Scott Westerfeld - The Last Days

“It’s lame,” Minerva said. “ Beatles , like the insect, except spelled like beat , because it’s music?”

Pearl cleared her throat. “Had to do with Buddy Holly and the Crickets, actually.”

“Whatever,” Minerva said. “It’s a really pathetic pun. And it’s plural.” She smiled at Moz.

“Whoa… really?” I blinked. But they were right: beetle didn’t have an a in it. They’d spelled it wrong.

Moz and Minerva were laughing at me, and he said, “You never noticed that?”

I shrugged. “I just figured they spelled it that way in England. I mean, I read this English book once, and all kinds of stuff was spelled wrong.”

Now everyone was laughing at me, but I was thinking maybe Minerva was right. Maybe it didn’t matter what we called ourselves: the Paranormals, the F-Sharps, or even the Desk. Maybe the music would grow around the name, whatever it was.

But we kept arguing, of course.

When Astor Michaels came back expecting an answer, Pearl pulled out her phone. “It’s only been forty minutes! You said an hour.”

He snorted. “I’ve got work to do. So what do we call this band?”

We all froze. We’d come up with about ten thousand ideas, but nobody could agree on a single one. Suddenly I couldn’t remember any of them.

“Come on!” Astor Michaels snapped his fingers. “It’s do-or-die time. Are we in business or not?”

Naturally, everyone looked at Pearl.

“Um…” The silence stretched out. “The, uh, Panics?”

“The Pa nic ,” Moz corrected. “Singular.”

Astor Michaels considered this for a moment, then burst out laughing. “You’d be amazed how many people come up with that.”

“With what?” Pearl said.

“Panic. Whenever I give bands the Name Ultimatum, they always wind up calling themselves something like the Panic, the Freakout, or even How the Hell Should We Know?” He laughed again, his teeth flashing in the semi-darkness.

“So… you don’t like it?” Pearl asked softly.

“It’s crap,” he chuckled. “Sound like a bunch of eighties wannabes.”

No one else was asking, so I did: “Does this mean we’re dumped?”

He snorted. “Don’t be silly. Just trying to motivate you and have a little fun. Lighten up, guys.”

Minerva was giggling, but the rest of us were ready to kill him.

Astor Michaels sat down behind his desk, his smile finally showing all his teeth, a row of white razors in the darkness. “Special Guests it is!”

When the doorman heard our names, he didn’t bother to check the list or use his headset. He didn’t even meet our eyes, just waved us in.

Pearl and I walked straight past the line of people waiting to have their IDs checked, to be patted down and metal-detected, to pay forty dollars (a thousand dollars for every twenty-five people) to get in. It had all happened just as Astor Michaels had promised. We were underdressed, unpaying, and in Pearl’s case underage, but we were getting in to see Morgan’s Army.

“Our names,” I said. “They worked.”

“Why shouldn’t they?” Pearl grinned as we followed the long, half-lit entry hall toward the lights and noise of the dance floor. “We’re Red Rat talent.”

“Almost Red Rat talent,” I said. The “almost” part was making me twitchy. Pearl’s lawyer was still arguing about details in the recording contract. She said that we would thank her for this diligence in a few years, when we were famous. I knew that details were important in legal documents, but right now the delay made the world tremble, like going out the door without a bottle of pills in my pocket.

“Whatever,” Pearl said. “Our band is nine kinds of real now, Alana Ray—and real musicians don’t pay to see one another play.”

“We were already real,” I said as we crossed the dance floor, the warm-up DJ’s music making my fingers want to drum. “But you’re right. Things do feel different now.”

I looked at one twitching hand in front of me, mottled with the pulsing lights of the dance floor. Flashing lights usually made me feel disassociated from my own body, but tonight everything seemed very solid, very real.

Was it because I’d (almost) signed a record deal? My teachers at school always said that money, recognition, success—all the things normal people had that we didn’t—weren’t so important, that no one should ever use them to make us feel less than real. But it wasn’t exactly true. Getting my own apartment had made me feel more real, and making money did too. The night I’d gotten my first business cards, I’d taken them out of the box one by one, reading my name again and again, even though they were all exactly the same…

And now my name had gotten me to the front of a long line of people with more-expensive clothes and better haircuts, people who hadn’t gone to special-needs schools. People with real last names.

I couldn’t help but feel that was important.

Pearl was beaming in the dance-floor lights, as if she was feeling more real too. It was illegal for her to be here, and I’d expected the doorman to know she was only seventeen, even if Astor Michaels had said it wouldn’t be a problem.

That thought made me nervous for a moment. At my school they’d taught us to obey the law. Our lives would be complicated enough without criminal records, they liked to point out. Of course, saying that people like us couldn’t afford to break the law suggested that other people could. Maybe Pearl and I were more like those other people now.

My fingers started to itch and pulse, but not because of the flashing lights: I wanted to sign that record deal soon. I wanted to grab this realness and put it on paper.

As we waited for the first band to start, I looked around for Astor Michaels. He made me shiver sometimes, even though he seemed to like me, always asking my opinions about music. He also asked about my visions, which didn’t upset him the way they did Minerva. Of course, I never saw Astor Michaels upset by anything. He didn’t care that his smile made people nervous, and he only laughed when I told him that he moved like an insect.

I found him easier to talk to than most people, just not to look at.

“Too bad Moz couldn’t make it,” Pearl said. “What did he say he was doing tonight?”

“He didn’t,” I answered, though I had guesses in my head.

Moz was different now. In the last month he’d started borrowing things from the rest of us—Astor Michaels’s smile, my twitchiness, Minerva’s dark glasses—as if he wanted to start over.

He and Minerva whispered when Pearl wasn’t looking, and the two sent messages to each other while we played. When my visions were strong enough, I could see their connection: luminous filaments reaching up from Minerva’s song to Moz’s fluttering notes, pulling them down toward the seething shapes beneath the floor.

I tried not to watch. Moz still paid me and said he would keep paying until Red Rat Records had actually given us money. He had never broken his promises to me, so I didn’t want to tell my guesses to Pearl.

And I didn’t want to make her sad tonight, because it was nice of her to have asked me along to see her favorite band.

The opening act had just been signed by Astor Michaels—like us, except for our “almost.” But they already had a name. Toxoplasma was stenciled on their amps.

“What does that word mean?” I asked Pearl.

“Don’t know.” She shrugged. “Don’t quite get it.”

Neither did I, but I also didn’t understand why Zahler never used his first name, or why Moz had started saying “Min” instead of “Minerva,” or why no one ever called Astor Michaels anything but “Astor Michaels.” Names could be tricky.