Last Show

I was up on the solar catwalk fixing a dead junction box when I saw the pack come through the gate. You don't forget a pack like that. Grey canvas, three times patched, one strap held together with orange cord that Vanessa braided herself because she doesn't trust knots. Only one person in the whole territory carries it.

I dropped my wrench. I actually dropped it, and it rolled off the catwalk and clanged down onto the gravel, and Francis yelled up at me to watch my tools. I yelled back something about taking my lunch, which was a lie, because it was barely four in the afternoon. Then I took the ladder down way too fast and ran.

Primrose is not a big place, but it's spread out. Goat pens, the greenhouses, the wash house, the rows of little adobe houses we built in the early years. I cut through between the chicken coop and the drying racks, and Mrs. Okoye shouted something at me about knocking over her peppers, and I shouted sorry and kept going. My boots were loud on the dirt road. People turned to look. I didn't care.

Vanessa was at the depot steps, signing the logbook with Hal the quartermaster. She had her back to me but I'd know those shoulders anywhere. Two years of knowing those shoulders. Four years, if I'm being honest about the whole thing, but we'll get to that.

"Vanessa!"

She turned. She had her hood down and her hair was shorter than when she left, chopped off at the jaw, probably with her knife, probably somewhere past the salt flats. Her face did this thing where it tried to be calm and then completely failed, and she dropped the logbook pencil and just stood there.

"You're supposed to be at the grid," she said.

"Francis can survive without me for ten minutes." I got up the steps and stopped, because I hadn't seen her in six months and suddenly I didn't know what the rules were in public. There aren't really rules. People know. But the depot steps felt like a bad place to forget how to breathe.

She solved it for me. She grabbed my jacket and pulled me in and held on, and she smelled like road dust and woodsmoke and the specific soap they use at the waystation in Dunlow. Six months. I counted every one of them.

"Okay," she said into my hair. "Okay. Hi."

"Hi yourself."

I pulled back far enough to look at her. She had a new scar over her eyebrow, thin and pale. "What happened to your face?"

"Fence wire. It's nothing, it didn't even need stitches."

"It absolutely needed stitches."

"Ted would have agreed with you," she said, and grinned, and there it was, the grin. "Let me finish the log. Hal gets cranky when the paperwork's late, and I've got a debrief at six. Then I'm free until dawn."

"Free until dawn," I repeated. My stomach did something complicated, because free until dawn meant leaving again at dawn, six more months on the supply circuit, and here she was standing in front of me like she'd never been gone.

We sat on the depot steps while she finished the logbook, and I told her about the grid work, the new panels Francis had us mounting on the south silo, the goat that got into the battery shed in September and chewed through a cable. She laughed in the right places. She always laughs in the right places, even when the story isn't that funny. That's one of the first things I noticed about her, back before anything, when we were both new.

Here's the history, since you need it. We were both adults and both half-starved and both filling out the same intake paperwork for the Reclamation Project. She was twenty then. I was nineteen going on twenty. She got assigned to scouting and I got assigned to the theater crew, because I'd done two semesters of drama at the community college before the Collapse ate my whole life, and the Project likes people who can stand up on a stage and make other people feel things. And I had the biggest, most useless crush on her for a solid year and never said a word, because I was a coward and she was always leaving. Then the theater burned, and I retrained as a solar tech, and somehow the second time we met, at her second homecoming, I finally opened my mouth. That was two years ago, when we finally started dating. We've been counting homecomings ever since.

"Twelve hours," she said, snapping the logbook shut. "That's what I've got. Well, eleven and change by now."

"Twelve hours," I said. And then my mouth went ahead of my brain, the way it does. "I have a show tonight. For you. Just for you."

She looked at me. "A show."

"A show."

"Brooke. There's no show scheduled. I read the board this morning, it said the next performance is the harvest thing in three weeks."

"I know it's not scheduled." I was already standing up, because once the idea is out you have to go build it or it dies. "That's the point. It's not scheduled. It's one night only, audience of one, in the silo. I'll do the whole thing myself, lights, sound, everything. Ted can run the board if he's not on medic duty. I'll talk to him. I'll talk to Francis about the power draw, he'll grumble but he'll say yes, he always says yes when it's for a homecoming."

"A one-woman show," Vanessa said slowly. "In twelve hours. That you just invented."

"Yes."

"About what?"

I stopped. I had not gotten that far. "About," I said, "stuff. Important stuff. Things I've been meaning to say for four years and keep not saying because you're always walking back out that gate."

Vanessa put the logbook down very carefully, like it might go off. Then she stood too, and she took both my hands, and her hands are rough now, rope and rock and rifle, and she looked at me the way she looks at a route map when she's deciding if it's passable.

"If you build a whole show for me," she said, "I will sit in the front row and I will not move until it's done. Even if it's terrible."

"It won't be terrible."

"It might be terrible. You've got twelve hours."

"Thank you for your confidence."

"I mean it," she said, and now she was grinning again. "I will be the kindest audience you've ever had and also the most honest. Those are my terms."

"Those are acceptable terms." I squeezed her hands. "Debrief at six. What time do you have to be at the silo?"

"Whenever you tell me."

"Nine. Doors at nine. I'll put a candle in a tin can outside the stage door, very classy, very old world."

Vanessa laughed, a real one this time, head back. "A candle in a tin can. God. Okay. Nine o'clock." She kissed me once, quick, in front of Hal and the whole depot, which she never does, and I understood exactly how good a twelve hours she was planning to make this. "I'm going to go get debriefed and eat something that isn't trail jerky. Don't be late to your own show."

"I'm never late."

"You were late to our first date."

"I was twenty-one and nervous. That doesn't count."

"It counts," she said, picking up the pack, swinging it onto that orange cord strap. "Nine o'clock. One night only." She went down the steps and then turned around at the bottom, walking backwards. "Hey, Brooke. Make it count!"

"I'm going to make it count so hard," I said, which is not a real sentence, and she laughed all the way across the yard.

* * *

I went and found Francis first, because he's the boss and it's his grid. He was in the battery shed up to his elbows in the inverter cabinet, fifty-seven years old and still the fastest hands in the commune.

"A homecoming show," he said, when I explained. He didn't even look up. "For the scout."

"Extra draw on the stage circuits, what is it, four hundred watts of the salvaged lights if you go easy on the follow spot."

"Three-fifty if I'm careful."

"You won't be careful." He straightened up and wiped his hands on a rag that had been black for years. "Fine. Run it off circuit four, the one on the emergency bank, so you're not touching the greenhouse load. If you blow anything you're fixing it before breakfast." Then he looked at me properly, the way he does, one eyebrow up. "Six months is a long homecoming. Make it a good show, kid."

That's the thing about Francis. Fifty-seven years old, seen everything twice, and he still says make it a good show like it's the most important job on the commune. Maybe it is. Maybe it always was, even before the Collapse, even when theaters had real lights and didn't live inside grain silos.

I found Ted at the medic station rewrapping somebody's burn. He said yes before I finished the sentence. "Sound board, nine o'clock, one night only," he repeated, tying off the bandage. "I haven't mixed a show since spring. I was starting to forget why we keep that old board at all. Yes. Obviously yes. What's the show about?"

"I don't know yet," I said, and Ted laughed like that was the best answer in the world.

* * *

By seven I was in the silo with a headlamp and a bucket of salvaged drone batteries.

Here's how the silo works. It's a grain silo from before, ninety feet around, and when the Reclamation Project took Primrose over somebody had the bright idea to knock a stage platform into one side and hang benches from the old storage rings. The acoustics are insane. You whisper on that stage and the back row hears you clear. It's the one good thing the Collapse gave us, acoustics in a grain silo.

The problem is light. The salvaged stage lights pull serious watts and the drone batteries only hold so much, so I had to rig a hybrid. Four drone batteries wired into a step-down I built last winter, feeding the two softer floods, and then circuit four off the emergency bank for the follow spot only. Francis would have checked my math. I checked it twice myself and then a third time because I am not going to blow the greenhouse load the night my girlfriend comes home.

The batteries live in a crate behind the depot, and getting them across the yard at dusk without anybody asking questions was its own little job. I stacked three in my arms like firewood and walked fast. Mrs. Okoye was out by her peppers doing the late watering and she watched me go by.

"Evening, Brooke."

"Evening, Mrs. Okoye."

"What's all that?"

"Stage stuff."

She looked at me over the hose. She's about seventy and she misses nothing that happens inside the fence. "Stage stuff," she said. "At night."

"For the show."

"What show?"

"The harvest thing."

"The harvest thing is three weeks off."

I kept walking. She called something after me that I pretended not to hear, and I heard it.

Inside the silo it was cool and dark and smelled like dust and old grain, which is not a bad smell, it's the smell of every show we've ever done in there. I got the floods up on their stands first, then started splicing the battery leads, and that's when I heard the door open behind me.

I didn't turn around. I knew the walk.

"Ted," I said. "You're supposed to be at the medic station."

"I was at the medic station." He came down the aisle with his own headlamp off, feeling the benches with his hand. Forty-five years old, gray coming in early, hands that know every bolt on that sound board. "Then I got done, and then I was walking, and then somehow I was here."

"Somehow."

"Somehow." He looked up at my rig with his head tipped. "You're running the floods on drone batteries."

"I am."

"That's clever."

"Don't tell Francis I said so."

"He already knows. He signs off on everything you build." He sat down on the front bench, third row, and just sat there. "You want me to leave?"

"Actually, no. Can you watch the board tonight? Nine o'clock."

"Already said yes."

"I know. But I mean watch it closely. I might be doing some things up there I haven't rehearsed."

Ted nodded slowly, like that was a perfectly normal thing to say. "Six months is a long time," he said. "You know, before the Collapse I took my girls to a show every winter. Community theater, bad stuff mostly. Didn't matter. You sit in the dark with people you love and somebody says something true up on a stage, that's the whole religion right there."

He said stuff like that sometimes and then got up like he hadn't. "I'll be in the med station till nine. I'll come in the back way so I don't ruin your big dramatic entrance."

"You're ruining it right now."

"Am I?" He stood and stretched. "Then I'll go. Good luck with your batteries, Brooke." And he went out through the stage door, and I would bet my whole toolkit he heard every plan I hadn't said out loud and was going to pretend he hadn't, which is a kind of gift some people give.

* * *

By eight-thirty I had the rig lit and it looked good. Two soft floods, warm white, and the follow spot ready on its breaker. I had a stool on stage and a bottle of water and a page of notes in my pocket that I had crossed out four times.

I was on my knees backstage, wiping dust off the follow spot lens with my sleeve, when I heard the stage door.

"You said nine," Vanessa said.

I turned around. She was standing in the little backstage pocket with the candle tin in her hand, still lit, and she had washed and changed into the clean shirt she keeps at the depot for homecomings, and her hair chopped at the jaw was actually clean. But there was still dust on her, on her boots and her forearms and one streak across her collar, because you never get all of it off on the circuit.

"I said doors at nine," I said. "Performer gets in early."

"How's it look?"

"Good. Scary. Good-scary." I stood up, and I was covered in dust from the lens and the floor and four drone batteries, and I suddenly saw myself through her eyes, which was not a flattering picture. "I'm filthy."

"You're filthy," she agreed. She set the candle down on an amp case. "I like it. You look like you've been building something."

"I've been building something."

She came over to me then, across the little backstage space, three steps, and she stopped close, closer than the depot, and she looked at me the way she does before she asks a route question, checking my face for the real answer.

"Can I kiss you?" she said. "Properly. It's been six months and the depot one didn't count."

"Yeah," I said. "Please."

So she kissed me, and it was slow, and her hand came up to the back of my neck with all that rope-and-rock roughness and I put my hands on her waist and the dust on my sleeve got on her clean shirt and neither of us cared. Six months of that. Six months of sleeping in relay huts and writing letters that take five weeks to travel one way. I held on longer than is graceful and she let me.

When we broke apart she kept her forehead against mine. "Hi," she said.

"Hi."

"You taste like nervous."

"I taste like I've been wiring batteries for two hours. Also nervous."

"Good nervous?"

"Best nervous." I stepped back before I just stayed there all night with my face against her. "Okay. Go sit down. Third row. Ted will be lurking somewhere in the back