Well, let's hear what you've got for us tonight. He stepped back, giving her the stage. Amara pulled the guitar around to her front, positioned her fingers on the frets, closed her eyes for just a second, and thought of her grandmother. When they tried to silence you, baby, you sing three times louder. She started playing.
The song was Amazing Grace, but not the version anyone expected. She'd rearranged it, stripped it down to its bones, then built it back up with gospel runs and blues bends and jazz chords her grandmother had taught her. The cheap, battered guitar, held together with hope and duct tape, rang out clear and true. Her voice came in on the first verse. Low, steady, rich with the rasps she'd developed from 3 years of singing in the cold.
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound. A few people in the audience stopped shuffling, stopped whispering. She moved into the second verse, letting her voice build, adding layers, showing them what three years of busking had taught her about breath control and projection and how to make people stop and listen even when they didn't want to. That saved a wretch like me. Her guitar playing was getting stronger now, more confident.
She knew every quirk of this cheap instrument, knew exactly where to press harder, where to ease off, how to coax warmth from worn strings and scarred wood. She was halfway through the chorus, her voice climbing toward the high notes when it happened. A shriek of feedback cut through the air. High-pitched, piercing, painful. People in the front rows flinched.
Some covered their ears. Then static. Loud crackling static. Then nothing. The lavalier microphone clipped to her collar went completely dead.
Amara kept playing, but her voice disappeared. Her mouth moved, but no sound came through the speakers. To the audience, it looked like she was miming. She saw the host glance toward the production booth, eyebrows raised in exaggerated surprise. Saw Philip standing in the wings, arms crossed that cruel smirk on his face.
Someone in the audience laughed. Then another person, then a few more. Madison Blake watching from backstage with the other contestants giggled into her hand. "Technical difficulties, folks," the host called out, walking back onto the stage, his voice full of false sympathy. "I'm so sorry about this.
We're experiencing some sound issues. Let's see if we can get this fixed. Amara stopped playing. Everyone went quiet, expecting her to leave the stage to slink off in embarrassment while they fixed the equipment. Instead, she reached up and unclipped the lavalier microphone from her collar, walked over to the microphone stand in three deliberate steps, removed the mic from its holder, and set both microphones down on the stage floor carefully, deliberately, so everyone could see what she was doing.
The host blinked. Uh, Amara, I really think we should. She stepped forward into the center of the light and started playing again. No microphone, no amplification, just her voice and her guitar. She opened her mouth and sang.
Her voice cut through the space like a knife through silk. Loud, clear, every word perfectly articulated, every note landing exactly where it needed to land. Three years of singing over subway trains, over the screech of metal on metal, over announcements and conversations, and the chaos of New York had taught her how to make her voice carry, how to use her diaphragm, how to project from her chest, not her throat, how to fill a space with sound without a microphone. The laughter stopped. The audience went completely still.