Chapter 2
two
. . .
The dressing room mirror had good lighting. That was the nicest thing Phoebe could say about it.
She hummed a scale and pressed her fingertips against the edge of the vanity.
The first half of the set had gone well.
Better than well. She'd had them in her hand from the third bar, the crowd leaning forward like flowers following the sun, and she'd delivered every note with the kind of precision that came from twenty years of professional performance.
She hummed the scale again. Descending this time.
Her reflection stared back at her: braids perfect, red lipstick flawless, the wine-dark dress doing exactly what it was supposed to do.
Performance Phoebe. Gleaming and immaculate and utterly, completely alone in a cinder-block room that smelled like alien cleaning solution and somebody else's hairspray.
She ran another scale. Higher this time, pushing into the top of her range, the notes bouncing off the hard walls. Her warm-up voice filled the dressing room as it did whenever the real thoughts got too loud.
Seven thousand people out there. Eight? Most of the year, Evergleam was a quiet town.
A market lane, a bakery, and neighbors who knew each other by name.
For the six weeks of Frostfall, it swelled into a city with visitors pouring in from a dozen systems for a festival the whole sector talked about.
She'd grown up hearing about places on Earth that did the same thing like Glastonbury, a stretch of English farmland that ballooned into a temporary city of two hundred thousand every summer for the music.
She'd only ever read about it. Now she was standing in the middle of one, headlining all six weeks.
The amphitheater had been packed past capacity, bodies crammed into the aisles, alien species she couldn't name swaying in rhythm to songs they'd never heard before tonight.
She'd given them everything. Every riff, every sustained note, every perfectly timed pause.
She'd opened her mouth and poured her voice into that room like it was the only thing keeping her alive, and they had loved it.
She caught her reflection's eye and looked away. The humming climbed half a step.
"You killed it out there, girl," she muttered to the mirror in a voice nobody on that stage would recognize. Her Brooklyn accent scraped through, killed landing hard on the d, girl going flat and nasal at the end. She clamped her mouth shut so fast her teeth clicked.
No. Nope. She ran a lip trill to reset the placement.
Forward, bright, the neutral American she'd spent three years and four thousand dollars training herself to speak.
The voice that got meetings. The voice that got booked.
The voice that replaced the one she'd actually grown up with got all sanded away because a vocal coach in Midtown had told her, very gently, that regional accents limited marketability.
She'd been twenty-two. She'd nodded and said, of course, makes sense. And then she'd gone home and killed the last honest thing about how she talked.
Her comm buzzed against the vanity, vibrating the whole surface. She glanced at the screen. Vanessa. Her agent. Of course.
"Hey, V."
"Phoebe! How's the crowd?"
"Incredible. Standing room only."
"Love that for you. Listen, I've got an update on the Meridian deal."
Phoebe's fingers stopped on the garnet ring.
Meridian Records. The contract she'd been circling for three years.
The one that would literally put her on a galactic distribution platform, get her music into systems beyond Earth that she couldn't reach independently, and give her the kind of visibility that meant she'd never have to take another corporate gig where executives talked through her bridge.
"Tell me."
"They're close. Like, close close. Jared called me this morning."
"And?"
"And they love the Frostfall booking. The optics are great. Human headliner at the biggest alien festival in the sector, cultural bridge stuff, very zeitgeist. But…"
There was always a but.
"They want more of you, Phoebe. Not just the performances. The behind-the-scenes, the personal brand content, the accessibility angle. They need to see that you can be, and I'm quoting Jared here, 'warm, relatable, and available.'"
Warm. Relatable. Available. Three words that meant Give us the parts of yourself you've been protecting, and we'll turn them into a product we can sell.
"Available how?"
"Media appearances, socials, fan interaction stuff. The whole package. They want the audience to feel like they know you."
Phoebe's reflection stared back at her. Red lipstick. Perfect braids. Her own personal armor.
"Right."
"I know it's a lot. But this is Meridian, Pheebs. This is the door."
The door. The dream she'd organized her entire adult life around. The one she'd chased for a decade working under David Sterling's thumb, and had cost her Brooklyn accent and most of her savings.
"I'll think about it."
"Don't think too long. Jared said the window's—"
"I'll think about it, V."
She hung up before the Brooklyn could surface in her throat and set the comm face-down on the vanity. She hummed another scale.
Enough. Second half in four minutes. She checked the lipstick, adjusted a braid, stood up straight. Shoulders back. Chin up. Phoebe Calloway, headliner, opening night of Frostfall, walking out to own the second half of her set. She grabbed her in-ear monitors and headed for the wings.
The backstage corridor was dim, lit by those low amber panels the Mentharians used for everything, and she was moving fast because four minutes was three and a half now and she still needed to check—
She came around the corner and hit a wall of winter.
Not a wall. A person. The temperature plunged so sharply that goosebumps raced up both arms, the cold pressing through the fabric of her dress like she'd walked into a freezer. A hand came up, large and pale, and stopped a breath away from her bare shoulder.
She looked up.
And up.
Thorne was bigger than she remembered. That was the first coherent thought she managed before the rest of her brain shut down and let her body do the processing.
He filled the corridor. Six-and-a-half feet with his shoulders squared and those ice-pale eyes looking down at her with an expression that gave away absolutely nothing.
His hair was the same stark white-silver.
The stripe patterns on his neck caught the amber light and shimmered like frost on glass.
And he smelled, God, he smelled like a January morning.
Like the air right before snow, clean and mineral and sharp, with that thread of peppermint underneath that she'd been remembering wrong for ten months.
She'd remembered it as faint. It wasn't faint. It was everywhere.
Her body leaned toward the cold instead of away from it. Just an inch.
She'd last seen him in the snow outside her temporary quarters.
Last year's closing night. She'd asked him to walk her home. She’d found him at the edge of the empty amphitheater and, for once, dropped the performance before asking.
He'd fallen into step beside her without a word.
Twenty minutes through vanilla-scented snow and luminescent drifts.
She'd talked too much, the way she always did when she was nervous, filling silence with charm.
He'd been quiet. And at her door she'd said something she hadn't planned.
I think I'd like to come back next year.
I hope you'll still be here too. And she’d watched frost bloom across his knuckles in the dark, delicate and involuntary, while his face stayed perfectly, maddeningly still.
I will be here. I am always here.
That was it. That was all he'd given her, and she'd been carrying it around in her chest for ten months.
One full second of looking at him. His eyes on hers, that pale blue so light it was almost silver, seeing too much, seeing past the braids and the lipstick and the dress right to the part of her that was humming scales in a cinder-block room five minutes ago.
She could feel the weight of his attention on her skin the way she could feel the cold: physical and impossible to ignore.
The smile clicked into place, bright and warm and perfectly calibrated. "Officer Thorne. Still on the job, I see."
Her voice landed exactly where she put it, charming and friendly. Performance Phoebe sliding into position like a mask she'd been wearing so long it fit better than her face.
He didn't smile back. Didn't blink. His hand dropped to his side.
"Between-set sweep. Pre-show egress checks complete. Standard detail for the headliner on a night of this capacity."
He could have been reading from a security manual. Nothing in his voice or his face suggested he'd ever walked anyone home in the snow and said, I'll be here in a tone that a desperate woman could spend ten months overanalyzing.
He stepped aside. The cold moved with him, and her body registered the loss of it like a hand pulled away.
She did not ask whether he'd thought about that walk.
She did not say I've been carrying your perfectly neutral sentence around like it meant something, you impossible man.
She kept the smile on and walked past him toward the wings, her heels clicking against the corridor floor, the front of her dress still holding the ghost of his cold against her skin like a handprint.
The lights hit, and she was home.
Second half. She owned the stage from the first note.
This half was bigger, bolder, the setlist climbing toward the emotional peak she'd designed months ago.
The crowd surged forward. She gave them what they came for.
Every sustained note, every perfect run, every breath placed exactly where it belonged. She was magnetic.
She was searching for him.
Not obviously. A sweep of her gaze across the crowd, landing on the front-of-house security position just left of the stage, and there he was. Arms crossed, back straight, that monochrome stillness in a sea of color and motion. He wasn't watching the crowd. He was watching her.
Her chest got tight. She sang through it.
She launched into the bridge of a song about wanting, about needing someone to look past the obvious and find what was underneath.
Her voice did something she hadn't expected.
It dropped lower in her chest. The vibrato loosened, went raw, and the note she'd planned to cut at four beats stretched to six, then eight, sustained and bare and aimed directly at the security position left of the stage.
She could hear it. The difference. The way her voice shifted when she sang toward him, less produced, more naked, like the soundcheck version of herself was leaking through the performance and she couldn't quite seal the crack.
I’ll be here. I’m always here. Fine. Now, here she was, too. Here was the version of her voice that she didn't give to crowds. She gave it to empty rooms and, apparently, to a man who smelled like winter and wouldn't stand close enough to touch.
Being watched by Thorne was nothing like being watched by thousands of strangers.
The strangers took her voice and gave back noise, applause and energy she could ride but never hold.
His attention settled into her body like a hand pressed flat against her sternum.
It made her want to stay in the light. To stay exactly where his eyes could find her.
She'd never wanted that before. Not like this.
Toward the front, something snagged her attention.
A human man standing completely still while the aliens around him swayed and clapped and moved the way bodies move when music gets inside them.
He wasn't moving. His eyes were locked on her.
Unblinking, fixed, hungry. The stare landed on her body with a quality she could identify at twenty feet because she'd been receiving it since she was nineteen years old.
The what can I get from you look that treated her like a resource instead of a person.
She tracked to his collar. Press credentials, clipped to his coat. A journalist.
Of course. Watching closely was the job.
She was being paranoid and reading menace into professionalism because her heart was always whispering They want something from you.
They always want something from you. She was a headliner at the biggest festival in the sector.
Press coverage was expected. The man was doing his job.
She pushed the paranoia down and climbed into her closing number.
This was the one she'd built the set around. A song about truth she'd written in her Brooklyn apartment. It was the most honest song she'd ever recorded. It was also the one her agent said was "a bit niche for the Meridian pitch."
The final note climbed. Her voice opened, the sound filling the amphitheater from floor to rafters, full and shaking with the effort of being that exposed.
She let the performance drop. Just for a second.
For the length of one held note, she stopped being Phoebe Calloway, headliner, and was just herself.
Her eyes found Thorne's.
He stood at the edge of the stage, arms crossed, frost visible on the rail beneath his hands. The cold was rolling off him in waves she could feel from twenty feet away.
The audience erupted as thousands of bodies rose to their feet, the applause hitting her like a physical force, and beneath it—
A metallic groan. High. Directly overhead.
Her eyes snapped up. A rigging line above center stage, taut and shining under the light array, shivered. Frayed. The cable split with a sound like a gunshot.
Something massive and metal was falling out of the dark straight at her.
Her feet wouldn't move.