Chapter 22
LIORA
My hand shakes when I sign the damn thing. Not from nerves. From rage, maybe. Or disgust. Or grief that’s decided to move in and make itself comfortable under my skin.
The contract is thick enough to choke a cybelemoth and full of more legalese than a HoloNet scam agreement. I sign every page anyway.
Because the rent’s due. Pepper needs fuel cells for her image inducer. And last week, I almost sold my blood to a black-market biotech lab just to keep the lights on. So yeah, I’ll take the payday. Even if it means letting some sleazy studio exec package my trauma into a popcorn flick.
Planetary Pictures assigns me a driver. Not glamorous. Not discreet. He’s got a ponytail and plays synth-jazz on the ride over like he’s scoring a noir movie in his head. I don’t ask his name. He doesn’t ask mine.
The studio lot looks like a slice of dream gone sour. Glossy towers rising out of forgotten sprawl, all chrome sheen and fake optimism. There’s a giant holo-billboard over the gate with a mockup of the film’s title: THE MAZE: HEART OF REAPERS. Font looks like blood spatter. I want to throw up.
“Here we go,” I mutter as I step out of the hovercar, tugging my coat tighter around my middle.
Inside, the set smells like sawdust, overheating power couplings, and somebody’s lunch from three days ago. The air’s thick with stress and caffeine and the buzz of bad energy.
“LIORA RIN!” a voice bellows, and suddenly there’s a man sprinting toward me in a trench coat made of silver vinyl and a face full of stubble that looks glued on.
“Miles Maximus,” he says, grabbing my hand with both of his like I’m a visiting dignitary instead of a desperate woman with a contract and a child to feed. “Visionary. Auteur. Your biggest fan. You’ve made the bravest choice of your life, letting us tell your story. It’s gonna change the galaxy.”
I try to smile. It comes out more like a grimace. “Sure.”
He smells like espresso and energy gum. His eyes are too bright, the kind of bright that means the man hasn’t slept in at least three days. Behind him, a woman with a clipboard and a thousand-yard stare appears like a summoned demon.
“Deb,” she says, not offering a handshake. “Assistant director. Keeper of the chaos. Please don’t die on set. It complicates insurance.”
I actually laugh. Just once. Then the nausea comes back.
“Wardrobe’s through there,” Deb continues, gesturing with her stylus. “Your dressing room’s technically a repurposed storage closet. Don’t lean on the walls. One of them isn’t real.”
I blink. “Noted.”
They lead me past the set for the Maze interior. It looks nothing like the real thing. The lighting’s too clean. The walls are fake-rusted foam, and everything smells like fresh paint and cheap plastic.
And then I meet him.
Kane DeSoto.
Playing Gyon.
He’s built like a gladiator and wearing body armor that looks like it was designed by a committee of horny teenagers. His hair’s dyed silver and slicked back into a warrior-ponytail. He turns to me, grins wide enough to flash caps on every tooth, and says:
“Kane DeSoto is honored to meet the lady of the hour.”
My soul leaves my body.
“Kane DeSoto has read all the notes on Gyon’s character,” he continues, pumping my hand like we’re old friends, “and Kane DeSoto is ready to channel that primal power. That emotional depth. That raw, predatory sensuality.”
“I need to sit down,” I whisper.
He follows me. “You don’t mind if Kane DeSoto gets a selfie with you, right? For the fans.”
Deb steers him away with a death glare, and I exhale like I’ve been holding my breath for hours.
The first take starts an hour late.
It’s a scene based on a real moment—one where Gyon and I had to crawl through a collapsed maintenance tunnel, no light, no map, just each other’s breath to go by.
The script turns it into a love confession.
“I’ve never wanted anything,” Kane-DeSoto-Gyon says, eyes squinting heroically, “but Kane—Gyon—wants you.”
I nearly burst out laughing.
Or screaming. I can’t tell.
“Cut,” Miles says, sounding delighted. “Beautiful. That’s the stuff. That’s heart. Let’s go again but sexier.”
I stare at him. “Sexier? We were bleeding. I had a collapsed lung.”
He pats my shoulder like I’m an emotional support animal. “Art, babe. This is art. The audience needs to feel it.”
I think I black out for a second.
Between takes, I hole up in my not-room and try to rewrite lines on the sly. Deb catches me at it, raises one eyebrow, then hands me an old stylus. “Keep it subtle,” she murmurs. “Miles can’t read subtext anyway.”
Pepper’s in the green room with a rotating crew of bored assistants who think she’s adorable. Her inducer holds. Her eyes stay brown. Her temperature’s under control. But I check her every ten minutes anyway, heart pounding like I’m on a heist.
When I stop by for a break, she grins at me with jam on her face.
“I like it here,” she says. “They got pillows that make fart sounds.”
“High art,” I reply, and kiss her forehead.
By the end of the day, I feel like I’ve been stretched over a rack and asked to perform a musical number. Emotionally, physically, cosmically exhausted. And all I’ve done is say five lines, dodge Kane-DeSoto’s ego, and try not to scream every time someone says “creative liberties.”
But.
When I lie down that night, Pepper curled in the crook of my arm, I don’t feel hollow.
I feel scraped raw.
Like maybe, just maybe, there’s something worth salvaging in this wreckage.
Then I dream of Gyon.
He’s in a place I can’t reach. Sky above him. Blood on his knuckles. He says my name and I wake up with my throat tight and tears burning my eyes.
I touch Pepper’s hair. I stare at the ceiling.
And I try not to want anything.
I don't even wait for the AD to call wrap. The second they yell “Cut,” I’m already halfway off the soundstage, my boots smacking loud on the painted cement floor, the edges of my costume snagging on a prop crate.
Deb yells something after me—probably a reminder to sign out or return the Reaper-sim harness—but I don’t stop. I just keep moving.
The scene was trash.
It was supposed to be my moment—one of the few times I felt something like hope inside that gods-cursed Maze. But instead of raw survival, they made it into a damsel fantasy. Kane-DeSoto-as-Gyon dragged me out of fake rubble like he was hero-lifting a prize trophy. And the worst part?
They wanted a kiss.
Right there. Mid-fake-smoke and busted foam piping, while I’m in a synthetic “burn” suit and covered in theatrical grime.
I told them no. Firmly.
They filmed it anyway with a body double and a creative camera angle.
I slam my trailer door behind me so hard the handle rattles.
My lungs are burning, but I can’t seem to breathe.
The tiny space feels too small, the air too thick.
I strip off the costume in rough tugs, let it puddle at my feet, then crawl onto the little fold-out couch in the corner and pull my knees to my chest.
And I cry.
Not loud.
Just tight and silent, my face buried in my arms, my whole body shaking like it’s trying to eject the emotion by force.
Because it’s not the scene. Not really. It’s what it reminds me of.
The real version.
The heat of Gyon’s arm under mine as he pulled me out of that collapsed tunnel. The grunt he made as a beam scraped his ribs. The way he shielded me with his body even though he was bleeding, growling, panting.
“Stay behind me,” he’d ordered.
“Not a chance,” I’d snapped back, just before we both took a dive and landed in a pile of twisted metal.
The memory cuts so sharp I can’t tell what’s real anymore. What’s fantasy. What’s leftover trauma and what’s longing wearing a stolen face.
I eventually cry myself out. My skin’s tacky with sweat. My breath comes in shallow gasps. The hum of the set generators outside the trailer window pulses like a heartbeat too loud.
I fall asleep like that.
And that’s when I dream.
Not the usual fever-chatter dreams. Not the ones where Pepper's inducer fails in public or the press finds out or Gyon’s body is dragged out of rubble with a tag on his toe.
This one feels different.
Lucid. Heavy. Like memory wrapped in silk.
He’s standing at the edge of my field of vision when it starts—backlit by a violet sky I know I’ve never seen. His silhouette is all power, coiled and ready. His horns glow faint blue at the tips, like smoldering coals. And when he turns to face me, I forget how to breathe.
“Liora,” he says.
Just that.
My name.
Like a command. Like a secret. Like I’m the only thing that’s ever mattered.
I run to him—of course I do—and the second I reach him, his arms wrap around me, iron and warmth and that scent I’d almost forgotten: ozone and fire, metallic and primal, like the air before a storm.
His mouth finds mine before I can think. His kiss is brutal, hungry, possessive, and I melt into it like it’s home.
“You’ve been hiding from me,” he growls against my lips.
“You left,” I snap back, even though it’s a dream and we both know it.
His hands slide down my back, rough palms tracing the curve of my spine. “I never stopped looking.”
“You died.”
“No,” he murmurs, pressing his forehead to mine. “I survived. I always survive.”
I want to hate him. I want to scream and pound my fists against his chest and demand to know why he stayed gone. But I can’t. Because in this dream, his body is heat and gravity and everything I’ve denied myself for three long, empty years.
His mouth moves down my neck. “You still mine, little flame?”
I hate how fast I say, “Yes.”
He lifts me like I weigh nothing, hands spreading fire over my skin, lips trailing promises down my throat. My body arches to meet him, heat blooming low and dangerous. Every place he touches feels like waking up after a decade in the cold.
“I missed your fire,” he says, voice gone rough.
I claw at him like a starving thing, desperate and half-feral. I don’t care if it’s not real. If it’s just my wrecked brain giving me what I want for once. I don’t care. Because in this moment, I feel alive. Not surviving. Not pretending. Just alive.
He carries me to the edge of something—somewhere between stars and stone—and lays me down, covers me with his body, his heat, his fury, his need.
“You’re not real,” I whisper.
He bites my shoulder, just enough to sting. “Then wake up.”
I do.
Hard.
Bolt upright on the couch, the blanket twisted around my legs, my skin flushed and damp, my pulse drumming in every inch of me.
The trailer’s dark. The lot outside is quiet. My comm says it’s 3:42 AM.
I press a hand to my chest and feel the thrum of something I thought I’d buried.
I haven’t dreamed of him like that since the first year. Not in color. Not in touch.
I slide off the couch, legs unsteady, and splash cold water on my face in the trailer’s tiny sink. The mirror shows a flushed, wide-eyed version of me I barely recognize.
I whisper, “Get it together, Rin.”
But I don’t.
Because even now, even after three years, even after surviving without him and learning how to breathe through the emptiness, I still need him.
Like air.