Sound check was what they called it when there was no specific agenda, when it was just the two of them in whatever corner of Tier Three offered sufficient acoustic space and insufficient official attention. They had been doing it since they were fourteen and fifteen respectively, when Kael had found Joss playing her first tessaviol behind the water reclamation block and the two of them had spent an hour in mutual wary assessment before arriving at the conclusion that neither was a threat to the other's immediate interests.
They met that evening in the usual spot — beneath the infrastructure arch at the Tier's southern boundary, where the great curving support struts that held Tier Four above Tier Three created a sheltered space about four meters across, dry and wind-baffled and acoustically interesting in ways that Joss had catalogued exhaustively. The ambient resonance of the structural supports created a low harmonic undertone, a natural chord that the arch space added to any sound made within it, and Joss had been using this property for two years to develop what she called her layering technique, which was the Melodist practice of working multiple melodic lines simultaneously.
Kael sat on the ground with his rods and worked through his warmup sequence while Joss played.
She played something unstructured, the musical equivalent of thinking out loud, the tessaviol generating sounds that drifted and reformed without committing to a clear line. It was her version of what he did with the rod mechanics — the instrument before the performance, the exploration before the execution. He'd watched her do this for three years and it still occasionally surprised him, not the technique but the quality of attention she brought to it.
"I heard you met Verse," she said, without stopping.
"On the Four platform. He was waiting for me."
"He was waiting for an opportunity. You happened to be it." She resolved the drifting line into something with more shape, a phrase that lasted three bars and then dissolved. "What did you think?"
Kael considered. "He's sure of himself."
"He believes what he says. That's different from being sure." She glanced at him. "People who are sure of themselves have weighed the alternatives. Verse hasn't — he's found a framework that explains everything and stopped looking at the things that don't fit."
"You sound like you've thought about this."
"He recruited me eight months ago." She said it without particular emphasis, as though it were a factual statement about the past that no longer required significant affect. "I said no. He was civil about it. We've had two subsequent conversations and he's been civil each time." She played another phrase, this one with a different quality — something that sat in the chest rather than the head. "He's not wrong about the structural problems. He's wrong about the solution and he doesn't know it yet."
"What's wrong with the solution?"
"An Awakened-administered Lower Tiers still has a bottom. Someone still lives there. The people who live there still need the same things people at the bottom always need — food, safety, a way up. Changing who runs the administration doesn't change the architecture of the problem." She paused. "Unless he's also planning to change the architecture. Which would mean changing the Spire itself, not just the Tiers. Which is a very different kind of project."
Kael filed this. "Is he planning that?"
"I don't know. Possibly he is and hasn't said it yet. Possibly he hasn't thought that far." She shrugged. "The thing about ideological people is that the idea is always complete in their heads before the implementation is. The gap between the complete idea and the complete implementation is where things go wrong."
"That's almost cynical for you."
"I'm a Melodist. I work with incomplete information and make it sound finished. I'm very familiar with the gap."
He smiled at that. He didn't smile often — not because he was unhappy exactly, but because he lived in a concentration of attention that didn't naturally produce it. When it happened it was usually Joss.
"I heard something in the recording," he said.
She stopped playing.
He told her about it: the forty-three twelve, the silence, the four-beat pattern underneath. He told it the way he'd been turning it over in his mind for three days — factually, without the weight of what it might mean, keeping it to the observable data.
Joss was quiet for a while after he finished. She plucked one string, single note, held it until it faded.
"You've had that chip for eleven years," she said.
"Yes."
"And you've played it hundreds of times."
"Yes."
"And you heard this for the first time when you used the room's audio system instead of the handheld."
"Yes."
"Then it's been there the whole time and you just didn't have the playback system to detect it." She considered. "Which means either someone put it there knowing most playback systems wouldn't catch it. Or it was always part of the recording and whatever equipment was used to capture it in the first place picked up a frequency range that standard consumer units don't reproduce." She paused. "Both of those are interesting."
"The first one is more interesting," he said.
"The first one means it was intentional." She looked at him. "Which means someone wanted it to be heard eventually, by someone with the right equipment, who had been carrying it long enough to know what wasn't supposed to be there."
He thought about that. The shelter staff member who had smuggled the recording device into the concert hall eleven years ago. The chip itself, handed to Kael through a chain of events he'd never fully traced, ending up in the hands of a six-year-old in a Lower Tier shelter.
"I need better analysis equipment than I have," he said.
"You need someone who works with audio signal extraction." Joss tilted her head. "There's a person on Four who does that kind of work. Legitimate — she works in acoustic engineering for one of the maintenance corps. But she does side work."
"Cost?"
"Favorable, if I introduce you. She owes me something from a situation last year that I'll describe as complicated and leave it there." She picked up the tessaviol properly, both hands, signaling the end of the analytical portion of the conversation. "Don't do anything with it until we've had it analyzed. Don't tell anyone else."
"I know."
"I'm saying it anyway." She began to play, something cleaner and more intentional than before, a melody with real shape. It moved through the arch space and took on the low harmonic undertone of the structural resonance, the tessaviol's voice and the Spire's voice combining into something neither of them was individually.
Kael set his rods down and listened.
This was the other reason for sound check. Not the information, not the tactical thinking, not even the practice. This: two people in a sheltered space at the bottom of an enormous city, making sound that no one had commissioned and no one was evaluating, that existed only for the duration of its own production. He had very few things in his life that were purely his. This was one of them.
He picked up his rods and added his rhythm to her melody, and the arch added its chord to both of them, and for a while that was enough.