The kid tried to lock the door before Ramona had finished making it.
"Door barred. Lock hard!"
He put everything into the last word: chin out, shoulders up, silver puffer crackling. The magic snapped from his mouth and found no door. A woman selling hot chestnuts winced on his behalf.
Ramona kept the little hitch in her flow.
Chain in my lane, thought you settled the score.
Brass teeth in a neat row. Each link is a door.
On door, the chain strung between the bicycle racks unfolded into six narrow brass panels. The kid sucked in a breath through his teeth. Ramona stepped through the first door, pushed the second with her shoulder, and kicked her way through the rest in time with the beat coming from somebody's battered speaker. Her orange windbreaker caught on the final handle. She kept walking, dragging that door two steps before it gave up and collapsed back into chain.
The cypher made the appropriate noise.
"Thought you were making doors," the kid said.
"I was getting there."
He bent over, laughing, hands on his knees. Ramona pulled a brass thread from her cuff. A good jacket would have torn. This one had survived two tours and a spell that had briefly made every zipper on her body into a mouth.
Above them, a train thrashed across the girders. The beat vanished beneath it. Nobody stopped: the circle kept time with shoulders, fingers, the heels of shoes. On the chestnut cart, the woman murmured hot in the pot, hot in the pot, giving the paper bags one last warm breath before passing them across. Two gargoyles with live moss in their eyebrows hung upside down from the viaduct to listen. The larger one held a phone in both claws.
"Gonna use that upstairs?" the kid asked.
"On Keynote? He'd put a mortgage on it before I got through."
She tapped fists with him and headed for the station stairs. Behind her, somebody called, "Cutline! Bring us the summer!"
She lifted a hand without turning around. The festival headline slot came with her name across six blocks of billboards and a sound system she had once dreamed about in such detail that waking up had felt like being evicted.
One battle.
She took the stairs two at a time, then made herself slow down. No point arriving out of breath.
Keynote was waiting on the third landing, broad shoulders filling a plum jacket, a cup of ginger tea held carefully between his silver rings. He wore white boots. White boots on a station staircase. The man had committed to an idea.
"You caught your sleeve," he said.
"News travels."
"Gargoyle stream. Good doors."
He held out the tea. She took a mouthful. Neither of them said anything about the fact that he still ordered it without honey because that was how she liked it.
Ramona had her notebook open against her palm. She should have closed it before she reached the landing. Instead, while she swallowed, her thumb tapped out the troublesome second line.
"Every gap with a tag, every—"
"Cut with a twist," Keynote said. "You're bringing the bridge."
She stopped tapping.
"You heard that once."
"You read it to me for forty minutes."
"You were asleep."
"I was listening with my eyes shut. It's different."
She drew a hard line through cut with a twist. He smiled into his tea.
"You've tightened it," he said. "The first version took half a verse to get out of the alley."
"You won't hear this version from a chair."
"Was planning to get one made."
He stepped aside, and she climbed past him before she smiled.
They had once carried a speaker up these stairs between them, stopping at every landing to argue about whose end was heavier. Back then the promoters had printed KEYNOTE & CUTLINE in the same size. Then he had won this tournament, and she had taken a year off battles to make an album, and the introductions had begun shrinking her: his partner, his former partner, the woman who used to perform with him.
Six new bars since he'd last heard the bridge. He could have the opening. She still had the crossing.
At the roof door she shut the notebook and left it in her jacket pocket.
The roof was all elbows and light. People crowded the railings, stood on benches, leaned from the windows of the taller buildings next door. Far below, the station signs changed platforms. The skyline wore advertising halos and the delicate moving tracery of somebody's enormous live love poem.
In the middle of the roof, a wooden stage stood inside a red boundary rope. Crash mats filled the space beyond it. Four safety casters in yellow jackets occupied the corners, checking one another's mics. Ramona stepped onto the boards and heard a low, hollow thump beneath her right heel.
She tried it again.
"Don't kick holes in it till we start," said the DJ.
"Put a better kick in your beat, then."
He grinned and turned a knob. The bass reached up through her knees.
She knew the rules. Both feet beyond the red rope and you lost. Jumping inside it was fine; flying outside it was conclusive. You could change whatever material you could reach with your voice, if you had the breath and the image. People's bodies were their own. No verse had ever turned a rapper into a toad, although three finalists had tried the previous year.
The DJ lifted his mic.
"South roof! East windows! Whoever's hanging off that aerial, your mother can see this stream!"
The aerial crowd waved.
"Final battle. Winner headlines the High Summer. In the orange, you know her from—"
"Cutline," Ramona said into her mic.
He looked at her, understood, and spread his free hand.
"CUTLINE!"
The noise hit her hard enough that she nearly missed Keynote ducking through the rope. He set his tea on a speaker, rolled his shoulders, and waited for the beat as though he had been promised it personally.
The DJ gave them four clicks.
Keynote came in precisely on the one.
Brought your whole notebook? I know it by heart.
You came for a solo. I still know your part.
Brass in my backline, bend low for the throne.
Come get your feature. I headline alone.
Two brass lighting stands beside the stage bent toward him. Their tubes wove into a high-backed chair, bulbs blazing along the arms. He sat as it finished forming beneath him, one white boot crossed over the other. The crowd caught headline alone and sent it around the roof.
He inhaled. The throne held on their living voices.
Ramona felt the familiar rush behind her teeth. Recorded music could give you a beat. It couldn't lend you a breath. That was why a thousand people still climbed a filthy station staircase to see what happened when somebody said something new.
She let Keynote have two more headline alones. Then she moved.
Big chair, bright glare, little king in the middle.
Two tons of brass for a two-note fiddle.
Pins, split. Rims, lift. Let the thin wings bite.
Your seat is a moth with a taste for the light.
The chair's back divided down its long spine. Brass ribs spread into wings. Keynote's crossed boot dropped. The throne lurched toward the lights over the crowd, and he had to spring from it, landing inside the red rope with both arms out.
The moth swept over his head. Ramona steered it with a rising li-i-ight, spending the end of her breath on a dive toward his jacket.
He answered while it was still above him.
Those wings are two shutters. Shut tight. Stay closed.
I saw that one coming before you composed.
Brass slammed flat. The moth fell into two neat panels at his feet. The front row caught stay closed, stay closed, keeping his shutters square while he breathed.
Ramona laughed despite herself. So did the roof. It was a bad habit, appreciating him in public.
He took his breath on their laughter, then filled the next bar.
Every board in this floor is a step to my seat.
I rise by the line. You retreat by the beat.
The floor rose beneath him in broad wooden tiers. The nearest one struck Ramona's shins. She hopped back, landed on another moving step, and found herself descending a staircase that was still being built in the wrong direction.
Retreat by the beat, the crowd called, delighted to have something that scanned with a stomp.
Keynote climbed. Ramona reached the last step. Behind her heel, the boundary rope pressed against her shoe.
He tilted his head as if to say, Well?
She gave him the bridge.
I know every dead end the bright maps missed,
every fence with a bend where the back streets kiss.
Shutters, shed brass. Let a spine span the ridge.
Where your kingdom runs out, I can build me a bridge.
The fallen panels split into narrow ribs. They sprang from her lowest step to his highest, locked together, and spread into a shining deck. She ran up it before the last echo of bridge had left the windows.
There: his smile changed.
The bridge hit his top step with enough force to slide it backward. Ramona was over the gap and climbing. The roof caught her hook, build me a bridge, and held it while she snatched air. Three strides took her within reach of his white boots. She pitched her next bridge upward; its forward end lifted with her voice, ready to tip his perch toward the mats.
Keynote shifted his weight. She saw him read the angle.
Bridge into bricks. Full stop. Drop.
My city's got a ceiling. You're looking at the top.
On drop, the deck broke into brass blocks beneath her.
She flung herself forward. Her left foot found the wooden tier. Her right skated on a block. She hit the stage on one knee as Keynote's last line cracked over her head, and the tier slid with her on it, carrying her toward the rope.
The crowd's bridge-hook broke into a shout. By the windows, his supporters were already bouncing full stop, drop back at her.
Ramona caught the edge of a board. Her right shoe went under the rope and landed on a crash mat. Her left was still hooked around the tier.
The nearest safety caster lifted a hand. Waiting.
She pulled her knee under herself, dragged her right foot back, and stood.
Keynote had stopped smiling. He was watching her properly now.
"Nice bridge," he said, off the beat.
It was. She had spent eleven months getting it to sound that easy. For three strides it had been everything she'd meant.
The brass blocks rolled down the wooden tiers. Each one struck with a different note: hollow, hollow, hollow. Under the bass she could hear the stage answering.
Keynote took a breath.
She moved first, chopping her line across his entrance.
All these stairs for a throne? You got a fear of the ground?
Your palace is a carpet. Let me roll it back down.
She crowded the first line, then found room for down. The tiers unrolled into a flat wooden floor, dragging Keynote three paces toward her before he freed his boots. She stayed down in her knees, feeling the boards flex.
The DJ leaned over his decks. He had heard the change in her flow.
Keynote swept a brass block up into his hand. He began another line. She crowded him with a faster one, words snapping into the spaces between his stresses. Neither cast took shape. The roof shouted at the collision.
He was still looking for her endings. She could see it in his mouth: the beginnings of answers waiting for her nouns. They had done that for each other for years. If she ran short of breath, he caught her line. If he lost the rhyme, she put it back under him.
He had caught her on the landing. He had caught her bridge.
The unused closing bars waited in her head, polished smooth. She could hear exactly how he would break them.
Ramona set her heel against the scattered brass. Beneath it, the board gave its deep little thump.
She looked up at him.
I know every dead end the bright maps missed—
His eyebrows rose. Again?
She gave him the familiar route, fast enough to make him hurry. The bent fences. The ridge. The brass gathering, still shapeless, at her feet. Her words packed themselves into the approach he knew. The crowd let its hooks fall away, listening for his reply.
Where your kingdom runs out, I can build me a—
One, two, three.
Keynote was already there.
"Bridge into bricks—"
She left the fourth beat empty.
Ramona was already rapping beneath his remaining three words: Full. Stop. Drop. She doubled her new line across his long, square stresses.
Big throne, thin boards. Hear the hollow hum.
Brass beater. Guest feature. Your boards are my drum.
His drop found no bridge to change. Her drum landed in the sharp intake of his next breath.
She put your straight at his feet.
The brass at her heel snapped into a pedal, its long beater reaching beneath his patch of floor. Keynote drove straight into an answer.
"That drum's a dead—"
The planks tightened and tilted toward the mats. His back boot slid; his front knee hit the taut drumhead with a hollow knock. The rest of his line went out in a grunt. He planted his free hand, trying to get a boot beneath him.
Ramona kept her heel over the pedal and rapped over his scramble to stand.
High seat. Low end. Let the whole roof jump.
Everybody knows your name. Now they know my—
She drove her heel down.
THUMP.
The drumhead threw Keynote off the stage.
For a moment he was perfectly horizontal, plum jacket open, white boots brighter than anything on the roof. Both feet passed the red rope. The safety casters' answering chord caught him above the mats, folded the air beneath his back, and set him down sitting, one silver-ringed hand still holding the mic.
The drumbeat went out between the buildings. Windows trembled. The gargoyles under the viaduct answered with a roar that came up through the train girders.
Ramona's pedal melted into harmless brass pieces when she finally breathed.
The DJ had one hand over his mouth. Then he found his own mic.
"CUTLINE!"
This time there was nothing before it.
Her knees were shaking. She let them. The roof was shouting her name; the people in the windows took it up, a fraction late, making a ragged echo down the street. Someone caught the new hook. Big throne, thin boards. Someone else answered, Hear the hollow hum.
Ramona looked toward the mats.
Keynote was laughing so hard he had to put the microphone down. He tried to stand, failed, and accepted a hand from a safety caster. One white boot was no longer white.
"You," he said, pointing at her.
She wiped her mouth on her sleeve.
"Me."
Above the DJ, the High Summer sign changed. The promoter touched two fingers to the lettering and spoke the booking into its lights.
CUTLINE. HEADLINE SET.
Ramona stared until the words stopped blurring. There would be a contract in the morning. Tonight there was her name, enormous, with room around it.
Keynote ducked under the rope, recovered his ginger tea, and discovered it had gone cold. He considered the cup, then set it down again.
"Run that back," he told the DJ.
The DJ looked at Ramona.
She glanced once more at the sign. Then she rolled her shoulders, found the spring in the boards, and raised her mic.
"Different verse this time."
Keynote's grin spread slowly.
The bass came up through her shoes.