Clarissa took a deep breath and let herself go. The person who turned the corner into the alley would not have been recognized by her closest friends and associates. She her carriage and mannerisms were all different. Her voice had a new timbre and an accent that said her home was a long way from here. But the bum seated on a dented trash can didn't know that.
"Quiet night, ain't it?"
"Piss off," the grimy man said, ignoring her by tossing down a smoke and lighting another.
"I can hear that in any shithole around here. Gimme a real Dis."
The man shifted in his chair. The hilt of a blade appeared between the folds of his vagrant getup. In many ways he was as fake as her. Turning his head left and right, he exhaled a cloud of bluish smoke all around his head. Satisfied, he tilted his chin at something behind her.
"Barrel," was all he said.
Clarissa turned and saw a large liquor cask behind her. The bottom was still damp, probably bootlegged this morning and brought from the harbor down the street. It was capped on top and she pulled on the oversized cork. The top rotated smoothly up on oiled hinges. Instead of a bottom, there was a rope ladder. She hopped in as the lookout hissed a warning. Closing the hatch behind her, she descended into the earth.
She felt a weak vibration when her feet touched the ground. Wrhythm was playing tonight and was already trying to bring the cavern down on the revelers. The natural stone passageway veered off left and right from the rope ladder. One direction had a torch glow, the other was dark. Anyone stupid enough to walk into the honeycomb of caverns and sewer systems under the Conduit City without a map or a guide deserved what they got. It was tempting though. The people who would catch her were the ones she was trying to find. But she wanted to join them, not end up a casualty like so many others. She wasn't that desparate yet.
She walked a short distance towards the glow before rounding a bend and hitting a line of wannabes. A couple heads at the back turned towards her with half smiles which said, "Good luck, you're too late." As she swept past them, the smiles turned to frowns. She came up to the rope line barrier and smiled at one of the bouncers.
"Hey Chez, how's the Dis? I can feel it up here."
He winked at her. "It's Wrhythm. You'll see." he said in a nasal voice that did not fit his massive frame, smiling and lifting the rope to let her in. The groans behind her said everything about how good the show was. Or how good a story the unlucky ones were going to tell their friends later. One of them tried to sneak under the rope while his back was turned, but Chez directed his smile towards the man and stopped him dead. His nose, many times broken and never properly set, was much scarier than his glower. The other bouncer, T, watched the whole episode and hadn't bothered to move.
Bumping fists with Chez and nodding to T, she parted the curtain and entered another passageway, involuntarily taking the last deep breath of relatively clean air she would be getting for awhile. Also because the real real gauntlet was before her. Vendors hawking everything from food and water to drugs and spiked collars lined the walls. She was immediately assaulted by all manner of pitches and some hands even reached out in an attempt to drag her into their orbit. The crowds at the stage she could handle, this was something altogether different though.
Dodging hands and eye contact, she wove her way through the commerical cesspool. It reminded her of walking through a waterfall: a moment of intense pressure and cold with complete peace on the other side. As soon as she passed a vendor she was forgotten as if she didn't exist, as if their vision only went one way.
The volume of noise increased with the vibration as the path descended. A shabby man came jogging up from the other direction holding a sheaf of papers. Looking at her as he went by, he made a tick mark on one of them. "Keeping count," she thought of the runner. There were several entrances and a constant inflow and outflow of people. Clarissa was always impressed with the organization of Discords, especially for big acts like Wrhythm. How they managed to find these natural caverns and set up all the entrances she did not know, but it was an impressive feat. She knew that proper bribes were given to the City Watch, but despite this security was tight and Discords were impossible to find without foreknowledge.
Even though the noise was increasing, her nose told her she was getting close. The organizers packed as many people as they could into the main cavern and the smell of sweat became noticable. Sometimes it rained during a Discord.
She came at last to the final curtain, which flew open in front of her. A group of five people tumbled out, two of them obviously bleeding and all of them laughing. No doubt they were headed up to the vendors for more of whatever got them into a fight in the first place. Smiling as if at children who had hurt themselves but not badly, she entered the main stage.
Her breath caught in her throat. She'd been in the scene for almost a year and crashed a couple dozen Discords. This was easily the biggest venue she'd ever heard of.
There were at least a thousand people packed into a space that would comfortabaly fit half that. Looking down, she could see Wrhythm slashing away. The lead man, Kaneker, was in rare form on his imbued guitar. The discordant sounds emanating from it gave the scene its name. Clarissa immediately felt the tug of the projected element energy suffuse her whole body. Some of her friends said they had near religious experiences with some artists, but for her it was more an uptick of energy and a sense of rearrangement. Or at least an attempt at rearranging something inside her. As soon as the music stopped, the body went back to its equilibrium.
As she watched, a reveler, crazed by the music, substances, or both, was boosted up by the crowd and started to climb onto the stage. The vocalist, Sevy, didn't miss a word of the song, "I Don't Care About You," as he picked a lit cigarrete out from the frets of Kaneker's guitar and flicked it directly into the interloper's eyes. Clarissa assumed the idiot kept screaming the whole time as he fell back into the crowd. Just another set at a Discord.
She didn't know how she was going to find her friends in this mess. The guards at the entrances had strict rules: one at a time and if they see anyone "lining up" everyone is blacklisted. Most crews went separately and found each other inside, but in this element inspired morass the search seemed hopeless. There was nothing for it but to plunge in.
She glided through the crowd, sliding into openings and creases like a dancer to avoid the rowdiest revelers. At one point a mosh pit materialized around her and she escaped with a few well-placed chops and kidney shots, slipping out of the area without getting too buffeted. That was how she had met Chez. A crew who thought they were somebodies jumped him at an entrance eight months back and she took the opportunity to help him. She wasn't big, not like Pali. The thought made her grimace. But she was fast and knew how to find and exploit a weakness. She chipped in a few timely knee kicks and assorted dirty blows while Chez's fists did the rest. The idiots didn't know what hit them and from then on Chez and the other bouncers let her know that lines were for other people.
Over the next half hour she flowed through the crowd, sometimes with and sometimes against the current, but could not locate anyone she knew in the throng. She got near the stage at one point and caught amidst the upraised fists and crowd surfers the deep blue eyes of the members of Wrhythm. She had seen them perform once before, but hadn't noticed this odd coindidence. Frowning while she dodged the revelers, she noticed a man in robes talking to their manager at the back of the stage. He was a strange sight and out of place amongst the haphazard garmets worn by the majority of the crowd. At that moment the mass of humanity surged back like a school of fish, carrying all its members with it. Clarissa was hard pressed to keep her footing and rode the waves as best she could. Suddenly, she felt a hand grasp her wrist.
Spinning, she twisted out of the grip and her other hand went to the hilt of a concealed dagger she carried. The young woman who had grabbed her wrist had a frightened look on her face. Squinting, recognition dawned on Clarissa.
"Tanya?" She had to shout the question and wasn't sure if the woman heard her until she smiled broadly. Grabbing her wrist again, Clarissa's friend, who had disappeared 3 months ago without a word, led her out of the crowd towards a nearby side passage.
It was relatively quiet in there and Clarissa took a long look at Tanya as they walked. It wasn't that something had changed, it was a lot of somethings. The Tanya she knew had nervous eyes that darted from place to place seemingly at random and a carriage that suggested the influence of the eyes trickled down to the rest of her body. This woman appeared collected and graceful. Her hair was short instead of long and her blue eyes shone with a light that Clarissa did not remember. Where had this woman been?
"Clarissa! It's so good to see you! It feels like ages! Like an ocean of water has passed under our bridge."
"Tanya, you...you look great. What the hell haircut is that? Where the fuck have you been? The crew has bets down on what happened. Was it shithawk?"
Tanya's eyes glazed over for a moment and she looked confused. "No...I vaguely remember that name..." Shithawk was a guy who was interested in Tanya and tried to join their crew around the time she disappeared. He was alright, but one time he bent over to pick something up and revealed a shock of hair only over his ass crack. The crew started calling him shithawk and wanted Tanya to confirm if it went all the way down. Clarissa knew now that she was dead money in the pool.
Tanya suddenly brightened again and said, "No, it was so much better than that. And better than this," she said, raising her hands up and turning left and right, encompassing the whole Dis scene and, it seemed, the entire idea of continuing to search for something that had been found. "I found an oasis. I thought you might like it too."
Clarissa's mask stayed in place only by the hardest. The mask of a disaffected youth tired of authority and looking for an alternative, any alternative, even if it was self-destructive. A year of work might be about to pay off.
"You sound crazy, Tanya, but look at this," she said, waving her hand at the passage back to the stage, "we swim in crazy. What the hell, I'll bite."