God help me.
I hit the pad.
A deep, sub-bass thrum filled the room.Thump-thump. Thump-thump.It wasn't a kick drum. It was a sampled recording of a human heart, heavily processed, layered with a washed-out synth pad that sounded like rain on a windowpane.
The crowd knew it instantly. A ripple of recognition went through the room, a collective intake of breath. They’d been listening to the SoundCloud rip on repeat.
Alfie closed his eyes. He didn't posture. He didn't dance. He just stood there, stripped of all the rockstar armor, just a man bleeding out on stage.
"I saw the lightning strike the ground..."
His voice was quiet. Too quiet. The sound engineer at FOH, a local hire, because Zia was... occupied, had to crank the gain, capturing every breath, every crack in the timbre.
"But you didn't hear the thunder sound."
"I saw the color of the noise..."
"You saw three terrified boys."
I felt the blood drain from my face. He was changing the lyrics. Imperceptibly. Shifting the tense. It wasn'tI saw. It wasWe saw.
He was dragging us all into the confession.
I glanced at the side stage. Rowan was standing there, arms crossed, tablet held like a weapon. But she wasn't signaling for the cut. She was watching Alfie with an expression that looked terrifyingly like pride.
Alfie’s hand came up, gripping his chest, right over his own heart.
"I won't chase you down the street,"he sang, the melody climbing into that rough, burnt-sugar falsetto that usually wrecked me.
"Won't ask for what you cannot meet."
The crowd began to sing along. Softly at first, then swelling. Two thousand Scottish voices carrying the harmony, a choir of rough angels backing up a confession they didn't fully understand.
"We want to learn, not take."
"We want to build, not break."
I felt a stinging sensation behind my eyes. I kept my hands moving, tweaking the reverb tails, putting a shimmer of silver on his high notes, painting the sound exactly the way Zia had described it to me.Silver sparks. Molten copper.
If she was listening, if the bus audio feed was live, she was hearing me color the air for her.
Alfie opened his eyes. He looked straight into the camera lens of the livestream rig.
"You’re the ghost in the machine,"he belted, power returning, the grit in his voice rasping against the mic capsule."The clearest sound we've ever seen."
Then he went off-script entirely.
"Credits roll," Alfie murmured, the reverb heavy, creating a cathedral echo in the sweaty ballroom. "Screen goes black. But we don't fade out."
He dropped to his knees at the edge of the stage. A theatrical choice? No. His legs just gave out. The Alpha drive was eating him alive, chewing through his stamina. He gripped the mic grille like it was oxygen.
"We wait," he breathed. "Furniture or wall."
Code.He was broadcasting our private safety protocol to two thousand people just to reach one person.
I killed the high-end frequencies instantly. I stripped the shimmering synth pad, the melodic hope, leaving only that sub-bass heartbeat thumping through the floorboards.Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
Kit caught the signal. He didn't do a cymbal wash. He didn't do a big rock finish. He simply stopped.
