Page 8 of Heat Unscripted

I picked every piece myself. The floor-to-ceiling windows that turned London into something silent and far away. The panels on the walls that looked like art and were really there to kill the echo. The lights that dimmed on a schedule, so I never had to think about them. I made a place where I could work without anyone else’s noise getting in. That work had taken Shadows of the Stream from a thing I did on weekends to a thing people lined up for.

Tonight the place wasn’t empty.

Isobel Gretan was in the leather chair I’d put by the east window, legs folded under her, which made her look even smaller than she was. She had a pencil stuck in her hair again, blue this time instead of the usual yellow or silver. Her glasses had slid halfway down her nose and she hadn’t pushed them back.

I noticed that. I noticed it more than I needed to.

“The Rogue’s arc in the third act,” I said, dragging us back to it. “You’ve written her choosing the pack over the mission.”

“I’ve written her figuring out the pack is the mission.” She didn’t look up. Her pen kept moving in the margins, fast, sure, notes I’d fold in tomorrow because her read on character had never once been wrong. “The treasure was never the point. The point was finding people worth splitting it with.”

“That’s a big tonal swing from the first two acts.”

“It’s the only ending that makes sense.” Now she looked up, and her eyes behind the lenses were level and had no apology in them at all. “She’s been faking independence the whole campaign. Sooner or later the act has to cost her something. Otherwise it’s just posing.”

I held her look a beat too long. The line landed harder than a note about a character usually did. I set the feeling aside to deal with later and kept moving.

“The tea should be done.”

I went to the sideboard where I’d laid out the service. I made it the same way every late night, the same blend, the water at the right heat, the timing exact. The routine settled me. It settled me tonight too, though I couldn’t have told you what needed settling.

Her scent reached me while I poured. Chamomile and something clean and chemical under it, the Beta Neutral she wore like a coat she never took off. I’d noticed it the first time we met and filed it away the way I file everything. Just a fact. Nothing to it. Plenty of people in this business spray on the neutral so nobody notices their designation in a mixed room. Sensible. Boring.

What sat under it was harder to name.

I carried her cup to the little table by her chair. She took it with a nod, nothing extra in it, no smile she didn’t mean. I liked that about her. She never spent a gesture she didn’t owe. It made working with her easy in a way most of this work isn’t.

“For the voice recording tomorrow,” I said, going back to the sideboard. “I had something sent over.”

The jar was small, amber glass, the label written by hand in a font I couldn’t read. The seller told me what was in it. Raw honey with licorice root and marshmallow, the kind of thing singers take. I’d read up on it for a while before I bought it. Three different opera houses had pointed me to the same source.

I brought it over and held it out.

“Herbal honey,” I said. “For your throat. The licorice brings down swelling. The marshmallow coats the cords. You’ve been running longer sessions than usual for the finale, and I’ve noticed—” I stopped myself. Changed lanes. “The recording’s going to be hard on your voice. This should help.”

She looked at the jar. Then up at me. The corner of her mouth twitched, like she’d almost said something else, there and gone before I could get a name on it.

“You read up on vocal care.”

“I read up on anything that affects the production.”

“My vocal cords affect the production.”

“Obviously.”

She was smiling now, small and a little crooked, and it changed her whole face so completely that it got hard to picture her without it. I’d seen her smile before. At Tuck’s jokes, at Cillian’s flat little observations, at the moments in the campaign that hit clean. I just couldn’t remember her aiming one at me before, not like this. Like I’d done something she hadn’t expected a person like me to do.

She reached for the jar.

Our fingers touched.

It was nothing. A half-second brush, the kind that happens a hundred times a day when people hand each other things. I’ve shaken more hands than I can count. Passed papers and diceand coffee across a hundred tables and never once felt any of it as more than objects moving from one place to another.

My pupils went wide.

I knew because I felt it go. The sudden open, the rush of light, the room’s careful glow turning sharp and bright for a second. My chest pulled in air I hadn’t asked it for. The pepper in my own scent, a thing I usually never notice, went sharp enough to taste at the back of my tongue. My gut tightened. One word surfaced before I could stop it. Mine. I threw it out the second it landed.

Isobel’s eyes went wide behind her glasses.