Chapter 30
THIRTY
Zia
The screen blurred. The pixels of my real name, Zia Vale, swam in front of my eyes, dissolving into a wash of nauseating, jagged red static.
Breath in. Four.
Breath out. Six.
The rhythm failed. My lungs were a locked room, and someone had swallowed the key.
The tablet slipped from my numb fingers. It hit the mattress with a muffled thump, a sound that shouldn't have been loud enough to wake the dead, but in the hushed, breathing quiet of the nest, it sounded like a gunshot.
"Z?" Alfie mumbled against my stomach. He shifted, heavy and warm, his nose nuzzling the soft skin he’d been kissing minutes ago. "Whats’it? Did we forget a patch note?"
I couldn't speak. I couldn't move. The cortisol spike hit my system with the violence of a blown amp, turning the cozy, indigo-lit sanctuary into a trap. The air, thick with the scent of sex and safety, suddenly felt cloying. Suffocating.
Real names.
Previous jobs.
Seattle address.
They found me. The noise floor had risen up and swallowed the signal.
"Zia." Euan’s voice cut through the haze. Sharp. Alert. He wasn't waking up slowly; he was booting online instantly. He sat up from where he’d been draped over the foot of the bed, his eyes locking onto my face. "Your respiration is irregular. Heart rate escalating."
"Can't," I choked out, clawing at the collar of the t-shirt I was wearing. It felt like a noose. "Can't..."
Kit moved then. He didn't ask questions. He launched himself from behind me, his massive frame creating a shield between me and the rest of the room, though there was no threat inside the walls. He grabbed my shoulders, his grip firm, grounding.
"Look at me," Kit commanded, his voice dropping into that narcotic, instructional register. "Eyes here. Lock on."
I stared at him. The tattoos on his chest were blurring.
"Breathe," Kit ordered. "In. One, two, three."
I tried. A shallow gasp rattled in my throat.
"She’s panicking," Alfie realized, scrambling up, the golden lethargy of the afterglow vanishing instantly. The scent of burnt sugar flared in the room, acrid and sharp, scorching the ozone. "What happened? Is it a spike?"
"No," Euan said. He reached for the tablet I’d dropped.
I tried to lunge for it, to hide it, to shove the genie back in the bottle. "Don't—"
Euan looked at the screen. His face went absolutely blank. It was the terrifying, dead-eyed calm of a machine analyzing a catastrophic failure.
"Doxxed," Euan said. The word fractured the air.
Alfie froze. "What?"
"Full profile exposure," Euan listed, his voice devoid of inflection, though his hand was gripping the tablet hard enough to warp the casing. "Legal name. Internship history. The incident at SoundGarden. Photos from"—he squinted—"high school."
"No," I whispered, wrapping my arms around my knees, physically trying to hold myself together. "No, no, no."
The fortress kept out Alphas. It kept out industry creeps. But it couldn’t keep out data.
"Gareth," Kit snarled, the sound vibrating through the mattress. "I’m going to kill him. I’m going to drive to London and pull his head off."
"Not Gareth," Euan corrected, his fingers flying across the screen now. "Technique is different. This is brute force, sloppy aggregation. Someone paid a crawler."
"They know who I am," I said, the reality crashing down on me. "They know I'm Zia. They know I ran. They’ll find the Rider history. They’ll twist it. They’ll say I was difficult. Unhirable. Broken."
I looked at the door. The Exit Card was in the drawer.
Run.
The command was primal. It screamed in my blood. Pack your bag. Verify the suppressants. Disappear before they can turn you into a headline.
I started to scramble toward the edge of the nest. "I need to go. I need to clear the cache. I need—"
"Stop."
Alfie caught me. He didn't grab my arm; he wrapped his body around mine, tackling me gently back into the pillows. He buried his face in my neck, right over the claim mark he’d left there, and keened. A high, distressed sound that halted my panic in its tracks.
"Don't run," Alfie begged, his voice cracking. "Please, fox. Don't run. We’re the wall. Use the wall."
"I can't stay here," I sobbed, fighting his hold weakly. "It's breached. The bubble is popped."
"The digital perimeter is breached," Euan stated, standing up. He was naked, glorious in his rage, unbothered by it. He looked like a statue of vengeance carved from marble. "The physical perimeter is secure. Nobody enters this bus. Nobody touches you."
"Euan's right," Kit said, moving to cover my back, sandwiching me between them. "Physical security is absolute. Tammy Rook is outside. We haven't stopped moving. We're a moving target."
"You don't understand," I gasped, pressing my face into Alfie’s chest. "I built everything on being invisible. If I'm visible, I'm just... I'm just an Omega engineer with a history of 'difficult behavior'. I lose the work. I lose the credit."
"You don't lose us," Kit growled into my hair.
"I lose me!" I screamed. The sound tore my throat. "I become 'the Omega touring with Riot Theory.' I become a designation, not a producer!"
Silence rang in the room.
Then, Euan moved to the small desk in the corner where his laptop sat charging. He cracked it open. The blue light bathed his sharp features.
"Rowan," Euan said. "Speakerphone. Now."
He didn't wait for approval. He dialed.
It rang once.
"Report," Rowan’s voice cut through the air. Crisp. Awake. She sounded like she was standing in a war room.
"Containment breach," Euan said. "Z's been doxxed. Severity Level 1. Real name. History."
"I see it," Rowan said. The sound of furious typing chattered in the background. "It hit the forums twelve minutes ago. It’s migrating to Twitter now. I’ve got a kill-switch on the official Riot Theory socials, comments are locked."
"Who did it?" Kit demanded, leaning over me towards the phone, his body heat radiating fury.
"Digital footprint suggests a freelancer," Rowan said, her voice cold as ice. "Handle is NightCrawler. Low-rent data broker. But someone paid the fee. Someone with industry specific knowledge."
"Miles Green," Euan said. It wasn't a guess.
"Miles Green?" Alfie lifted his head, tears streaking his face but his eyes burning with murder. "That Beta prick from the rival network? The one who tried to poach us in '19?"
"He uses NightCrawler for opposition research," Euan confirmed. "He favors creating instability in tour dynamics. Disrupt the pack, ruin the show."
"He thinks outing her will break us," Kit realized. "He thinks we'll scramble to do damage control and drop the ball on the tour."
"He thinks I'll run," I whispered.
The realization settled over me like a cold blanket. This wasn't just gossip. It was tactical. Miles Green knew the weak point of any Omega in a high-stakes environment: flight risk.
"Are you running, Zia?" Rowan asked. Her voice softened, just a fraction.
I looked at the three men surrounding me.
Alfie, who had just spent hours worshiping my body, now looking ready to burn the world down to keep my name out of its mouth.
Kit, who had built a fortress out of his own body to keep me safe.
Euan, who was currently engaging in cyber-warfare while naked.
I looked at the drawer with the blue tape.
If I ran, Miles Green won. If I ran, the narrative became "Omega couldn't handle the pressure."
If I stayed...
"No," I said. My voice wobbled, then steadied. "No. I'm not running."
"Good," Rowan said. "Because I have a plan. But it requires you to be very, very angry."
"I'm getting there," I said, grabbing Alfie’s hand and squeezing it until my knuckles went white.
"Euan," Rowan commanded. "Engage the honey pot. The physical one."
Euan’s hands paused on the keyboard. He looked over his shoulder at me. A slow, terrifying smile touched his lips.
"The bouquet-cam," he said.
"What?" Alfie asked, blinking.
"We anticipated a physical breach attempt," Euan explained, turning back to the screen. "Miles Green likes trophies. He likes proof. He’ll want to verify Zia’s identity with more than just old data. He’ll want current leverage."
"He'll try to get a camera in the room," I realized. The horror was a cold pit in my stomach, but my producer brain was latching onto the logic. "A bug."
"A gift," Rowan corrected. "We’ve intercepted a delivery order for the Manchester venue. Addressed to 'The Engineer.' A bouquet of white lilies. Large arrangement."
"Lilies," I scoffed, offended on a sensory level. "Cliché."
"Inside the vase structure, there is a high-density transmitter," Euan continued. "We blocked the delivery at the loading dock, but we didn't refuse it. We simply... redirected it."
"Where is it?" Kit asked.
"It’s in my bunk," Cal’s voice drifted from the front of the bus.
We all turned. Cal was standing in the doorway to the back lounge, holding a tray of tea. He looked entirely unbothered by the nudity or the panic.
"I put it in a Faraday bag," Cal noted, setting the tray down on the only clear surface. "Euan taught me. Blocks the signal."
"If we unblock it," Rowan said over the phone, "and we feed it a staged conversation... we can catch Miles Green accepting the illegal recording. We trace the IP receiving the stream. We hand it to the authorities and the trade press simultaneously."
"We entrap him," Alfie breathed. "We act out a scene."
"A specific scene," I said, my mind racing. "He wants confirmation of a scandal. He wants the 'poor abused Omega' or the 'slutty band pet'."
I sat up, pulling the duvet around me like a royal robe. The panic was receding, pushed back by the cold, hard edges of a plan. I wasn't the victim here. I was the person who fixed broken signals.
"Rowan," I said. "Don't block the doxxing. Let it run."
"Explain," Rowan said sharply.
"If we scrub it, we look guilty. We look like we're hiding. Let the information sit there. Yes, my name is Zia Vale. Yes, I used to work in Seattle. Yes, I walked out on bad contracts."