Hannah’s new band was in the process of convincing her to stop wailing on the scuffed-up skins of their former drummer’s kit; it was ten minutes past the end of their set and they weren’t sure what to make of this newest addition to their line-up. What she lacked in experience she certainly made up for in enthusiasm.

Hannah, moved by the frantic spirit of the music and her own nervous energy, had unintentionally worked herself into one of her infrequent rages, and it took her some time to exhaust herself and snap out of it. She was calm and ready to return to her usual smiling self when her bandmates finally convinced her to come join them for a victory shot in the room behind the stage. None of the rioters and crust-punks in the pit had minded that she’d kept the beat going, but the owner of the space wanted to close up by 1 AM.

“Nice job, Hannah!” Jake steadied a cymbal as she shakily disengaged herself from the drums.

“Really? Because I only know one beat…”

“One Beat Hannah, our heroine!” cried Three Chord Oli as he packed away his guitar.

“He means it,” Jake assured her. “You were exactly what we needed. This band has new life!”

“It’s a fresh sound!” Olivier agreed.

“Rest in peace, Alexandre,” Jake added gravely.

The two took a moment of silence while Hannah blushed with relief at not having ruined their show.

“Hey, Monsieur Doctor, when are you setting up your first aid tent? There’s, like, four fractures and a black eye out there. Plus a couple kids are wigging out on I don’t know what. Mystery pills.” Michaud had escaped the dancefloor. He staggered into the back room wiping at his bloodied nose, collapsed on a couch that looked like it had also recently endured a mosh pit skirmish, and seized one of the beers that had been left there for them. “Joanne, Reine de la Guitare—you’ve still got it.”

“Why wouldn’t I?” said Jo, who was half asleep on a decrepit loveseat. “This is literally all I’ve been doing for the last decade.”

“Yeah we get it—you’re broke. Haven’t you learned how to take a fucking compliment by now?” He slung his feet over the arm of the couch and gulped his drink. A curly-haired woman appeared seemingly from thin air with a napkin from a pizza box and dabbed at his nose with it. He smiled sweetly at her.

“I take no responsibility for however this turns out,” Jo muttered, watching them. She stood up, nearly stepped on Hannah, and looked surprised, as though she’d forgotten Hannah was there. Hannah realized that she probably had. “Hailey—Hannah. Sorry. Thanks for filling in.”

Hannah, who hadn’t been a musician long enough to have mastered the skill of foisting one’s own awkwardness off onto other people, stood uncomfortably, suddenly aware of herself and her pigeon-toed stance and the fact that she still held her battered sticks in a sweaty death grip.

“Yeah, no problem. So, I was… ok?” she asked. In another two years Hannah would have a band she’d put together herself, would know at least four more beats, and would be well on her way to growing familiar with this dance. At present, she felt like a small child.

Jo nodded and smiled absently. “Rock and roll,” she said. She clipped her guitar case shut and left for the main room, where people still moshed away as music played through someone’s phone hooked up to the PA, much to the dismay of the venue owner.

Jake waved a hand after her dismissively. “She’s wasted. You were great.” He beamed at Hannah, then traded his bass for a small, white plastic box and disappeared to undertake volunteer medical duties, only slightly drunk himself. Hannah decided she liked bass players. She grabbed one of the free beers she’d rightfully earned and followed Jo to the main room, where the turmoil in the pit was finally starting to subside. Jo lifted and hand and parted the waves of moshers without breaking her stride, soon reaching the far bank to greet her date.

Behind her the dancers closed back in, trapping Hannah in the melee, where she suddenly found herself face to face with her final test of the night: the beautiful boy with the septum piercing.

***

Falling through the ice? Seriously? It was forty below, and the ice was two feet thick and frequently supported the small Zamboni that groomed the skating trails. Breaking through was indisputably the least of Aaron’s worries at the moment. He shook his head in frustration and looked behind him. He’d just rounded a bend in the river and couldn’t tell if he was still being followed. It occurred to him that his pursuers might have predicted his route and gone to head him off at the Osborne Street bridge. Still, if he was fast enough he could get there first. He shivered and wondered how long he’d been standing there.

It had snowed a day before and then hit a record low temperature overnight. The sudden deep freeze caused the snow-laden trees and scrub that lined the river to look like they were made from silvery blown glass; the whole landscape appeared as though it could shatter into pieces if you took too heavy a step. Standing still, he finally felt the force of the cold, and he realized he had entered this deserted northwest passage without a parka. He hastily retied his scarf. He’d lost one mitten while discarding his coat, and he pulled the sleeve of his sweater down as far as he could. He could feel a layer of sweat turning to ice against his skin.

He started jogging again, trying to calculate whether his downfall was more likely to come as a result of losing his stamina before he could evade his pursuers, or from the temperature freezing him into a strangely life-like ice sculpture to be admired for the remainder of the season by passing skaters.

The cold air made breathing more difficult, but moving made staying warm easier, and he estimated that his strength could hold until Osborne—Aaron had once been nervous about a job interview and had drummed along in his basement to a speedcore album he put on repeat for two and a half hours straight, so you couldn’t say he wasn’t in shape. (His neighbours directly to the East had sold their home and moved shortly afterwards.) He could worry about frostbite later.

He’d turned the last bend before Osborne when he suddenly hit a particularly slippery patch of trail. His boots skidded out from under him and he careened backwards toward the frozen riverbank. He braced himself for impact against the hard-packed snow, already feeling his head cracking open against the icy edge of the path—he’d be found in the morning frozen to death in a sad bloody ice cube—

He broke through the shiny outer crust of the snowbank and landed in a cradle of fluffy snow, softly cushioned and completely unharmed.

I’m fine, he thought to himself. How many times had he worked himself into a frenzy of terror over something that had turned out to be a non-issue? What was a ‘clone collector,’ anyway? It sounded like something he’d invent to spook himself into going home rather than taking a walk alone at night.

From the riverbank all he could see was the night sky brightly reflecting the snow, and the sea of gentle white swells blanketing the ice. It occurred to him that the whole city was a white padded room designed to protect him from himself.

He took a deep breath and realized how utterly exhausted he was. Shifting in his cottony throne, he rested his head, one of the few parts of him still warm under his toque. Little rivulets of snow poured down over his sweater and into his lap like sand in an hourglass, to comfort and warm him until his time was up.

Columns of stars twinkled and beckoned some ways ahead, and he squinted dazedly down the river until he recognized the lights of the Osborne bridge. He’d make it there very soon, catch up with Jaymie, and behold the wonder that was Jo playing the guitar Tom Morello-style, as soon as he’d rested his eyes for just a moment.

He was still there several minutes later, passed out, when the two collectors, gasping with fatigue themselves, finally caught up.

“I’m going to need a drink after this,” said the man, who carried Aaron’s coat under his arm. “This guy could win an Olympic medal.”

“I’m sorry your first night on the job had to be so trying,” said the woman, removing a small bottle from her backpack. “Many of them come very quietly.”

“This has been taxing both mentally and physically. Not to mention upsetting,” said her young partner, eyeing the sleeping man in the snow.

“Let’s be quick—it’s freezing out and we’re not supposed to let them get damaged.” She tipped the mouth of the bottle against a cloth as Aaron began to stir.

“Quick? As opposed to savouring the victory?” the man muttered.

“Funny, it’s not usually the little skittish ones who clone themselves,” the woman mused.

“Why not? Maybe they’re hoping for a strength in numbers.”

“No, they’re too paranoid that a clone might turn on them. It’s usually arrogant idiots that do it. The ones who think they’re invincible. The irony is that the copy of them is just as arrogant as they are, and it does turn on them.”

Aaron’s eyes blinked open and widened in alarm, but only for a second, because as he sat forward there were suddenly firm gloved hands pressing against his mouth and the back of his head, and he was drugged into oblivion.

***

After the show Jo found herself in no state to drive home. She mingled dazedly in the packed room, received a small congratulatory kiss from Lucas, and took him up on an offer of a fresh drink from the bar. She said an awkward hello to Rex and Maggie and wondered if Lucas had noticed that her only friends in the audience were minors.

After the Bukowskis’ tour, Jaymie had announced that the band would take an entire week off from band practice to rest and recuperate and learn an entire new set of covers, on their own time, in preparation for the upcoming tribute show. When rehearsals had started up again earlier that week, Jo had found herself hoping that something between them might have changed since their shared ordeal.

She wasn’t sure what exactly she was expecting—and it wasn’t as thought things had been bad before—but she knew there was a certain bond between any group of bandmates, unspoken and invisible to the outside observer, which she hoped might have been strengthened in some subtle way.

Instead, Jaymie seemed intent on writing off the entire incident as a stroke of poor luck and, at the very least, a good lesson in exercising caution on the next tour; Aaron was using it as further grounds in his bid to quit the band; and Rex, whom Jo hoped was displaying their usual unfathomable teenage ways rather than subtle signs of PTSD, was as calm and impenetrable as ever. Jo thought she’d spotted the black stenciled threads of a home-done tattoo spidering out from beneath the rolled sleeve of their shirt, and she both admired Rex and felt a flutter of concern, which was an emotion mostly new to her; she was coping with it by alternately exploring it in her mind for a few minutes here and there, and smoking until it was all but entirely snuffed out for hours at a time.

They’d chosen a band to cover that they could all agree on. (Or had Jaymie chosen the band and convinced them it everyone’s idea? Jo wasn’t sure.) Band practices had been productive and entirely businesslike. Jo felt a small stab of shame for even noticing that Jaymie and Aaron hadn’t come to the show to see her play. Rex had disappeared as soon as Lucas returned with her drink.

Her bandmates in the Ballet Llama had departed. She concluded that Michaud must have escaped with Sasha under cover of Sasha’s cloak of inconspicuousness—apparently her skill extended to others close in her vicinity—before paying Jo her cut of the door, much to her annoyance. The reunion show had been his idea—likely a promotional move to bring attention to his new solo project—and now she’d have to hunt him down for her hundred bucks, or however much it was.

Casio Jonny from the band Gunt, who'd frequently opened for the Ballet Llama in the past, had greeted her with the tequila shot that had put her just over her comfortable limit, before he too left for home or the next party. She felt a familiar pang of post-show loneliness—the kind you get when everyone has finished telling you how talented you are at your instrument and then left together while you struggle with your gear up the narrow, dark staircase at the back of the venue, alone, in the middle of the night.

“Did you drive?” Lucas appeared in the back room as she stared at her neatly stacked equipment and tried to decide what to do with it. She found herself immensely relieved that he hadn’t left.

“Yes, but then I got drunk, and a little high, so…” She was careful to keep the slur out of her speech.

He laughed. “Well, I live about five blocks away…”

“Are you offering…?”

“Or I can easily order a car for yourself and your luggage,” he added quickly. “Got the app right here…”

“I’ll come back for it in the morning,” she said decisively, not sure she could safely carry it up the stairs in her current state anyway.

They left out the back and found the night was still bright and clear and utterly frigid. Jo shivered and Lucas tucked an arm around her waist.

His neat goatee was very close to her face. She felt it tickle against her ear. He must be 6’2 or even 6’3, she thought. Not that that matters.

Lucas exhaled into his scarf, and the breath fogged his glasses and then instantly froze into a thin layer of ice that refused to be scraped clear again.

It might have been the effects of her inebriation, but Jo let out a giggle, which was not something Jo did very often. It alarmed her slightly. She suddenly had a vision of the unfortunate drummer—a man a little older than her whom she hadn’t known all that well and hadn’t gotten along with any better than she did with the other members of the Ballet Llama, but with whom she’d played in the band for the two years she’d been a member—leaning against the counter with his last beer in his hand. She realized she hadn’t thought about him for the entire night. She’d been fortunate to have worked late at the library and arrived only in time to see the ambulance leaving.

It crossed her mind that she hadn’t known Lucas for very long. What were the rules about leaving a venue late at night, shortly after an unsolved murder had taken place, with someone you’d gotten together with through a dating app? Jo had never been afraid of anyone before—at least not one person all by themselves—so she wasn’t used to the feeling. It passed the next moment when Lucas nearly stumbled into the street and she had to pull him back by the hood as the light turned green. Cursing, he gave up trying to clean his glasses and put them in his pocket.

“Alright,” he said. “I’ll have to trust you. Take me home, please.”

“What’s your address?” she laughed. Then, conspiratorially, “You can trust me. Whatever everyone else has been saying about me—don’t listen to them.”

“If what I’ve heard about guitar players is true, I’m probably in too deep already. But what choice do I have? I’m blind,” he said grimly, and told her an address on a nearby street.

Jo took his glove in hers and led him toward his apartment building, where they arrived ten minutes later frozen and shaking. They stiffly pulled off their outer layers, and then a few inner layers after that, and it was only once she was down to her tank top and long underwear and under the warm covers, with one long leg curled over one of his to try and stop them shivering and with his beard scratching pleasantly against her neck, did she feel like this whole pointless punk rock reunion had been worth something