Kylie Cantrall's Arc

Chapter 40 of 78

The morning after Kylie made the offer, Arianna asked the question that had no answer. "Where do we actually record it?" The manor was big, but every room had windows. Every window had a camera somewhere behind it. They had won one song. They had nowhere private to make it. Kylie walked the halls and listened. The living room echoed. The kitchen buzzed with the fridge. Voices carried through the walls. She could not sing here without the sound leaking out, and she could not risk another leak. The last one had stolen their private week. "We could rent a studio," Arianna said. But renting meant staff. Staff meant strangers. Kylie thought of her assistant, who she still did not trust, and of Malia, who had used trust like a key. "No," Kylie said. "No strangers near this song." Then she remembered the small room off the back hall. Her label had built it for her years ago and she had barely used it. She opened the door. A compact mixing desk sat under two studio monitors. A microphone hung on a stand behind a black screen. Gray foam panels covered the walls, dotted with orange and purple squares. The room swallowed her footsteps. No echo. No leak. "Sing something," Kylie said. Arianna stepped to the microphone and hummed one low note. Kylie shut the door. From the hall she heard nothing. She opened it again, grinning. "The panels eat the sound. Nobody outside hears a thing." But the room had a problem. It was built for one voice. One chair. One microphone. Kylie needed to layer her harmony over Arianna's lower part, and they had to hear each other while they sang. She pulled a second chair from the hall. She dragged the microphone stand to the center so both of them could lean in. Arianna tested the desk. The monitors clicked on. Her hum came back through the speakers, warm and close. "I can hear you and me at the same time," she said. Kylie sat beside her. Their shoulders touched at the single microphone. "Ready?" Kylie asked. Arianna nodded and started their song. Kylie waited for the low line, then dropped her harmony on top, the way she had planned since the ship. The two voices stacked clean in the speakers. No one had recorded it. No one had stolen it. It was theirs, captured for the first time in a room only they controlled. When the take ended, Kylie saved the file. She held the whole song in her hand now, hers and Arianna's, not a leak and not a rumor. "We have the recording," she said. "Now the label has to meet our terms, or they never get to release it." The private space was solved. What they did with the song was the next fight.