Chaos at the Concert

My half-sister's voice came through the cheap backstage door. Without auto-tune, Chloe sounded shrill. “She’s not going to just hand over the copyrights, Liam. She built everything.” “She will.” Liam sounded as certain as he had last night, when he'd whispered promises against my ear. “Aria is sentimental. We offer her a tiny severance, she cries, then she signs. If she refuses, the evidence I planted will make it look as if she's been stealing from the company for years. She'll be worrying about jail, not negotiating.” I leaned closer until the cold door handle pressed into my cheek. “Her life's work.” Chloe gave a small, ugly laugh. “And it'll all be mine. Officially.” “It always was, baby,” Liam said. “She was a useful tool. A brilliant one, but tools can be replaced.” Five years. I had spent those five years building Crossfade Records from nothing. My proprietary layering system had turned Chloe's thin voice into a global phenomenon. Liam kept me in a soundproof room while the two of them took the applause. Now they planned to take the copyrights too. Last night's promises, the ring on my hand, the way Chloe used to thank me after a session: all of it felt suddenly cheap. I waited for the tears Liam had predicted. They did not come. My mind had already moved to passwords, backups, and the ten-minute gap before the encore ended. I took out my phone and started recording. Through the gap, I caught the rest: Liam would lock me out of the servers, feed the press a doctored story, and let Chloe cry on camera about her sister's betrayal. They discussed it like a release schedule. Liam had planted the records already. Chloe knew which reporter would take the first interview. By the time they finished, my theft and breakdown had been packaged for the morning news. That was enough. I left the door without making a sound and headed through the backstage corridors. Code first. Grief could wait. They were on stage, taking their final bows. They had ten minutes before they’d come looking for me to celebrate. I had nine. Barry, the guard outside central control, gave me a friendly nod. “Big night, Aria!” “The biggest.” I made myself smile. I sat at the triple-monitor console. The servers hummed under the desk while my hands moved through commands I'd used thousands of times. This room had been mine long before Liam started calling it executive infrastructure. I knew which drive ran hot, which monitor lost color at the edges, and where every cable went behind the wall. If Liam had ever paid attention in here, he might have searched for the backdoor I was about to use. I bypassed Liam’s executive-level access in twelve seconds. My own backdoor, a little insurance policy I’d built years ago, opened the core server. `Project Nightingale. Master Files.` Every beat, layered vocal, and line of code was there. Everything that had turned Chloe from a karaoke singer into a star. The directory held years of midnight takes and corrections no one else knew how to reproduce. Chloe had sung the raw tracks. I had built the voice the public recognized. `TRANSFER`. I sent the directory to an encrypted offshore cloud server registered under a name Liam would never find. The progress bar crawled. Come on. The crowd was chanting Chloe’s name beyond the walls. They kept the rhythm while the bar advanced, thousands of voices giving her credit for sound that still lived under my hands. `98%`. `99%`. A new message popped onto the screen. It was from Liam. `Where are you? Come to the stage. Time to pop the champagne.` `TRANSFER COMPLETE.` I armed a command I'd written in advance. In sixty seconds, it would wipe every local and network copy of Project Nightingale. The transfer was safe. The copyrights were mine. All Liam would have after the wipe was hardware and a singer he had never heard without me. Then I crossed to the wall panel. A plastic cover protected the red switch for the arena's main grid. I flipped the cover up. My phone buzzed again. Liam. `Aria?` I pulled the switch. The servers went quiet. The arena went black, and the crowd fell silent for half a second. Then, chaos. Screams rose from the stands. Emergency lights blinked on in the hall, and an alarm started. I had my cover. Crew members poured through the doors at once, shouting for flashlights and backup power. No one looked twice at the woman in black moving with them. I slipped past Barry while he fought with his radio, then joined the rush of stagehands and crew. “Aria!” Liam yelled from down the hall. Two of his security guards were coming toward me. I ducked into a side passage and found a dead end with one unmarked door. The oak door belonged to one of the private VIP rooms reserved for people whose names never appeared on the guest list. It was the only way out of the passage. I shoved it open, stumbled inside, and let it swing shut. The alarms vanished behind the soundproofing. Someone was in the corner. Before I could call out, a hand closed around my wrist and yanked me backward against a man's chest. An arm wrapped around my waist, pinning me. I was trapped. His voice scraped across my ear. “Who the hell are you?”