Perrin Ashgrove (Human, Slipwave)

She told them in the corridor behind the common room, forty minutes before the set, in the clothes she always wore for it, and Perrin's first thought was that she had chosen the corridor so that nobody would have to look at anybody.

A Ranger's novice. Provisional, she said, and under evaluation, and the words had the shape of words off a page. The band was her placement. In their files, and she said the branch's, and then, seeing it land on nothing, the Music Corps', the band was a project, with the band's name on it, and the project was her, in the room, writing down what the room did. Nothing changed in the room. She had been told that and she was telling them. If something did change she would say so.

Marlow asked what a project paid, which was Marlow's way of asking whether they were now a Ranger band, and she said it paid nothing and they were not, and that the woman at the back table had been very exact about that, and would go on sitting at the back table, and the room would not be told. Marlow said that was fine, then, and went to tune, because to Marlow a thing that paid nothing and changed nothing was a thing that had not happened, and he had the gift of living like that.

Perrin did not have it. He stood in the corridor with her a moment longer.

What he noticed was not what she had said. It was that she had said it today. The thing had happened that morning, she said so, the morning, upstairs, and she had come down to the ring before the set to say it, rather than after, or next week, or never, which were the three ways he had seen people in dock bands handle a change in their circumstances, and he had been in dock bands for eleven years. He had not, until that corridor, had any reason to think about which of the three she was, because for a year nothing in her circumstances had changed that he knew of.

He said the thing he could say, which was that it was fine by him, and that he would want to know if the file said anything about his timing. She said the file would say what the room did, and the room had never once complained about his timing, and that was the nearest she had ever come to a joke with him, and they went in.

The set was the set. Nine songs, the break at the quarter-hour, the loaders in at the shift change with the dust still on them, and the last song to a full room. The woman at the back table wrote something at the second verse and nothing after. The room took its line in the chorus, the high one, the way it had every night for a year, and Tissadelle came down off it at the same bar and sang the plain note under them, and the room, which would never know there was a file on it, sang.

Perrin had wondered, now and then across the year, whether she could reach that line. He found, counting it through on the drum, that he had never once heard her try; and that it was not the same thing; and that he had not, before tonight, had any reason to tell the two apart.

The Ranger left before the loaders did. The room went on singing, and Perrin kept the time.