Page 17 of Dragon Chaos Around

CHAOS: The orientation of my floor plans is not relevant to the structural assessment.

ALANI: It’s a little relevant.

CHAOS: Goodnight, Ms. Nores.

ALANI: Goodnight, Mr. Silverscale. I’ll be on the east wing floor tomorrow at 8am if you need a better vantage point. I recommend right-side-up this time.

She set the phone down.

Crystal and Giselle watched her from across the room with matching expressions that communicated, with devastating clarity, that the log was being updated and the risk management spreadsheet had a new entry and the two of them were going to be insufferable about this for the foreseeable future.

“Not a word,” Alani said.

“I didn’t say anything,” Crystal said.

“Mezzanine surveillance is now a recurring calendar event,” Giselle noted, her pen moving. “Filed under ‘dragon courtship indicators: preliminary.’”

Alani threw the last swatch. It missed. Crystal caught it. Giselle wrote it down.

The sabotage could wait until morning. She would handle it the way she handled everything: with competence, with strategy, with the unshakeable confidence she’d been building her entire life.

But first, she stared at the ceiling of her hotel suite and acknowledged—with the same brutal honesty she brought to budget reviews and vendor assessments—that he had texted her about construction at nine-thirty on a Friday night and her heart had kicked into the rhythm it had no business producing.

Her phone buzzed one final time.

CHAOS: 8am. I will be there. The floor plans will be correctly oriented.

Catastrophe in progress, the honest part of her brain confirmed.

She smiled at the ceiling.

SEVEN

ALANI

Hour thirty-one. Four espressos. Two showers. Zero sleep.

Alani stood barefoot on the balcony of her hotel suite, phone clamped between her shoulder and her ear, the September wind pulling at the oversized NYU sweatshirt she’d stolen from Royce’s closet six years ago and never returned. Manhattan hummed sixteen floors below—garbage trucks and early joggers and that five a.m. hush that passed for silence in a city that didn’t believe in it. The sky above Midtown was the bruised violet of a dawn that hadn’t committed yet.

“—and the scenic panels arrive Tuesday,” Maya Chen’s voice said through the phone, crisp despite the hour, running on the same combination of pride and caffeine that fueled Alani’s entire industry. “My structural lead flew in from Atlanta last night. He’s reviewed your specs for Zones 2 and 3, and he wants to reinforce the support framework for the twelve-foot villain silhouettes. It adds half a day to the timeline, but the stability margin goes from acceptable to bombproof.”

“Bombproof. I like bombproof. Approved.” Alani scrawled the adjustment on the construction timeline taped to the balcony’s glass door—she’d run out of desk space fourteen hours ago and had colonized every vertical surface in the suite. The glass was covered in sticky notes, timelines, vendor contact sheets, and one passive-aggressive fortune cookie message that Crystal had taped at eye level: The woman who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the woman doing it.

“The atmospheric rigs are shipping from the Chicago warehouse tomorrow,” Maya continued. “Cracked oil machines, LED panel arrays, and the custom fog diffusers. I pulled the units we used for the Villain Expo installation—they’re field-tested and code-compliant.”

“You’re an angel.”

“I’m a woman who you once helped redesign an entire convention floor in nine hours while a peacock screamed in the loading dock. Angels wish they had my project management skills.”

Alani laughed. The sound scraped—raw from thirty-one hours of continuous phone calls, negotiations, vendor coordination, and the kind of logistical problem-solving that would have broken a less caffeinated woman. She didn’t care. The laugh was real, and it tasted like victory.

Maya Chen—founder of Apex Experiential Design, three-time industry award winner, owner of the best atmospheric rig fleet on the East Coast—had agreed to take the Silverscale contract at eleven p.m. on Saturday night, eighteen hours after NovaCraft’s exit.

She’d agreed because the project was the Silverscale Convention and every experiential designer in the country wanted their name on it. She’d agreed because Alani had designed the scope and Maya trusted Alani’s creative vision. And she’d agreed because Alani had spent eight years building the kind of industry relationships that converted a midnight phone call into a yes when any reasonable person would have said too late, too compressed, too risky.

The cost was higher. Maya’s team was smaller than NovaCraft’s, which meant subcontractors. Subcontractors meant premium rates. The budget gap between NovaCraft’s original contract and Apex’s revised quote sat in Alani’s mental ledger like a splinter: forty-seven thousand dollars.

She’d eat it.