"There's a problem," said the landlord.

Ethan knew what the problem would be. Or at least in the right ballpark. That Liam had been grounded again for buying his younger brothers cigarettes. Or that the ancient, creaking Volkswagen that Louis should have sold while he could had finally given up the mechanical ghost. Or maybe his friends from 7G Art had finally made contact with females of their own species and gone somewhere cool instead.

In short, the problem was that no-one had showed up.

"Too many people have showed up," the landlord went on, and it took a long, silent moment for the shocking difference from the expected to click into place. When it did, Ethan opened his mouth to say something and croaked like a frog, only less meaningfully.

Now, a little smile was playing about the smooth features of the usually dour landlord. "Not that it's a problem for you lot, of course. You'll be loving it. But there's far too many to cram upstairs, or down. So I've made a bit of a deal; it'll work out for me, too."

"What?" said Ollie behind him, but Ethan didn't think he meant the agreement.

"We're shifting you across the road," the old man said, "So you best be getting your stuff and moving out. Showtime in ninety minutes."

"To the Alto?" Logan gasped, echoing around his plastic pint-glass.

"To the Empire. Sold out too. Now sod off."

And so, numbly, they got their amps and their instruments and sodded off. No-one said a word, as if to acknowledge the thing might break it. The thing was a simple fact, a number, and to look at it from the wrong angle risked bringing boring reality crashing down around the dream. Because the White Stag, which they had played a handful of times and never filled, held about forty in their function room. The Alto could manage a hundred. But the Empire, the domed silhouette haloed in its neon always within their sight but never within their grasp, had a headline capacity of a thousand.

* * *

They still hadn't said anything by the time they rounded the corner, lugging their luggage, and came face to face with the gaggle of people across the road. But it wasn't a gaggle, it was a queue. A queue of fans. The sort that any member of the Telephants had only ever been part of, not sailing by to an entrance lined with security. And as the four lads approached the side-door, the fans began to wave and shout and point somewhere just behind Ethan. Maybe they'd been sent as a last-minute support, he thought. Maybe there was someone famous following them in. But when he turned, there was no-one behind them.

When they had tumbled inside and ascended to the dressing room and handed off their equipment to people that actually looked half-competent, things seemed safely real enough for Logan to raise his head to the cracked plaster and shriek "What the fuck?!" Seven minutes ago, they had been hoping to get through half their set before the barmaids cleared them out to accommodate the Friday-night rush. Now they were a little over an hour away from playing a stage in front of more people than had ever come to their three-dozen efforts combined.

"Did you see them all?" Daniel was muttering, probably to himself. He shrugged out of his bomber jacket and collapsed heavily onto the cushioned bench by the door. "I mean, did you see them?"

Ethan took out his phone and thumbed doubtfully through their Spotify stats. Their latest single, Love Slave, a piece that impossibly, Ollie had said, sounded worst than the title suggested, had gained thirteen more listens this afternoon. The others were stagnant. Ethan had them memorised.

He was not going to let this opportunity go to waste.

"The new stuff's going viral," he declared, and though Logan and Daniel politely looked away, Ollie was there straight in front to meet his gaze. "I told you it was time to cut the bullshit. We just go for bangers and look where it's already got us." But his voice faltered over the last words. Because however he spun it, however he used this moment to tighten his hold on his creation, it just didn't explain whatever the hell was going on.

He hadn't meant to, but he'd obviously tuned out, because when he refocused his attention, Ollie was across the room, at a chipped writing desk, ugly forehead furrowed in dumb concentration, scribbling away with a pencil. Logan and Daniel were at his shoulders. And worse still, Logan and Daniel were nodding.

"What are you doing?" Ethan called as he marched across the dressing room, and he blinked the wincing embarrassment of his shrill, whining tone angrily from his mind.

"A set list," Ollie said simply. He'd gotten a beer from somewhere- not just from somewhere, but from the mini-bar by the mirror, because this was an actual proper venue!- but it sat, unopened and forgotten by his side, as he crossed something out and switched lines with a jagged arrow. He glanced up, once, as Ethan bore down on him with glaring eyes and pouted lips, and went straight back to writing. The other two seemed to be concentrating very hard on the desk. After a moment, and another crossing-out, Ollie stammered on. "I...I don't know what's going on here guys. I mean, someone's fucked up somewhere. Maybe all the grandmas in the country looked at our animal name and got us mixed up with Arctic Monkeys, I don't know. But whatever's gone on, this is our chance, man." He looked around at each one in turn, brushing the dyed blonde fringe from his eyes as he did. He looked very small, very serious. "This is our chance to show everyone what we are. Who we are." Logan and Daniel nodded, obedient animals both. Ethan felt his cheeks burn like sullen embers.

"So we give them something different!" Ollie declared, and as he reeled off the list of songs, he stabbed his pencil forcefully into the paper, leaving a set of pin-pricks all the way down the left margin. Infusing them with spirit. "Shock them! All that... different vibe we've been trying and never been brave enough to actually play to anyone. Open with Maelstrom, for God's sake! All those swirling synths at the end will lead nicely into Mindfield if you just play your bit for a few bars, Dan, you know, overlap them. And then onto all three parts of the Queen of Amlar, why not? Let's go for it!"

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"We've not played it for anyone," Ethan said in the low, boiling tone that forbids anyone to interrupt it, "because it's mindless wankery bullshit." Ollie looked back, speechless and bubbling with thought. Logan found a set of darts in a drawer and busied himself looking for the board. Daniel mumbled something about checking his drum sound and went off in search of the roadies that weren't their roadies because they didn't have any.

"Banger," growled Ethan, furious, "after banger, after banger. And if you don't like it, Ollie." And he shot a finger out at Logan across the room, who gave a little yelp even though he'd been doing his best to look like he wasn't looking. "If any of you don't like it, then fuck off and make your own band, because this one's mine." And he swept the set list from the table, tore off a sheet of paper from the pad, mashed it up against the illuminated mirror, and stabbed out his own.

* * *

Ten minutes later, after Daniel had returned and the others sat by the tunnel to the stage door waiting to be told that this was all a big mistake and that they'd actually missed their slot back at the White Stag and to just pack their things and go home and revise for their Maths exam on Monday, Ethan had his pre-gig snack. Ollie regarded the speckled white tablet as it rustled its way out of the cling-film and down Ethan's stubbled throat with undisguised disgust. "Vile," he said, like he always did. "You need to stop this, Ethan. Really. You're a straight-A student. You're not a rock and roll star, even if..." He threw up his hands in confusion. "Even if we're doing whatever this is."

"Mmmmm," said Ethan, swilling it down with a shot of chilled vodka. Actually, it tasted like shit. As much as it pained him to say, Ollie was right about the drugs. He didn't even know what this thing was. Just another pill from just another hooded chav out by the garage at the school. It could kill him, and then his dad really would be pissed. But Ollie was wrong about one thing. He really was a rock and roll star, and tonight, he was going to prove it.

* * *

He stumbled when the man with the lanyard told him it was time to get up and go. He bounced off the walls of a corridor that stretched for miles under the town until he tunnelled up into a swirl of lights and came out onto a stage that looked just like the Empire. And he remembered then that it was the Empire, and that all the clapping, jostling bodies below were here to see him, and that he was here to accept the role that fate had dealt him.

He approached the microphone. "Ladies and gentlemen," he screamed. "We are the Telephants!" There was a smattering of applause that seemed incongruous to the sheer size of the swell of skin below, but maybe he just couldn't hear very well beyond the rushing blood in his temples. "And this... this is what you've been waiting for. This is Love Slave!"

Three frightened deer shuffled up behind him, dazzled by the glory, and took up their places, and they began. The Telephants could have been crushed by the heavy weight of the expectations of a thousand, and crumbled into disaster. Or they could have soared, raised high by the joyous multitudes, into legend. But in the end, they turned out to be damned average. Logan messed up the bass-line to Wonderland in half a dozen places. But Ollie saved the day, with what even Ethan had to admit was a pretty good solo. The crowd thought so, too. The crowd, in fact, as Ollie stepped up to the front and covered for his friend, went wild.

But who was Ollie covering for? Ethan saw Logan staring at him, and Daniel too. And then he realised he hadn't sang for two verses. Instead of singing, he had been looking at the crowd beneath him, really looking, and he'd been asking himself some questions that just weren't conducive to screaming out his love for that sexy exchange student he'd met in Brussels last spring.

The first thing to say about them was that there were so fucking many of them, but that bit was obvious. It had unnerved them all. They had sold precisely fifteen digital albums on Amazon, not including family and a couple of teachers. But there was no question there. Somehow, somewhere, their talent had shone through at last. It had happened to a million bands before them. They had hit their big break. Just a bit quicker than most. Just overnight. Just in a careless sliver of a moment, as they were getting ready to set up their sorry battered junk in a pub across the road.

No, the questions came as the roar dimmed and the drums slowed to an elephant's heartbeat and he started really looking at them. The individuals.

They were weird.

He remembered the chorus to Airstrike, or some of it anyway, and then Ollie was patting him on the shoulder and guiding him to the shadow of the drumkit as the stilted clapping petered out. Someone booed. The audience swallowed it up with hushed, respectful calls for quiet. Like someone had sang out through a minute's silence.

Like someone had died.

Through the dancing, shuddering lights, Ethan peered out and saw Ollie with his head against Logan's, muttering, conspiring against him. His fists moved from his guitar and flopped uselessly back to his sides. He moaned. His head was going to explode. Everything was pulsing. And then a grating, bellowing howl assaulted his ears and through the quicksand of his mind he made out the opening dirges of Free Waters, one of Ollie's experiments, one he'd forbidden him to play, but then Ollie was singing the prelude and the crowd was crying out for more, for louder, and also, Ethan was sure of it, the words to a piece known only to the four of them, one that had been composed last Thursday in the school gym after hometime.

He didn't have the strength to fight. So he looked and he asked the questions that had been dawning on him since he'd looked for the first time. Like why so many of them were wearing the same purple and green T-shirts, something about a queen, and a field, something familiar and why did it seem so familiar, he was sure he would know if his head didn't hurt so much and the room would stop swimming and he could focus and read what it said. It looked like a tour shirt but even though he couldn't read he knew by the shape of the letters he didn't know the band. Didn't know the band at all.

And why were they so excited by Ollie, Ollie and his stupid boring music, dull ideas he'd been trying to stamp out of his group since Ollie had come to him with those first insane recordings a few weeks back? They'd heard Love Slave - and that was a real banger - and hardly batted an eyelid. But this drivel had found them enthralled. Ethan stood swaying by the distant drums and watched the faces as they watched Ollie.

And why, as his tired, pounding eyeballs roamed the room, why did they blink in and out of existence at the corners of his narrowing vision, in and out at will, why did they tap their right temples and talk to people who weren't there? Why did they have trousers that seemed to be made from the absence of light, why did they subtly, in clutched hands, raise tiny glowing matchsticks and fill the room with chattering electricity, why were they ignoring him and enjoying the music?

Why were they here?

The band, oblivious, spurred by the cheers, played on and on, played into strange, dark territory trod only in secret meetings between the three of them when Ethan was at football practice, he suddenly understood, when they knew he wasn't listening to their stupid ideas. Known only to them and to one thousand roaring fans beneath them, flittering and twinkling and glancing every so often in his direction with sudden remembered sympathy.

Frightened, he raised a hand, struck a tuneless chord on his guitar. But he couldn't hear it above the joy all around him. He looked on, awestruck, feeling like he'd stumbled into something he shouldn't be allowed to see, like a sacred rite or the birth of something new.

Now his chest hurt. He clutched at it feebly, drawing in breath after burning breath, peering through the dancing lights at the temples of the onlookers, at the flickerings the others couldn't see, and finally he read the name on the shirts and found it was horribly close to something that they'd mulled before choosing the name of their own band.

He stared and stared and the pain grew worse. And then it was over, and the crowd vanished into the night, and as the ambulance came for Ethan, so did the answers.