25. Jules
Jules
My head is still trying to kill me when I walk into Kaia’s room.
Not metaphorically or dramatically. Actively. Every step feels like a bad decision, every light is too bright, and I’m pretty sure sound has developed a personal vendetta against me.
I stop just inside the door and squint at everyone.
Okay.
Nope. This is not normal.
Kaia stands near the window with her arms crossed, steady but tense. Mina sits on the edge of the second bed, hands clasped in her lap like she’s holding herself together through sheer force. Remy leans against the wall, quiet and watchful, already ten steps ahead of the rest of us.
And Camille is at the desk.
Of course she is.
Tablet out. Spine straight. Already in control.
I exhale slowly and regret it immediately. “Okay. Why does this feel like an intervention?”
No one laughs.
Cool. Great. Love that for me.
I step farther into the room and shut the door carefully because if I slam it, I might actually die.
“Are we sure we can’t tell Blaire?” Mina asks before I can even decide where to sit without throwing up.
Camille doesn’t hesitate. “I’m not certain she can be trusted.”
The room goes still.
Really still.
Even my hangover takes a second to process that.
“Of course she can be trusted,” Mina says, sharp and immediate. “She’s been with us the whole time.”
Kaia nods once. “She’s the one holding this together.”
“Doesn’t mean she’s not part of it,” Remy says quietly.
That lands differently.
Mina turns toward her. “Remy—“
“I’m not saying she is. I’m saying we don’t know she isn’t.”
Silence settles over the room.
I press my fingers to my temple. This is too much. Too early. Too everything.
“Okay,” I mutter. “I feel like I missed about twelve steps, so maybe…” I wave vaguely at Camille. “Start talking before my brain actually melts out of my skull.”
Camille looks at me for a moment, assessing, before turning her tablet toward us.
“There are inconsistencies in Eon’s contract structures,” she says.
I stare at her. “You called a secret meeting without Blaire to talk about contracts.”
“Yes.”
I close my eyes briefly. “Incredible. Love that for us.”
“No.” Remy pushes away from the wall. “Let her talk.”
I crack one eye open and look at her.
She’s serious.
That’s new.
With a sigh, I drag myself over to the bed and drop beside Mina with significantly less grace than I usually allow. Worry flickers across her face, but I wave it away.
“The contracts aren’t simply legal agreements,” Camille says. “Their language supports the magical structure operating beneath them.”
“Everything is structured,” I say. “That’s kind of your whole thing.”
“Not like this.”
Camille starts pulling files onto the screen while the four of them catch me up on what they found last night.
The summary is not ideal hangover material.
Our Eon contracts are apparently more than aggressively boring legal documents.
They contain magic that connects us to the audience during performances.
That connection creates some kind of resonance channel, which stays open for the entire scheduled performance window, even if the show stops because of a technical failure, demon attack, or, hypothetically, one of us getting thrown across a stage and losing consciousness.
Through that channel, something can access the emotion generated by the audience.
And Eon knows.
Maybe not every person at Eon. Maybe not even Blaire. But the Council has records from other groups, incomplete reports, delayed interventions, and contract language that makes all of it look a lot less accidental than I would personally prefer.
Then Mina reminds me about how our mysterious demonic fan has remained close but somewhere beyond the edge of her Sight while we traveled from city to city.
The fact that the clapping demon from Harbor’s Edge may be connected? Definitely terrible.
By the time Camille opens the files she wants to show us, my hangover has dropped several places on my list of current problems.
She taps the screen, and lines of dense, aggressively boring text scroll past. Except the same words keep appearing.
Kaia leans closer. “Why does it keep repeating ‘yield’?”
I squint until the letters stop blurring. “Yield. Output. Sustainability. That’s just corporate nonsense.”
“It’s not,” Camille says.
Remy moves closer to the desk. “It’s patterned.”
That gets my attention. “What?”
“The music,” she says, pointing at the screen. “It cycles. Same structure, same emphasis points.”
She swipes to another document, this one filled with musical notation and waveform patterns I recognize from the altered arrangements. “The instrumental motifs change during performances, but they keep returning to the same sequence: escalation, repetition, sustained output.”
Remy pulls up an image of the Eon ward symbol and places it beside the waveform. “The ward lines follow the same sequence.”
I stare at the screen again.
Now that she’s pointed it out, I can see it. The phrases return at precise intervals, almost like a chorus buried beneath several thousand words of legal language.
“Oh,” I say slowly. “That’s weird.”
“Very,” Remy says.
“Okay, creepy, but not, like, end-of-the-world creepy.”
“It aligns with the warding,” Remy says.
Kaia looks at her. “What?”
“Remember how we noticed it in Harbor’s Edge?
The wards Bane uses have the Eon logo worked into them now, but I don’t think it was only a design change.
” Remy gestures between the contract language and the musical patterns.
“The symbol follows the same structure as everything Camille found. And the base pattern is changed.”
My stomach drops a little. “Changed how?”
“The wards still protect us, but…” She hesitates. “They also pull something back.”
“Pull what back?” Mina asks, her voice tight.
Remy’s jaw sets. “Energy. Emotional output.”
Silence.
I blink. “Isn’t that bad?”
“That’s not how warding is supposed to work,” Kaia says.
“No,” Remy agrees. “It’s not.”
Camille taps the screen again, replacing our contract with a list of names and dates long enough to keep scrolling.
“This isn’t isolated to us.”
The room shifts.
Because that tone? That is the tone Camille uses when something is very, very wrong.
She replaces our contract with an archived Eon file. An old promotional photograph fills the screen: five women in silver stage outfits, smiling beneath a logo I recognize from documentaries and anniversary posts.
“Eon’s first signed group,” Camille says. “Velour Sky.”
I frown. “Yeah, they…” I pause. “Plane crash.”
“Yes.”
I shrug weakly. “That happens. Statistically, rarely, but—“
“No remains were independently identified,” Camille says. “The investigation was managed through Eon’s legal team, and the final report was sealed within forty-eight hours.”
My hand drops. “Okay. That part is a little weird.”
“Eon ceased operations after the crash,” she continues. “Then they returned with a new group.”
“Neon Saints,” Mina says automatically.
Camille pulls up an old promotional photo. Four women in jewel-toned stagewear stare back at us, all sharp eyeliner, metallic boots, and perfect smiles. Their whole image is brighter than Velour Sky’s, but only barely, like Eon took the same concept and turned the saturation up.
I nod. “They retired.”
Camille looks at me. “They didn’t retire.”
I blink. “Yes, they did. I literally follow them.”
I grab my phone because obviously I do and pull up their page.
The most recent post is from three days ago: all four members laughing around a table covered in pastries, the caption wishing one of them a happy birthday with three pink hearts and their old fan-club slogan.
Before that, there is a beach photo, a throwback rehearsal clip, and a polished carousel about how grateful they are to still have fans after all this time.
“See?” I shove the phone towards her. “They’re active. They post all the time.”
Camille doesn’t even glance at the screen. “Those posts aren’t from them.”
I laugh because no.
“No. That’s insane.”
“They’re scheduled,” she says. “The photographs are pulled from archived shoots. The captions reuse old interview transcripts and approved language. Eon’s internal systems are maintaining the accounts. Every post was generated through Eon’s archive scheduler.”
My smile drops.
I look down at the birthday post again. The picture is bright and natural, but now I notice the clothes. The hairstyle. The phone on the table, an older model half-hidden beside a coffee cup.
There are no recent live videos. No candid appearances. No tagged photographs from anyone outside their official network.
“That’s not…” I swallow. “Why would they do that?”
“Because they’re dead.”
The word hits like a physical thing.
“No,” I say immediately. “No, that’s not—“
“Or gone,” Camille corrects. “But there have been no verified sightings, independent confirmations, or communications outside controlled channels for years.”
My fingers tighten around my phone. “That’s a stretch.”
“Then there is Glass Anthem.”
The air changes again as the next photograph appears.
Five women stand beneath harsh white stage lights in black-and-silver costumes, their styling sharper and darker than the groups before them. Smudged metallic makeup. Severe silhouettes. Hands linked at the center like they’re daring the camera to separate them.
Kaia stiffens. “They went on hiatus after the Valencia concert.”
“They disappeared,” Camille says.
Remy’s expression darkens. “No public reappearances.”
Mina shakes her head. “That doesn’t mean—“
“It means there is a pattern,” Camille says. “And I saw what happened in Valencia.”
Something in her voice makes me look at her more closely. Her posture is still perfect, but one hand has flattened against the edge of the desk. Her watch sits untouched on her wrist.
“What happened in Valencia?” Kaia asks.
Camille doesn’t answer immediately.
That might be the most frightening thing she has done all morning.