The Reverb Between Us

PART I: THE CARNIVAL

Los Angeles doesn’t breathe. It buzzes.

From power-lines to parking lots, the whole city is one massive, tangled audio cable: hot with signal, high with tension. On the day Camp Flog Gnaw opened its glitter-drenched gates at Dodger Stadium, LA felt like a speaker turned up just past safe.

Missy stood at the edge of the Astral Stage, fingers curled around her headset, black band tee knotted at the hip, ready to go full throttle. She wasn’t just here to run sound.

She was here to win a war.

Because across the field, at the Obsidian Stage, was Tia.

Tia, her ex-best friend. Tia, her ex-girlfriend. Tia, the one who stole her gift and twisted it.

Missy hadn’t seen her since last year. Since the last show. Since the incident. Today, that changed.

Missy wasn’t a psychic. Not really. Not in the “reads crystals and charges her phone with moonlight” kind of way. She just heard things. Felt them, through cables and echoes and reverb. Heard what people thought—in fragments, in static, in pulses of fear or lust or joy.

She could tune into the unspoken. She could shift it. Missy learned to EQ feelings. She called it emotional engineering.

And Tia? Tia weaponized it.

By 5:00 PM, Missy had already used her power three times:

She spiked the applause in a singer’s monitors to drown out anxiety.

She layered bass beneath a backup dancer’s heartbreak and turned it into power.

She quieted a baby crying in the VIP pit using literal sound therapy.

But as the sun dipped below the skyline and the stage lights sharpened, the crowd began to sway. Not dance —sway. Like they were caught in someone else’s rhythm.

Missy turned.

Tia had taken the stage.

Boots laced. Headphones low. Eyes locked on her.

“Told you I’d make this city sing,” she whispered—directly into Missy’s skull.

They dueled in silence.

Missy fed warmth and wonder through the frequencies.

Tia pumped dread and mania through hers.

Crowds surged. Cried. Fell in love. Fell apart.

And somewhere between the bass drops, the screams, and the chaos, Missy stopped fighting and started listening.

To the city. To the signal underneath all of it.

She caught the real frequency. And she turned it all the way up.

When it hit, the crowd didn’t cheer. They exhaled. Like they’d been holding their breath for years.

Tia vanished behind smoke and LED screens.

Missy stood alone.

But LA? LA felt better.

PART II: THE FIRST DROP (Six Months Earlier)

They met in Echo Park, at a semi-illegal show on the edge of a duck pond.

Missy had a fistful of tangled cables and a coffee-stained crew pass. Tia had a reel-to-reel rig and a mouth full of opinions.

“You think digital doesn’t have soul?” Missy teased.

“It has convenience,” Tia said. “But soul? That’s analog. That’s blood and dust.”

Missy hated her instantly. Which meant, of course, she was doomed.

The weeks after that were a blur of load-ins, last-minute sets, shared spliffs, and arguments over compression settings that somehow turned into kisses.

They mixed sound like they were casting spells.

Then, during a backyard show in Highland Park, Missy heard it again.

Not the music. The thoughts.

A girl in the crowd: Please don’t let me pass out.

The lead singer: Why did I invite my ex?

Tia, from across the yard:“You’re hearing it too, aren’t you?”

Missy turned. Tia didn’t even look her way. She just smiled.

They called it vibing the line.

They’d EQ performances based on what they picked up. If a crowd got restless, they’d feed calm into the monitors. If an artist felt insecure, they’d send power through the bass.

They were brilliant. They were dangerous.

And then Tia got bored.

“What happens,” she asked one night, “if we make them fight instead?”

Missy said no. Tia did it anyway.

It ended in a warehouse set called “Ascension,” where Tia dropped a vocal track that made a girl sob so hard she had to be carried out.

Missy confronted her after.“You’re hurting people.”

Tia grinned. “They came to feel something. I gave it to them.”

“You gave them you.”

That was the last time they spoke. Until Flog Gnaw.

PART III: THE REVERB BETWEEN US

Four weeks after the festival, Missy finds a cassette tape on her doorstep. No label. Just one word in silver Sharpie:

Encore.

She digs out her old tape player and hits play.

Static. Then Tia’s voice:

“I never wanted a crowd. I just wanted to see if you’d come find me.”

Then silence. Then a low-frequency pulse—an emotional ping—encoded with a location:

Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Of course.

The cemetery is still, except for Missy’s heartbeat in her ears.

She finds the hidden door behind a crumbling mausoleum, just like she knows she will. The pulse grows louder. Beneath it all, LA hums like it’s watching.

She steps into a soundproof chamber bathed in faint neon.

Tia’s there.

Boots up. Leaning back. Wearing the shirt Missy once gave her. The one with the upside-down rose and the words:

Not everything beautiful blooms.

Missy smirks.

“You always were dramatic.”

Tia shrugs.

“Look who came anyway.”

They don’t talk. Not out loud.

The thoughts pass between them like echoes in a loop pedal:

“You abandoned me.”

“You betrayed me first.”

“You were supposed to build it with me.”

“You burned it down.”

Tia steps closer. Eyes soft. Voice small.

“Let’s try again. No more noise. Just us.”

Missy doesn’t answer. She presses her hand to the console.

Together, they tune in. Not to power. Not to pain. To the silence underneath it all. To each other.

And somewhere in the distance, Los Angeles starts humming a new song.

EPILOGUE: FOUR DAYS LATER

Missy wakes up to silence.

Not just the absence of sound—but the absence of noise. No car horns. No upstairs neighbor dragging chairs. No stray thoughts bleeding in through the drywall.

Just stillness.

She sits up in bed, half-expecting to hear Tia’s voice again—some sarcastic whisper tucked behind her left ear. Nothing comes.

The cassette deck on her dresser is open, the tape long rewound. The Sharpie label has smudged completely. It just says: E

Encore? Epilogue? End? She’s not sure.

Later that night, she walks alone through Echo Park. Same spot where she first saw Tia twisting a reel-to-reel into submission like she owned time.

Now the space is quiet. The pond still.

She sees two teens setting up a mic by the fountain, laughing and testing the levels. One of them nudges the fader too hard and panic-flinches—but the other just smiles and adjusts it gently.

Missy almost steps in to help. Almost.

But then she stops. Because the sound they’re making? It’s good. A little messy. A little raw. But good. The way things sound when you’re just starting to believe in your own voice.

Missy turns and heads home, hands in her jacket pockets, boots tapping soft rhythm into the concrete.

She doesn’t need the crowd. She doesn’t need the mix. She just needs to remember this:

The city is still listening. And somewhere out there, Tia probably is too.