Suzie Troll set her sticks down and checked her phone again. The Just Girlz had blown up overnight, and Mic wanted a piece of it. He'd cut a promo clip for his label, pushing the band as the next big thing — but she hadn't seen the final edit yet. All she wanted was to hold on to the people who knew her before any of this. Across town, the old crew crowded into a small editing studio, packed shoulder to shoulder around a bright screen. Mic's clip played loud. Suzie's face filled the frame. Their faces did not. Every shot of the early days had been scrubbed clean, like they'd never been in the room at all. Someone paused the screen. The silence after was worse than the clip. They thought she'd signed off on it. They thought she'd chosen this. Suzie found out from a single text: "saw the cut. nice work." She read it twice. Then she drove straight to her uncle's place, because Billy would tell her the truth without dressing it up. He watched the clip once. He said, "That one lands different. You didn't make it, but they think you did. So you fix it." She dug through her bag and pulled out the crumpled lyric notebook from those early days — the unfinished song they'd all started together, her handwriting tangled with theirs. Underneath it, the original uncut tape Mic's team had handed her as a courtesy. She hadn't watched it. She did now. The full footage was all of them. Every face. Every laugh. Suzie brought both to the old crew that night. She set the tape on the table and the notebook beside it. "I didn't choose the cut," she said. "But I let it get this far." They didn't smile. They didn't hug her. But one of them picked up the notebook and turned to the unfinished page. It was a start. And somewhere across town, Billy was already on the phone with Mic, and Mic was about to learn that using Billy's niece had a price.

Suzie slid into the back booth of the diner before sunrise. Mollie was already there, hands wrapped around a cold mug. She talked fast and low. Mic had split the girls up. He was sending them to the new studio across town, not their old room. He'd given each of them a leather-bound journal and told them to write only the version of the story he approved. Mollie pushed her own journal across the table. Suzie read a page. Then another. It was Mic's words in Mollie's handwriting. Suzie felt her stomach drop. She thought of the book Mic had written about her uncle — the one she'd stayed up reading. It wasn't about music. It was about a man who couldn't stand being smaller than Billy. Now he was doing the same thing to her. She drove straight to the new studio. The old crew was waiting on the rusty iron gate outside, sitting on it like a row of birds. They didn't wave. They watched. Mollie nodded once. That was enough. Mic met her at the door of the private booth. He smiled the way he smiled in photos. He held out a fresh leather journal with her name pressed into the cover. "Write it the way we talked about," he said. "Keep it clean. Nothing about the early days. Nothing about Billy." He paused. "You say the wrong thing, you lose the deal. Simple." Suzie looked at the journal. She looked past him at the booth, at the red light waiting. She thought about the crew on the gate. She thought about every week for the past year she'd picked the easier silence. She set the journal down on the console, unopened. "I'm not writing that," she said. "I'm recording the truth. All of it. The early days. The cut. What you did to my uncle." She stepped into the booth and shut the door behind her. She pressed record. She said their names — every girl, every song, every room before this one. When she came out, Mic was gone. The crew was still on the gate. Mollie stood up first. She didn't smile. But she walked toward Suzie, and the others followed.

Suzie stood outside the booth and watched the crew watch her. The red light was off. Mic was gone. On the console, a torn page lay where his journal had been. She picked it up. It was a address scrawled in his hand, and one word underlined twice: tonight. Mollie read it over her shoulder. The punk club across town. Mic's old stomping ground. He would have a stage, a mic, and a room full of people ready to believe the loudest voice. Suzie's stomach went cold. He would speak first, and she would spend a year cleaning it up. She drove. Mollie rode shotgun. Two blocks from the club, traffic stopped. People were standing in the street. Someone had nailed a hand-painted board to a post: DOWN WITH MIC. Then another. Then a row of them, taped to windows and pressed into fists. A woman stepped off the curb and put a hand on Suzie's hood. Orange hair. Six months pregnant. She didn't knock. She just waited until Suzie rolled the window down. "I'm Amber," she said. "He owes me. He owes you more." She held up a folded newspaper. The headline screamed about Suzie's uncle. Lies, top to bottom. "He printed a thousand. He's handing them out at the door right now. Trying to sell them. Trying to sell me a story too." Suzie took the paper. Amber's hand stayed on the hood a second longer. "I loved him," Amber said, quieter. "I'm not asking you to care. I'm asking if you're listening." Suzie nodded. She was. Down the block, a kid ripped a copy of the paper in half and dropped it. Then another. The crowd wasn't buying. The signs kept going up. Suzie got out. She walked past the protest boards, past the torn papers in the gutter, straight to the club door. She didn't go in to fight him. She went in to stand where he was standing and tell the room what was already on her phone — the recording, the names, the truth. By the time she reached the stage, Mic was talking to an empty half of the room. The other half had already turned to look at her. He had moved first. He had lost anyway.