Turntable Eyes |10,769 PCS|

while she played. Club Static was a basement under a noodle bar, reachable only through a door covered in graffiti and a staircase that smelled of rain and bass. On Fridays the queue stretched past three neon signs. Everybody came for Vex.

Nobody knew the records she played belonged to someone else. Every one of them came from a crate left to her by Juno, the old DJ who had taught her to beat-match at fourteen and vanished from the scene a year ago without a word. Vex played Juno's records every week, hoping that somewhere, somehow, Juno would hear.

Tonight the crowd was the biggest she had ever seen. At the bottom of the crate, wedged under the cardboard, she found a record she didn't recognise. A plain black dubplate, no label, with three words scratched into the run-out groove in Juno's spiky handwriting: PLAY ME LAST.

At two minutes to closing she slipped it onto the turntable and dropped the needle.

The club went silent. Not quiet. Silent. The lights stopped strobing. Three hundred dancers froze mid-step, as still as mannequins.

Then, through the speakers, in a voice Vex had not heard in a year, Juno spoke.

"Hey, kid. If you're hearing this, I need you to look at the back of the room."