On the drive downtown, the city changed beyond the windows. Apartment buildings gave way to office towers and streets crowded with restaurants whose menus displayed prices Zara had never seen beside ordinary food. A billboard showed Chase Hendricks wearing a white suit against a gold background, his mouth open in the famous expression that appeared on his album covers. Under his name, large letters promised ONE NIGHT FOR THE FUTURE OF MUSIC.
Micah had told Zara to ask Chase whether he could really sing the high note. He had watched the video so many times that he tried to imitate it while brushing his teeth, turning the bathroom into a place of alarming squeaks. Zara promised nothing. Asking a famous person to prove something felt rude, especially when the man's charity foundation was paying for their school choir to stand on his stage.
When the van reached the theater, a production assistant met them with a clipboard and a distracted expression. He checked their names, handed out laminated passes, and led them past loading cases toward a corridor that smelled of dust, coffee, and warmed electrical equipment. Children were told not to touch the ropes, not to ask celebrities for photographs, and not to wander away from Ms. Johnson. Zara listened carefully because she had already decided that the most important thing she could do was not give anybody a reason to send the school home.
The backstage area surprised her. From the audience, a theater looked like velvet and light; behind the curtains, it looked like a workshop full of cables, ladders, folded chairs, and people carrying things too quickly. A man in headphones rolled a heavy case past them and apologized without slowing down. Someone shouted for an extension lead, while another person demanded to know why a spotlight was not responding to its cue.
Zara stood near the wall and watched a sound technician test a microphone. He spoke a number, listened through one ear of his headphones, then asked somebody to adjust the level. The enormous stage beyond the curtain remained almost empty. She had never been so close to so much expensive equipment, yet what caught her attention was the faint pattern of notes coming through the speakers as the band rehearsed.
She could tell which instruments were playing even when they were hidden behind scenery. She could hear the slightly flat piano string in the upper register and the steady, reassuring pitch of a tuned guitar. Music, she had learned, was easier to understand than people because it almost always told her what it was doing. That afternoon she was about to discover a sound that seemed deliberately designed to hide the truth.
The first thing Chase Hendricks said when he arrived was that the lighting made him look tired. Zara could not see him from the holding room, but the walls did little to stop his voice. He demanded a warmer spotlight and a different bottle of water, then asked why nobody had corrected the backdrop bearing the sponsors' names. The production crew treated each complaint as a small emergency, moving quickly to solve problems that seemed to Zara less important than the missing handles on several instrument cases.