Updated Mar 28, 2026 • ~6 min read
Chapter 4: Sound Check
The Wells Fargo Center was already a problem by the time Dash arrived.
Load-in had been delayed two hours because of a union issue with the local crew, which meant the stage plot was behind, which meant sound check was pushed to four instead of two, which meant the opening act’s check was pushed again, which meant Maya Chen was standing at the lip of the stage when he got there at three-forty-five, talking to a monitor tech with a controlled expression that Dash recognized immediately as someone who had found a problem and was deciding how to handle it.
He didn’t interrupt. He found a spot at the side of the house, in the darkness beyond the light grid, and watched.
The problem, as far as he could tell from forty feet away, was a monitor feed issue — the left floor monitor wasn’t picking up her vocal properly. He could tell because she kept stopping after each pass through a phrase, angling her head toward the monitor, listening to something he couldn’t hear. The tech was running through the board with that specific helpless urgency of someone who knows what the problem is but can’t find where it’s coming from.
Maya listened. Asked a question. Listened again to the answer. Crouched down at the monitor, touched something on the back of it, stood up. Said something to the tech.
The tech went back to the board.
She ran the phrase again. Listened. Shook her head. Not fixed yet. She walked back to the monitor, crouched again, held a brief physical conversation with it — Dash saw her put her hand on the casing, move to the cable connection at the back, flex it slightly, then trace the cable to where it met the stage floor. She stood up, looked at the cable’s path across the stage, and walked to the point where it passed under the stage tape and had presumably been stepped on repeatedly during the delayed load-in.
She said something to the tech. The tech made a face that meant he should have thought of that.
They swapped the cable. She went back to the mic. Ran the phrase.
Stood up straight. Nodded once.
Done. Ten minutes, start to finish.
She went back to running sound check without any visible shift in energy — no relief, no frustration, just forward motion, the same focus she’d had when she walked in. She ran through two songs, adjusted her monitor mix levels by giving the tech hand signals he apparently understood, checked her guitar tuning, and was done in twenty minutes.
Dash hadn’t moved.
“You’re staring,” said a voice to his left.
He didn’t turn around. “I’m watching a professional work.”
Joss materialized out of the dark and stood beside him, arms crossed, watching Maya walk offstage with her guitar. “She fixed it herself.”
“I noticed.”
“Most people would have made it the tech’s problem. Or the venue’s problem. Or anyone’s problem but theirs.”
“Yes.”
Joss was quiet for a moment. Dash knew the specific quality of Joss’s silences — he’d spent fourteen years cataloguing them — and this was the one that meant he was saying something without saying it, which was his preferred mode when the subject was something Dash wasn’t going to want to hear stated plainly.
“I’m not interested,” Dash said.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to.”
“Was I.” Joss turned slightly, considering the empty stage. “I was going to say that Marco wants to change the third song in the set because he feels like the transition to ‘Dead Weight’ is too abrupt. But I can see you’re having a different conversation with yourself, so by all means, go ahead.”
Dash looked at him.
Joss looked back with an expression of absolute, weaponized neutrality.
“Fine,” Dash said. “The third song transition has been abrupt since Cleveland and I told Marco that. Tell him we’ll talk about it at check.”
“Will do.”
Joss didn’t move.
“What,” Dash said.
“Nothing.” A pause. “She’s good on stage.”
“I know she is.”
“She’s also clearly someone who knows what she’s doing in every practical sense. Cable fault diagnosis at a sound check is not something you get taught in a songwriting workshop.”
“No, it’s not.”
“She’s been doing this a long time, is what I’m saying. Before anyone was paying attention. That’s a different kind of person than the ones we usually have opening for us.”
Dash said nothing. This was the Joss version of a speech — something that looked like observation but was actually advice. He’d been on the receiving end of enough of them to know that the best response was to let it land and decide later what to do with it.
“Marco,” he said. “Third song. Set check at four.”
“Already texted him,” Joss said.
He walked away without looking at Dash. Dash stood in the dark of the house for another minute, looking at the stage where Maya had been standing. The monitor tech was already pulling the damaged cable, coiling it up with the practiced efficiency of someone who’d been doing this since before he could drive.
Dash thought about the cable thing. The way she’d traced the problem to its source without drama, without asking for help until she’d found the answer herself. He thought about what it meant to work that way — to move through the world with that kind of self-sufficiency, not because you had to prove something but because you genuinely didn’t think to hand the problem off.
He’d been handing problems off for three years. Label problems, management problems, creative problems. He’d handed off the creative problems so many times that he was starting to forget which solutions had been his.
He went to find Marco.
That night, after his own show — which was good, technically precise, the kind of performance you could put in a highlight reel and nobody would find a flaw — he sat on his bus in the narrow lounge area with his notebook open and wrote one line that wasn’t terrible.
He crossed it out.
He wrote it back.
Left it there, alone on the page, with nothing around it.
Tomorrow was Boston.
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