Page 96 of Heat Unscripted

Network has made Friday’s discontinuation final. All of their actions withdrawn, effective immediately. No conditions. Ours continues. — M. Collinsworth

Below it, a second message. Sloane.

I’m opening champagne. You’re buying the next bottle. Welcome to the loudest side of the wall.

And under Sloane’s, one more. Tessa, who’d watched the whole thing the way she watched everything, quietly and completely.

Told you it would depend on who was in the room. Look who was in the room.

I read it twice. The studio was warm with four scents. Cedar and peppercorn and sandalwood and chamomile, merged so completely the separate notes only showed up as texture inside one whole thing. The smell of a pack in a room where something had changed, where the air itself held a truth that had been spoken and taken in and carried out by ten million people into a world that was going to have to deal with it.

I sat in my chair. In my studio. In my flannel and my glasses and my actual face.

The camera was dark. The broadcast was over. Tomorrow the numbers would be tallied and the articles would be written and the industry would shift or dig in and shift anyway, because the sound of an Omega voice at full frequency can’t be un-heard, and the face of the woman behind it can’t be un-seen.

But that was tomorrow.

Tonight, Tuck’s arms around me, Bram’s hands on my shoulders, Cillian at the board where he’d spent six years engineering my safety and would spend the rest of his life engineering something better. Four people in a room that smelled like all of them.

I was done hiding. Let the world catch up.

THIRTY-THREE

Isobel

The studio smelled like all four of us now.

That was the thing that hit me first, before I’d even sat down. Cedar and bourbon, dark peppercorn, sandalwood, chamomile, all of it soaked into the foam panels and the chair and the grain of the desk. The room used to smell like nothing. Now it smelled like a home somebody actually lived in.

Same acoustic foam. Same silver microphone on its stand. But the chair carried my shape. The mic stood at the height I’d set when I stopped treating it like a thing I had to beat.

A witness. That was all it had ever been.

Cillian had rebuilt the broadcast rig from scratch. Not the network’s system, his own, routed through Resonance Media’s servers and out to a platform that carried our signal because it had no reason to kill it. The camera sat dark, angled at the table. Four chairs. Four microphones. Four sets of dice.

The Shadows of the Stream finale. For real this time.

The marathon was behind us. The sealed booth, the whine, the three seconds that had cracked my whole life open. This was the other thing. The last session of a campaign that had run three seasons across four years of development, productionmeetings, rewrites, and late nights in Bram’s penthouse and rehearsal booths where I’d sat fourteen inches from Tuck and told myself the distance was professional and not biological.

The difference this time was the audience knew. They’d seen my face. Heard my designation. Watched me say the years of hiding out loud without flinching. Millions of them now, the number climbing on Cillian’s dashboard, and they weren’t here for a show. They were here to watch four people who loved each other play pretend, and to see what was left when the pretending stopped being the point.

Tuck arrived first.

Cedar and bourbon came through the door ahead of him, filling the room before his body cleared the frame. He wore the flannel, a fresh one, blue-gray, soft at the collar, not one I’d stolen for the nest. His dice bag hung off his belt loop. The scar through his eyebrow caught the desk lamp as he ducked under the doorway.

“Already in the millions, huh,” he said, and dropped into his chair like it had been built around him over three years. The chair groaned its usual complaint. “That’s a lot of people watching me roll nat ones.”

“Your likelihood of rolling a nat one is above the statistical mean, actually.” Cillian didn’t look up. His fingers moved across the faders, not adjusting, just checking. “I tracked it across all three seasons. You have some strange luck”

“You tracked my dice rolls?”

“I track everything.”

“That’s either romantic or terrifying.”

“Both.” The corner of Cillian’s mouth moved. Half a second, more shift than smile, the thing I’d learned meant he was actually amused. “Both is accurate.”

The door opened again, and the peppercorn reached me before Bram did.