The lobby was all glass and cold air, the kind of building that made his boots sound criminal on the marble. David stood just past the revolving door with a bouquet strangled in one fist and a paper bag sweating grease into the other, and every head that bothered to turn did the same quick math: black clothes, hardware in the face, wrong floor, wrong life. The AC was cranked to morgue levels and his arms prickled under the long sleeves anyway, that old useless sweat starting up. The flowers were already losing a petal to the cellophane. Orange gerberas. He'd stood in front of the bucket at the flower stand for twenty minutes like an idiot, and that was what he'd walked away with: something bright enough to announce him from a block away.

He knew the floor. Seventeenth. He knew the lunch break, twelve-thirty, except Thursdays when some standing meeting slid everything sideways. He knew the deli two blocks over where they always got the same turkey thing with too much mustard, because he'd ended up behind them in that line once, hood up, half the menu memorized before they had finished ordering and he'd been calling it a coincidence ever since. It was twelve-ten now. He'd timed the train. This was normal shit. Flowers and lunch, showing up, feeding somebody. His father had never once in his life brought his mother anything that wasn't a bill or a bruise, so the math checked out, so this was fine, so he could stop rehearsing it any minute now.

The bouquet was too much. He knew that crossing the lobby, watching the marble throw him back warped and skinny, some undertaker carrying his own flowers. Nobody in this building had steel in their face and a scowl that could curdle milk. A security guy by the turnstiles tracked him for exactly three seconds and then decided he was somebody else's problem. David catalogued the exits without meaning to: front, service corridor behind the desk, and the stairwell door propped with a fire extinguisher. He hated his own brain for doing it. He just wanted to hand something over and not be seen seeing anyone. That was the whole trick of his life: staying invisible while holding something bright orange.

"Help you?" The receptionist's name tag said BREE. Her smile was doing overtime.

"Yeah." It came out lower than he meant, gravel in a quiet room. He set the bag on the counter before he could crush it. "Here for..." and he gave User's name, watched her type it, watched the little pause while a phone rang seventeen floors above him and nobody picked up.

"Looks like they might be tied up in a meeting," she said, apologetic, corporate. "I can leave a note at their desk, or you're welcome to..."

"I'll wait." Too fast. He heard it land. He made himself lean back on his heels, easy, unclenching the bouquet one finger at a time. "It's lunch. User's gotta eat sometime."

"Sure." The smile again, shinier. "I'll just need you to sign in."

Full name, printed, like a confession. David Mendez, black pen, the timestamp. She clipped a visitor badge to his shirt that said ESCORT REQUIRED in red and then apologetically did not escort him anywhere, just aimed him at a cluster of armchairs designed to be looked at rather than sat in. He sat. The badge pulled his collar crooked. His foot started tapping and he caught it and killed it, hands flat on his knees, rings cold against the denim.

Thirteen minutes. He counted ceiling tiles. He ran his lines: the casual ones, the I was nearby, the don't make a thing of it. Every single one sounded like a lie even inside his own skull, because it was. He'd spent forty minutes on a train to be nearby. He pictured leaving: flowers on the desk with Bree, a note, gone before the elevator doors finished closing. Clean. No witnesses. Except then he wouldn't know if they ate. He wouldn't know anything, and not-knowing was the one thing his body refused to do, it would rather sit here in this ugly chair under this ugly light being looked at sideways by every khaki in the building.

The deli bag had gone translucent at the bottom. He moved it to the other knee before it could leave a stain.

Then the elevator chimed, and the doors opened, and there User was, lanyard, badge, mid-laugh at something a coworker was saying, alive in a way he had never once managed to be. Every rehearsed line evaporated off the floor of his brain at once. David stood. The flowers came up with him, half-strangled, petals giving one shiver before he got his hand still.

He held up the bag instead of everything else he was carrying.

"Tell me you haven't eaten yet."

The kit was the only place his head ever shut up. Four songs in and David's shoulders were already burning, sweat crawling down his spine under the long sleeves, bleached hair stuck to his jaw in stringy ropes. The venue was a shithole: some bar off the highway with a stage built out of plywood and prayer, ceiling so low the cymbals nearly kissed it. Maybe seventy people packed in, all of them breathing each other's air. It smelled like old beer soaked into concrete, BO, and the fog machine juice somebody had spilled behind the amps last week. The stage lights ran hot and cheap, one of them flickering a seizure-strobe over Sean's side of the stage. David didn't mind any of it. Up here, behind the drums, the world narrowed down to kick-snare-kick and the count in his skull, and for twenty-five minutes at a time he didn't have to be a person.

His eyes still swept the crowd between fills. Old habit. Couldn't kill it if he tried: his body did it on its own, mapping exits, mapping faces, marking who was drunk and who was getting handsy and who was standing too close to the door. Everybody got a half-second. Nobody got more.

Then somebody got more.

User. Standing maybe fifteen feet back from the stage, caught in the wash of that busted flickering light, and David's hands kept playing on their own while his brain just stopped. Fell out of the song and into User. He couldn't even have said what did it. Wasn't like the light was doing them favors. Wasn't like they was the only person worth looking at in the room. Didn't matter. Something in his chest pulled taut like a snare wire and every instinct he'd spent twenty-six years learning to aim swung around and locked on User like a scope.

He almost blew the fill. Caught it, barely, dug back into the pocket hard enough that Cory glanced back at him over a shoulder. David ignored it. His whole body had gone tight-coiled and electric, and the thoughts started stacking up the way they always did, fast and ugly and hungry. Where'd they come from. Who'd they come with. User didn't look like the regulars: the regulars he had filed away, the ones who came to every DeadÆire show and screamed Jakey's lyrics back at him. they was watching the stage but there was something in how they stood there, and David needed to know what it was, needed it under his hands, needed to know if they was here for the band or here by accident or here for some other reason entirely, and the not-knowing was already chewing on him.

Don't be weird about it, some leftover scrap of sense told him. He didn't even know them.

The rest of him didn't give a shit about the scrap.

He tracked User through the last three songs. Every break, every measure where his hands knew the way without him, his eyes went back to that spot in the crowd to make sure they was still there. Some girl squeezed past User with two drinks and for a second he lost the angle and his stomach dropped straight through the kick drum; then the light swung and there they was, and the relief was so immediate it pissed him off. This was insane. He knew it was insane. He'd done this before, felt this before, the snap, the fixation, the whole rotten machinery of it, and he knew exactly where it came from if he let himself think about it, which he didn't. He just played harder. Put the whole thing into the snare until his rings stung his fingers and the song came apart into the feedback screech Jakey liked to end on.

House music kicked in. Somebody's playlist, too loud. The crowd started breathing again, loosening, drifting toward the bar and the bathrooms and the door.

Normally David stayed. Broke down his own kit piece by piece, slow and methodical, let the room empty around him. It was the routine. It kept his hands busy and kept people from trying to talk to him.

He was off the stool before the feedback even died.

"Yo, Dave..." Jakey caught him at the edge of the stage, still riding the high, sweat-slick and grinning. "Where you going, man, we gotta load..."

"Five minutes."

"Five... dude, the van's double-parked!"

David was already gone, down the side steps and into the bodies. The crowd parted wrong, slow, everybody either drunk or damp or standing in clumps talking over the playlist, and he shouldered through them with his jaw set and his eyes fixed on the spot where the light had held User. Fifteen feet. Ten. Somebody's elbow caught his ribs and he didn't feel it. His hands were steady. His hands were always steady; it was everything underneath them that wasn't.

He found User near the back, where the light got honest, and up close it was worse. Better. Worse. He stopped a half-step closer than strangers were supposed to stand, looked down at User through his lashes, and kept his voice low and flat and even, the way he kept everything.

"I noticed you out there."