Alani
SEVEN
Hour thirty-one. Four espressos. Two showers. Zero sleep.
“The atmospheric rigs are shipping from the Chicago warehouse tomorrow,” Maya continued. “Cracked oil machines, LED panel arrays, and the custom fog diffusers. I pulled the units we used for the Villain Expo installation—they’re field-tested and code-compliant.”
“You’re an angel.”
“I’m a woman who you once helped redesign an entire convention floor in nine hours while a peacock screamed in the loading dock. Angels wish they had my project management skills.”
Alani laughed. The sound scraped—raw from thirty-one hours of continuous phone calls, negotiations, vendor coordination, and the kind of logistical problem-solving that would have broken a less caffeinated woman. She didn’t care. The laugh was real, and it tasted like victory.
Maya Chen—founder of Apex Experiential Design, three-time industry award winner, owner of the best atmospheric rig fleet on the East Coast—had agreed to take the Silverscale contract at eleven p.m. on Saturday night, eighteen hours after NovaCraft’s exit.
She’d agreed because the project was the Silverscale Convention and every experiential designer in the country wanted their name on it.
She’d agreed because Alani had designed the scope and Maya trusted Alani’s creative vision.
And she’d agreed because Alani had spent eight years building the kind of industry relationships that converted a midnight phone call into a yes when any reasonable person would have said too late, too compressed, too risky.
The cost was higher. Maya’s team was smaller than NovaCraft’s, which meant subcontractors. Subcontractors meant premium rates. The budget gap between NovaCraft’s original contract and Apex’s revised quote sat in Alani’s mental ledger like a splinter: forty-seven thousand dollars.
She’d eat it.
Not from the convention budget—that was Silverscale’s money, allocated through the shared oversight structure she’d negotiated with Chaos.
She’d cover the difference from her own personal development fund.
The trust fund money she’d earmarked for the year’s convention attendance, cosplay materials, and the emergency reserve she maintained for exactly these situations.
It would mean skipping the Tokyo anime convention in November.
It would mean scaling back her cosplay build budget for the next three months.
It would mean explaining to her father—whose ambient surveillance instincts after forty years of reading financial patterns would flag why her quarterly expenditures showed a line item that looked suspiciously like a vendor bailout absorption.
She would eat it because the alternative was walking into the next meeting with Chaos Silverscale and admitting that her cornerstone vendor had collapsed and the cost overrun was a problem she needed help with.
Not happening. Not in this lifetime. Not in his eight lifetimes.
Her phone buzzed against her shoulder. She shifted it to check the notification without dropping Maya.
GISELLE: NovaCraft legal review complete. Their cancellation clause has a 30-day notice requirement. They gave 3. Breach is clean. We can pursue damages.
GISELLE: Also I found a link. NovaCraft’s parent company received a new investment round six months ago. Lead investor: Gryphon Ventures. Gryphon’s portfolio includes 14 media companies.
GISELLE: One of them is a subsidiary of Griffin Media.
Alani’s grip tightened on the phone. The dawn wind pulled at her sweatshirt. Below, Manhattan continued its dawn shuffle—unaware, unconcerned, a city too big to register the implications of a single corporate thread connecting a vendor dropout to a competing media conglomerate.
Sabotage. Confirmed.
She filed it. Not because it wasn’t urgent—it was—but because she was running a triage operation and the immediate priority was getting the replacement vendor locked, the build timeline secured, and the immersive corridor back on track.
The corporate espionage investigation would happen.
The NovaCraft breach would be pursued. But first, the convention.
Always the convention first.
“Maya.” She brought her attention back to the call. “I need your team on-site by Wednesday. Full crew. Construction starts on the east wing Thursday morning.”
“We’ll be there. Alani—” A pause. The silence of a peer recognizing the scale of what Alani had accomplished in thirty-one hours. “You pulled this off in a day and a half.”
“I pulled this off in a day and a half because I’ve got the best network in the industry and a cousin who doesn’t sleep.”
“Your cousin is terrifying.”
“My cousin is efficient. The terror is a side effect.”
She ended the call. Leaned against the balcony railing.
The dawn had committed—golden light spilling between the towers, catching the glass facades of Midtown and turning them into a wall of fire.
The city woke in layers: honking taxis, delivery trucks, the growing murmur of eight million people beginning another day with the assumption that the ground beneath them was stable.
Alani looked at the timeline on the glass door. Looked at the sticky notes. Looked at the text from Giselle with the Griffin Media breadcrumb that would, eventually, explain why NovaCraft had abandoned a contract they’d been excited about.
She was exhausted. She was triumphant. She was running on four hours of sleep spread across two nights and enough espresso to concern a cardiologist.
And she was going to walk into the next convention meeting and present the solution as if the crisis had never existed.