They Stole My Songs

Chapter 10

The sponsor kept the tour alive for exactly nine days after the concert, and then it sent a letter.

I never saw the original document, but Noah summarized it for me in the stairwell between the second and third floors. He spoke in the flat voice of someone reading an inventory. The beverage giant that paid for the Neon Heart Tour would discuss renewing its sponsorship only after hearing the artist sing live, in a room, with their own technical team and equipment, and no supplemental audio of any kind. The industry press called it "a routine vocal verification," printing the phrase as if it were ordinary procedure rather than an accusation of fraud.

Dylan Cross prepared the way Dylan prepared. He hired an outside sound company at triple rates and built the lie directly into the rehearsal hall: a pad feed buried in the monitor chain, her microphone doubled, and the backing track ready to swell whenever her voice reached for a register she could not hold. As insurance, he reassigned Noah. Reassignment was cleaner than firing; it produced fewer questions and left no paper trail for corporate human resources. Noah Bennett, eight years in that building, was moved to logistics: the loading dock, cable inventory, a clipboard.

"They put a man on the dock," Noah told me, "because the dock is the one place in a building with no ears."

The audition list arrived at my apartment by courier. Elena had made certain in writing that I received all documents in the matter. It was a single printed sheet:

Artist: S. Vale. Selections: "Neon Heart," "Glass Halo." Stand-in vocalist (sponsor's request): M. Reed.

I sat at my kitchen table and read the last line four times. Somewhere in a glass office, a beverage executive who sold canned drinks in forty countries had watched the shaky phone video from row nine, like a hundred million strangers. If they were going to pay for the voice, they wanted to meet it.

Elena came by that evening to review the terms. "You attend as a witness, not a performer," she told me. "If they ask you to sing, you sing. But understand what the room is. It isn't a stage. It's a deposition with better acoustics. Every person in that room will someday describe it under oath." She answered the sponsor's invitation in writing, establishing my presence as formal record. "Paper, Maya," she said. "We are in the paper business now."

The rehearsal hall was in Burbank, concrete and carpet squares that carried the flat air of rented space. Scarlett arrived flanked by three personal assistants carrying garment bags and a paper cup of throat-coat tea that she did not drink. Dylan stood at the rented console, arms folded tight across his dark shirt.

The sponsor's contingent arrived together. There were six of them, dressed in dark polo shirts without corporate logos, carrying matching black laptop cases. They set up three folding tables against the back wall and began a systematic sweep of the room before anyone touched an instrument. They checked the distribution boxes and tested the lines with digital meters.

I stood beside the coat hooks near the exit, keeping my coat on and my hands in my pockets. As the sponsor's lead audio technician crossed the floor with a cable tracer, I stepped forward and caught his eye.

"Check the monitor chain," I said quietly.

I had watched Dylan build this exact lie for the tour. I knew where he hid a second feed when he needed to double a live channel. The technician stopped, studied my face for two seconds, and turned his scanner directly toward the distribution rack behind Dylan's console.

It took their lead tech eleven minutes to find the pad feed.

He worked without speaking, tracing patch lines through the junction box until he reached the sub-mixer. He uncoupled the grey line from the terminal strip and held the copper connector up in his right hand.

"Whose is this?" he asked.

Dylan stared toward the far exit and gave no answer.

The technician disconnected the secondary interface, set a single dynamic microphone on a straight stand in the center of the room, and stepped back. Scarlett walked to the center of the carpet squares, wrapped both hands around the metal shaft, and began to sing "Neon Heart" alone for the first time in her life.

She tried. She set her feet apart and drove into the first verse, trying to fill an untreated concrete box with an instrument engineered for digital correction. She reached the bridge the way she had in rehearsal, waiting for an elevator that does not come. There was no storage room. There was no ghost offstage, no Maya underneath her to carry the vocal intervals.

Her voice cracked on the turn, thinned to a rasp, and gave out completely. She stopped in the middle of the second verse, her hands frozen on the metal stand.

The technicians at the back table kept their fingers on their keyboards. The low hum of the roof cooling unit was the only sound left.

Above the mixer, the presentation screen had been idling on the sponsor's corporate logo, driven by an unattended venue laptop. The screen flickered, lost signal, and rolled to the venue's media server default: a folder of reference files synced that morning from Sterling's internal drive by an assistant.

My demo session filled the display. Every track stem appeared in vertical strips, labelled MREED in blue block text. Before anyone could move, the automated preview loaded a slideshow of photographs of my manuscript pages: my notebooks, my handwriting, and my dates in the corners, preserved in an assistant's automatic backup.

Every head in the room turned from the screen to the corner where I stood.

"Those are my dates," I said.

Scarlett looked at me across the carpet squares. She looked at me without turning away, her eyes fixed on my face in recognition. She released the microphone stand, walked past her three assistants and the undrunk tea, and closed the door behind her.

Dylan's phone rang before the latch finished settling.

He answered it, pressing the glass tight against his ear. I stood close enough to hear the temperature of Victor Sterling's voice: cold, unhurried, speaking as though dictating a routine memo from the top floor of the corporate tower.

Dylan nodded once. "I understand," he said. He looked straight at me. "Yes. Cleanly."

Victor Sterling had just given the order about the receptionist.