Page 5 of Heat Unscripted

Bram called the next beat, dropping in-game poetry into my headphones with the same ease he brought to seating chartsand mic placement, like nice sentences were just what happened when he opened his mouth.

The booth climbed another degree. I could feel the suppressants straining, the chemistry working harder to hold, the curtain thinning from opaque to something closer to see-through. Still holding. Nothing that needed to become a situation. But thinner than it had been this morning, and thinner than this room could afford.

I started making a list. Resupply at lunch, which was close enough to manage. Find the secondary green room, the one with a lock and no window onto the corridor, and take the backup dose I kept in the inner zip pocket of my kit bag, behind the spare stylus and the travel painkillers I never touched. I’d done this quietly for eleven years. I’d do it now, the same way, and no one at this table would know there’d been anything to do.

“…and the third transition marker,” Bram was saying, tracing the through-line of the act, when Tuck shifted in his chair.

He wasn’t looking at his script. Wasn’t really looking at anything. His gaze had gone to some middle-distance nothing, the look he got when something registered off to the side and hadn’t yet pulled itself into a thought. A stuntman’s reflex for information coming in from an angle he wasn’t facing. His brow had drawn together, loose and unfocused, the way it did when he was working something out before he knew he’d started.

“Hey,” Tuck said, with the easy certainty he brought to every offhand thing that later turned out to matter. “Iz.”

I looked up from my notes, calm, mildly curious, like there was absolutely nothing on my mind. “Mm.”

“You smell different today.”

The pen stopped.

“Sweet.” He still wasn’t quite looking at me, still aiming it at that vague point in the air, delivering it with the unconcerned curiosity of a man reporting the weather in a city he wasn’t in.“Like…” He tilted his head, considering, the scar shifting with the movement. “Like something good. Something that was good before it got buried under a lot of chemicals.” A beat. “Still good, though.”

The booth went very quiet.

Not silent. The equipment hummed on, steady and indifferent. From the bay came the distant click of Cillian’s fingers on his keyboard, and the ventilation kept up its useless, mostly decorative effort. But the quality of the quiet changed. The way it changes in a room where everybody decides, at the same second and without a word, to hold something very carefully.

Bram, on the comms, didn’t speak.

I opened my mouth. The Rogue had a whole kit for moments like this, deflections built to feel like counterattacks, misdirection dressed up as confidence. She was great at them. I, on the other hand, was experiencing a fairly comprehensive failure of every system I’d spent years building to keep her answers separate from mine.

Cillian’s voice came through before I got a single syllable out.

“That’s on me.” Calm. Precise. No hesitation, just a man who already knew what he was going to say and didn’t need a run-up to say it. “I ran a cleaning cycle on the ventilation filters a little while ago. The solvent they use for the deep clean has a secondary emission. Sweet, a little sharp underneath, kind of medicinal if you catch it early. Burns off within the hour.” A pause, the specific Cillian pause that wasn’t doubt but a gap he left for you to acknowledge him. “Should’ve flagged it at the top. Sorry for the distraction.”

The furrow between Tuck’s brows let go. He gave a short, satisfied nod at the air, the nod of a man whose world had just produced a clean explanation for weird data and gotten easier towalk through, and his shoulders dropped back into their usual ease.

“All good,” he said, easy, and looked back down at his script. “Didn’t smell bad, anyway. Smelled decent, honestly. Better than most cleaning products.” He found his place without ceremony, the whole thing filed under done. “What’s the cue for the third transition?”

I let out a breath. One controlled pull through my nose, slow, even, releasing nothing anyone could name. My grip on the pen loosened a finger at a time.

In the bay, Cillian had his head back over his board, attention split across the faders and monitors. He was making another note on his tablet, small and exact, the kind that would mean something to him and nothing to anyone else. The silver ring in his ear caught the blue off the monitor stack when he tilted his head, and the sound-wave tattoos on his forearms moved with the slow drift of his hands across the board. He didn’t look up at me through the glass.

He didn’t need to. We both knew he didn’t need to.

“Third transition,” Bram said, settling back into the headphones with the smooth authority of a GM picking up from a clean pause, like the interruption had just been a breath in the scene and not anything that needed naming. “Pick up from the bridge.”

I found my place. The Rogue was poised at the edge of an obsidian bridge in a world that didn’t exist except in the space between Bram’s voice and all of ours, composed, hiding everything, because she was a character and characters hide things on purpose. Craft, not survival. She kept her secrets because they were interesting. Because they served the story.

Mine didn’t serve anything. Mine just had to hold.

I settled my voice, brought her forward, and ran the scene.

FOUR

Isobel

Geneva in November had a cold that felt deliberate. The air came off the lake clean and flat, like the city had decided in advance how everything was going to feel and wasn’t taking suggestions. I’d caught the early train from London. Hours of gray landscape sliding past the window while I sat still and tried not to think about the sealed booth waiting for me in eleven days.

I thought about it anyway. The train didn’t care.

I tried not to think about Tuck’s comment either, the one that had dropped into that room and gone still on the surface, or the easy way Cillian had built a lie to cover me without anyone asking him to.