Observation: Distance was the care gesture.
Question: If they can override the chase instinct for my safety... what else are they capable of controlling?
I looked up at the stage.
Alfie was singing a nonsense mic check, something about a postman and a cat, but his posture was rigid, angled away from me. He was protecting me from his own attention.
I typed one last line.
Hypothesis: They are rewriting the rules.
I locked the phone.
"Kick drum," I said into the mic. "Give me the thunder."
Kit hit the drum. It shook the floor. Somehow it wasn't just the floor that was shaken though, it was the foundations of everything I thought I knew about the Riot Theory boys.
TEN
Zia
Nate Lux smelled like lemon drizzle cake that had been dropped on a dusty stage floor.
It wasn't a bad smell, exactly, just performative. Artificial sweetness layered over the dry, static-charged scent of a Beta who lived for engagement metrics. He sat across the desk in his streaming studio, leaning into his mic with the practiced ease of a man who knew his good angles.
I wasn’t there. Not really.
Physically, I was in a sound-treated booth ten feet away, hidden behind a black curtain. Digitally, I was a purple fox avatar on the main monitor, my movements tracked by the rig strapped to my chest and face.
"So, we've got Riot Theory in the house!" Nate’s voice clipped the pre-amp. I winced and instinctively reached to pull his gain down on my remote interface. "We're raising money for Music Venue Trust, we've got Alfie and the lads on the sofa, and we've got the mystery voice herself, FoxTail!"
"Hi, Nate," I said. My voice ran through the vocoder, stripping the gender and the tremor out of it, leaving only theflat, clean signal. On screen, the fox avatar’s ears twitched in sync with my head movement.
"Big numbers today, guys. Huge." Nate checked his monitors. His eyes scanned the chat, hungry. "Chat is going absolutely mental. Everyone wants to know about the new sound. That raw demo Alfie dropped? The production on the new live sets? It’s cleaner, it’s tighter. What’s the secret sauce?"
Alfie, sitting on the plush leather sofa next to Kit and Euan, grinned. He was vibrating. I could see it on the preview monitor. His knee was bouncing, transmitting a low-frequency rumble into the floor that I could almost feel through the soles of my boots.
"No secret," Alfie said into his handheld mic. "Just found someone who knows how to listen."
@RiotGrrrl99: LISTEN TO HIM. THE DEVOTION.
@BassSlut4Cal: He looks at the monitor with the fox on it like he wants to eat it.
@TechNerd: Production value is up 400%. Facts.
"Right, right. Listening." Nate swiveled his chair. "But the chat... the chat has theories. You know how the internet is. They see a mystery, they want to solve it."
My stomach tightened. I focused on the waveform on my laptop. Keep it technical. Keep it safe.
"We keep the mystery because the work speaks louder," I said, my avatar nodding solemnly.
"Sure, sure. But..." Nate leaned in, his smile dropping into that conspiratorial 'we're just friends talking' expression that usually preceded a PR disaster. "I’ve got a mod overlay here. Standard stuff, pulls the most popular questions from the hashtag pile. Let’s see what the peoplereallywant to know."
He hit a button on his stream deck.
He didn't vet it. Or maybe he did, and he just didn't care.
A massive graphic splashed across the livestream feed, bright red letters over a silhouette of a wolf and a fox.
