The first time my voice doesn’t belong to me, I’m standing alone on a darkened stage staring into a sea of empty seats.
The Golden Pulse Arena feels like the inside of a spaceship—miles of polished black floor, cold blue light puddling around metal rigs, a thousand invisible eyes waiting in the dark. In a few hours, every one of those seats will hold someone important. For now, it’s just me, a dead-silent PA system, and the mic I’m supposed to warm up.
“Line check, Callie?” The disembodied voice crackles in my in-ear from Front of House. The sound guy, Garth, sounds bored, which is comforting. Bored means nothing’s going wrong.
I step up to the center mic. It’s heavier than the beat-up ones back at the conservatory; it fits into my palm like something that costs more than my rent for the year. The LED ring at the base glows a soft white.
“Yeah,” I say, my voice bouncing back at me in ghosted echo from the ceiling. “Uh, main vocal. Testing one, two—”
“Give me some real air,” Garth says. “Run the chorus you did earlier.”
Of course. The one no one’s ever supposed to actually hear.
I close my eyes, just for a second. The emptiness swallows me, makes the space feel like a practice room instead of the most-watched stage in the world. I let my shoulders drop, shake out my hands.
Music has always been safest in the dark, when nobody’s looking.
I take a breath—deep, from the places my vocal coach drilled into me—and let the melody slide out.
“\"If we’re burning out the sky,
I’ll be the shadow in your light,
The secret name you never say—\"”
The line hangs there, clean and bright, riding on the arena’s perfect acoustics. My own voice comes back at me from a hundred angles, silk over glass.
“Damn,” Garth mutters in my ear. “Again, with the harmony this time.”
I do it without thinking, slipping into a parallel line, the kind of thing Eli and I used to stack for fun in our tiny apartment. It feels like cheating, doing it here. Like smuggling something intimate into someone else’s cathedral.
I finish the phrase and open my eyes.
The white ring at the base of the mic has gone gold.
Weird. Different channel. Whatever.
“Levels are beautiful,” Garth says. “You’re spoiling us. Alright, I’ll switch you off main, go ahead and run whatever, I’m patching in the track for Sol’s rehearsal.”
My stomach twinges at the name. Riven Sol. The reason half the city is buzzing outside, the reason I’m not allowed to take pictures backstage, the reason I signed twelve NDAs just to be here.
No big deal.
I step back from the mic to give the phantom of his highness some space. The house lights dim further, leaving only a faint halo on center stage. Somewhere far above me, the giant LED screen hums to life, glowing faintly.
I should leave. Go back to the labyrinth of cables and coffee-stained gaffer tape where the other tech students are pretending not to be starstruck. But my sneakers feel stapled to the stage.
There’s a weird thrill in singing words he’ll be singing in front of the whole world tonight. Like borrowing a stranger’s clothes from a distance.
