Hiya @hendrix617 and sorry to be slow to get back to you! I think this is the advice you need:
The TL;DR is you need to “do something” with that variable - setting it is great for usage during build; for usage at BROWSE time you’ll need to interpolate its values during build, since there is no concept of an “environment” at runtime - just static files that need to have any variables interpolated already.
If you need to hide your API token, that won’t be a good idea - I can see it in your page source. In that case you probably need a function like this one to “hide” the token when using it: