His whole face opens. He sits back and crosses his arms and nods with the satisfaction of someone watching his own prophecy land. “Good,” he says. “Good, good.” He drums both hands on the table once, a HammerFall punctuation mark, evidently. “This is very good.”
“I’m glad you approve,” I say, drier than I intended.
He points at me. “I like her,” he announces. Then, louder: “Kragen. I like her.”
Kragen has come off the stage; I didn’t see him do it, and he’s standing at the edge of the room with an expression that suggests he’s been there long enough to have heard at least partof this exchange. He looks at Grulk. Then at me. Then at Grulk again.
“I see that,” he says.
“She looked up StillWater,” Grulk informs him, as though reporting something of civic importance.
“I know.” He comes over and pulls out the chair beside me. “After the first visit,” he says, not quite a question.
“Yes,” I say.
Kragen looks at me with that unguarded warmth he usually keeps banked down. Then he almost smiles, lower-wattage and more real than the one he wears for rooms. My sternum registers it like a plucked string.
“Second set in five minutes,” he says to Kragen. “Don’t waste it.”
“Thank you, Grulk,” Kragen says, though his tone suggests he’s not sincere.
“I’m helping,” Grulk says cheerfully.
Kragen stands and looks down at me. The bar noise surrounds us, and Grulk has turned to introduce himself to the adjacent table at a volume that makes their conversation everyone’s conversation.
“Stay,” Kragen says. Not quite a question. Not a command. An admission.
I look up at him. “I was going to.”
A flicker of feeling flashes across his face, quick and unguarded, here and gone. He goes back to the stage.
The second set is different.
He knows I’m in the room now, and he’s playing with that knowledge. His hands find every note. His face gives the songs what they ask for. Nothing contradicts anything I know about him.
He plays the old song about two-thirds through the set, the one from his world; I recognize it now from the StillWater clearing. The room goes quiet in a different way as they listen. Not more attentive. More still. Like the sound is asking more of them than the other songs do. It lasts three minutes, and then he comes back to a familiar song, and the room exhales.
I sit with what I just heard.
He came through the Emergence with that song in his memory. Carried it eight years in a bar in Missouri and dusts it off when the room feels right for it. Both things true at once: the male who owns a Friday night and the male who carries old music through a crossing between worlds. Not contradictions. The same person in two frequencies, playing in the same key.
I knew this. I’ve known it for weeks, in the way you know things you’ve thought about carefully. Watching him from here, in the lamplight, with Grulk’s empty glass on the table and Walt’s unrequested drink cool in my hand, I understand that knowingit and seeing it complete are different things. The picture has been assembling since the first visit. This is the last piece.
He is who he is. All the way through. I’ve been waiting without knowing I was waiting to find that out for certain, and now I know, and I’m not afraid of what I’m going to do with it.
The set ends. He comes off the stage and through the room, and he doesn’t stop to talk to anyone. He comes to me.
His stage version stepped down somewhere between the mic and my table. This version arrived. The transition happens in real time—not a change, just a settling—and I feel something in my chest resolve like a final note finding its home.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey,” I say.
Walt appears at Kragen’s shoulder. He carries himself like someone who has already made up his mind and is getting around to saying it. His attention shifts to Kragen. He looks at me. Eight years of knowing this male down to the grain of him.
“I’ll close up tonight,” he says. “You two get going.”
Kragen goes still.
