Page 36 of Rust of Control

Rand looked older.

That was the first thing Jude noticed, and it surprised him. Not that Rand had aged. That Jude noticed it as a fact, not as something that made him feel anything. Rand stood in the backstage corridor in a jacket that cost more than the band's first van. He'd aged and he was tired and underneath both of those things he was a man who knew he was out of moves.

"There's my singer," Rand said. The smile. Jude had believed that smile for two years.

"Don't," Jude said.

Rand's smile held a beat too long and dropped. Behind Jude, Kit was there. Sy was there. Mara was there. Jude felt them without looking, the weight of people who knew what they were standing behind.

"You're making a mistake," Rand said. His voice had shifted, the charming register gone, the private one underneath it now. The kitchen-table voice. "Whatever they've told you, whoever these people are you've been staying with, you don't understand what you're walking into. You don't know what Varga does to people who cost him money."

"I know exactly what Varga does," Jude said. "I had the broken ribs and concussion to prove it."

Something moved in Rand's face. The calculation running and coming up short.

"Come on." Softer now. The last tool in the box. "Jude. We built this together. You and me. Everything you have-"

"Hollow Bright is a line from one of my lyrics," Jude said. "The name was mine before you were in the band. The songs are mine. The crowd out there came for me." He kept his voice level. "You took the money. You hurt me. You hurt all of us." His throat tightened on the last sentence and he let it, because the tightening was true and Rand had spent two years teaching him to hide true things. "We didn't build anything together. You borrowed what was all of ours and called it yours."

Rand moved his gaze past Jude to Kit, to Sy, to Mara. He read their faces and found nothing.

"You're going to be a dead man," Rand said, venom and rage dripping from every poisoned word.

"No," Jude said. "I'm not."

He turned his back on Rand and walked toward the stage, and the band came with him, and behind them he heard Rand's footsteps moving toward the house and whatever exits he thought he had.

Let him look, Jude thought. Let him look.

The first song was "Hollow Bright."

He'd written it at nineteen, in his bedroom, on a guitar he'd bought secondhand from a pawn shop on Gratiot. He'd played it for his mother first, sitting on the edge of her bed, and she'd listened with her hands in her lap and her eyes full, and when he finished she'd said: that one's true, baby. That one's all the way true.

He played it now the same as he'd played it at nineteen. Every word still true.

The crowd gave it back to him loud.

He didn't look for Rand during the first four songs. He could feel the room. He'd always been able to do this, track where attention pooled, and right now twelve hundred people's attention was on the stage and one person's was moving through the room like a stone in still water, looking for an opening that wasn't there.

Good. Let him look.

Song five. Song six. Ten days of rehearsal and it showed. Every piece landing where Sy and Kit and Mara had learned to put it. The crowd was theirs. The room was theirs. The stage was his.

Between songs he let the silence run three seconds longer than usual. The crowd knew what was coming. He'd posted the setlist. "The Monster Beside Me" was last and everyone in the building knew it was brand new. A debut drop and they were the first to hear it.

He felt Rand stop moving.

"This one's new," Jude said into the mic. His voice came out steady, which still surprised him sometimes. "I wrote recently because life changes us, and we get to decide how. It's about someone I used to know." He paused. "He knows who he is."

He nodded to Sy.

The drums came in.

He'd played this song in rehearsal twenty times. He'd played it alone in the safehouse kitchen at two in the morning while Nate slept and the river went by outside. He'd played it in his head while Ghost put faces on the board, while he stood in front of the mirror with no concealer, while he sat on the cold steps with the folder in Kit's hand.

He'd never played it like this.

The first verse came out of him clean, the words landing exactly as written. Precise, unhurried, the surface of Rand in the early days before the teeth showed through. He could feel Rand in the room. He didn't look. He sang to the crowd, to the twelve hundred people who'd come out on a Friday night for a show and a cause, and he let the song do what it was made to do.