Rust of Control (Iron and Blood #3)

Chapter 1

The stage lights at the Lords clubhouse put out a hard, dry heat, and Jude stood in it and let it hold him up.

The Lords had built the stage properly, with money.

The platform took the band's weight without a flex and the monitors never once fed back.

Jude felt the steadiness of it through his boot soles.

A real platform with a skirt and a lip, a black backdrop with the club's piston-and-skull crest stitched on it taller than a man, a lighting truss bolted to the steel of the ceiling and run off a board Sy could actually program.

None of it was for show. The Lords just did not own cheap things.

But Jude could have sung off a flatbed in a parking lot and felt the same, because what he came up here for was free and no club could stock it.

Onstage there was a wall of light between him and every face, and the room past it went soft and far away.

The hundred-some people packed onto the clubhouse floor stopped being people he would otherwise have to stand near.

They became a sound. A pressure against his sternum he could lean into, and that leaned back.

Up here he could not feel his hands shake.

The big labels never understood that, the men in the good Chicago offices who slid contracts across the table and used the word reach like it was a gift.

Down on a floor Jude counted exits and read every face twice and built a sentence in his head before he let it past his teeth, and the stutter he had spent fourteen years sanding down sat at the back of his mouth the whole time, a stone he could not quite swallow.

Up here there were no sentences to build.

There was only the next line, and he always knew it, because at two in the morning in a spiral notebook he had been the one to write it.

He leaned into the mic and gave them the second verse.

Behind him Kit caught the change a half-beat early, the way he did when a room was running good, and the bass came up under Jude's voice like a floor rising on a lift.

Sy bent into the guitar. The drums kept time.

Jude did not think about the drums. They were behind him, they were on the beat, and tonight that was all he asked of them.

You ask me how I am, you don't wait to hear, he sang, I say I'm good, you say good, and you disappear.

He had written that line at his own kitchen table about every green room and after-party he had ever stood in, a hundred open mouths and not one ear, and he sang it now to a packed clubhouse and watched a man near the front mouth the words back without once meeting his eyes.

Nobody in here heard the joke. That was the joke.

He shut his eyes and sang the part that was only his.

He had written the hook in that spiral notebook a year before there was a band to hang it on.

Hold the hollow up to the light, he sang, and call it bright.

A voice screamed it back at him out of the dark past the lights, off-key and certain, and it landed in his chest like a hand laid flat.

They knew the words. They had driven out to the dead end of a service road off Telegraph, to a biker clubhouse that smelled of good leather and engine oil and they knew his words.

For three minutes and forty seconds Jude Davros was not a problem anyone in the room had to solve.

He was the loudest thing in the building, and not one person there wanted him smaller.

Then the song ended.

The song always ended. Singing had never once let him down in twenty-four years, and it still only lasted as long as the song.

The heat came off his face like a door opening onto winter.

The lights dropped to their low amber wash. The crowd went back to being a hundred-some strangers standing too close, and Jude's hands came back to him. They were shaking. They always shook when he came back to himself, every time, as though the stage had only been holding them still on loan.

He got the mic into the stand on the second try.

Rand was already off his stool. He came around the kit wiping his palms down his jeans, and he had something on his tongue, small and pale, gone before Jude could be sure he had seen it.

He probably wanted Jude to see it. Rand liked a witness for the things he did to himself; it made them somebody else's problem.

“Killed it,” Rand said, kissed the side of Jude's head, and was already looking past him.

Jude followed the look without meaning to.

There was a guy near the bar, young, prettier than the room deserved, and he was holding very still and watching Rand back, a drink in his hand he had not touched.

He had the patience of someone who had been told to wait and intended to be good at it.

Jude's stomach turned over, slow and cold, on a hinge it had worn smooth months ago.

He looked away first. He was always the one who looked away first, and he had stopped, a long time ago, telling himself that was the same as winning.

Kit was coiling a cable by the monitor. He had stopped coiling it to look at Jude, his face gone soft and careful in the way Jude could not stand, the look you gave a guy whose dog was sick.

Sy wore the same look, further off, and so did the additional guitar player they'd borrowed for the night.

They loved him and they were tired of him, and Jude had long ago stopped being able to tell those two feelings apart on their faces.

“I'm gonna,” Jude started, and stopped, because the rest of the sentence was find the bathroom and his voice had come out wrong, thin, with a catch in the front of it.

Kit nodded like Jude had finished. “Go,” he said. “We've got the gear.”

Jude went.

The back clubhouse bathroom was strange industrial opulence and a lock that turned.

He turned it. He put both hands flat on the rim of the sink and looked at the rust bloom under the cold tap, orange creeping out from the bolt like something growing, and he tried to breathe down into the bottom of himself the way Dr. Aronson had walked him through, four counts down and six counts back, hand on the stomach to feel it move.

His stomach would not move. The breath kept stacking up high in his chest, shallow and useless, and his heart was going too hard and too quick, and the bulb seemed to brighten and recede, brighten and recede, in time with nothing.

His hands on the sink did not look like his hands.

The bathroom was very small and getting smaller, and he knew, in the cold clinical back room of himself that never went fully dark, that nothing in here could hurt him.

He knew it. That knowledge never once reached his lungs.

“Okay,” he said to the mirror. “You're okay. You're o-”

The word jammed. The o came and then nothing celse, his jaw working on a sound that would not lift, o-o-okay, and hearing it was worse than the panic, because the stutter only ever showed up to tell him the truth: that he was nine years old, that the floor was not solid, that he had never once been okay the way other people meant the word.

He stopped trying to talk.

He ran the cold tap and held his wrists under it until they hurt.

He watched his own face in the spotted glass and waited the way you wait out weather.

The eyeliner had smeared into the creases under his eyes.

The glitter he had pressed onto his cheekbones before the set was patchy now, and the berry gloss was almost gone, chewed off, and what was left was the face under all of it.

It looked younger than twenty-four. It looked, if he was honest, about nine.

It took a long time. It always did.

When the worst of it had passed and his breath had come back down where it belonged, Jude did what he knew how to do, the only stagecraft he had ever been genuinely good at.

He fixed the eyeliner with the pad of one finger.

He did not try to rebuild the rest. He arranged his face into a calm a person could look at without worrying, practiced the calm once in the glass, and it held.

He had been painting over the cracks like this since before he had words for what he was doing.

It was not a talent. He had just needed it too young, and so he had it.

He unlocked the door.

He did not go back to the band.

He found the booth in the far corner instead, the one half behind a support post where the light gave out.

He folded himself into it with his knees up and his arms around them, the messenger bag shoved under the table by his feet.

Rand was not in the room. Rand had taken the pretty guy out into the cold to take care of something.

That was the phrase Rand used for it, and the band knew, and Jude knew, and not-saying-it had become its own kind of furniture they all walked around.

He got his phone out.

He should call a car. A sane adult with somewhere to be would call a car.

He had the app. He had a small careful pile of his own money in an account, kept where the band's hands could not reach it, so there would always be enough to send home to his parents on the first. He could press four buttons and a stranger would come and he would never have to speak to the stranger at all.

He did not want a stranger.

He wanted the one person who, at eleven forty-two at night, would not make him explain.

Jude typed it before he could argue himself out of it.

No punctuation, his thumb hovering and then pressing send because if he read it again he would delete it.

He watched it sit there in its little blue shell, delivered, and the wanting-to-take-it-back came up so fast it nearly choked him.

Nate was probably asleep. Nate had a life, a whole one, with people in it who were not somebody’s sad kid brother, and Jude had no right to a person at eleven forty-two at night.

He typed again, fast, on top of the shame.