The flare in his chest was not proportional to the evidence, and in the back of his mind he knew that if it were any other performer, he probably wouldn’t be so overly cautious.
He tightened the perimeter anyway.
The lights dropped. The crowd noise crested and broke into applause, and then the stage lights came up, and she was there.
Phoebe Calloway took the stage, and the wine-dark dress moved like liquid against her body. The braids glittered. The red lipstick was perfect, even from his distance, a precise slash of color against her dark skin.
The crowd roared. She smiled wide and it was warm and calibrated. His truth-sense pinged the faintest edge of artifice, the gap between the woman running the room alone and the woman working a crowd of thousands.
He was professionally required to maintain visual contact with the headliner. Security protocol. Standard operating procedure. He fixed his gaze on her and set his jaw.
She opened with something he didn't recognize. An up-tempo, rhythmic song. her voice cut through the amphitheater's acoustics with a power that pressed against the back of his skull. The crowd caught fire. She moved across the stage, drawing theaudience's energy toward her like gravity, her body commanding the space like she'd owned it since before he'd ever heard of Earth.
The human male in row five hadn't moved. Still too still, still too focused. Thorne watched him in his peripheral vision and waited.
She shifted into a slower number. The lights pulled in, tightening around her, the warm gold cooling to something bluer, more intimate. The crowd hushed. Her voice dropped into that lower register he'd heard on the walk, the one that lived beneath the performance voice, rawer, less controlled. She sang about masks. About the face you wore for the world versus the one you hid, and who people really were when no one was watching. Whether anyone would love that version if they saw it.
His truth-sense caught fire. The warmth surged through him, chest and throat and the backs of his hands, because she meant it. Every word. The same authenticity he'd felt during the soundcheck, the same unguarded truth, but this time she was delivering it to a packed house and meaning every syllable, and the crowd didn't even know what they were getting. They heard a beautiful song. He heard a woman singing about herself and trusting a room full of strangers with it.
Frost bloomed across his gauntlet. He watched delicate crystalline patterns race over the leather, spread past the cuff and onto the sleeve of his uniform. If anyone in the upper tier glanced in his direction instead of the stage, they'd see it. Ice crawling up the arm of the chief security officer like his body had decided to announce what his face would not.
He gripped the rail. The metal frosted under his palm. He forced the cold back, clenched it down, shoved it into the box where he kept everything that didn't serve the mission.
The frost didn’t listen. It clung to his knuckles, thin and stubborn, glinting in the reflected stage light. He stared at hisglove. An off-season of silence hadn't dulled what he felt for Phoebe Calloway. He had spent ten months in discipline and duty, and the feeling hadn't faded or frozen or filed itself away underunproductivewhere he'd tried to keep it. It had been growing.
She was here, and now her voice was in his chest. The feelings for her he had been pretending were manageable weren’t manageable at all.
two
. . .
The dressing roommirror had good lighting. That was the nicest thing Phoebe could say about it.
She hummed a scale and pressed her fingertips against the edge of the vanity. The first half of the set had gone well. Better than well. She'd had them in her hand from the third bar, the crowd leaning forward like flowers following the sun, and she'd delivered every note with the kind of precision that came from twenty years of professional performance.
She hummed the scale again. Descending this time. Her reflection stared back at her: braids perfect, red lipstick flawless, the wine-dark dress doing exactly what it was supposed to do. Performance Phoebe. Gleaming and immaculate and utterly, completely alone in a cinder-block room that smelled like alien cleaning solution and somebody else's hairspray.
She ran another scale. Higher this time, pushing into the top of her range, the notes bouncing off the hard walls. Her warm-up voice filled the dressing room as it did whenever the real thoughts got too loud.
Seven thousand people out there. Eight? Most of the year, Evergleam was a quiet town. A market lane, a bakery, and neighbors who knew each other by name. For the six weeks ofFrostfall, it swelled into a city with visitors pouring in from a dozen systems for a festival the whole sector talked about.
She'd grown up hearing about places on Earth that did the same thing like Glastonbury, a stretch of English farmland that ballooned into a temporary city of two hundred thousand every summer for the music. She'd only ever read about it. Now she was standing in the middle of one, headlining all six weeks.
The amphitheater had been packed past capacity, bodies crammed into the aisles, alien species she couldn't name swaying in rhythm to songs they'd never heard before tonight. She'd given them everything. Every riff, every sustained note, every perfectly timed pause. She'd opened her mouth and poured her voice into that room like it was the only thing keeping her alive, and they had loved it.
She caught her reflection's eye and looked away. The humming climbed half a step.
"Youkilledit out there, girl," she muttered to the mirror in a voice nobody on that stage would recognize. Her Brooklyn accent scraped through,killedlanding hard on the d,girlgoing flat and nasal at the end. She clamped her mouth shut so fast her teeth clicked.
No. Nope. She ran a lip trill to reset the placement. Forward, bright, the neutral American she'd spent three years and four thousand dollars training herself to speak. The voice that got meetings. The voice that got booked. The voice that replaced the one she'd actually grown up with got all sanded away because a vocal coach in Midtown had told her, very gently, that regional accents limited marketability.
She'd been twenty-two. She'd nodded and said,of course, makes sense. And then she'd gone home and killed the last honest thing about how she talked.
Her comm buzzed against the vanity, vibrating the whole surface. She glanced at the screen. Vanessa. Her agent. Of course.
"Hey, V."
"Phoebe! How's the crowd?"
