Jonah came back to Hollow Stage the way he always came back to any place that still remembered his hands: by the backstage door, palms smelling of grease and rope, jacket slung over a shoulder like a tired flag. Outside, the alley held the neighborhood's small network of smells—bakeries coughing warm cardamom, a fishmonger airing his last baskets, and a chestnut vendor who sold his nuts in paper cones stamped with a faded comedy mask. The vendor winked at Jonah as he ducked under the marquee's sagging letters; for the vendor, the theatre's lights were as dependable as his evening bell. Jonah tipped his head, let the bell's last clang count him in.
Inside, Hollow Stage was a collection of repairs and habits. The stage floor had been replaced half a dozen times with mismatched planks that refused to line up, and the dressing rooms smelled of lemon oil and hairspray. A kettle bubbled in the green room, its whistle the theatre's second-most-sacred sound after the stage manager's cue. Mae was sitting on a stack of flats, her feet scuffed and her hair tied up with a curtain tie, reading an old playbill as if it might tell her what to do next in life.
"You brought snacks?" Jonah asked, setting his toolbox down and letting the case clack like a metronome.
Mae bounced a shoulder. "Only stale biscuits shaped like tiny footlights. They're almost sentimental." She shoved one at him with theatrical disdain; it tasted like sawdust and sugar. She laughed and then, with no malice, said: "You're late, you know. The kettle sang without you."
He grinned despite the tiredness. "It only learns the tune to annoy me. Besides, it's loyal in ways people won't be."
She tossed back a strand of hair. "Loyalty's overrated. Give me a fire escape and a decent mattress and I'll write my own loyalty." She paused, eyes going toward the stage. "You think tonight'll be any different?"
Jonah rubbed his palms and reached for a coil of nylon line. The work named him better than anything else did: rigger, head stagehand, the man who could listen to a groan from a pulley and tell which bearing was on its way out. He listened. The fly-loft breathed; a dull metallic sigh slid through the rigging. He ran his fingers over a drum of rope, tested a cleat, and tightened a stubborn knot. In the dim, the theatre felt hungry in a way that had less to do with hunger than with attention. It wanted rhythm.