The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine Read Online Free Page A

the
iconic goddess. It was cool for a while. They liked to listen to me sing, but
then they stuck me up here and forgot.” She coughs and spits blackened phlegm
down into the hole of the smokestack below.
    “You sound... normal,” I say.
    The princess nods. “I’m immune
or something. I’ve been writing my own songs up here. I never got to do that
before. You have to get me out.”
    The clasped lock lies outside
of her reach.
    “We have a band. Three Ring
Dragon,” Miranda says, as she undoes the lock. “We could use a backup singer.”
    The girl
rises and looks Miranda up and down. I can see her thinking—too chubby, too
dark, too plain—but then the princess slouches forward. “I was never that good
at singing anyway,” she says.
    “We know.” Miranda smiles.
    As the princess steps out, she
kicks her cage. It falls over the other side of the smokestack, and we hear it
clang onto the ground.
    “Not cool!” Zaki One yells up.
    “You almost hit me,” Zaki Two
adds.
    “Sorry,” the princess says
airily. She leads the way down. Her legs wobble, but she stays upright.
    “You’re still the princess,” I
whisper to Miranda.
    “I’d rather be the revolting
peasant,” she whispers back. We make it down to the ground and none of the kids
minds that we liberated their princess from her tower.
    No one notices.
    Looking for a place to
practice, we enter the cold halls of the hospital and take the stairs up to the
roof. A docked helicopter sits like a forlorn spider, and we can see the city
from every direction. We see the blast-marks and smoke from our old
neighborhood. When we start practicing, we face away from it.
    The princess makes us more
powerful. She adds in sound where there’d only been silence before. She gets
us, and maybe soon, if everything goes well, we’ll become the Four Ring Dragons.
    We play and look down on the
kids on the hill. They move like puppets whose master keeps forgetting about
them. I can’t look too long without a numbness floating up in me.
    We write a song about them. Not
a song to start with, but one to end with. We’ve never written a song for so
many people before. Maybe with the princess it will work.
    At dusk we walk down the cement
stairs and out onto the overgrown field. Kids lie motionless on the grass.
Others light a pile of dried brush and throw slabs of grey meat onto the
flames.
    “Think it’s safe to eat?”
Miranda asks.
    “No. It probably comes from
around here,” Zaki One says.
    “Going to eat it anyway,” Zaki
Two says. “No choice. We never get a choice.”
    “Let’s play first,” I say.
“Let’s play hungry. It’ll give us an edge.” Something in the air feels
different tonight. The fire reminds me of summer camp, sing-a-longs, and
marshmallows.
    I tune my guitar and play like
Jimi, then Page, and then Johnson. Just to show off a little. Then I start to
play like me. Like everything I know and everything that’s happened comes into
my music.
    “Been standing so long,”
Miranda croons, and then repeats it.
    The princess echoes, “So long,
so long,” on the backbeat. Zaki’s flute and harp come in under and over my
guitar.
    “Been standing so long I forgot
how to sit. How to leave. How to fly.” It’s one of the first songs we ever
wrote together. We rock it. Even the princess doesn’t miss a note.
    Like mosquitoes at dusk, kids
draw near and surround us. They stand too close. The princess swirls around and
forces them to back off. We reach the end of our first song, and I see a few
kids crying.
    Pain is good.
    Our next song cuts deeper. It’s
stripped down and harsh. We wrote it a couple of years ago; back when we were
playing to sold-out shows and kids remembered how to thrash. Miranda screams
and I break a guitar string trying to match her. Around us kids sway like it is
a love song.
    Feel, I think as I play.
Remember. Wake up. We can still make something in this world. The anger in the
song thrums out between my fingers like