CHAPTER 17
Clara
Ten minutes is not time.
It is a weapon with numbers on it.
TEN MINUTES UNTIL THE LAST TAKE.
Avery is somewhere with water falling over her and a red door behind her.
Avery is alive now.
Not eleven years ago. Not in an edited statement. Not in a clean report. Now.
I stand.
My legs dislike the decision. They file paperwork. I ignore them.
“We’re going,” I say.
Alvarez is already moving. “We are. You are going with paramedics.”
“No.”
“Great. There it is.”
Malcolm says nothing.
That is new.
I turn toward him before I can stop myself.
He stands beside Casey with the Edda Marsh folder in his hand, jaw tight, borrowed windbreaker too short in the sleeves, ash on his throat.
His left shoulder sits lower than the right, but his hands stay still.
No reach. No grab. No command dressed as care.
He looks like a man swallowing a door.
“Say it,” I tell him.
His eyes meet mine.
The hallway alarm screams overhead. Diana is yelling at a firefighter about the disabled suppression system. Casey is crouched over the drive, face pale, muttering transfer percentages like prayer. A storage manager is trying to cry quietly near the vending machine.
Malcolm takes one breath.
“I want to say you shouldn’t go,” he says.
“Good start.”
“It’s not my decision.”
“Better.”
“If you go half-dead, you slow down the team.”
“There he is.”
His mouth tightens, but he doesn’t retreat into silence. “You’re coughing. Your hands are shaking. You nearly got trapped in a burning unit. That matters operationally, not romantically.”
“Romantically?”
His face changes.
A small, disastrous realization that he used the wrong word in the worst hallway in Los Angeles.
Diana, thirty feet away, says, “I heard that, and I hate all of you.”
Despite the smoke, the dead, the missing girl, a laugh tries to climb out of me. It fails halfway and turns into a cough that scrapes my ribs.
Malcolm’s hand twitches.
Stops.
Good.
Annoyingly good.
I press my knuckles to my mouth until the cough passes. My eyes water. The hallway doubles for a second, then comes back into one ugly line.
“I can walk,” I say.
“Then walk where Alvarez says. Not ahead.”
“Do not enjoy sounding reasonable.”
“I hate it.”
“Fine.”
Alvarez points between us. “Your emotionally complicated compliance is noted. Move.”
Casey looks up. “Drive copy is at sixty-one percent.”
“We don’t have time,” I say.
He wipes his forehead with the back of his wrist. “If I stop now, we might lose the directory integrity.”
“You’re using words to slow me.”
“I’m using words because panic makes me say full sentences.” He looks at Malcolm, then me. “Avery raw copied. Last Take Master partial. Edda folder partial. Deposition folder not yet.”
Avery raw.
That matters.
“Take the drive,” I say.
Casey’s face goes worse. “With an active transfer?”
“Can you clone while moving?”
“Not elegantly.”
“Nobody asked for elegance.”
He blinks once, then unplugs the whole setup from the wall and shoves the laptop, drive, write blocker, and cables into his bag while still connected. “This is bad practice.”
Diana strides past us barefoot on one side again, because apparently the shoe rescue was temporary. “Everything about this morning is bad practice.”
Alvarez moves first.
I follow.
Malcolm falls in beside me with half a step of distance. Not enough to abandon. Enough to let me choose the pace.
I hate that I notice.
The stairs down from Crescent Vault smell like bleach and hot dust. Each step lands in my knees.
My lungs feel rubbed raw. Someone below is shouting about evacuation logs.
Someone else keeps asking if the smoke will damage stored antiques, which seems bold in a building currently housing kidnapping footage and old crime.
Outside, morning has turned gray and rude.
The white van is surrounded by uniforms. The red coat inside hangs empty from a hook, speaker taped to a crate beneath it.
A fake Avery voice ruined the air there.
Police tape flutters in the breeze. Beyond the curb, a few early commuters have slowed to stare because humans are terrible around fences.
Alvarez pushes us toward his car. “Annex possibilities. Talk fast.”
“Wardrobe Annex,” Malcolm says. “Shoebox aux storage. Old annex line near Stage 14. The video sign showed ANC. Could be Annex C, Annex Corridor, or a partial sign.”
“Water rig?” Alvarez asks.
“Portable rain bar,” Malcolm says. “Needs pump or pressurized feed. Electricity. Drainage if they don’t want flooding.”
“Old annex has drains?” I ask.
He looks at me. “Some. Not enough.”
“Stage 14?”
“Yes.”
“Shoebox?”
“No room for the rig we saw unless they rebuilt.”
Diana comes up behind us with Casey and a bag full of cables. “There’s Wardrobe Annex C. Used for wet costume distressing during the original. Reboot uses it for storage because production enjoys resurrecting bad ideas with worse labels.”
I look at her. “You knew that?”
“I direct. I ask where people ruin fabric.”
Malcolm’s head turns. “Annex C has a floor drain.”
“And water access,” Diana says. “Old dye sink.”
Alvarez opens the car door. “Then we go there.”
I reach for the passenger side.
Malcolm stops.
Not with his hand.
With his body changing.
I look at him.
“What?”
His eyes move to the building entrance. Then the street. Then the sky as if cameras may have learned flight.
“The last text wanted us to rush to the wrong order,” he says.
I hate that he is right enough to continue.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning Annex C may be the stage. Or it may be where they want us while Avery is somewhere else.”
“Do you have a better location?”
“No.”
“Then I’m getting in the car.”
He nods.
No argument.
No satisfying villainy.
I get in.
The car smells like stale coffee, radio plastic, and someone’s fast-food fries from a past life. Alvarez drives. Malcolm sits behind him, not beside me. Diana and Casey pile into the second car with a uniform. I turn enough to see Malcolm in the rearview mirror.
He looks at my face.
Not my injuries.
My face.
I look away first.
“Tell me what you didn’t tell me,” I say.
Alvarez’s eyes flick toward me.
Malcolm’s silence takes up the back seat.
“I told you I saw Victor,” he says.
“That was a headline. I want the body copy.”
Alvarez mutters, “That’s bleak.”
“Occupational hazard,” I say.
Malcolm leans forward, forearms on his knees. The folder rests between his hands. Edda Marsh’s name flashes each time a streetlight crosses the windshield.
“Before the final take, I was called off the hall for a rigging check that didn’t exist.”
My skin tightens at the back of my arms.
“By who?”
“Second AD on paper. But the call came through Victor’s assistant.”
“Name?”
“Mara Bell.”
“No.”
Malcolm stops.
Alvarez looks at me. “What?”
“There was no Mara Bell,” I say. “Not on that production. I knew every assistant because Laurel borrowed lip balm from half the crew and then gave them back wrong.”
Malcolm’s eyes hold mine in the mirror.
“Then the call was false,” he says.
“Or the name was.”
“My log listed M. Bell.”
The car shifts lanes. Tires hiss over a patch of old water.
M. Bell.
A small false name. A fake assistant. A hole shaped like paperwork.
“What happened after you left the hallway?” I ask.
“I checked the rig. Nothing was wrong. When I came back, Victor was near the red door with Nate.”
“Nate?”
“Yes.”
My stomach hardens.
“He wasn’t on set.”
“He was not supposed to be.”
“What were they doing?”
“Talking to Edda Marsh.”
The folder between his hands becomes heavier from the front seat.
I taste metal.
“She was still there?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“But Rowan said she was moved off.”
“I thought so too. She came back.”
“For the door.”
Malcolm’s voice lowers. “I think so.”
“What did she say?”
“I heard part of it. ‘You can’t run another live take with the pin installed.’”
The road noise becomes too loud.
The pin.
Manual hold.
Door that would not open.
Alvarez says something into the radio, giving updated location, but his voice sounds far away.
I stare through the windshield at the morning traffic. A man in a white pickup drinks from a paper cup at a red light. A woman in scrubs crosses the street carrying a banana. Real people going to work while my past develops teeth in the back seat.
“And Victor?” I ask.
“Victor told her it was a rehearsal setting. Nate told her language mattered.”
I laugh once.
It is not a good sound.
“Nate would.”
“She saw me,” Malcolm says.
That pulls my eyes back to the mirror.
“Edda?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“She looked scared. Angry. She said, ‘If she gets stuck again, it’s on all of you.’”
“If she,” I repeat.
Not Laurel.
She.
Could mean Laurel. Could mean me. Could mean anyone in a red coat placed behind a door because fear reads well on camera.
“What did you do?” I ask.
Malcolm does not hide.
That hurts worse.
“I asked what was going on. Victor told me Edda was upset because props people get protective of mechanisms. Nate said production was handling it. Then Victor asked me to check the west exit because an extra had wandered into a closed hall.”
“And you went.”
“Yes.”
My hand closes around the edge of the passenger seat.
Vinyl under my nails. Cracked seam. A tiny crumb near the cup holder. My brain grabs useless details because the useful ones are too sharp.
“You left again,” I say.
“Yes.”
“And when you came back?”
“Smoke. Rain. People yelling. Laurel down. You on the floor near the door.”
My body misplaces temperature. Arms hot. Hands cold. Mouth dry.
“What about Edda?”
“Gone.”
“And Victor?”
His eyes stay in the mirror. “At the edge of the hall. On his phone.”
Alvarez swears under his breath.
I turn forward again.
The traffic light changes. We move.
I want to open the door and step out into normal traffic. Not to run. Not to die. To stand in the street and let a driver honk at me for a reason that makes sense.
“You kept that too,” I say.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
His answer comes slower.