Page 16 of Bearly Out Loud

“Your breath control in the third movement is architecturally precise.” He said it the way someone said it when they meant it—no corporate sheen, no rehearsed flattery. “The way you shift from rage to grief without losing either one. Most performers choose one emotion. You carried both.”

“Thank you.” She held his gaze because she was Nari Wixx and she held everyone’s gaze. “That monologue was a single take at three in the morning. Best review of my career. Worth every second.”

She hadn’t expected that—the particular quality of his attention. Not executive interest. Recognition.

“Shall we read?” Priya’s voice cut through like a well-timed edit. “Or shall we continue the mutual admiration society until lunch?”

Dojin stepped back. Created distance. Nari appreciated the distance the way a person appreciated oxygen after holding their breath—necessary, restorative, and disappointing.

NINE

NARI

The script sat on the music stand in the booth. Yua Voidwalker’s introduction scene. Nari closed the soundproof door, adjusted the mic, and read the first page.

Her blood went cold.

No.

The character’s name was different. The world terminology had been filed down, sanded smooth, genericized in ways that might fool someone who didn’t know the source material. But the bones were there. The thirteen-gate mythology—restructured, relabeled, but architecturally identical to the system Grandpa Hideo had created. The Void Gate. The female ronin erased from history. The guardian who chose exile over obedience.

This was Sora Nightwind.

This was her grandfather’s unpublished work, dressed in a different costume and walking across someone else’s stage.

Priya’s voice came through the booth speakers. “Whenever you’re ready.”

Nari’s hands were shaking. She pressed them flat against her thighs. Breathed. Let the training take over—the muscle memory of a thousand sessions, the discipline that turned shock into fuel.

You are going to deliver this. And then you are going to find out who put it here.

She channeled the shock. Let the cold fury sharpen Yua’s introduction—a character emerging from shadows, declaring herself to a world that had forgotten she existed. The rage wasn’t manufactured. The grief was not performed. She gave the lines everything she had because the words belonged to a man she loved, and whoever had stolen them didn’t deserve the reverence she was about to pour into every syllable.

She finished. The booth was silent. The control room was silent.

Nari looked through the glass. Priya had taken off her glasses—a gesture Nari had never seen from a woman who treated her tortoiseshells like a surgical instrument. Dojin was standing in the back corner of the control room. Motionless. His hands on the edge of the console, his knuckles blanched.

The silence held for six seconds. Nari counted.

“Is the silence good or should I update my resume?”

Priya put her glasses back on. Pushed them up her nose. Took a breath. “That was acceptable.”

From anyone else, an insult. From Priya Brayo, a standing ovation. Nari filed that away and kept her face neutral, because inside, she was shaking with a fury that had nothing to do with professional accomplishment and everything to do with the stolen bones of her grandfather’s last story sitting on the stand in front of her.

Dojin said nothing. His eyes held hers through the glass—warm, stunned, searching for a word that apparently hadn’t been invented yet—and Nari looked away first because she wasnot going to have feelings through a soundproof window about a man whose company might be built on her family’s stolen IP.

Might. Investigate first. Feel later. Way later. Preferably never.

She pulled out her phone during the five-minute break Priya called.

Nari: The character is Grandpa’s. I’d bet my Louboutins.

Takumi: You love those shoes more than most humans.

Nari: Exactly.

Takumi: How sure?