Mara remembers the —a mysterious blaze that destroyed half of Arcadia’s analog equipment, blamed on an electrical fault, but whispered among staff as a sabotage. The studio’s owner, Victor Cheng , never talked about it again, and the room was locked.

Mara steps forward, clutching the FLAC file on a secure USB. “We’re not trying to profit from his work. We’re trying to preserve it. He left this song unfinished—he trusted us to finish it.”

A soft ding from the server rack pulls her attention to a notification: The filename is garbled, but the metadata reads “Artist: Unknown – Title: ‘Eclipse.’” No one on the roster has recorded a track with that name, and the file appeared out of thin air on the internal network.