Banjo came to Marley’s door to invite them to dinner, and while a meal with strangers wasn’t something that would normally appeal, Marley couldn’t ignore rich, complex aromas wafting up the stairs. They hadn’t eaten since that breakfast at the Pine Box.
Following Banjo down, they were struck by the elaborate and unusual woodwork, probably added in recent years with 3-D woodgrain printers or computer-controlled laser wood carving tools. The moldings had beautiful intertwining circle and chain patterns, and the baseboards were carved in a long, unrepeating scene showing people of every gender and description dancing in a meadow. One of the figures carved into the baseboard near the top of the stairs, with hands flung high and a nimbus of bushy hair, looked just like Banjo Hamilton.
Dinner was served at a table with at least twenty mismatched antique wood chairs and set with a hodgepodge of china and glassware that ranged from bas relief acrylic tumblers that might have come off a 3-D printer that afternoon to carefully mended porcelain tea cups that must have been many decades old. There were glass bottles of water; several large, wooden bowls filled with salad; and three pots of what looked like stew, each accompanied by a basket crammed with thick slices of brown bread.
“Sit anywhere,” Banjo said. They pointed at the pots. “That one’s seitan, that one’s mushroom, and that one’s rabbit.”
“As in, actual rabbit?”
“We raise them ourselves,” Banjo said. “It’s emotionally excruciating.” Marley took the nearest seat. Banjo sat next to them and passed them a bowl. “Can someone get me some mushroom?”
The conversation was far-ranging and lively. The combination of residents and long- and short-term guests around the table, chattered and joked about places they’d been, artistic projects, work, politics, the garden, the rabbits, the weather, and a dozen other topics. Partway through the meal, Marley’s attention was caught by Oskar, a German guest with a brushy blond beard who sat a few seats away. He was laughing at something somebody had said.
“That’s really true?” he said. “No advertising?”
“One hundred percent,” said an intense young woman with large glasses. “I didn’t even really understand what advertising was until I was thirteen and we went on a school trip to America. It’s awful.”
“But you need it to do business,” Oskar said. “How do people sell things if they can’t tell people about them?”
“It’s pretty simple,” said Uday, who sat on the other side of Banjo. “When you want to buy something or hire someone, you just look through one of the directories or have your AI find what you want. There’s a lot of information in there—all of the products or services on offer, pricing, how long the place has been in business, what the composition of its workforce is, whether it’s a sponsored business, customer reviews—”
Oskar snorted. “You mean bot reviews. And fake reviews.”
“Do you use Jackson Trust System in Germany?” Banjo asked.
“I don’t,” Oskar said. “I mean, I’ve heard of it, but nobody I know uses it.”
“I guess it’s just more popular here,” said Banjo. “If you have enough JTS reviews, you can filter for just high-trust entries.”
“Meaning from people you know?” Oskar said.
Banjo, chewing a bite of stew, shook their head. They swallowed. “Everybody indicates what people they trust for opinions, and those people say who they trust, and so on—so you get this network of trust where it’s easy to find out whether a review passes muster for people in your network.”
“How do you make any sense of reviews without JTS?” said the woman with the large glasses.
Oskar shrugged. “I just don’t think the advertising thing is fair to businesses. They have a right to get the word out about what they do. It’s important.”
Uday frowned. “But since nobody’s advertising, you don’t have to advertise just to compete. It saves businesses a lot of money, and they can still get out factual information about goods and services people want to buy, for free.”
“Yeah, super,” said Oskar dismissively. “But what about, if someone doesn’t know he wants something, so he doesn’t look for it?” he said.
The woman with the large glasses wrinkled her nose. “If you don’t know you want it, do you really need it? Why do people need new things all the time?”
“It moves the economy,” said Oskar.
“But it’s more economically sound just to never make the thing that isn’t needed,” said the woman with the large glasses. “As long as you’re distributing wealth equitably, you don’t need to make people spend more and more money all the time.”
“That’s exactly the problem with advertising,” Banjo said, reaching out and pulling the bread basket over. “It’s all about getting people to want things they don’t need. Do you know how they design advertising? They come up with a problem, try to make you think you have it, and then they offer what they’re selling as the solution. They try to make you think you have to look a certain way to be beautiful and then tell you their product will make you look like that. Or they try to make you think you’re bored and that you need their product to have fun. Their first job is always to try to make you think that you don’t have enough, or that there’s something wrong with you.”
“But you could just outlaw that kind of advertising,” Oskar said. “You don’t have to say, ‘No advertisements!’”
“Advertising,” said the woman with the large glasses seriously, “is people trying to influence you to do something that will benefit them regardless of whether it’s good or bad for you. So when people are exposed to advertising all the time, they’re constantly being emotionally manipulated.”
“It hasn’t hurt me,” Oskar said.
The woman looked skeptical. “How do you know? When was the last time you can think of that an ad made your life better?”
“Uh ...” Oskar said.
The woman nodded. “Exactly.”
The next day, Marley bought a Þ95 train ticket and rode meandering railways to Tacoma. From there, they called for a pet-friendly shared car to bring them the rest of the way to Lewis Lake. The car took nearly forty minutes to arrive and turned out to be an old, coffee-colored Sparrow hatchback—autonomous and electric, like virtually every other car—with two facing bench seats. When it pulled up to the curb by the train station, Marley’s lenses highlighted it so they’d know it was their ride.
There was only one other passenger apart from Marley and Anthem, a woman of indeterminate age with yellow, spiky hair and an oversized pea-green coat. She barely glanced at Marley when they got in with Anthem: she seemed engrossed in some kind of game on her lenses. Tired from the train ride, Marley took the opportunity to not start a conversation. As the sun settled behind the Willapa Hills to the west, the car drove itself down a road that paralled a railroad track through ranks of towering pine trees.
Lewis Lake turned out to be a shallow, runty body of water covered with lily pads and located somewhere between the blink-and-you-miss-them towns of Roy and Yelm, a few miles south of the southernmost fingers and inlets of Puget Sound. The writer’s collective wrapped along the eastern shoreline of the lake, three long, two-story strawbale buildings with big windows. Wooden tables and chairs were sprinkled strategically around the property. When the car stopped, the yellow-haired woman didn’t even look up.
“Bye,” Marley said quietly, taking their pack and climbing out. Anthem yawned and jumped down after them. Deep in the trees, Marley saw the flicker of a fire and heard boisterous, plinking music. They tried to walk toward it, but as the car drove off with a whir, Anthem followed her nose, reading an encyclopedia of scents along the edge of the wood. Marley waited. When Anthem was done, she whuffed and trotted over to follow Marley down a dirt path.
Marley sent a voice message to Gia: “I just arrived. I’m walking toward some kind of music thing in the woods?”
Gia didn’t send a message back, but less than a minute later, a shadowy figure came running up the path, brandishing what looked like a tiny guitar and making a high pitched noise like eeeeee! This turned out to be Gia holding a ukulele. She flung herself at Marley and threw her arms around them, clunking the ukulele against their back. Anthem, caught up in the excitement, jumped around them both and barked.
“Anthem, take it easy,” Marley squeaked out. It was difficult to talk through a full-force Gia hug. Marley hugged back. It must have been more than a year since they’d seen Gia, and now their shared profession had imploded.
Gia finally released Marley from her death grip, only to drop to her knees and hug Anthem nearly as hard. “Who’s the sweetest doggie? Who is it?” she rhapsodized.
Anthem looked mournfully up at Marley, but she bore Gia’s love patiently.
A delighted grin had taken over Gia’s face. “I can’t believe we got you out here!” she said. “I’m so ... !” She made motions with her hands, vaguely like her head was exploding. “Do you want to come to Wednesday Uke Night? Or are you hungry? There’s dinner in an hour or so. Oh, or do you need to set your things down? You didn’t bring much. And also—this is Lyric!”
Another figure emerged from the trees, this one also holding a ukulele, but it was moving much more calmly than Gia had and was not making any shrieking noises. As she came closer, Marley could make out Lyric’s dark hair falling in crumpled waves over her shoulders. She wore a loose-fitting brown dress that rippled as she walked, and while her smile wasn’t manic like Gia’s, it was just as broad. Marley was struck by how arresting the woman’s contrasting eyes were in person. VR calls didn’t do them justice.
Lyric stopped a few steps away, and Anthem ran over to her to inexplicably sit by her side, looking from her to Marley and back. Nothing came to mind for Marley to say, so instead they mustered their best courtly composure and bowed. Lyric nodded approvingly and curtsied back, then offered her arm—the one that wasn’t carrying a ukulele.
“Wednesday Uke Night?” Marley said, stepping forward and taking Lyric’s arm. Belatedly, they offered an arm to Gia, but Gia waved them away, instead lifting the ukulele, laboriously setting her fingers, and striking a chord.
“You need to get a ukulele,” Gia said as they walked toward the music.
“OK,” said Marley. “Why?”
“Because Yelm, Washington is going to be the first town in the world where everyone plays the ukulele! Even I have started to play the ukulele, and you know I have no other talents apart from writing, beauty, and broad-spectrum charisma.”
“A ukulele town? That’s a little strange,” Marley said.
“Here!” Gia said, stopping. She pushed her tiny ukulele into Marley’s hands and pressed one of Marley’s fingers down on a string. “No, next to the fret, not on top. OK, now ... strum.”
Marley strummed. The ukulele made a chord, like actual music. They handed the ukulele back and reconnected with Lyric. Linking arms with her felt weirdly normal, as though they always walked together.
“So is it strange?” Gia said. “Or is it amazing?” It took Marley a moment to realize she was talking about everyone playing the ukulele.
“There’s a man in town named Chuckie Bail,” Lyric said. “He’s been giving free group ukulele lessons forever, and he’s been trying to get everyone in town to learn, including us out here at Lewis Lake. Gia started two weeks ago.”
“And I can already play six songs!” Gia said.
“How many people make up the town?” said Marley.
“About fifteen thousand,” Lyric said.
“And how many people can play the ukulele so far?”
“There are only a couple dozen holdouts,” said Lyric. “Not counting young kids. He doesn’t start them until they’re five.”
“Oh,” Marley said. “That’s pretty good.”
The path led them to a clearing where knee-height rounds of wide tree trunk surrounded a stone-lined fire pit like seats in a theater. About forty people of all ages and appearances stood and sat around the fire. A few were in clusters, talking, but most held ukuleles and were heartily singing the chorus to “Lose Me, Darling,” a folk song that had been popular when Marley was a kid. Anthem stuck close to Marley and Lyric, confused by the noise. Lyric guided them to seats at the edge of the crowd and sat Marley between herself and Gia. Lyric lifted her ukulele, while Gia watched the other players and tried to imitate the chords.
“We can go settle you in whenever you want,” Lyric said. Then she picked up the chorus and sang along in a throaty alto, strumming on her ukulele:
You can lose me darling, if you can let me go.
You should make me know
That I should go
If you don’t love me so.
You can choose me darling, or you can choose me not,
If you can stand
To drop my hand
And give up what we’ve got.
Or I could stay, stay, stay,
Like the sunshine stays in May.
There is no way
If I should stay
That I could stay away.
No, there’s no way
If I should stay
That I could stay away!
The collective had guest rooms, but since some members had moved out soon after the Goldman AI was announced, there were whole apartments to spare, and Marley had been assigned one in the building farthest from the road. Lyric walked them there as Wednesday Uke Night wound down, and Gia went to the community room to pick up dinner for all three.
The door to the apartment was unlocked, and they walked together into a room that stretched from one side of the building to the other, with deep windows at each end. One large window had a cushioned window seat, while another was fitted with a plant rack. Marley was surprised, when they closed the door, how quiet it suddenly became, though it wasn’t surprising when you considered how thick the walls were: 40 centimeters of straw, with spray concrete on the outer wall and plaster covering the inside. The room’s interior was muted white and lacked sharp lines, which gave the place a cozy, handmade feel.
There were two built-in bookshelves and a few items of furniture in the room: a couch, a coffee table, and a little kitchen table with four chairs. A miniature autokitchen resided in a nook to one side, while an opening next to it led to a tiled bathroom with a beautiful mosaic tub. Across from the kitchen, a curtained archway led into a bedroom half the size of the main room, with an already-made queen bed on a low platform opposite a wide, built-in desk. From a window by the bed, Marley could just barely see the lake.
The lighting was homely and recessed, and the apartment was pleasantly cool despite the continuing heat outside.
Putting their bag down by the couch, Marley went first to the kitchen, where they rummaged in a cupboard until they found a large bowl. They filled this at the sink and set it on the floor for Anthem. Then they took down a plate and extracted a dog food packet from their pack to empty onto it. Anthem made a beeline for the dishes and ate intently.
Lyric sat at the little table, and Marley walked over and took the chair next to her.
“It’s a beautiful apartment,” they said.
“Yeah, it’s a pretty good,” Lyric agreed. “The community room will take your breath away, I bet.”
They were silent for a number of heartbeats. Marley was having trouble finding the right direction to take them in conversation, but Lyric didn’t seem concerned or impatient: she just sat, her head tilted to one side, watching Marley.
“You’re from Vermont?” Marley said finally.
Lyric nodded. “It’s beautiful here, but it’s more beautiful there,” she said. “Sorry—I know I’m biased.”
“What’s it like?”
“Well, I grew up in a converted barn on one of the Lake Champlain Islands. It’s a pretty big lake—not like the Great Lakes, but still. The house is up on a hill. We weren’t close enough to see the lake, but it was woods all around us, and you’d see deer and rabbits and wild turkeys and sometimes foxes and things. Oh, and lots of birds. You could hear barred owls sometimes, but we hardly ever saw them. Apart from the wind and the birds singing, it was so quiet! You could go outside on a winter night, with everything white and still around you, and you’d look up at the stars, and it would be like the whole sky was a slab of black granite embedded with stars.”
“It sounds like you miss it.”
“Sure, but I’m happy here, too. For now. I thought I’d be here for a long time, but I can’t be sure anymore. It was the first place in a long time that felt safe.”
“Safe from what?” said Marley, leaning forward.
“Oh,” Lyric said. “Well, you know how the Americans strong-armed the Mountain Republic back into the United States?”
Marley nodded.
“It wasn’t all of America,” Lyric clarified. “I mean, even when it was just economic pressure, there were protests in America, big ones ... A lot of Americans supported us, but Constitutionalists were in power, and they had their minds made up, and they sanctioned us and leaned on other countries until we were too isolated to make it.
“We should have known after the first time,” Lyric continued. “Did you know that parts of New York and New Hampshire joined Vermont in the late 18th century? Vermont was an independent republic after the American Revolution.”
“Really?”
“They did. Vermont had to give all those parts back as a condition for entering the union. Anyway, when the Americans started trying to re-annex the Mountain Republic, there was a resistance movement, and it kept going even after the annexation.”
“And you were part of that resistance?”
Lyric smiled. “Yes. I was working with a group that gathered intelligence on people inside the Mountain Republic who had aided the Americans. There were American sympathizers who were breaking all kinds of Mountain Republic laws, sometimes to encourage the reunification, sometimes just to make some money. Some of those things were still illegal by the new American laws after the Republic ended, but the Americans mostly didn’t prosecute those cases.”
Marley nodded. “Why were you gathering intelligence?”
Lyric sighed. “I guess we thought we had a chance of getting the American public on our side if we exposed some of the things people had done during the annexation.”
“So you found some things you could use? Smoking guns?”
“We found a lot. There was this one man particularly, in New Hampshire—well, but it doesn’t matter, because the Americans infiltrated our organization, and those of us who could had to escape.”
“What would they have done to you?”
“Locked me up and thrown away the key, I guess. They got a lot of friends of mine. They’re scattered across prisons all over the United States now.”
“But you got away.”
“I got away. I crossed the border into Quebec at night and made my way west from there. I applied for political asylum in Cascadia, but I wasn’t able to get it, at least not right away. The Americans were pressing the Canadians to extradite me, so I snuck into Cascadia the same way I snuck into Quebec.”
“You’re here illegally?”
“Don’t turn me in!” Lyric said, smiling.
Marley had to admire her confidence, considering.
“I think I’m all right for now,” Lyric said. “Technically, I’m not supposed to be in Cascadia, but in practice, they give some leeway to people who are applying for asylum. The problem is that there are a lot of Cascadians who don’t want to annoy the United States, so there’s debate over my case and over other refugees from the Mountain Republic.
“You seem like you’re OK, though,” Marley observed. “Right now.”
“I am OK,” said Lyric. “I’m happy where I am. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.”
Lyric and Gia stayed with Marley, talking animatedly long into the night until it became clear Marley was fading. As they left, Lyric blew Marley a kiss goodnight from the doorway, and Marley felt a warm shiver go through them.
Before taking their lenses out to sleep, Marley checked their messages. There was another one from the CitDiv office, flagged for importance by the messaging AI. Marley sat in the armchair to read it.
Dear Mx. Jun, it said. We are pleased to inform you that you have been approved for participation in the Citizen Dividend Selective Income Expansion pilot program. Because of the sensitive nature of this project, communication about it with any unauthorized person, including personnel from the Citizen Dividend Office or other government departments who are not directly involved in the pilot, is strictly prohibited and punishable by law.
Marley read on with increasing disbelief. The warnings and threats continued for paragraphs and got progressively more dire. As bizarre as that was, the main topic of the message was even more bewildering: it seemed to boil down to the Cascadian government secretly giving Marley more money for no clear reason. There were vague references to Marley having been selected for demonstrating “civic responsibility,” whatever that was supposed to mean. No way had been provided to opt out, and the confidentiality requirements were absolute.
A long block of legalese at the end explained where the authority came from to impose this secrecy, but it made little sense to Marley. Increasingly, they were trying to imagine how they could have gotten included and how they could turn it down. It wasn’t that extra money wouldn’t come in handy: it was just that Marley couldn’t see any reason extra money should come to them instead of someone else, and they weren’t interested in taking advantage of it just because they could. The problem was, it seemed possible they didn’t have any choice. Could they talk to a lawyer? They weren’t positive, and maybe it would be somewhere in that legalese section if they decoded it. The restrictions seemed to rule out even that, though. Maybe they weren’t expecting anyone to turn it down.
In the end, Marley resolved to sleep on it. Sometimes solutions emerged by themselves overnight. Even when they didn’t, Marley’s experience had been that difficult problems almost always got easier after a good rest.
Before settling down to sleep, Marley opened their bank statement to see whether any payments had already been deposited.
They had.
The bank records were a little hard to believe. There had been not one deposit, but six, all on the same day, all in different amounts but adding up to three or four times what Marley had made from their job on Deaf Ears—and that was already considered a respectable income. Marley knew they should be delighted, but the sense of a shoe waiting to drop was too strong to shake.
They would talk about it with Lyric, they decided, warnings or no warnings. Maybe it would make more sense to Lyric than it did to Marley. Marley hoped so.
They took out their lenses, washed their face, and took their tooth cleaner out of its case. Thoughts about the strange windfall gave way to thoughts about Lyric and her warm and lively way. She was a candle flame of a person. Marley slid the cleaner between their teeth and bit down gently. Its low hum resonated in their jaw as it flossed and scrubbed.
Maybe Marley should talk to Lyric and Gia about the No Divide opportunity, too—although ... hadn’t they decided not to do that? It surprised them that Néstor and Jessica had even imagined Marley could be a good candidate to host a streaming show. Marley knew their limits. They preferred to observe the world, compose their thoughts, and then distill them into something useful. Streaming interviews meant having to think off the cuff and keep up a conversation, and all the time you were doing that, you’d know you were in the direct path of the audience’s attention. There was no opportunity to correct mistakes, no way to come back to do things better or to pause to come up with the best thing to say.
Teeth clean, they popped out the tooth cleaner and set it in its tray, where it washed itself out. Anthem followed them into the bedroom and up the two steps to the bed, which in that high position felt strangely like a throne. Marley pulled back the covers and climbed in, sinking into the mattress with a grateful sigh. They had hardly pulled the sheet and blanket over them when Anthem leapt up, turned in circles, and then settled with a huff on Marley’s feet. Even with this comfort and the miraculous quiet the apartment offered—Anthem’s gently comic snoring aside—it took Marley a long time to shed thoughts of the CitDiv money, of No Divide, and of Lyric. In the end, though, the comfort and quiet won, and they slept.
They met Lyric and Gia for breakfast in the community dining room as other residents came and ate and talked and went. The autokitchen there was like nothing Marley had ever seen: some crazy person or genius had grafted on a variety of unusual modules that looked like they had been salvaged from other autokitchens. The result was bulky and antiquated-looking, but it turned out that between the modules it included and some AI customizations, the Lewis Lake autokitchen was capable of coming up with completely novel meals based on very little information beyond dietary restrictions.
Once Marley, Gia, and Lyric had checked in with the autokitchen using their lenses, Gia demonstrated: she pushed a large button on the side of the machine that had been painted with bright orange question marks. The three of them wound up with vegetable mochi puffs; slices of crisp-toasted, spicy mycoprotein; and little multicolored buildings constructed out of berries and cube-sliced fruit.
“I’ve never seen any of this before,” Marley said. They took a bite of mycoprotein as they carried their wooden tray across the room. “Mmm, and it’s good!”
Gia nodded, shrugging, her mouth full of mochi puff.
“You can order normal things, too,” Lyric said, “but we usually do this. Sometimes it’s just OK, but other times, it’s fantastic—and you never know what you’ll get.”
They put their trays down at a table in a distant corner of the room where they could look out through the trees at the tiny lake, where the morning sun silvered the water.
As much as the CitDiv money was on Marley’s mind, they weren’t going to talk about it in such a public place, so they brought up the next most pressing question—No Divide’s proposal. They recounted the meeting in North Bend for Gia and Lyric between bites of fruit and mochi puff.
“I like what they’re about,” they said when they finished. “I just don’t want to do that.”
“Why not that?” Gia said. “Streaming interviews? You’d kill at that. Do you know how many times I’ve seen you have actually constructive conversations with complete idiots?”
“It sounds like it’s terrifying for you, though,” Lyric said.
Gia made a rude noise, apparently to illustrate how likely it was that anything could frighten Marley.
“It’s not just that,” Marley said. “This isn’t just conversations with random people.”
“Isn’t it, though?” said Gia.
“Would you have a say in whether or not they aired an interview, after you saw how it turned out?” said Lyric.
“I don’t know,” Marley said. “I could ask. But even then, I’d still be wasting everyone’s time if it’s no good.”
“It sounds like they want you to try, though,” Gia said. “The worst that can happen is that it’s terrifying and it doesn’t go well, and then you’d just be like ...” She gestured with her hands, as if to say “you see?”
“That doesn’t sound great,” Marley said, poking at their mycoprotein.
Gia made a “who cares?” face. “It’s pretty good for a worst case scenario,” she said.
They ate in silence for a few minutes as Marley thought about it. Was there some way to do it and avoid the spotlight? Was there a chance they might somehow be good at it?
“Are you trying to find a reason to turn it down,” Lyric said, “or are you trying to find a way to make it work?”
Marley considered this. “I mean, it’s a good idea for a project ... I just don’t feel super confident about it.”
“That makes sense,” said Lyric. “But I wonder if maybe they specifically want somebody who doesn’t come in looking like they think they know everything. It sounds like they want somebody who just wants to understand people better.”
“Which is 100% you, Marley,” Gia added.
She was right. It was.
Marley’s went back to their apartment while Gia and Lyric stayed behind to handle some chores. The sky was heavy with storm clouds, with tiny gaps here and there lancing down shafts of sunlight. On a path through the trees, Marley was distracted when a sunbeam hit something just off the trail. It glittered, dark and moving, yet shiny, like metal.
They had to kneel in the leaves to see it. Their first thought was some kind of beetle, but leaning close, Marley could make out the strange, angular shape of the legs and the squareness of the carapace. It wasn’t an insect: it was a tiny drone.
What it was doing there, far from anywhere a business or hobbyist would be likely to use it, Marley had no idea. They picked up a stick nearby and poked at it, but they weren’t prepared for its sudden reaction, skittering under the leaf cover. Marley kicked over the leaves, but it had vanished.
Back in the apartment with Anthem, Marley messaged No Divide to ask whether they’d have a say in whether a completed interview would be aired. Jessica wrote back within minutes: Marley could decide not to let a full interview air, but if that happened, No Divide would have the option of editing together just parts of the interviewee’s responses to air, leaving Marley out of it.
In the same message, Jessica listed some of the streaming review sites that were offering to post about the series if it ran. Someone had been talking the series up: the list contained a good number of sites, some of which Marley often read themself. If the interviews went well, they had a fighting chance of getting a good-sized viewership.
Marley hadn’t given much thought to how people would find out about the program, but finding an audience was one of the biggest difficulties for any kind of streaming show, and No Divide seemed already to have a plan to address it. Imagining the interviews being seen by thousands or tens of thousands of people made the project feel better and worse at the same time.
Marley’s conversation about it with Lyric and Gia had made it clear to Marley that the job didn’t seem like a bad fit so much as simply terrifying. Coming out to their family, especially to their Korean grandma, had also been terrifying. Moving to Stone had been terrifying. Starting work on Deaf Ears had absolutely been terrifying, too—and those had all been good decisions. All Marley was gambling, it turned out, was comfort, and as far as they were concerned, comfort was overrated.
Before they could reconsider, they wrote a brief note to Jessica and Néstor to say that they were willing to try an interview and see how it went. Then they sat on the bed and took a few deep breaths. Anthem came over and leaned against their legs. Marley rubbed Anthem’s ears, something that calmed them both down.
Jessica’s response was speedy and enthusiastic. No Divide had already identified a number of prospective interviewees, and as it turned out, one lived not far from Lewis Lake. Within a few messages, Marley was scheduled to interview him early the next week. As they left the apartment to find Gia and Lyric and share the news, they wondered how they’d found themself on this new track so suddenly and with so little an idea of what they were getting into.
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