The bunting went up on a Tuesday that felt like a Saturday, which meant the Hex was excited about something.
From his porch Malik watched Dottie direct the hanging pastel ribbons strung between lampposts, a hand-painted banner declaring WESTVIEW TALENT SHOWCASE in letters too cheerful to be real.
The whole block had turned out to help, which is to say the whole block had been turned out, smiling and pleasant and not one of them questioning why a neighborhood needed a talent show on a week’s notice.
Under the carrier-hum, Malik felt a thickness.
The air gone dense, like the Hex was holding its breath and calling it a party.
Grief under the bunting.
He recognized it now the same ache the broadcast had been papering over since week one.
“Mr.
Ashford!” Dottie’s voice, bright as paint.
“You’ll want to be at the hall by six for rehearsals.
Everyone contributes.
It’s tradition.”
Tradition that started this morning, Malik kept behind his teeth.
He tipped his hat, warmed his expression.
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world, Mrs.
Jones.”
She beamed.
Moved on to the next house, the next instruction.
The biggest stage the town had thrown yet a whole hall full of neighbors, scripted to applaud, and behind them, if he threaded it right, more Half-Awake than had ever found his frequency at once.
The trick: grow the real audience without becoming the town’s center.
Two opposite performances in the same room.
He’d done harder.
Probably.
The rehearsal hall smelled like floor wax and synthetic lavender the Hex equated with community spirit.
Folding chairs in neat rows.
A low stage dressed with footlights that had never been plugged in and never needed to be.
Dottie held court at the front with a clipboard, assigning acts with the benevolent tyranny of a woman who knew exactly whose taste mattered.
Malik slipped in mid-list.
Three rows back.
Not front that read eager, which read memorable.
Not back that read resistant, which Dottie punished.
Middle.
Present and overlooked in the same breath.
June was already seated two rows ahead, hands folded in her lap, posture perfect.
She never turned when he sat.
But her shoulders shifted a fraction that small adjustment when you’ve clocked someone in your periphery and decided not to react.
No direct words since the garden.
But he’d passed her on the walk to the market yesterday and she’d said, pleasantly, to no one in particular, “Lovely weather for keeping one’s head down,” and Malik had replied, just as pleasantly, “Isn’t it just,” and both of them had smiled at nothing and kept walking.
A working vocabulary.
Not trust.
A shared understanding that the floor was full of traps and two people watching for them beat one.
“Mrs.
Calloway,” Dottie called, and June rose smoothly.
“You’ll recite.
Something uplifting.
Poetry, perhaps.
Slot six.”
June nodded.
Sat.
Wrote the number on the inside of her wrist with a pen she’d brought from home which meant she’d guessed Dottie would assign and reassign until everyone was exactly where she wanted them.
Smart.
June was smart in ways that were going to keep her alive or get her corrected, and Malik couldn’t yet tell which.
“Mr.
Ashford.” Dottie’s eyes found him, and Malik brightened on cue, the eager-neighbor mask snapping into place.
“A song, I think.
Something cheerful.
Slot eleven.”
Late in the order.
After the peak, before the closing act.
Nobody remembered slot eleven unless you botched it badly.
Perfect.
“I’d be honored,” Malik said, and meant: I will be so charming and so forgettable that you’ll smile at the memory and not retain a single detail.
Dottie moved on.
The list grew.
Walt got slotted early a card trick, mailman-clever hands and when their eyes met across the hall Walt’s gaze said, clear as speech: don’t do anything stupid up there.
Malik’s gaze replied: I’ll try.
Walt looked unconvinced.
Rehearsal ran long.
Dottie reshuffled the order twice, swapped acts, cut one man’s juggling routine entirely with a smile that could’ve stripped paint.
The hall’s warmth thickened.
The prickle rose at his nape Tuning, the barest edge of it the Half-Awake, already gathering.
Not in the hall.
Behind it.
A few dreaming sensitives brushing his frequency like they’d caught a whiff of an event about to happen and wanted to be present for it.
That was good.
He just had to make sure the show they got was his, and not the queen’s.
Six o’clock came and the hall filled.
Every seat claimed, neighbors in their best pastels, bunting overhead swaying in a breeze that had no source.
The footlights came up still not plugged in, still glowing and Dottie took the stage in a dress the color of ambition.
“Welcome,” she said, and the room applauded before she’d finished the word, “to Westview’s First Annual Talent Showcase.”
First and only, Malik thought.
The room never caught the gaps.
The acts rolled.
Walt’s card trick landed clean a queen pulled from a shuffled deck, no flourish, just competent and he left the stage to polite applause and no follow-up questions.
Herb sang about sunshine.
A woman Malik hadn’t placed yet played a piano the Hex had probably materialized that morning.
Slot six.
June took the stage in a gray dress that didn’t try, stood at the microphone, and recited.
He couldn’t place the poem.
Seasons.
Waiting.
Loss dressed up as patience drugstore-greeting-card verse, except delivered by someone who meant it.
June’s voice stayed even, pleasant, exactly as scripted.
But.
Halfway through the second stanza, she paused.
Not long.
A breath.
A beat where the line should have landed and missed, like she’d forgotten the next word and had to reach for it.
She had not forgotten.
Malik recognized the precision of that silence deliberate, surgical.
She’d let the room feel a crack, just for a second, before she smoothed it over and finished the verse to warm, reflexive applause.
The neighbors clapped.
The queen smiled, satisfied.
And Malik felt it the prickle spiking, the carrier-hum warming because the Half-Awake had leaned in.
They’d caught the crack.
Wanted to see what was under it.
June left the stage without looking at him, but Malik understood.
She’d threaded her own needle convincing enough to pass Dottie’s inspection, cracked enough to register as real to the ones watching from further away.
She’d grown her own audience, and on purpose.
Malik revised his read.
June wasn’t just smart.
She was dangerous, and if she ever worked out what the audience was, the ally-or-threat question would come due fast.
The slots marched on.
Nine.
Ten.
Eleven.
Malik stood.
Crossed to the stage on a good neighbor’s easy stride.
Took the microphone Dottie handed him and turned to face the hall full of scripted smiles and, behind them, the ones who’d come to see if he’d do anything worth the attention.
He’d picked the song yesterday.
Something period-safe, pleasant, the kind of tune a fellow hummed while fixing a deck chair.
No edge.
No risk.
Eminently forgettable.
He opened his mouth to start.
And the bunting flickered.
Just once.
A frame.
The lights held and the neighbors kept smiling, but for one impossible beat the whole cheerful room went silent and still and staring at nothing mouths open mid-applause, eyes fixed on a middle distance that had no referent and under it, under the painted joy and the pastel ribbons, Malik felt it.
The grief.
Not hidden.
Held.
So vast the Hex had to script an entire showcase to keep the lid on it, and the lid was slipping.
Then the frame passed.
The neighbors blinked.
Resumed.
Clapped for an entrance that was still hanging in the air, and not one of them seemed to notice they’d lost a beat.
Except June.
Her eyes found his across the hall.
She’d caught it too.
The flicker.
The moment the set had cracked and the raw grief underneath had looked through.
Malik’s mouth had gone dry.
The carrier-hum spiked not danger, not exactly, just an alert his system hadn’t catalogued yet.
The audience, both of them, were waiting.
Right.
Song.
Do the song. This story is hosted at g.com.
He did.
First verse, light.
Voice carrying just enough charm to be pleasant and not enough to be notable.
Chorus the room hummed along, because they’d hum whether he wanted them to or not.
Final line landed on a note that was sweet and competent and entirely unsurprising.
The hall applauded.
Warm.
Reflexive.
Dottie nodded, pleased he’d threaded it.
Memorable enough to satisfy her, boring enough not to stick.
Malik left the stage.
Took his seat.
Settled into a satisfied, unremarkable glow.
And felt the frequency warm, steady, better-fed than it had been since he’d landed in this town.
The Half-Awake had liked it.
Not the song the flicker.
The crack.
Two people in a room full of puppets seeing the same wrongness and knowing the other had seen it too.
That was what they’d tuned in for.
He kept his eyes forward.
June sat three rows ahead, hands folded, posture perfect and if you weren’t watching for it you’d miss her thumb pressing into her palm.
Once.
Twice.
Testing whether the moment had left a mark.
The showcase rolled on.
Closed.
Dottie thanked everyone for their contributions and declared it a smashing success, and the neighbors filed out into a scripted evening that smelled like cut grass and warm cider nobody had poured.
Malik lingered.
Helped fold chairs helping was forgettable, forgettable was safe.
June worked three rows over, and when their paths crossed by the stage she said, low enough that only he’d hear, “That wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“No,” Malik agreed.
“It’s getting worse.”
“Yeah.”
She looked at him then.
A teacher’s measuring look, filing him under a category he couldn’t see yet.
“If it does that again the flicker we can’t both react.
It’ll mark us.”
She was right.
Two people catching the same impossible glitch read as coordinated, and coordinated read as aware, and aware got you corrected.
“Next time,” Malik said, “you look.
I’ll cover.”
“Or I cover, you look.”
“We’ll flip for it.”
June almost smiled.
Folded the last chair and left without another word, and Malik stood in the empty hall thinking: we just made an operational agreement.
Not allies.
Not friends.
Two people who’d decided the odds improved if they staggered the risk.
It wasn’t trust.
But it was a beginning, and in a town full of scripts and frozen smiles, beginnings were the rarest crop.
Malik finished stacking chairs.
Walked home under bunting that still swayed in a breeze with no origin.
The carrier-hum had settled, warm and steady, and when he checked careful, internal, two fingers on a signal’s pulse he could feel it.
More of them than before.
Not a lot.
Not enough to risk a move on.
But enough to know the showcase had worked.
He’d grown his audience in the margins, right under the queen’s nose, and the only person who’d noticed was the one person he least wanted noticing.
Two problems, then.
The grief under the bunting, slipping its lid.
And June Calloway, too capable for anyone’s comfort, who’d just proven she could play the same game and was about to start asking why.
Malik unlocked his front door.
Stepped into a house the Hex had dressed for him.
The smile dropped the moment the door closed no one left to perform for and he stood in his front hall thinking about flickering bunting and a room full of people staring at nothing and the certainty that, sooner or later, the grief the Hex was sitting on was going to crack the floor.
And when it did, being watchable wasn’t going to be enough.
He was going to have to decide what he was willing to lose to stay standing when the lid came off.
Malik checked the memory the eyebrow scar, still there; his mother’s voice saying his name, still present, still his and went to bed in a house that smelled like showroom and something burnt the Hex kept forgetting to air out.
The carrier-hum stayed warm all night.
Outside, the bunting swayed.
Inside, a grief the size of a town held its breath and called it a party.
And somewhere further than the world, an old and patient wrongness turned its attention toward the signal that had just gotten loud enough to hear.
But that was a problem for tomorrow.
Tonight, Malik had an audience.
And for the first time since the boundary went up, he’d grown it without a death toll attached.
That was worth a decent night’s sleep.
He’d take it.