"This reverb," she murmurs, mostly to herself. "It’s too wet. It’s drowning the vocal."
"Decrease the decay time by 1.2 seconds," I suggest, staring resolutely at my monitors. "And apply a high-pass filter at 200 Hertz."
She pauses. I can feel her eyes on the side of my face. "Why 200?"
"Because Alfie’s low resonance lives in the 150 range. If you obscure it, the track loses its floor."
A beat. "Right. Good ear."
"It’s data," I correct gently.
"It’s helpful," she counters.
She stays for twenty minutes. Eight feet feels like being in the same room as a supernova. I feel the heat of her existence on my skin. When she leaves, I have to go stand in the walk-in freezer of the venue catering kitchen for six minutes to recalibrate my core temperature.
Day Three.
"Six feet," she says. "And... I need to see the screen."
Six feet. 1.82 meters. Striking distance.
If I lunged, I could reach her in 0.4 seconds. My Alpha brain knows this. It screams this information at me on a loop.Subject in range. Close the gap. Secure the asset.
I grip the edge of the desk until the wood creaks.
"You may approach my six," I say, my voice tight. "I will rotate the monitor so you do not have to cross the threshold."
She steps forward. Six feet is intimate. Six feet is social. Six feet is where the air pressure changes because another human body is displacing it.
She smells like rain on hot asphalt and grapefruit peel. It is overwhelmingly clean.
She peers at my screen. We are looking at a messy frequency spectrum from the Leeds disaster.
"It’s angry," she says, pointing at a knot of red frequencies in the low-mids. "Look at that snare. It’s muddy brown. It needs to be... tighter."
"Tighten the Q," I say automatically. But my focus is entirely on her hand, pointing near mine. Her wrist is thin. The fox-tail tattoo is peeking out from her sleeve.
"It’s not just the Q," she says, frustrated. She taps her temple. "It’s the color. I can’t explain it to you. You see numbers. I see... paint."
She steps back. The session ends. I remain frozen until she is behind the safety line of her bunk.
Day Seven.
We have been driving for ten hours. The bus is a capsule of exhausted silence. Alfie is asleep in the front lounge. Kit is in his bunk.
Zia enters the rear lounge. She is practically sleepwalking, her eyes half-lidded, scrubbed of makeup. She looks soft in a way that makes my chest ache with a physical sharp pain.
She shivers. The air conditioning is aggressive tonight; I lowered the temperature to keep the Alpha scents dormant, heavy air doesn't travel as far.
"Cold," she mumbles.
She reaches for the back of the chair where we pile the communal layers. There are three hoodies there. One plays it safe, Kit's. One is a sensory riot, Alfie's. One is mine.
She grabs the black slate hoodie. Mine.
She pulls it over her head.
It drowns her. The sleeves go past her fingertips. The hem hits her thighs. But the crucial data point, the catastrophic variable, is the scent. That hoodie has been on my body for three days of high-stress tech crisis. It is saturated withhojicha, roasted green tea, and the sharp, sugary snap of sesame brittle.
