The Second Trick

Cherie Gaines was twenty-eight years old and she could tell you the exact contents of her lunch cooler for the next eleven days without looking. That was the kind of life she had on Farrow-7. Logistics worker, colony of Dustfall, population four hundred if you counted the mining bots, which nobody did.

Her days went like this. Wake up. Check manifests. Move crates from point A to point B. Eat. Sleep. Repeat. The dust outside never stopped blowing. The dome shopping district had exactly six businesses left, and one of them was a bookstore that maybe three people visited a month.

So when her tablet buzzed with a message from a name she hadn't seen in six years, she actually put down her protein bar to read it.

"Cherie! Reggie Conroy here! Remember me? Drums? One hit wonder? I'm putting the band back together for ONE NIGHT ONLY at Bingham's Books, back stockroom, this Saturday. You in? Reply fast, the drummer joke doesn't work if I'm also the drummer. --Reg"

She read it twice. Then she laughed out loud in the break room, which got her a look from Agnes across the table.

"What?" Agnes asked.

"Old bandmate. Wants a reunion show."

"A show? Here? In Dustfall?"

"That's what it says."

Agnes shrugged and went back to her sandwich. But Cherie kept staring at the tablet. The band. Static Halo. God, she hadn't thought about Static Halo in years. One song on the colony circuit charts, "Dust In The Lines," which was a terrible pun and everybody knew it and everybody hummed it anyway. Keyboardist, age twenty-two, playing the tiny venues of three different mining colonies in a rotation so small you'd run into the same crowd twice in a week.

Reggie had founded the thing. He'd been twenty-five then, and now he was thirty-one, six years later, and he still talked about the song like it had almost been something. It hadn't. It had been number nine on a chart that only existed because a guy on Halloway Station made it up on his laptop.

But she was bored. God, she was so bored. Bored down to the marrow. A reunion show in a bookstore stockroom sounded ridiculous and weird and like literally anything other than checking manifests.

She typed back: "I'm in. What do I need to bring? My keyboard still works, I think. It's been under my bed for four years."

The reply came in under a minute, which meant Reggie had been sitting on his tablet waiting. Of course he had.

"YES! Saturday, six PM, Bingham's Books, you can't miss it, it's the only bookstore. The owner's paying me, well, he's paying the whole event, long story. Bring the keyboard! Bring anything! See you there!!!"

Cherie put the tablet down and looked at her cooler schedule and felt, for the first time in months, like a week might actually go by at a normal speed.

* * *

Saturday came with the usual wind and the usual dust. Cherie carried her keyboard across the dome in its beat-up case, and the strap dug into her shoulder the way it always had, and that felt strangely good. Familiar. At six sharp she pushed open the door of Bingham's Books.

The store smelled like old paper and dust, and not the outside dust, which was red and got everywhere. This was a different dust. A paper dust. She'd forgotten stores could even smell like that.

"Hello there!" A man came out from behind the counter. Older, silver hair, glasses on a chain. "You must be with the band. William Bingham, proprietor. Well, proprietor is a strong word for what I am these days. Barely a caretaker, honestly."

"Cherie. Keyboard."

"Ah! The keyboardist! Reggie's spoken of you. Through there, through the stockroom, mind the crates." He waved her past the counter. "Can I say something? This is the most exciting week this store has had since the freighter stop closed. I'm selling the place, you know. Retiring off-world. My grandfather's watch is the one thing I'm taking with me, believe it or not. But that's a story for a quieter night. Go on through."

The back stockroom was bigger than the store itself. Shelves everywhere, tall ones, leaning ones, stacks of crates in every aisle, and a cleared space in the middle where someone had shoved a drum kit. Reggie was there, thirty-one years old and balder than she remembered, hitting a snare with the happy expression of a man who had finally escaped something.

"CHERIE!" He dropped his sticks and came over with his arms out. "You look great. You look exactly the same."

"That's not a compliment, Reg."

"It's absolutely a compliment. You escaped the aging. I did not." He pointed at his own hairline. "See? Gravity wins eventually."

She laughed and hugged him, and over his shoulder she looked past the drum kit, and that was when she saw the table.

A magician's table. Black cloth, folded back, a folding backdrop leaning against the crates. And behind it, on a step stool, reaching up to string a line of small lights between two shelves, was a woman with dark hair and a green jacket.

Cherie stopped. Her whole body stopped, like a crate on a stuck conveyor.

Jo. Jo Hall.

Six years ago. A party on Halloway Station, after a show, both of them twenty-something and stupid. Reggie's friend of a friend. The two of them had ended up on a balcony, somehow, talking about cards and keyboards and whether the colony circuit was a real career or a slow way of going nowhere. And there had been a moment. A real moment. Cherie had leaned in, or Jo had leaned in, she honestly couldn't remember anymore which of them moved first, and then somebody inside had knocked over a chair and yelled something and the moment had just... died. Gone. And then Cherie had chickened out entirely and said something dumb about the weather and the whole thing had closed like a door.

They hadn't spoken since.

Jo looked down from the step stool. And froze too.

"Oh," Jo said.

"Hi," Cherie said.

Reggie turned around, sensing the temperature drop. "Oh. Right, you two know each other, yeah? Jo's doing a magic act between our sets. Bingham's idea, the old guy loves a bit of theater. Cherie, Jo. Jo, Cherie."

"We've met," they both said at the same time, which was somehow worse than anything either of them could have planned.

Jo came down off the stool. Up close she looked older, obviously, everyone did, but the same in the ways that counted. Same crooked smile. Same way of standing like she was about to do a card trick whether you wanted one or not.

"You look great," Jo said.

"You too."

"Six years, huh?"

"Something like that. Five and three-quarters? I never counted." That was a lie. She had counted exactly once, on an anniversary of nothing, and then felt stupid about it.

Jo rubbed her hands on her jacket. Cherie had never seen her look unsure before. On the balcony that night she'd been all confidence, shuffling cards one-handed, talking about fame like it owed her money.

"So," Jo said. "You still play?"

"Under my bed. The keyboard, I mean. I dug it out this morning. Half the keys stick now."

"That's very rock and roll."

"It's very colony living, is what it is. Everything sticks here. The dust gets in everything." Cherie set her case down by the drum kit. "So you're doing magic now? Full time?"

"Traveling circuit. All three colonies, same rotation we used to do, basically. Birthday parties, store openings, this." She gestured at the stockroom. "A bookstore going-out-of-business party slash reunion show. It's actually a great booking. The old man's a sweetheart. He's got this gold watch, grandfather's, and he wants me to make it disappear and reappear during the finale. First time a client's ever asked me to use something that valuable."

"Is that safe?"

"Probably not. It's a man's family heirloom. No pressure." Jo smiled, and it cracked into a real laugh halfway through, and Cherie felt something in her chest unlatch a little. "God. Cherie. I really did think about... I mean. Halloway. The balcony."

"The chair," Cherie said. "Somebody knocked over a chair."

"Somebody knocked over a chair," Jo agreed, solemn as a judge, and then both of them were laughing, and Reggie was looking between them with the expression of a drummer who understood exactly none of it and was fine with that.

"So you're both weird," he said. "Great. Great. Band's weird again, just like old times. Cherie, your keys are over there, sound guy is me, I'm also the sound guy. Jo, you're up first, opener, warm the crowd. Crowd is going to be like nine people, so, low bar."

"Nine people," Cherie said. "We played for nine people once on Vashti and called it a packed house."

"We called it a triumph of intimacy," Reggie said, pointing a drumstick at her. "Get your keyboard out, stuck keys and all. We've got two hours till doors."

Cherie opened her case. Jo went back up her step stool to the lights. And every so often, as Cherie untangled cables, she caught Jo glancing down at her, quick, and catching her looking back up, and neither of them said anything about it, and the little colored bulbs went up one by one along the shelves.

They ran the first set twice. It went better than it had any right to. The stuck keys actually added something, Reggie said, a kind of gritty texture, which was exactly the kind of thing a drummer says when a keyboard sticks. Jo hung lights and hummed along and occasionally dropped a screwdriver, and every time she did, Cherie's stomach did a small stupid flip, and she told her stomach to grow up.

Around hour two, William Bingham came shuffling back through the stockroom with a tray of paper cups. Silver hair, glasses on a chain, the whole picture of a man who had spent decades selling books to about three visitors a month, and didn't regret a minute of it. Or maybe he did. Who could say.

"Break time," Reggie announced, dropping his sticks. "William brought actual juice. Actual juice, on this colony."

"It was on sale," William said. "Sixty percent off. The distributor's clearing everything out before the store closes."

That landed kind of heavy, the way it does when somebody says a thing casually that isn't casual at all. Cherie took a cup. The juice was that chalky reconstituted kind but it was cold, which on Farrow-7 counted as a luxury.

William sat down on a crate and pulled a chain from his vest pocket. The gold watch. Even dusty back-lit in a stockroom it looked expensive, old and heavy, the kind of thing you'd build a whole retirement around.

"Miss Hall," he said. "Would you care to rehearse the finale? I'd like to see it before tonight's show. I'd like to know my heirloom can vanish and return on command."

"You got it," Jo said, wiping her hands on her jeans. She held out her palm and William set the watch in it. "Okay. So. Everyone watch closely, because this is the part where I mess it up and we all panic."

She held the watch up. She did some business with her sleeve, a turn, a flick, and the watch was gone. Just gone. Empty hand.

"Ooh," Reggie said.

Then Jo looked straight at Cherie, smiled this crooked little smile, and said, "Check your jacket pocket."

Cherie's jacket was hanging on a shelf post, ten feet away. She got up and patted the pocket. Her fingers hit cold metal. She pulled out a solid gold watch. The solid gold watch. A man's heirloom, in her pocket, without her having moved.

"What. How. I've been sitting right here."

"That's the trick," Jo said, spreading her hands. "You've been sitting right here the entire time."

"But I would've felt you."

"Would you have?" Jo asked, and the way she said it carried some little weight underneath that made Cherie's face go hot. She carried the watch back and set it in William's hands.

"Incredible," William said, turning it over, checking it. "Every piece here. Marvelous. I'd hug you but I'm holding my grandfather's watch."

The break stretched on. William talked about the sale of the store, the buyer from off-world, the shuttle manifest. And then Reggie, sitting on his drum case, said the thing he'd apparently been sitting on all afternoon.

"So. Heads up, since we're all here. William's not just closing the store. He's leaving. Off-world, for good. Like, retired-to-somewhere-with-trees leaving."

Cherie looked up. "Wait, seriously? Bingham's is closing?"

"End of the month," William said. "Dustfall's got six businesses in the dome now. After I'm gone it'll be five, and then probably four, and so on. You watch. Towns like this don't collapse all at once. They fade. Like an old song on a bad speaker."

"That's bleak, man," Reggie said.

"It's honest," William said, "which is different."

Cherie sat with that. Six businesses. Three visitors a month. A whole domed shopping district that had once had a grand opening, she'd bet, with balloons. And now a going-out-of-business party with a reunion band and a magician and an expected crowd of nine.

"So this is it, then," she said. "The last show. Like, the last last show. For the band, for the store, for..." She waved a hand at the stockroom, the shelves, the dust. "All of it."

"Last hurrah," Reggie agreed. "One night only. Never to be repeated."

"That's very dramatic," Jo said.

"That's marketing," Reggie said. "I put it on the flyers."

Cherie laughed, but it caught in her throat a little on the way out. Four years the keyboard had been under her bed. Four years of eleven-day lunch schedules and logistics manifests and the same walk to the same dome. And now everything was ending at once, and it felt less like grief and more like a door she hadn't known was closed, opening an inch.

* * *

The break ran long. Reggie disappeared into the front of the store to argue with William about poster placement. Jo finished with the lights and jerked her head toward the door. "Walk with me? I need air. Real air, dome air, whatever counts."

They stepped out into the courtyard. It was the middle of the dome, this little paved square under the big glass ceiling, with two sad benches and one tree that was mostly artificial but had one real branch somehow. Red dust hazed up against the glass where the wind hit the outside of it. The light through the dome came down a pale brown.

Cherie sat on a bench. Jo sat beside her, close, not that close.

"This is the nicest spot in Dustfall," Cherie said. "That's a low bar, but still."

"Beats Halloway Station," Jo said. "Halloway's all metal and vending machines."

"And balconies," Cherie said, and then wanted to bite her own tongue off.

"Yeah," Jo said, quiet. "And balconies."

The artificial tree's one real branch moved in the dome's air circulation. Cherie watched it instead of looking at Jo, which was cowardly, but she'd had six years of practice being cowardly about this exact subject.

"Can I ask you something?" Jo said.

"You're going to anyway."

"Why didn't you? That night. On the balcony. Because I've replayed it, like, a hundred times over six years, and I always land on the same question. You leaned in. Or I leaned in. Something was happening. And then the chair, and the yelling, and you just... switched off. Like somebody turned your amp off mid-song. What was that?"

Cherie turned the juice cup in her hands. The chalky juice had gone warm and she didn't want it anyway.

"I was scared," she said. It came out flat and simple, which surprised her. She'd expected to build up to it more. "That is the complete answer. I was twenty-two and you were this huge confident person who talked about fame like it was going to answer your calls, and I wanted to kiss you so bad it made me stupid, and then the chair fell and I panicked and I thought, good, escape route, and I took it. I said something about the weather. Who says something about the weather on Halloway Station? There is no weather there. It's a station."

Jo laughed. It was a real laugh, surprised out of her. "There's no weather on Halloway."

"None. I panicked so hard I invented weather."

"Okay. Well. Here's my embarrassing half, then." Jo pulled her knees up onto the bench, boots on the paving. "I was leaving. That's mine. Two days later I had a booking on the other side of the circuit, and then another, and