Technically, this was a one-bedroom carriage house—all they could afford to purchase in this area—but with a little bedroom negotiating, the three of them had managed to live in it for nearly a year now. Besides, Remy and Val had always shared small spaces—a bedroom, a van, a studio. They’d grown into each other, vines and fruits overlapping, until you could hardly tell whose roots were whose.

“Yeah,” Val said, looking disappointed that Remy was up. Remy’s presence indicated the day had to begin, and Val was on a personal quest to become an owl or vampire or sentient night-blooming flower.

People often spoke about following their passions but rarely spoke about the value of good old-fashioned busy work or its meditative qualities. No, it wasn’t fulfilling, but that meant it wasn’t dangerous. You couldn’t break your heart on busy work.

“The drummer is the heartbeat of the band,” she had said. “Without the drummer, everything falls apart.”

Thirty thousand people screaming didn’t sound like people at all. They sounded like a lion, or a thunderstorm, or an earthquake: Something alive and infinitely powerful and beautiful and dangerous.

Vivi’s product was empathy, and she peddled it so flawlessly that not one of the thirty thousand people knew it was a product at all.

Reimagined, it still sounded like a Vivi Swan song. That was the thing about her music; no matter how you turned it, flipped it, mirrored it, flattened it, they were all about her own heartbreak.

Mercy was sick. She’d come too early and was tiny, with limbs that had the smooth, slick look of plastic. Her eyes were big and vein-blue under her lids, and when she cried, it was more like an animal’s mew, tiny and frail. Nothing they did helped—not the pastor, or the elders, or the old ladies who had seen hundreds of births in their lifetimes.

Val was the musician; Remy was just the drummer. Drummers didn’t write songs, didn’t dream in melodies the way guitarists did. The idea of writing a song was as foreign as the idea of painting a masterpiece or cooking a lobster or touching snow.

“It’s a virtue,” he said, opting for the shortest, plainest version of the truth. “So I’m Remember, my older brother is Valor, and my little sister is Mercy.” Vivi’s eyebrows lifted, and Remy grinned. “You can say it. My parents never gave us a chance.”

“What’d you get teased for?” Remy asked before thinking better of it. He believed her, of course—everyone, no matter how famous or pretty or skinny—has a teasing story. But he was curious to know what asinine aspect her classmates had chosen. Hair? Teeth? Quiet Coyote had toured with a girl who’d been picked on for the size of her fingernail beds, so anything was possible.

“So you paid someone to appropriate the absolute hell out of Jamaican culture on your head?” he said, daring to walk the line between joking and professionalism.

Remy inhaled. The air smelled like coffee—the good kind of coffee, the sort he picked out after paydays.

“I think there’s a pretty distinct possibility that you and I are just really worried about being left behind by the people we love.” “Well, to be fair, there’s not many people I love, so losing one is a big deal.”

He just needed to see her. It wasn’t a crushing, desperate need—it was more a dull ache, a want that could be ignored but only if you were willing to make yourself miserable.

“When you talk to me, there’s a way your voice goes. It sort of sounds like everything is a question, but in a good way, and it feels…” She paused and looked particularly embarrassed; when she met Remy’s eye, she finally went on, “It makes me want to answer them.”

“If you’re both all in, it isn’t complicated. Messy, maybe, but not complicated.”

“I don’t want to look at pictures of people’s newborns either, but that doesn’t mean I want them destroyed!” “The pictures or the newborns? That’s dark,” Val said thoughtfully.