One Hum Each

Dot Fairweather counted the vote with their eyes shut.

It was Thursday night, 15 October, and every Beast on Beat Street stood in a chalk square in the Frequency, the big square at the heart of the street. As Dot walked past each square, the Beast in that square hummed. A low hum meant deep. Four small notes meant clean.

The street was choosing how to keep the Signal. Last spring every speaker on Beat Street played the same tone for forty-seven seconds, and Dot caught it on a tape that was now wearing through. Tomorrow the record plant would cut it onto a master, once. Deep, as the bass crews felt it come up through their ribs, or clean, as the melody crews heard it.

The street trusted Dot’s counts, even the ones it hated. In all their years of keeping lists, they had never once nudged a name.

But on the back of the count sheet, in pencil, were two letters: M.O.

Moss Okafor, the bass crews’ captain, had come to Dot’s office on Sunday. “Eleven days, Dot,” they said. “If it’s close, it’s deep.” Dot knew what Moss meant. The first time the Grey came in, two pages of Dot’s list of missing Beasts stuck together, and Moss stood grey on a fire escape for eleven days while the street called every name but theirs. Dot found the pages in the end, and read every page twice from then on.

Tess Ambrose, the melody crews’ captain, was standing at the very back of the square. Tess was the first Beast to say Dot’s name back the morning Dot arrived, and in the Beastside that makes you someone’s house for good. So Dot had asked Tess to stand as far away as possible, where nobody could say Dot heard Tess first.

The first square hummed low, from the chest. Dot marked it and walked on.

Then, from the back, a voice started the four notes. It cracked on the second, went flat on the third, and kept going. Tess could not sing and never pretended to, but every singer on the street had already picked a side, and a crowd follows the first voice it hears. The squares took it up one by one, until Dot was walking through it.

It was close. Dot knew how close before the last square, and added it up anyway. Clean, by eleven hums.

Dot turned the sheet over, licked a thumb, and rubbed out the two letters. Then they read the result from the steps of the record plant. Across the square, Moss read it off Dot’s lips, turned, and went down into the sub-bass room under the street, shutting the door behind them.

On Friday the master was cut clean, on the tape’s last good pass.

Pim Ruiter came out of the canteen on Thursday and found a stranger at the board.

The board stands outside Friday Hall, where L33T Labs decides what is true. Every Friday at three, a Beast stands up in the Hall with a claim, and every seat either says holds out loud or keeps quiet. If most say holds, the claim goes on the board, and nothing on that board has ever come down.

Pim’s own claim was up there. Last spring, after a year of counting Shapes, the worries with bodies that wander in and settle on a Beast, Pim showed the Hall that quiet Beasthoods draw fewer of them. It was true, and the Hush had quoted it in every street since. They called it Ruiter’s Proof.

The stranger had a hand flat on the board, just under Pim’s Proof, measuring the empty space there the way you’d measure a wall for a shelf. Pim saw a Cat’s balaclava. The canteen’s night cook, passing with a tray, said later it was a Sheep. That is how it goes with the Understudy, the Hush’s travelling voice: every Beast who meets them sees a different face.

“That’s my wall,” Pim said.

The Understudy took their hand away and left.

At three the next afternoon, Imani Sato stood in front of the Hall with a chart drawn in pencil. Imani had charted the Hum for thirty-one years: the low sound under the ground that sets the Beastside’s week, five tight days and then two easy ones. Since late July the line had not eased once. That was the whole claim. The easing has stopped, and every Beast is a little more tired each week than the last.

Pim could already hear the Hush quoting it.

Imani broke their own rule to get this Friday. Twelve years ago, one of Imani’s crews went out to measure the Edge, and one Beast walked fourteen paces into the Grey. It took two days of shouting to bring them back. Imani never sent a crew to the Edge again, until this week, when they promised the Beast who keeps the Hall’s calendar a crew for the next time the Edge comes in. The Beast who walked into the Grey was the night cook.

On the Hall’s wall, beside the big map, hangs a needle that drops at three every Friday as the Hum eases. It didn’t move.

The Hall always waits for Pim to say the first holds. And Imani was Pim’s house, the first Beast to say Pim’s name back. But Pim sat in the front row thinking about the empty space under Ruiter’s Proof, and about five Beasthoods voting on a Quiet Week at the first frost, and kept quiet. When a seat knows a claim is true and keeps quiet, the Labs call it sitting on it. The whole Hall watched Pim sit on it.

The clock over the door ticked twice. Then, from the back row, the night cook said, “Holds.”

Five hundred seats followed. The chart went up that evening, in the space the Understudy had measured. Pim stood under it until the lamps came on, then took out a notebook and wrote in the margin: Friday. Sat on it.