Power Trio

“If he can’t come to the phone right now,” Anise says, pacing the green room, “maybe you could ask him where our team is. Seriously. I’ve been having to ask the nice teenager on the cash box for help with the fucking cabling.”

Kell edges into her field of vision, holding up a hand in a sheepish bid for her attention.

“I understand that.” She cups the phone away from her mouth for a moment. “One second, Kell. No, I understand. But he needs to understand that the rider he signed wasn’t us asking for his autograph. We have about half of the backline we were told we’d have, I’m shorthanded and I got people running to the hardware store trying to buy the gear you didn’t have for us and—I hear what you’re saying. Look, find Edward and get him on the phone, okay? I’m seriously tired of yelling at you for shit that wasn’t your responsibility. He is throwing you under the bus. Don’t let him. Have him call me back.”

She spits that last sentence like a machine gun, then hangs up the phone and breathes out on an eight-count. “Sorry about that. I hate having to go Karen in front of the talent.”

“Hey, it’s no worries,” Kell says. “You’re Karen-ing in our corner.” Anise’s eyebags look particularly heavy tonight. Kell wonders what number coffee for the day that is in her hand. “So, uh, Thekla says we’re just gonna get started on sound check and see what it sounds like mic-ing her cab. We’re behind.”

“I know. I know. I’m seriously gonna kill Gus. How hard can it be to find a fucking extra DI box in the state capital?” Anise runs a hand through her pine-colored hair. “Pass my apologies to Legendary, okay?”

“It’s cool, girl.” Kell gives her a faltering pat on the shoulder. “Not your fault.”

“I’m the manager. It’s my fault.” Anise’s phone buzzes in her palm, making her jump. “Ah, this son of a bitch. I have to take this. Break a leg, okay?” She strides off before Kell can respond, sticking the phone to her ear. “Hello? Do I have Edward here? No? No. Of course I don’t.”

Kell returns to the stage, squeezing past a pair of arguing techs huddled over a floor plan. The Jaybird is a classic proscenium, with a big general-admission pit and a cocktail tabled balcony ringing the hall. It can hold about 300 people comfortably, and twice that in packed-sardine mode; they’re expecting close to a full house, but the opener never gets the full house.

The acoustics would be great in here if the setup wasn’t botched. Thekla’s guitar is rising through mud like the Swamp Thing, and Kell has a sinking feeling that her drums are going to sound like a cap gun.

“No luck,” she reports to Legendary.

Thekla scoffs a harsh laugh. “Great. Anyone got stools and some candles? We could do an Unplugged.”

“Let’s just try and do a run, yeah?” Kell offers.

The band takes their marks. Kell nudges Thekla as she heads for the drums. “We’re gonna be fine, okay? Nobody back there is gonna blame us for any hiccups on the sound. Anise’s hair is on fire, she gets it.”

“I don’t care about the people back there.” Thekla looks dejectedly out at the venue. “This isn’t how we should start the tour.”

“Sure. But it’s just Albany, right?” Kell hops onto her drum throne. “Let’s fuck around and have a good time.”

They push through the first verse and chorus of Fossil Fuel. There’s a monitor wedge pointed right at Kell, and she can barely hear Ev. Sion sounds like a scalpel. Maybe it’s good on the floor, but up here the levels are rancid.

“Can we get a little more bass in the monitor?” Evan calls. “Yo, Tarik. Are we sounding okay?”

The orc, who’s leaning on the wall by the emergency exit, gives them the okay sign with the hand that isn’t calibrating his earpiece.

“Well, there you go.” Evan nods to himself.

“The Tarik seal of approval.” Sion fiddles with his overdrive pedal and winces at the feedback. “Albany is in the bag.”

* * *

There’s a number of words that are untranslatable from Orcish to English, but the most important, in Kell’s estimation, is tangr’ak. The literal translation would be something like rhino fire (Two things orcs, historically, adore).

She’s heard some people trying to explain it as some kind of competitive streak or explosive rage unique to the orc, but to her that’s gussied-up xenophobia. Tangr’ak is closer to joy than rage; it’s something that sharpens and drives you. It makes you want to leave a mark. Competitiveness is closer, and tangr’ak often wells up hand-in-hand with it, but it’s not the same thing, and they can exist independently of each other. It can go hand-in-hand with horniness too. That’s why you sometimes get footage of orcs on opposing football teams making out at halftime.

If you want to be considered an adult, you need to show the herd you can harness your tangr’ak, master it and point it at some task where it serves the greater good. Misdirected, unchecked tangr’ak can be ruinous, can reinforce every negative stereotype about her people. But harnessed, and properly directed, it becomes a catalyst, their great pride and strength. The youngest chess grandmaster in the world is an orc high schooler who saddled his tangr’ak to the game.

Everyone’s assigned a mentor (there’s some fancier word for them, but nobody except the olds uses it). Kell was this punchy, unmoored kid who grew up around well-meaning but confused pinkskin teachers who had to deal with a whole extra emotion they didn’t have a name for. When she washed out back to New Laytham, most of her elders didn’t know what to do with her, thought her tangr’ak had gone too long untended, and had to be doused and rekindled as this sulking little ember. Her mentor was this big bruiser named Harwin. She was just the latest in a line of misfits he’d had.

But then she got lucky.

Harwin played the drums.

She feels her tangr’ak now, blazing and churning in her heart like nitro fuel, as she circles the kit on Tremendousness and launches into a blistering metal fill, canting the rhythm into her snare so that her feet can blastbeat a punishing artillery barrage of kick drum.

She’s never been in a cavalry charge, never faced one down on a gleaming shield wall, and she never will. But her cymbals gleam just as brightly. And she feels the tangr’ak every time she’s at her kit. That night at Glorie’s, she accidentally let it burn so fiercely that she’d probably have had to go to the alley and find something to break if Evan hadn’t kissed her.

But she’s rarely needed to lean on it this hard. This has been a tough set.

She can still barely hear Evan over these dogwater monitors, but she trusts her human to do his job and lock in with her. Sion and Thekla are still an EQ nightmare, their levels all out of whack from her perspective, and judging by Sion’s twitching forehead vein, his as well. But the techies told them this was what sounded best, and Thekla just went “fine” in this snippy tone, and they got going.

That’s not the big problem, though.

The crowd’s fine, really. It’s about as big as they had at Ringside, it’s just in a space designed for way more people. There’s a lot of empty floor visible. That isn’t the big problem either.

The big problem showed up right after their first song, and keeps showing up between them. He waits until the clapping has died down and Thekla’s about to speak on the microphone, and makes a big dumbass scrawing noise like a big dumbass bird.

Thekla flinches through her papered-on smile. “Thank you.”

“PLAY FREEBIRD!” screams the big problem. He’s wearing a Bills jersey.

“It gets funnier every time you say it, man,” Thekla says, to a rumble of laughter. “Would love for that to stop happening. Okay. This one’s called—”

“FREEBIRD! FREEBIRD!”

“—Vampire Facial.”

They launch in, and oh god. Poor Thekla. This song normally gets her so juiced up. She doesn’t even take the mic out of the stand tonight, sticks to it like a wallflower.

Evan, she notices, is looking out into the audience as he plays, which he never does. Usually he’s watching someone else in Legendary or looking at a point above everyone’s heads. He hits an unfamiliar lick tonight, something he normally never puts in unless they’re fucking around. He’s putting some mustard into those plucks. His lips press tightly together, invisible behind his beard.

This is what it looks like when Evan’s pissed, she realizes.

They finish Vampire Facial. Kell braces like she’s waiting for a punch.

“Thank you, Jaybird. We got a few more for you. Shrike is—”

“PLAY FREEBIRD!”

“—up next and they’re gonna—”

“AWOOOOO!”

“Hey.” Evan steps to the backup vocal mic. “Bills shirt guy. Hey, come up here. Come here.”

A moment of bone-freezing awkward silence.

“The gentleman who was yelling.” He points. “We heard you, man. No, don’t look behind you. I’m talking to you. Come closer.”

Someone in the audience gives a whistle of approval, and the dude is half-manhandled to the front of the crowd. “You want Freebird?” Evan unhooks the mic from the stand. “Guess what, my man. We’re doing it. Y’all ready for Freebird?” he cries to the audience, gets some confused cheers.

“The thing is,” Evan continues. “I don’t know the lyrics. You know the lyrics, Thek?”

Thekla’s staring agog at Evan. “No.”

“I mean we can play it,” he says. “Right? We just need a singer.”

Sion taps out the first few notes of the solo. The crowd gives an appreciative wave of applause, a few woos.

“All right, dude.” Evan crouches down and holds the mic out. “You know the words, yeah?”

The man shakes his head weakly.

“Sure you do. You been saying Freebird for 20 minutes, you’re the biggest fucking Freebird fan in Albany, you don’t know the words?” Evan stands up. “Who wants this guy to sing Freebird?”

Kell picks up on his beat, starts the chant from behind her drums. “Freebird! Freebird! Freebird!” The crowd joins in.

“C’mon.” Evan offers the mic again. “Awoooo! Freebird! No?” The heckler is laughing and demurring as he backs away.

“Then shut the fuck up!” Kell roars.

Laughter and applause as Evan slams the mic back into the stand. He looks back at Kell, winks. “You pull this shit when Shrike’s playing, you’re gonna get your eyes clawed out,” he says. “This one’s… what are we on, Thek?”

“Commodity Credit,” Thekla says, and Evan’s bass roars out an aggressive, triumphal version of that song’s opening riff. Kell leaps in behind him, pummeling out an improvisational intro. This isn’t their usual way to start Commodity Credit, but this isn’t the usual Evan.

When it comes time for the first live performance of Field Fire, the hesitant Evan H from the Shed, and earlier that day, is gone. He doesn’t have Thekla’s practiced showmanship, but there’s a magnetism about him. He circles the mic between verses, like he’s playing hard-to-get with it. The motion strikes Kell as familiar.

Then she remembers the old Angstrom Parr Show videos she used to watch online, the 60s psych rockers. That’s how Lyle Garett used to sing in the Rainsticks. Evan sings like his granddad. She can hear him in Evan’s voice too, now that she’s made the connection, that same cracked soul. She dips a little heavy psych swing into her drums on the last verse, shares an inside joke grin with Evan as he glances back at her.

Thekla’s big yellow eyes, she notes, are following every move Evan makes. The life is back in them.

By the time they’re on the last song, they’ve got a real crowd. And sure, that’s probably just because it’s closer to curtain time on Shrike, but the juice is back. Kell’s blood is singing. And when Thekla bids them good night, and tells them to get their asses ready for Shrike, her smile finally reaches her eyes.

“Yo, Ev, that was tight.” Kell grabs her human as they head backstage in an amorous clinch hold and plants a kiss on him to burn off her residual tangr’ak. “Where the fuck did that come from, lover boy?”

“I dunno.” Evan taps her forearm and she releases him. “That guy was annoying as hell and I wanted to show his ass up. I was pissed. I didn’t upstage Thek, did I?” He glances at the goblin, who’s in a huddled conversation with Conna about the terrible sound system.

“No way, dude. I think she was about to hump your leg.”

He chuckles. “Where’s Sion going?”

The elf is powerwalking back toward the green room. “Dunno,” Kell says. “Off to do another little diary entry, maybe.”

Evan, who’s been doing his best to keep the ash elf engaged with them, heads off to intercept.

Thekla detaches from Conna and trudges to the green room, her stage excitement already flaking off to reveal the downcast anxiety underneath.

But Kell is putting a plan together. She thinks she knows just what Thekla needs to get her out of this hole. “Yo, Thek,” she says, strolling into step with her goblin. “You wanna make a little bet with me?”