"Where are you going?" Rowan asked, her eyes sharp, assessing.
"Bunk. Need the vocal booth."
"We move in twenty minutes."
"Then don't hit any potholes."
I slammed the sliding door to the back lounge, isolating myself in the small, sound-treated space we used for demoing tracks on the road. The air in here was stale, smelling of old coffee and frustration. I set up the mic, hands shaking so hard I nearly dropped the XLR cable.
I needed to scream. I needed to howl until my throat bled.
Instead, I pulled up the session file from the recent show. The oneshefixed. The one where the waveform looked like chaos ordered into beauty.
I bypassed the mix. I muted the drums, the bass, the loops. I stripped everything away until it was just silence and the ghost of the track she’d saved.
Then I hit record.
I didn't sing. Not really. I let the melody break, let it rasp and catch. I poured all the blackberry-burnt-sugar desperation, all theI want you but I won't take youinto the mic. It was raw. Ugly. The sound of a man standing on a cliff edge, voluntarily stepping back because the person he wanted to jump with hadn't asked him to fly.
One take. No auto-tune. No polish. Just the sound of a heart breaking in real-time.
I bounced the stem. Just my vocal. Naked.
Rowan was going to kill me. The label was going to have a stroke. Gareth Blake was probably going to spontaneously combust.
Good.
I logged into the band’s official SoundCloud. Not the polished PR one, the "junkyard" account we used for demos and b-sides, the one the real fans monitored like hawks.
I uploaded the file.
Title:For the Engineer Who Ran
I stared at the description box. My cursor blinked, a rhythmic taunt. What could I say that wouldn't spook her? What could I say that would reach her through the noise, through her fear, through the miles she was putting between us?
I typed, deleted, typed again.
"To the anonymous engineer who fixed the Showbox meltdown — your lungs saved my voice. We want to learn, not take. You’re credited, fox-tail and all."
I hit Publish.
Then I threw the laptop onto the sofa, sank to the floor, and put my head in my hands. The scent of burnt sugar filled the small room, thick and cloying.
"You didn't verify the upload with legal," Rowan said from the doorway. She hadn't knocked.
I didn't look up. "Fire me."
"Can't. You're the face." Her heels clicked on the floorboards as she stepped in. She sat on the edge of the sofa, looking at the laptop screen. "You credited the fox-tail. That's identifying."
"It's distinguishing," I corrected, looking up finally. "It proves we sawher. Not just an Omega. Not just a fix-it girl. Her. The artist."
Rowan’s expression was unreadable. She scrolled through the comments that were already starting to populate the feed.The numbers were ticking up. Ten plays. Five hundred. Two thousand.
"The internet is waking up," she noted dryly.
I pulled my phone out. Twitter, or X, or whatever hellsite it was today, was already catching fire.
@RiotGrrrl99:Did anyone see what Riot Theory just dropped?? "For the Engineer Who Ran"??? HELLO?
