Mira Hoshino's Arc

Chapter 2 of 4

Mira woke up to her phone buzzing in the dark. Not the alarm. Notifications. She grabbed it and squinted at the screen. Her latest track had seventeen thousand shares overnight. The comments section scrolled past in a blur of names and rage, and three screens down someone had posted the corporation's logo with a red X through it. She pulled on yesterday's jacket and walked to the record stall where she'd left the burner phone two weeks ago. The vendor didn't ask questions when she handed him tracks to sell, and he didn't ask now when she checked the phone's cracked screen. The comments had kept coming while she slept. GiganCorp named in half of them. Someone had pulled contract dates. Someone else had matched her lyrics to leaked emails. The critique she'd buried in the bridge wasn't hidden anymore. The public screens near the market corridor showed her track climbing the feeds. One of them displayed the comments in real time, the corporation's name appearing over and over like graffiti spreading across glass. Mira stood there watching people stop and read. A woman pointed at the screen and said something to her friend. Two kids took photos. The critique was out of her hands now, moving faster than she could catch it, and tomorrow she'd have to face her cousin knowing the plan had already started without her permission. She dropped the burner phone in a recycling chute on her way back. The cracked screen went dark as it fell. Her real phone kept buzzing in her pocket, but she didn't check it. The meeting was in sixteen hours and the only question left was whether her cousin would recognize this as the moment Mira chose the message over the safety they'd both fought for. She'd wanted to control the exposure, to time it perfectly. Instead it had gone viral while she slept, and now the only choice was whether to own it or run from it when her cousin asked.