Octavia closed the door and let the soft heartbeat of the city console her.

She took a small amount of comfort in hearing the door shut, and in knowing she had contributed another moment of life to the city’s mighty heart. A city only lived so long as its people did, and Octavia was on course to breathe another hundred years into the old place by the end of the evening.

The heartbeat she heard mostly came from the thumping of train tracks to the east set against a pulsing rave happening some blocks away to the west. They danced in and out of time like drunken lovers. The stars above her, sidechained to the strobelights from the same party, faded as she tried to pick them out, then reappeared when she gave up. Canterlot itself phased in and out of light.

Standing here with her hand still wrapped around the door handle felt pretty pathetic, now that she realized it. There were trains rocketing across the countryside to the east, and a rave to the west. She had options.

So she plunged her hands into the pockets of her jeans and departed towards the far-off romantic sound of a train bounding across its tracks. The crushed baroque lover-type in her was drawn to strange sounds. Maybe she would buy a ticket and go somewhere, travel through the night like people used to do when they felt in need of change. Back before autocarriages and teleport pads, before trains were the least convenient way to travel, back when people lived a certain way that couldn’t be quantified yet still seemed lost on her now. Back before sadness became a dissonant antithesis to living. Well, Octavia was alive--make no godsdamn mistake. The city lived because of her. It glowed.

But it was still dark. It took her about three minutes of walking to get turned around. First she realized her ears had fooled her--all that chugging and clanging had gotten turned around in the disorderly rows of tall buildings. The trains had to be coming from the south, from Canterlot’s central terminal. Second, she noticed she had found her way back to Market street and the north side of town.

She followed the sound blindly up the road, and sure enough, there was Lyra’s house again.

But it was the nature of sound to twist and turn. It was the nature of light to shimmer and deceive. The city was to blame, but it had given Octavia too much for her to acknowledge it.

So she went west. Towards the strobes.

Along the way, she came across another party. Dozens of people, mostly girls in slutty dresses, danced by the window to something edgy and harsh, shrieking happily, teetering out the window for a gasp of cool night air. Sweat and alcohol clung to their bodies, but thankfully they were eight or nine stories above Octavia, so she couldn’t really smell it. Occasionally, a can of beer would tumble from the window and crash against the ground. Dim red light poured into the sky.

As she watched, a girl dancing next to the window lost her footing. She shouted gaily and reached after her drink as it slipped from her hands into the darkness below. Cursing the way only a drunk person could, she went after it. Her friends cheered uproariously and grabbed her by the legs.

“I needed that!” the girl shouted, dangling half in the window and half out.

“You’re crazy!” one of her friends replied, clearly enjoying herself.

Once they pulled her in, a muscular looking bald man with sunglasses parted the crowd and closed the windows. Octavia took one more look at the scattered cans and plastic cups on the ground before walking on. The vapid music of the one party gave way to the heartbeat again. Distant trains and heavy bass. The stars phased in and out. Canterlot swelled with noise and light.

Octavia recognized her friend’s flat by the people spilling in and out of the windows. Its location on the first floor was prime for dramatic entrances and exits. Octavia opted for the door.

Inside Vinyl Scratch’s studio-turned party castle, things felt different than on the outside. Soaring atmospheric music moved dozens of drunken dancers. Alcohol flowed down the sides of the bar like wells of clean spring water. The floor was never sticky here, nor the ceilings too low or the hallways too narrow. The alcohol was always free, and no one left without a bottle of water for the road. There was only one point to all of this--to drink and dance and feel good--and as long as someone was here to drink and dance and feel good, Vinyl Scratch would stand behind a turntable tucked into the corner of the room and spin shitty house music like it was the last piece of music anyone would ever hear again.

If Octavia breathed life into the city, then Vinyl Scratch breathed a smile onto its face.

While the place projected its music onto the city, the feeling inside was altogether different. Outside the studio, before Octavia had walked inside, she took notice of the music and the city’s heartbeat. Inside, time became irrelevant. It retreated into its abstraction. 12:47AM ceased to exist. 128bpm bumped into its place.

As Octavia brushed past the few dozen people between her and Vinyl, she began to feel like them. She walked in 128bpm and thought at 12:47AM. She bobbed her head. Lights flickered. She wished she had brought sunglasses. People bumped and pushed her. Smells of alcohol and dope burned her nose. Someone spilled beer on her arm, then apologized and wiped it away with their sleeve. Octavia nodded at 128bpm and continued on.

“Vinyl,” she called under the music. The speakers flanking the DJ on either side eclipsed any sound from breaking her little bubble of concentration. Octavia shouted again and waved her arms. Vinyl adjusted her shades, staring intently at the display and all its buttons and dials.

Octavia plugged her ears and squeezed past the large speaker. “Vinyl,” she said earnestly.

In reply, Vinyl nodded her head at 128bpm.

House music was designed to pulse through people from every angle. The physical texture of the music when played at loud volumes supplied its uniqueness. A good speaker in the hands of a good DJ sung like a Stradivarius. Unlike a Stradivarius, which peaked at around 90db, Vinyl’s speakers could break 150 with a flick of a switch. This was the crutch of house music; when a person felt irritated or unreceptive, the pulse sent bad vibrations through their bones and gave them a headache.

Standing next to one of the two large speakers, Octavia began to grow irritated.

She reached out and tapped Vinyl on the shoulder.

The DJ spun around and lifted her shades. A smile passed across her face. “You sneaky bitch,” she shouted, cutting through the din with her soaring alto voice. “I didn’t think to see you here.” She leaned over her rig and kissed Octavia on the cheek.

“Neither did I,” Octavia tried to reply.

“What?”

“I didn’t think--” Octavia cupped her mouth and stepped closer. “I didn’t plan on coming here.”

“Well you’re here now, baby. Have some fun!”

Octavia stood still. Someone opened the window from the outside and dove into the room. Canterlot sparkled like stars against city lights, unfathomable explosions lightyears away dipped in red and green and blue hallucinogens a few feet before they could reach Octavia’s eyes. The size of Canterlot always astounded her. It made the lights and music and people on the inside more comforting.

“Lyra and I broke up,” Octavia said.

The music droned on and on. Someone on the dance floor shouted a song request.

“Oh, shit. Octavia, I’m so sorry.” Vinyl gave her a sympathetic look before turning to her record collection. “Do you feel okay?”

When she went to speak, it occurred to her that she didn’t know what to say. To lie--”I feel happy”--would feel trite. Happiness no longer held the emotion it once must have. When Octavia was a child, broadcasting her joy made her feel bashful. Now it made her feel like a liar. What changed? It wasn’t just her, either. She saw it all over the city, in the lighted billboards across the avenue from her apartment on the south side of Canterlot and in the eyes of the people she talked with on a daily basis, the baristas who made her morning coffee and the tellers in the banks and the freelance musicians who sat in for her colleagues in the symphony. Something had changed, or else she had seriously misremembered. Movies turned the bad guys into heroes. Books no longer had happy endings. To tell the truth--”I feel sad”--felt just as disingenuous.

After a moment of thought, Octavia replied, “Do you have anything to drink?”

“Yeah, ‘course.” Vinyl pointed to three oversized water coolers stacked on top of each other. “There’s, um. There’s jungle juice in two of them and something else in the top one. It’s alcoholic, don’t worry.” As Octavia turned away, Vinyl laid her hand on her shoulder. “Hey, listen. If you need anything, I’m here for you.”

“What?”

“I said--I said if you need anything, I’m here for you,” Vinyl shouted.

“Oh. Thanks.”

“Listen, come back in a few hours. The party will be over then. We can drink or eat, or whatever you want. Don’t feel like you're alone.”

“That’s very kind of you.”

Vinyl squeezed Octavia’s shoulder. “I want to be there for you. I’ll always be there for you.”

The odd closeness of the gesture made Octavia painfully aware of every sweltering body in the room. Her heart beat at 128bpm. Her face turned red, then green, then blue. She squeezed behind the speaker and rejoined the throng on the dance floor.

The music dimmed slightly. Boos went up from the crowd. “Octavia!” Vinyl called over it all. Her shades were back on, framing her careless smile. “Be careful of the top cooler. It might have xanax in it.”

Octavia waved slowly in acknowledgement. As soon as Vinyl returned to DJing, she made for the door. Three people brushed past her as she left, all of them strangers she had never seen before.

Like the end of a pleasant trip, the reds and blues and greens faded from her eyes until they were mere shadows of color flashing against her eyelids when she blinked. The city thrummed somewhere below 128bpm. Octavia continued west until she reached a familiar landmark, an old vine-eaten fountain built to commemorate the end of the second Griffon intrusion of 870. She circled around it once, tracing the cracks in the stonework as she walked, until she realigned with a road leading south. She heard the sound of trains again, that far-off romantic heartbeat. This time she knew where to go.

Octavia turned onto a side road and walked up a hill that ended in a dead end. The trains and parties felt less prominent here. This place felt more stable in its position. Octavia’s home was further south still, where the sound of transition was more prominent. Here, she heard the soft exhale of distant autocarriages play off her ears like the whisper of a far-gone lover.

She hopped up the steps to the last house on the street, a great ultra modern work of art with big glass windows in all the right places, and knocked on the door. She waited two minutes, then knocked again.

The windows stayed dark. The house stayed dormant. Octavia sat down on the stoop for a few minutes to enjoy the view, then knocked again.

This time, a few lights went on. A woman wrapped in a fuzzy robe the color of a refrigerator from the ‘50s opened the door. She smacked her lips before uttering a curt, “Oh, hey. Whatever your watch is telling you, it’s really AM.”

Octavia cracked for an instant. “Can I come in?”

The woman motioned inside with a nod of her head. Her hair bobbed, a tangle of curls and curlers. She knew. “Is it still raining out?”

“No, it stopped just after sunset,” Octavia replied.

“Did it now? Why don’t we go sit on the deck then? I’ll bet it’s a lovely night.”

Octavia followed numbly through the house, past a grand piano and an immaculate bookshelf full of exotic recipes. “Thank you,” she said.

“I just wish it had happened at a more sensible hour,” the woman replied. As she slid open the door to the deck, she added, “Was it bad?”

“It was for her,” Octavia said vaguely as she slipped out of her shoes. Her bare feet felt good on the cool wood. The sensation made her feel like she would collapse any second and not be able to ascertain why. “I don’t think she’ll ever date a musician again.”

The woman laughed. Her voice towered over the distant skyscrapers. “You don’t say. I’m gonna go fix us a drink. The pool is nice and warm if you want.”

Octavia nodded. “Thanks, Bon Bon.”

Octavia sat down by the edge of the pool and hugged her knees to her chest. The underwater lights cast a flickering shadow across her face. Tall bushes surrounding the backyard kept most of the sound out. The distant skyscrapers peeking over the greenery made no sound at all. They just watched. All the way above her, as high as anyone could ever possibly imagine, stars glowed in the sky. Octavia counted their reflections in the pool.

“Don’t be bashful,” Bon Bon called from the doorway, a drink in hand, “go on.” She set the glass down on a napkin beside Octavia. “Time for mine,” she said and dashed inside. A tender melody floated from a crack in the door, “Oh, wouldn’t it be great to get shit-faced?”

Octavia hesitated to disturb the water. Instead, she wiped her lipstick away on her expensive jeans and rolled up the cuffs to her knees. Her drink sweated gently behind her. She leaned back and took a deep breath. It was almost picturesque; Octavia with her fancy stained jeans, Bon Bon singing and mixing another drink inside, the stars in the pool, the city moving on without them--a beacon of progress receding into distant memory.

Octavia dipped her feet into the pool. Whole galaxies rippled beneath her.