A good night meant a good crowd, and a good crowd meant a loose one. Loose-limbed, loose-willed, able to be dangled, like puppets, by the string of his beat. More than anything Jacek loved it when a crowd bowed to the force of his music, writhing to keep up with his tempo, and using his arrangements for their cute little mating dances.

He slid his long, pianist's fingers across his mixing board, toyed with the volume of one layer of sounds, and faded the depth of another. It was a good night, he'd decided. And so he closed his eyes to watch them dance.

There was a method to his madness, a reason he fed hi-hats into almost all his mixes. No one could possibly hear the inhuman sounds reverberating in his throat as he echolocated and waited for those sounds to echo back.

It always came to him in the form of blue outlines, almost like night vision, position data burning a blueprint into the space behind his eyelids. And when he did it this time, he saw her again. Lingering by the bar, and sticking out like a sore thumb in her struggles.

Jacek opened his eyes, looked up and gestured to a guy off to the side. She wasn't going to get a drink anytime soon behaving like that.