12. CHAPTER TWELVE
Dressed in his signature lime-green suit, Tev sat at one of the tables, impossible to miss.
The electric color caught the shifting light, casting a strange, luminous glow across his purple skin.
He’d been trailing our tour for weeks as Zhari’s head of marketing—always nearby, always watching, and endlessly a step ahead.
Beside him slinked Nova. She was making her way to a plate someone left behind with a half eaten Space Dog on it. Such a naughty seed.
My sketchbook was open between his forearms, a tablet propped up beside it. The way his shoulders were set and the way his wristband sat face-up and ready all said this was not a “Hey, look what I found” moment.
This was a sit-down conversation.
“That’s where it went,” I said, eyeing the sketchbook. “I’ve been tearing the bus apart looking for that.” I walked over to him. “Well, not literally, but… why do you have it? That’s private.”
I held out my hand.
“What are you doing leaving it lying around on window ledges?” he countered mildly. “You’re lucky it was me and not some overeager intern with a portable scanner,” he sighed, “or a cleaner who mistook it for garbage.”
“I didn’t leave it,” I muttered. “Well, not on purpose.”
He huffed a soft laugh and flipped the sketchbook around so it faced me.
It was open to the page with the arena crowd crammed into the foreground and the stage carved out at the far edge like a bright wound. The little six-legged headphone monster I’d doodled in the corner stared up at me, blank-eyed and smug.
Next to the book, on his tablet, that same doodle floated in the middle of a mock promotional slide. It had been cleaned up, punched out, and placed above the Lumara Sound logo as if it had always been there.
Underneath it, a stack of numbers glowed in cool blue.
“What is that?” I asked, pointing to it.
“This,” he said, tapping his tablet, “is your little creature after we ran it with a mid-leg test group earlier.”
He swiped, and the graph expanded.
“They responded to it more than anything we’ve put out this leg. Better recall, higher positive association, more tags. Some twelve-year-old on Oris Station drew it on her face in glitter and called it a ‘Beats Bug.’”
“People… like it?” I managed as I sat down in front of him.
“People love it.” He leaned back, folding his arms. “Which is annoying, because up until now, our mascot options were ‘generic star swirl’ and ‘slightly different generic star swirl.’”
I stared at the tablet, the doodle still hovering above it.
“I did that in, like, ten minutes on a loading dock,” I said. “While half-asleep.”
“And that,” he said, “is what I find interesting.”
He tapped the open page again, but his finger didn’t land on the mascot. It landed on the crowd—the density of bodies and light and motion, the way the lines pulled toward the stage.
“This isn’t just cute,” he went on. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s very cute. But it also feels like the tour. It looks like the sound. Her costumes, the movement, the way you’ve framed the arena so the energy sucks you in—that’s brand instinct. You understand what a mark is supposed to communicate.”
Brand instinct.
The phrase sounded like something from a terrible corporate seminar. Coming from him, though, about my scribbles, it felt like someone had cracked open my chest and shone a light on a part of me I’d always assumed was imaginary.
“I draw things,” I said weakly. “That’s all I thought I was doing.”
“People who ‘just draw things’ don’t accidentally design the most effective visual we’ve put in front of fans this month,” he said. “You’re already doing the work. We might as well pay you for it.”
My pulse stuttered.
“Pay me?”
There was a strange, weightless little beat, like the universe inhaling.
He nodded once.
“Remote freelance, to start,” he said. “You’re on the bus, we’re on the road, and I’m not dragging you into boardrooms between shows.
You’d work from here, from venues, wherever we park.
After the tour, assuming we all still like each other, we’ll discuss a longer contract on Lumara.
Advertising and marketing illustration for Lumara Sound.
Campaign work. Visual identities. That sort of thing. ”
For a second, I thought I’d misheard him.
“You’re… serious,” I said.
“I am very serious.”
He rotated the sketchbook back toward me and slid it across the table.
“You’ve been designing this tour in your head since before you left Earth. I’m just trying to get ahead of your brain.”
A laugh jerked out of me, half-shocked and half-delighted.
“I don’t—I mean—do you really think I could do that?” I asked.
“Yes, I do, Vada,” he said. “You’re extremely talented. I’d rather put a contract in front of you and call it what it is.”
My fingers curled around the edges of the book.
“Can I… think about it?”
He tilted his head.
“You can,” he said. “But I’m going to be honest, Vada.
From where I’m sitting, this is not a ‘sleep on it for six months’ decision.
This is a ‘we’d like to move on this before the next leg’ decision.
You don’t have to say yes. But if the only reason you’re hesitating is that it feels too big, that’s not a good enough reason. ”
While it was sort of about Zhari, it was more about me—for once. My chest had lit up when Tev said brand instinct which was totally high frequency because only my mum has ever preached that.
This was about sitting in a dull office on Earth, doing data entry crap, and wishing I were brave enough to do anything art related.
It was the vending machine all over again. The choice between clinging to a handful of credits or spending them on something that might change the shape of my life.
“I…” I swallowed. “I don’t want to overthink this.”
“Good,” he said dryly. “We have enough overthinkers in this organization.”
“Okay. “Yes!”
Oh my stars. I couldn’t believe I had just blurted that out.
“Yes,” I repeated once more, in case he didn’t hear me. “I want it. I want the job.”
He nodded once, decisive.
“Excellent,” he said. “I’ll send you a draft contract tonight. Nothing scary. Scope of work, rate, and deliverables. You can yell at me about clauses after you read it.”
He tapped the tablet, switching to a different view.
“Also, for the record,” he added, his eyes flicking back to me, “you are very talented, Vada. Honestly. I’m surprised you don’t do this for a living.”
Heat crept up the back of my neck.
“Careful,” I said. “You’ll ruin my carefully cultivated low self-esteem.”
“I can live with that,” he said. “Go have your moment. I have emails.”
He gathered his tablet and stood. My sketchbook stayed in front of me, the art that landed me a job on display.
When he left, the mess hall felt strangely quiet. The hum of the ship, the clink of cutlery somewhere behind me, and the faint whir of the air filters all blurred into the background.
The foreground was just me and a job offer I’d wanted my whole life without having the language for it.
I opened the book and flipped past the mascot and the arena crowd to the pages with the Pilu, the bus bunks, and her face in half-finished lines.
“Look at you,” I muttered to my own scribbles. “You did something.”
My chest felt full and fizzy, like Luminal Fizz had taken up residence behind my ribs. For the first time in years, my brain wasn’t chewing on what I’d done wrong or how to shrink.
It was sprinting ahead, throwing up images—campaigns, posters, weird little creatures that might someday end up on someone else’s wall.
I wanted to tell her.
I tucked my sketchbook under my arm and left the mess hall, heading toward down the hall.
As I rounded the corner, I spotted Nova climbing up the giant glass window.
“Uh, how did you get over here so quickly? I just saw you in the mess hall a moment ago.”
Nova turned toward me and stared blankly. She blinked slowly a few times, then turned away and continued climbing.
“You are a very peculiar creature, Nova.” I shook my head and kept walking.
“Dune?” I called out.
“Yes, Vada?”
“Do you know where Zhari is?”
“I know where everyone is,” Dune replied.
“I know this, it was rhetorical Dune.”
“She is in the viewing bubble, relaxing.”
“Ah, thank you Dune.”
I climbed up the ladder to the viewing bubble where Zhari sat crossed legged looking out the window.
“Hey,” I said, hauling myself into the bubble and settling opposite her.
She turned her head, a small smile curving one corner of her mouth.
“Hey,” she replied. “So, was the Jelly Lounge amazing or what?”
“Oh my stars, it was totally out of orbit,” I gushed. “The Jelly Lounge was like eating inside a fish tank. It was incredible.”
I let out a sigh, tossing my head back.
“Ten out of ten. I want to go back before we leave. And anytime there’s a Jelly Lounge wherever we go, I want to go.”
“Good,” she smirked. “I like your brain too much to have it eaten by ribbon fins.”
I hugged my sketchbook close to my chest nervously.
“So,” I said, my pulse spiking. “Tev found this.”
I held the sketchbook up between us like evidence.
Her brows rose.
“Oh no,” she said in mock horror. “Were you arrested for doodling on company property?”
Zhari let out a laugh.
“I left it behind before I went out today, and he found it,” I said. “He loves my drawings.”
I beamed.
“Well, you are talented,” she said, perking up.
I looked down.
“Yeah, so much so that he offered me a job.”
I looked back up at Zhari, who now had a confused expression on her face.
Her attention sharpened.
“A job,” she repeated. “What kind of job?”
I pulled my legs up, hugging my knees so I wouldn’t fling myself bodily out of the bubble.
“Okay, so…” I said, the words tangling in their rush to get out.
“He ran my little headphone-bug thing through a test group, and apparently it did better than all their other visuals this tour. People liked it. Kids drew it on their faces. Brand metrics, blah blah. I don’t understand all of it, but he said I have ‘brand instinct.’”
I made quotation marks in the air with one hand.