The Black Room was glitching now. The stage lights were burning through, the crowd’s noise ripping at AJ’s eardrums like scrap metal. The golden cord of their connection was cutting into her, straining sharp as a garroter’s wire.He’s going to break it,was AJ’s last thought before—
He ripped himself from her like a hook from a fish’s mouth.
Noah’s face was a white oval now, his eyes dead as coins. He was fading into the wing.
He was waning, he was waning.
Then he was gone.
The stage lights dropped again, and AJ was plunged into red-toned black. The water in her body went flat, her mind quiet as a pine box. The space around her was wrong now—the flight path was gone. So was the audience’s energy. Without Noah, AJ’s signal could not reach the collective. She swayed in the dark, half an antenna, a spare part.
Then the lights came back up, and the crowd’s cheers pinned her to the spot. They thought they had just seen the best performance of their lives. AJ bowed once, folding along her center like a dried moth, and then the curtain closed. It did not reopen.
The work lights sprang on. Around her, the crew hooted theircongratulations from the wings, from the rafters. AJ waved an arm to disguise her shaking.
Time was skipping now. She found herself in the dressing room with no idea how she got there.
So quiet. Too quiet.
Where’s Bud?
AJ realized with a jolt that she hadn’t said goodbye to the dog she’d known from a pup, the dog who had been a living tether between them.
A shallow sob escaped her. She wanted to cry, she needed to cry, and yet all she could do was stare at the laundry bag in the corner, the one that still contained some of Noah’s clothes. Another shallow sob bubbled up like a hiccup.
She would change. That’s what she did every night. AJ took off her black T-shirt and sat down in front of her own reflection, staring at her face, streaked with mascara. She gazed at her body, at the skin and tendons and ligaments Noah had loved.
That’s fixable.
Of course it was. AJ would just get a new body, one that didn’t already belong to Noah.
She turned from the mirror and stared at her hands. They were her mother’s hands, capable hands, hands that had never failed her. Why the fuck hadn’t they been able to stop him?
Because he’d told herno.
AJ hadn’t thought it possible.
She wiped the mascara off her face using her T-shirt then threw it in the laundry bag, and now she couldn’t put the bag back down. Instead, she carried it over to the green leather couch and wrapped her body around their dirty clothes. AJ closed her eyes.
So quiet.
In the past, Noah’s absence had felt like a darkened portal, a silent phone. Now when she looked inside, it was as if he had never been there. She was beating her fists against a solid brick wall, asking it to open. There was no magic here, only mortar and clay.
Too, too quiet.
AJ is a tabula rasa.
She’s imprinted on him.
I fear this means a calamitous end to this experiment for all of us.
Time skipped again. Now AJ was back onstage. The crew had all gone home. They were used to AJ and Noah keeping odd hours. They trusted them to lock up.
AJ stood under the work lights and turned slowly on the spot, looking for her shadow.
But she had none.
That made sense. She was in a theater cut from time, a bodiless being with no future and no past.
