather she had never put there. She lifted it out. It was warm. It came apart in her fingers into pale light and then into nothing at all, gone off her skin without a trace of down or dust.
She stared at her empty hand for a long moment.
"...Ventilation," Sandrone said firmly, to nobody. "Bird in the ducts. I'll bill for that too."
Behind her, up the corridor, in a dressing room on the talent side, four hundred flowers, plus four hundred more, bloomed gold to the walls.