Page 34 of Rust of Control

When Jude finished nobody said anything for a moment.

"The kids at the Loft show," Mara said. "There was that group. In the front row. Young. Really young." She looked at the table. "Rand bought them drinks after. I watched him do it and I thought-" She stopped. “I was just crew back then. I… I didn’t think…”

"You thought he was being Rand," Kit said. His voice came out flat. There was a fire in him that made his golden skin pink and his freckles stand out. "We all thought that. That's what we thought every time."

"It's not your fault," Jude said.

"I know whose fucking fault it is." Kit looked at him. His amber eyes were red at the rims. "How long have you known?" he ran a thin hand through the long falls of his raven dark hair.

"Rand specifically? A few weeks. That something was wrong-" Jude paused. "I think I knew something was wrong for a long time and I didn't have words for it. That’s not an excuse. Just the truth"

Sy hadn't spoken yet. Big, very dark skinned, and quiet; a man who'd learned young that taking up space was optional. He looked at Jude now. "What do you need?"

"A show," Jude said. "One show. Big, advertised everywhere, Trevor Project fundraiser so it looks like we're coming back for a reason. We need Rand to show up."

"He will," Kit said. There was a world of disgust in his normally gentle voice. "If he thinks there's money and you're there he'll show up."

"That's the point. The crew needs him in one place at one time. And I-" He stopped. Looked at his hands. "I have a song. I wrote it since all of this. I want to play it. I want him to hear it." He looked up. "I want him to know I know, from the stage, in front of everyone, before they take him."

The kitchen was quiet for a moment. The river outside. The low sounds of the house.

"When?" Sy said.

"Two weeks. The Majestic, if we can get it."

Kit was already pulling out her phone. “I know some people who owe me. We’ll make it happen.”

The crew said yes. Marcus sat with the plan for exactly the length of time it took him to find the holes in it and close them, which was about twelve minutes, and then he nodded and said the crew would be positioned. Ghost mapped the venue exits on his laptop in the time it took Jude to drink a glass of water. Nate didn't say anything when Jude told him, just looked at him for a long moment with the stillness that meant he was doing the math, and then said: "I'll be in the room."

"I know," Jude said.

"Front row if I have to."

"Please don't. Your face is too recognizable."

Nate's mouth did the thing. "I'm recognizable."

"You're enormous. It's different."

They rehearsed every day for ten days.

The Meldrum space, same as always, minus the drum kit because it was Rand's and none of them wanted it in the room. Mara brought her own. She'd always had her own: a Tama Superstar in matte black with a kick drum that rattled the fillings in your back teeth. She set it up in forty-five minutes flat, pink dreads tied back, shaved sides catching the fluorescent light, moving through the assembly with the focused speed of someone who'd been waiting for this rehearsal her whole career. She was small enough that the kit dwarfed her. She sat down behind it and looked like she was about to eat it alive.

He ran the rehearsals. It took two days to stop hesitating before he said let's run that again or back to the top, two days of catching himself waiting for permission that wasn't coming from anywhere. On the third day he stopped catching himself. Turned out permission wasn't a thing he'd needed. He'd just been taught to wait for it.

The band found something without Rand in it. Looser in some places, tighter in others. Mara hit the pocket differently than Rand ever had. Cleaner, harder, with a kind of joy in it that Rand's playing had never once had. Kit filled space in the low end that Jude hadn't known was empty. Sy's rhythm guitar came up in the mix because nobody was telling him to sit back. Jude noticed all of it and filed it and let it change things. Even his own notes on guitar came easier, truer. Free in a way he hadn't realized he'd lost.

"The Monster Beside Me" was last every rehearsal. He'd given them the lyrics and chords on day one, walked them through the structure, and then played it for them start to finish without stopping. When he finished the room had been quiet for long enough that he'd started to wonder, and then Kit said, from somewhere behind him: "Jude."

"Yeah."

"This is the best thing you've ever written."

He hadn't answered that. He didn't have an answer that was smaller than the truth, which was that it was the first song he'd written in two years that was entirely his.

By day ten they had it. Not just tight. Right. The build in the second verse, the drop in the bridge where Jude's voice went alone, the outro that climbed until it didn't, Mara and Kit and Sy knowing the push and the silence and how much of each. They ran it once on day ten and when it ended nobody said anything at all, and that was how Jude knew.

The show sold out in four hours.