CHAPTER 22 #2
My body betrays me and does it anyway.
She adjusts.
Says nothing.
That silence is mercy with its teeth showing.
We move toward the stairs.
Each step down is an argument between gravity and pride. Clara smells like rain rig water, smoke, cold fabric, and coffee that has lived too long in paper. I should not notice that now. I notice everything because pain has stripped the world down to contact points.
Her hand at my waist.
My burned palm held away from her.
The headline glowing in her other hand.
Alvarez ahead.
Paramedic behind.
The tram below.
Avery alive.
Gavin gone.
Victor still in a suit somewhere, letting the media do what men with clean cuffs always hire it to do.
At the bottom of the booth stairs, Clara starts to release me.
I hold on half a second too long.
Her eyes come to mine.
I let go.
“Sorry,” I say.
“For needing help?”
“For forgetting that needing it doesn’t entitle me to keep it.”
The sentence lands between us in the damp air.
Her face shifts.
She looks away first.
Not because she is weaker.
Because she has Avery, her office, Victor, Gavin, Laurel, the press, the police, and me bleeding all at once. I am not allowed to require the softest part of her attention.
Good.
I keep telling myself good until it stops feeling like loss.
Outside the shuttle set, the backlot has become morning and crime scene at the same time.
Police tape. Medics. Fire crew. Studio security pretending hierarchy still matters.
Press lights through the fence. Crew clustered behind barricades with coffee cups and phones, some crying, some recording, some doing both because people are worse when scared and bored.
Avery is on a stretcher near the ambulance, wrapped in blankets. Diana stands beside her, one bare foot on a folded towel someone found, still holding Avery’s hand while pretending to argue about the ambulance’s interior lighting.
Molly is not here.
Molly is at Clara’s office, where police are looking at a room built to make Clara look like the kind of woman entertainment media has always wanted her to be.
Obsessive.
Unstable.
Final girl who never got over the role.
A convenient woman.
I stop walking.
Clara notices first. “What?”
“Victor doesn’t need the planted room to convict you.”
Alvarez turns. “Meaning?”
“He needs it to split the evidence.”
Clara’s eyes sharpen.
Good. She’s with me. Always faster than comfort.
I point toward the ambulances, the press, the lot.
My burned palm protests the motion. I drop it.
“Avery’s testimony points to Victor. The drive points to Red Vale and old transfer logs.
Gavin points to systems. So Victor floods the public with a story that makes every piece look like something Clara staged because she’s obsessed with Laurel, Avery, and the original film. ”
Alvarez’s expression goes flat. “Defense strategy before arrest.”
“Yes.”
Clara says, “And if the office is contaminated—”
“Anything Molly finds there gets challenged.”
Alvarez swears.
The paramedic says, “I cannot medically endorse this conversation.”
“No one asked you to endorse crime,” Clara says.
“I’m endorsing the ambulance.”
“Brand loyalty. Admirable.”
Alvarez looks at Clara. “I need you away from your office until forensics clears it.”
“No.”
Everyone gets quiet.
That no is not mine.
It has better posture.
Alvarez’s jaw tightens. “Vane.”
“My employee is there.”
“She’s not alone.”
“She’s Molly. Alone is not a headcount.”
Despite blood loss, head pain, and poor judgment, I almost smile.
Clara sees it.
“Don’t,” she says.
“I respect terror as management style.”
“Then respect mine.”
“I do.”
That stops her for half a second.
Only half.
Then she turns back to Alvarez. “Molly will touch something if she thinks it helps me.”
“Then call her.”
“My phone is dead.”
Diana, twenty feet away, lifts her phone without looking at us. “Mine was invaded by Satan and production IT.”
A uniform offers his.
Clara takes it. “Thank you.”
The uniform looks like she handed him a promotion.
She dials from memory.
Of course she knows Molly’s number. Of course that detail hits harder than the larger things. Love is often stored in ugly practical formats.
Molly answers on the first ring, loud enough for all of us. “If this is not Clara, I am armed with a stapler and federal disappointment.”
“It’s me.”
“Thank God. Also, I’m furious.”
“Don’t touch anything.”
“I have touched nothing except my own hair, which is suffering.”
“Molly.”
“I know. I know. Gideon is here. He told me to stand on the rug and not breathe legally.”
Gideon’s voice in the background: “I said evidentiary.”
“Same cult, different robe,” Molly says.
Clara closes her eyes for one second.
A small human fault line.
Then opens them. “What do you see?”
“Someone turned your back office into a serial killer Pinterest board.”
Clara’s fingers tighten around the borrowed phone.
She does not speak.
Molly fills the space because she knows her. “It’s fake. Bad fake. Too obvious. They used glossy printouts, Clara. Glossy. You would rather eat toner. Also the red string is crooked in a way that insults your entire nervous system.”
Clara’s mouth moves.
Not a smile.
A survival reflex.
“Anything planted that looks dangerous?” she asks.
“A hard drive on your desk. Not yours. A burner phone. A stack of old call sheets. A printed manifesto that uses the phrase ‘they should have let me finish the scene,’ which you would never write because you hate finish as an emotional verb.”
Gideon says in the background, “Please stop reading potential evidence aloud.”
Molly says, away from the phone, “Then stop making evidence so readable.”
Alvarez leans toward the phone. “Molly, this is Detective Alvarez. Do not touch anything. Do not let anyone from studio legal inside.”
Molly’s voice changes. Colder. “They already tried.”
Clara’s eyes open fully. “Who?”
“Victor’s lawyer. With two men from studio security. They said they had to secure proprietary materials.”
Alvarez says, “Where are they now?”
“Outside the door with Gideon, who has become extremely expensive and very calm. It’s unsettling. I miss when he looked tired.”
Gideon’s voice, distant: “I can hear you.”
“Good,” Molly says. “Invoice your hearing.”
Clara looks at Alvarez.
Alvarez is already moving, calling for units to Clara’s office.
The paramedic says, “Ambulance.”
“For him,” Clara says, pointing at me. “Not me.”
“I wasn’t inviting you socially.”
I take the phone from Clara before I think better of it.
Her eyes cut to me.
I hold it where she can take it back if she wants.
She doesn’t.
“Molly,” I say.
Silence.
Then, “Security Batman. You alive?”
“Currently disputed.”
“Clara sounds too calm, so I assume things are terrible.”
“Yes.”
“Useful. Horrible, but useful.”
“If anyone tries to remove anything, film them without crossing the threshold. Don’t touch evidence. Don’t argue physically. Let Gideon do the legal theater.”
“I hate how reasonable that was.”
“Me too.”
A pause.
Her voice drops. “Are you helping her or making yourself feel better?”
There are worse ways to be stabbed.
Not many.
Clara looks at me.
So does Alvarez.
The paramedic sighs through his nose, which I choose to ignore because I’m no longer letting medical professionals have dialogue authority.
“I don’t know,” I tell Molly.
Truth. Ugly. Small. Usable.
Molly is quiet for two seconds.
Then she says, “Better answer than I expected. Annoying. Fine. Go bleed productively somewhere else.”
I hand the phone back to Clara.
Her eyes stay on me.
No forgiveness.
No trust restored.
Something more dangerous because it is not clean enough to name.
“Ambulance,” the paramedic says with the strained tone of a man about to drag me by the belt.
I get on the stretcher because standing has become experimental and because Clara does not need another body to manage.
That is my decision.
Mine.
The second I sit, my vision blurs at the edges. Humiliating, but educational.
Clara watches.
Her hands remain at her sides.
Good.
Bad.
Necessary.
Alvarez steps close. “Reed, you’re going to the hospital. Officer rides with you. I’ll get a formal statement there.”
“I’m not under arrest?”
“Do you want to be?”
“No.”
“Then enjoy medical ambiguity.”
Clara says, “He stopped the tram.”
Alvarez looks at her.
“He did,” she says.
Not soft. Not pleading. Statement of fact.
I look away because the words land too close to where I’m already broken.
Alvarez nods once. “That will be in the report.”
“Make sure the audio from the booth is preserved,” she says. “The mic was live.”
“I know.”
“And the bypass wiring.”
“I know.”
“And the folder he had.”
“I know, Vane.”
She looks at him for a second.
Then, quieter: “I’m not trying to be difficult.”
Alvarez raises one eyebrow.
She exhales through her nose. “I’m trying to be difficult accurately.”
“Appreciated.”
The paramedics start rolling me toward the ambulance.
Clara walks beside the stretcher for six steps.
Only six.
Not to comfort.
To speak.
“Don’t give a statement without a lawyer,” she says.
“I thought you hated me.”
“I can multitask.”
“There’s the Clara I know.”
Her face changes. “You don’t get to say that yet.”
Fair.
I nod. The motion makes my head pulse. “Okay.”
She stops walking.
The stretcher keeps moving.
Distance opens, foot by foot.
I should let it.
I do for three seconds.
Then I say, “Clara.”
She looks at me.
Not kindly.
She still looks.
“I gave you the lighter because you were scared,” I say. “And you made it useful for someone else. That was always you. Not the room they built. Not the headlines. Not Victor’s version.”
Her face goes blank.
Too blank.
The stretcher rolls.
For a second, I think she will not answer.
Then she says, “Stop saying true things when you’re being wheeled away. It’s manipulative.”
A laugh hurts my ribs.
“I’ll schedule them better.”
“Don’t schedule anything with me.”
“Okay.”
The ambulance doors open.
Avery’s ambulance pulls out first with Diana riding in back after informing two officials she was “medically necessary because everyone else has the emotional range of wet cardboard.”
Clara watches it go.
Then she turns toward the gate, toward her office, toward the public story already being built to swallow her.
She does not look back at me.
Good.
That is what I tell myself as they load me in.
Good.
The officer climbs in after me. The paramedic secures the strap across my chest. My burned hand gets wrapped. My head gets checked again. The doors are about to close when Alvarez appears outside.
“One more thing,” he says.
The paramedic glares.
Alvarez ignores him. “Stage 14 is sealed. But the first sweep found something in the old red-door wall.”
My pulse shifts.
“What?”
“A hidden drive bay. Empty.”
Of course.
The safest place.
Already cleared.
Victor or Gavin moved the original.
Alvarez continues, “But there was a note taped inside.”
He holds up his phone with a photo.
White paper. Black marker.
NOT HER OFFICE. NOT HIS CAR. NOT THE STAGE.
ASK WHERE THE FINAL GIRL HIDES WHEN EVERYONE WATCHES THE DOOR.
The ambulance smell—antiseptic, rubber, plastic, stale oxygen—turns sharp.
I know the answer before I want to.
Not because I’m clever.
Because Clara would know.
Marla’s.
The booth.
The place after the first scream.
The place with the mark on the wall.
The place nobody would search because it looks like a memory instead of evidence.
I close my eyes for one second.
Then open them.
“Marla’s,” I say.
Alvarez’s face confirms he already got there too.
The ambulance doors shut.
And through the small back window, I see Clara at the gate, phone pressed to her ear, turning toward the street.
Not away from danger.
Toward the next door.