The first thing to hit was the heat, dense as a wool blanket the instant the limo door unsealed. Bri’s glasses fogged, then cleared, and she was still blinking when Asune’s arm locked around hers, fast and proprietary. There was no warning. No, “are you ready,” no, “brace yourself.” Just the slide of warm, perfectly-manicured fingers into the crook of Bri’s elbow and an urgent, whispered: “Let’s make you look stuck up and bitchy for tomorrow’s tabloids.”

Before Bri could protest, Asune yanked her bodily from the air-conditioned shadow into the glare of a thousand camera flashes. It was a maneuver so practiced that even the limo driver, holding the door with a practiced smile, didn’t flinch. He just watched Asune work, a student of chaos recognizing a master at her craft.

Asune’s posture changed immediately. Shoulders back, chin up, eyes narrowed to a lethal, paparazzi-friendly squint. Bri, trailing behind by half a pace and three stages of social readiness, let herself be led, defaulting to the only defense she had ever found effective: going somewhere else behind her own eyes. It worked. The nerves smoothed out. Her face went blank. If she looked “stuck up and bitchy,” so be it. The sunglasses gave her an edge.

The scene outside the car was every bit as loud as it had looked from within: camera flashes stuttering so fast they made the daylight flicker; shouts of names, none of them hers; the low, adrenalized roar of a crowd held barely in check by velvet rope and muscle-bound security. For one wild second, Bri wondered if Asune had rehearsed this exact exit in the mirror, complete with the microsecond pause at the curb and the calculated half-smile for the nearest camera.

Asune didn’t seem to care whether anyone recognized them, only that they be seen. She raised a hand, gave the smallest, hand twist in history, then pivoted on the ball of her foot and steered Bri directly into the blast zone of the red carpet. Her nails dug in just enough to be noticed.

The carpet itself was already mobbed. To their left, a pod of Diamonds and Golds in flawless white jackets had formed a glittering blockade, with Mako at the center, flanked by a flock of girls all perfectly blow-dried and identically poised. They looked as if they’d redone their makeup and hair in the limo, all perfectly blow-dried and identically poised. Mako clocked Bri and Asune, gave them a dismissive head-to-toe scan, and turned away with a laugh loud enough to carry. Bri felt it but didn’t react, not even a twitch. Next to them, a line students jockeyed for selfies, each one craning to catch the best angle of the Erebus looming overhead.

To their right, the press area: a dense clot of camera operators and bloggers in matching shirts, all yelling at once in a language that was fifty percent English, fifty percent brand name. “Look here! Over here, please!” “Smize for TikTok, ladies!” “Big smiles!” The voice didn’t care if you were famous, as long as you filled the frame, they could sell the shot.

Asune guided them past the first photo op with a queen’s wave and the blank, proud look she’d perfected in years of pretending not to care what people thought. “You’re doing great,” she hissed through her teeth. “Give them nothing.”

Bri let her face freeze. It wasn’t hard. Despite her ultimate desire to fade into the background, she’d had a lot of practice trying to disappear at events with her mother. The sun stabbed off every reflective surface. She just aimed her gaze somewhere between the ship and the horizon and waited for the ordeal to be over.

For all the chaos, the whole scene was orchestrated. Security had them funneled to a second, smaller entry point: the VIP drop-off. It was lined with potted palms, a velvet runner, and a discreetly waiting porter in a white jacket. He wore a badge that said “Edwardo,” but the set of his jaw said, “I will die before I let you carry your own bag.”

Asune nudged their luggage toward the porter without breaking stride. “First impressions,” she said, sotto voce, her hand squeezing Bri’s arm as she steered them toward another bank of cameras. “Look like you’re having fun, and nobody can touch us.”

Just then, a news drone buzzed low overhead, its lens fixed on their faces. Bri flinched, her instinct to flee warring with her paralysis. Instead, she forced a smile that felt more like baring her teeth.

Asune gave a tiny nod of approval. “Perfect. We look like we only showed up to mock everyone else.”

Bri wanted to laugh. No money, she thought, the words a hard knot in her stomach. She belonged here about as much as a stray cat at a dog show—but the noise swallowed the thought before it could form.

The last leg of the carpet led them past a photo wall dotted with the cruise’s sponsors: alcohol, tech, fashion, all jostling for logo supremacy. Asune stopped them in front of it, struck a pose, and whispered, “This is your moment.”

Bri, caught in the crossfire of three camera flashes, did her best impression of someone who didn’t have a care in the world.

Asune grinned, eyes glittering. “You’ll thank me when you see the pictures.”

There was a trick to surviving the next gauntlet, Asune said: “Act like you’ve done this a hundred times. Or like you’re too rich to ever be guilty of anything.” She snatched her suitcase back from the white-jacketed porter and sailed toward the security line, Bri in tow, never breaking stride.

VIPs had their own entrance. No long snake of bored teenagers, no hissed instructions from frazzled teachers. Instead: a single, velvet-roped lane. The queue moved fast, but at the price of being stared at by a half-dozen bored staffers in blue blazers. Their eyes scanned every face, every outfit, every twitch.

At the front, a girl with diamond pins in her dark, perfectly styled hair was being escorted through the scanner arch. Asune leaned in, voice low and catty: “That’s Sheba, you take English with her, right? Bet she snuck in some good stuff.” “Yeah.” Bri lips quirked, “I heard she throws a hell of a party.”

The arch was twice as tall as a standard airport model, pure matte black, bracketed by two standing staffers with tablet stations.

As they edged forward, Asune started rattling off instructions to the next porter about her bags: “That one is fragile. That one is temperature sensitive. This one? Don’t let her open it unless I’m present, or it will get ugly.” The porter’s nod was slow and patient, his expression unchanging. He’d clearly heard this speech before, in all its variations, and would forget it by the time the bags hit the hold.

Bri watched, arms folded, until the porter reached for her own battered backpack. She clutched her battered backpack, unwilling to let it out of her sight.

Asune shrugged. “You’re about to get it back anyway. Security is less than a minute.”

It was true. The whole thing moved with the precision of a magic trick: bags whisked away, students shuffled forward in pairs, then single file through the black arch. The arch didn’t beep or blink or even acknowledge their existence; it just swallowed people and spat them out the other side, a silent filter.

When it was her turn, Bri stepped through the arch and into a moment of total silence. For half a heartbeat, the world outside the frame ceased to exist. Then the staffer on the right, a man with perfect skin and unflinching gaze, said, “Please place your phone and all electronics in the tray.”

Bri did as she was told depositing her bag, pulling out her phone, scratched and stickered but still functional, looked sad next to the luxury models in the other trays. She nudged it forward, half-expecting it to vanish or be judged unworthy.

The tray glided under a scanner, glass panel flashing blue for a split second. Bri watched the machine, certain it was looking at more than just battery size and serial number. There was a rumor that these new models could copy your entire life in three seconds flat: every photo, every text, every location you’d ever let your phone track.

The staffer handed her phone back. It felt warm.

“Here you go.” he said. His eyes flickered over her glasses, her hair, her face, logging every feature. Then he looked past her, dismissed.

On the other side of the arch, Asune was already done. She leaned against the wall, calmly touching up her lip gloss in a pocket mirror, oblivious to the scan. She caught Bri’s eye in the mirror and grinned.

“You survived,” said Asune. “See? Painless. Now you’re officially a VIP.”

Bri rolled her eyes. She slipped the phone into her pocket, resisting the urge to check if anything had changed on it. If her privacy had been stripped, she didn’t want to know about it here, under the camera gaze of a dozen strangers.

They moved away from the checkpoint, which, up close, looked less like airport security and more like a test chamber for lab rats. Another batch of students queued behind them, most of them glancing nervously at the scanner, some joking, some sweating.

Asune licked her lips, satisfied with the touch-up. “You want to know a secret?” she said, lowering her voice. “Every single time, I tense up thinking I’ll set off an alarm.”

“Asune continued. “It’s ridiculous. I’m not hiding anything, but my stomach just drops. Makes no sense.”

Bri nodded in agreement. “Yeah, I get the same way too. Maybe it's an authority thing?” She nodded, and the knot in her shoulders loosened, just a little. The stupid conversation was working.

From here, a velvet rope cordoned them off from the next stage. Asune ignored it, drifting to the edge of a huge, glass-walled tunnel that ran from the terminal straight to the ship. It was empty, the sunlight blasting through and throwing sharp geometric patterns onto the carpet. The Erebus filled the entirety of the view, an open mouth waiting to swallow them.

Asune paused, eyes on the ship. “You and I could run this whole deck,” she said, mostly to herself. “They’d probably give it to us if we asked nicely. Or threatened them. Either way.”

“Who are you kidding. Your parents would disown you.” Bri found herself smiling. It lasted only a moment, but it was real. Asune looked at her without her usual bravado. “Worth it.”

On the far side of the tunnel, they watched as the Diamonds re-formed into their glittering cluster, all hair tosses and performative laughter, every move a calculated signal to the cameras. To the left, a Gold group formed up, Houston front and center, already working the selfie angle with the ship as backdrop.

Asune looked over at the lower tier groups, the Steels and a handful of other Silvers. Her gaze softened. “They look so nervous,” she said. “Like it’s all going to go wrong the second they step on.”

“Bri watched them. “It’s easier to be scared when you have something to lose.”

“Maybe.” Asune slotted her arm back through Bri’s. “But you and I are not.”

She tugged Bri forward, toward the tunnel’s entrance. “Let’s go,” she said. “You’re not allowed to have a panic attack until at least dinner.”

“Noted,” said Bri.

They walked on, leaving the security checkpoint and the media circus behind a wall of thick, sound-dampening glass. Ahead, the ship didn’t just loom; it filled the sky, a silent, white monolith waiting to swallow them whole.