10. CHAPTER TEN
Sira led me a few steps away from the ramp, just far enough that the crew flowing on and off the bus turned into moving shapes instead of people I knew.
She flicked open her chrome flip phone. A small holo blinked to life above it.
My own face stared back at me.
It was that ramp shot from earlier—the one she’d snapped closed before I could really see it. Me on the edge of the frame, mouth open mid-laugh, bus lights catching the glitter in my hair.
A little blurry. Not flattering. But definitely me.
"Ah, I know. I have seen it many many times."
“That went up last night,” Sira said. “It has already been shared enough times that I saw it again in this morning’s media digest. I needed to figure out how much damage control had been done regarding who people thought you were. It seems they do not truly know… yet.”
“So… congratulations. You’ve officially seen my bad side.” I tried for a joke and didn’t quite stick the landing.
Her mouth didn’t move, but the line of her shoulders was softer than I expected.
“It’s not the image itself that concerns me,” she said.
With a swipe, more clips flickered into the air: a side-stage crowd video from the last show, my silhouette cut against a speaker stack, a grainy loading-dock shot of me perched on a crate with a bottle in hand, and a blurred glimpse of my shoulder and bun caught at the edge of someone’s market selfie.
“It’s the repetition.”
She tapped the holo. Tiny red circles flared wherever I appeared across the different clips.
“Fans are very good at recognizing faces,” she said. “Even when those faces are not meant to be part of the show. You are starting to appear often enough that people are asking who you are. When that happens, the label pays attention.”
“I’m not trying to be in anything,” I said. “I’m just… existing near things.”
“I know,” she said. “You have not done anything wrong. I am not here to tell you off. I am here to make sure you understand what this looks like from my side of the spreadsheets.”
She expanded one of the posts. Comments scrolled past faster than I could read them all:
Is she like Zhari’s PR girly?
Saw her on the dock too, drawing.
SHE’S IN EVERY VIDEO.
Plant from the label??
What if she’s the girl from ‘Single Orbit’?
My skin crawled, as if I’d walked into a room where people were talking about me and couldn’t back out fast enough.
“What I need you to hear,” Sira said, “is that none of these people know you. They have a few seconds of your life from a bad angle, and they are building a story out of it. Then they repeat that story to each other until it feels true.”
“Neat,” I said. “Love that so much.”
She shut the phone. The holo vanished, leaving only the dim dock light.
“You are not a mistake,” she said, reaching out. “She invited you because she knew I wanted you to be here. And I don’t regret that decision.”
“But,” I said, because there was obviously a but.
“But you are my responsibility now,” she said. “If this becomes a problem, I am the one sitting in a glass room being asked why a human from Earth keeps appearing within arm’s reach of my artist.”
A short, breathless laugh slipped out of me.
“You make it sound like I’m leaking radiation.”
“You are a risk,” she said. “This is a big tour. The last thing we need is the press up our backs, refusing to mind their business. Zhari is this entire enterprise. My job is to manage those risks and see the bad scenarios before they happen.”
“And I’m… one of the bad scenarios,” I said.
“You are a person,” she corrected, “who is now inside a machine that does not know how to treat people as anything but stories and assets. I am trying to keep the machine from grinding you up.”
That hit somewhere behind my ribs.
“I don’t want to make your life harder,” I said. “Or hers. If having me here like this is—if it’s too much, I can—”
“Don’t finish that sentence,” she said.
I shut my mouth.
“You think I have not seen the difference since you arrived?” she asked. “She eats without me nagging. She sleeps more than two hours at a time. She comes back from the stage and talks about the show, not the metrics. The crew is less…”
She searched for a word, then settled on:
“Uptight. You are not a disruption. You make us all run smoother.”
My throat tightened.
“Then what do you need from me?”
“I need you to be aware,” she said. “Of where you stand. Of how often you are in clear view when cameras are out. Of the fact that if this goes further, anonymity will not be an option.”
She ticked invisible boxes in the air.
“No camping in the same obvious spot at the barrier every night,” she said.
“No developing rituals that put you in the front of every side-stage video. If you notice ten devices pointed at you at once, perhaps step to the side. Enjoy the shows. Enjoy your time here. But remember that every wide shot is content for someone.”
“I can do that,” I said. “Less ‘main character,’ more ‘blurry background prop.’”
“That is a terrible way to describe yourself,” she said. “But yes. For now, blending into the set dressing a little more would help.”
We watched a loader drone glide past with a stack of cases.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
“Yes.”
“If this all explodes,” I said, “if people figure it out and the label loses its mind—are you going to make me leave?”
Her jaw tensed for a second. When she answered, her voice was steady.
“If I believed you being here was hurting her more than it helped, yes,” she said. “I would send you back to Earth myself.”
My heart squeezed.
“But right now?” she went on. “Right now, she is lighter than I have seen her in a long time. You are walking around trying very hard not to put a foot wrong. So no. I am not planning your exit. I am planning around your presence.”
“Okay,” I said.
“One more thing,” she added. “If, at any point, this becomes too much for you—too many eyes, too many headlines—tell me before you vanish. We can find other options. I can only imagine how it feels to be sort of dating a pop star. It’s overwhelming. I understand that. Things will be okay, though.”
The idea that she believed there might be options did something strange and warm in my chest.
“I will,” I said. “Tell you, I mean. Before any dramatic disappearing acts.”
“Good,” she said. “Now go eat. You have walked around Orin for hours, and I do not wish to file an injury report because my cultural guest fell over from low blood sugar.”
I huffed out a laugh that felt more like a sigh.
“Yes, ma’am.”
She snapped the phone shut and slid it into her pocket.
As I climbed back up the ramp, the little gravity charm bounced against my wrist, light and insistent. I still felt a little like a misfiled document in someone else’s cabinet. But at least now I knew the tour manager had a folder labeled Reasons We’re Keeping Her.
I just needed to make sure I didn’t get in the way.
As I made my way back to the mess hall, it was mostly cleared out. A few of the crew still lingered, spread across the room in loose knots.
Lyn and Yuki had claimed our usual table near the back window.
Lyn’s boots were up on a chair as she worked through a bowl of something steaming with her chopsticks.
Yuki was slouched sideways, scrolling through his flip phone with one hand and eating Nebs with the other in a rhythm that had to be muscle memory by then.
Lyn spotted me and straightened slightly.
“There she is,” she said. “Our little resident headline.”
I sank into the seat across from her.
“If Sira has her way, I’ll be downgraded back to obscure B-roll in no time.”
“So she did give you the talk,” Yuki said, dropping a bowl in front of me. “Figured. Eat. It’s impossible to catastrophize properly on an empty stomach.”
I looked down into the bowl.
Nebs.
Of course.
“She showed me posts,” I said. “Apparently, I’m a pattern now.”
Lyn twirled her noodles.
“Patterns are her love language,” she said. “If she’s putting you in charts, it means she’s taking you seriously.”
“She also used words like ‘risk’ and ‘machine’ and ‘chewed up,’” I said. “Not super soothing.”
Yuki pointed at me with his chopsticks.
“Did she call you a mistake?”
“No,” I admitted. “She actually went out of her way to say I’m not one. Just that there’s going to be more attention and I need to stop standing directly in front of every camera on the tour.”
“That’s reasonable,” Lyn said. “Annoying, but reasonable.”
I picked up my chopsticks.
“I just… I feel like I walked into the background of someone else’s movie, and suddenly people are doing frame-by-frame analysis of my hair.”
“That’s because you did,” Lyn said. “You just also happen to have the director’s favorite seat.”
Heat crawled up my neck.
“You know what I mean.”
“I do.” Her tone dropped, losing some of the joke. “Look. From the label’s point of view, yes, you are a variable. A new element in a system they like to think they control. From ours? You’re the reason she hasn’t thrown a mic stand at anyone in weeks.”
Lyn’s tone was sarcastic, but not entirely.
“I would pay to see that,” Yuki said. “But yeah. You make her… different.”
“Different how?” I asked, poking at my noodles with my chrome chopsticks.
“Less sharp around the edges,” he said. “More… present. Like she’s actually here with us and not six months ahead, climbing some imaginary ladder in her head.”
Lyn nodded.
“You know how it was when you arrived,” she said. “She was tense all the time. Every set change was life or death. She’s still a perfectionist, but now she messes up a step and laughs instead of spiraling. That’s you.”
“That’s not just me,” I said automatically. “She’s—”
“It’s you,” Lyn said.
I slurped a mouthful of noodles to hide the way my eyes stung. The spice hit the back of my throat and forced me to focus on breathing.
“Sira told me that if it gets to be too much, I need to tell her before I bolt,” I said once I’d recovered. “Which, I mean, I don’t plan on doing.”
“That’s Sira for ‘I might be intense, but I’m not a monster,’” Lyn said. “She knows what this life does to people. She’s seen worse than you.”
“Comforting,” I said.