Page 107 of Heat Unscripted

I picked them out in pieces. Warm amber and fig, and I knew the face before I turned to it. Sloane, back corner, legs crossed, leather jacket over her chair, looking exactly like she always did, like someone who’d decided the whole world was built wrong and drawn up her own floor plan.

She saw me and stood. The amber surged, bright and fierce, one Omega greeting another in a room that used to make that recognition a thing you hid. Her hair was cropped shorter than last year, close to the skull. Her eyes had the look of someone who’d been waiting for exactly this.

“There she is.” She crossed in four strides, boots hitting the floor like she walked to win arguments, and pulled me into a hug that smelled like every book she’d ever written. Warm. Fierce. She held on for exactly long enough.

“Voice of the revolution,” she said against my ear. “How’s it feel to sell out a convention?”

“Terrifying.”

“Liar. You love it.” She pulled back and held me at arm’s length, reading my face. She’d been one of the first to know what I was. She’d watched the whole thing from the front row of being my friend. “You look different.”

“I’m not wearing the glasses.”

“That’s not what I mean.” Her mouth tilted. “You look loud.”

My stomach went tight and warm, all at once. It was the word I’d found in my own hallway, standing between three rooms that held three men, breathing in a life with nothing muted.

Loud.

“I feel loud,” I said.

Her grin sharpened. “Good. Because that hall’s full of people who are going to hear every note you make, and about eighty percent of them are going to cry. I’ve got money on Tuck crying first.”

“Tuck cries at adverts.”

“I heard that,” Tuck called from the catering table, where he’d appeared at the speed of a man whose stomach answers to the word sandwiches. “And I cry at specific adverts. The ones with dogs. There’s a difference.”

Bram stepped up beside me and put his hand out to Sloane.

“Alarie.”

“St.James.” She took it, held it a beat longer than she needed to. “You look less constipated than the last time I saw you.”

“I’ve been told my emotional range has expanded.”

“To what, two whole feelings?”

“Three,” Bram said. “On weekdays.”

Sloane laughed, full and thrown-back, the kind that turns heads. The amber bloomed through the room and met the peppercorn and chamomile and cedar like scents that had spent a year getting used to each other.

The other speakers were filtering in. I caught the introductions in pieces. A songwriter who’d gone viral performing with her full Omega voice for the first time. A podcaster building a platform for designation-inclusive storytelling. A voice actress, younger than me, newer, eyes wide in a room full of people who knew exactly what she’d been hiding. She’d named my broadcast as the night she decided to stop suppressing.

Her scent was lighter than mine, greener, citrus at the edges, but the Omega was unmistakable. She saw me and went still.

“You’re—” She stopped. Swallowed. Tried again, with the courage of someone who’d rehearsed this and was finding out rehearsal had nothing to do with it. “You’re Isobel Gretan.”

“I am.”

“Your recording. The ten-minute one.” Her voice came out thin. Not scared. Just packed too tight to fit through the words. “I listened to it in my car in the car park of the studio wherethey’d just told me my harmonics were distracting and I should look into vocal coaching. And I thought…”

She pressed her lips together. The citrus bloomed off her, the scent surge that comes with the spikes you can’t stop. She wasn’t stopping it.

“I thought, she sounds like me,” she finished. “And if she can do it, I can sit in this car five more minutes, and then I can drive home, and I can figure out how to do it too.”

The whine came out of me before I could catch it. Small. Bright. The Omega version of a hand held out, no strings on it.

She whined back.