Chapter 37
“HAVEN’T SEEN YOU IN A while,” Eri says to Dez that evening from behind the bar. Her silver cocktail shaker’s raised in the air, making the hummingbird tattoo above her neckline quiver as she mixes her concoction. “Was it something I slipped in your drink?”
“Not at all.” Dez smiles. “I like it here.”
Eri nods. “Dives always have the best atmosphere.”
Dez agrees. It’s been weeks since she’s been back to the chalet in the clouds.
She’s longed for a night she wasn’t working late to come back here, for a wild evening at the bar with her roommates.
She looks again in Eri’s dark, unusual mirror, seeing herself, but still not finding the bartender in the reflection.
As in Asher’s Lifeline, something’s missing. Something that should be there.
“I’ve just been …” she starts to say.
Eri raises an eyebrow. “Busy?” She slides forward a tray holding four drinks Dez didn’t order, each a different color, each in a different-shaped glass. “I’m glad you stayed, Desdemona. Once you ascend, Rafe’s not going to know what hit him.”
“If I ascend.” Dez shouldn’t have spent so much of her day on Asher’s Lifeline. She barely finished Iris’s film, and she never found the scene of the birth of Iris’s son she wanted to include.
She squints at Eri. “What do you mean about Rafe not knowing what hit him?”
The bartender leans forward and lowers her voice. “If ever it seems like he holds all the cards, he doesn’t. He needs you as much as you need him.”
They hold each other’s gazes long enough for the intensity to bristle across Dez’s skin. What does Eri mean? Before she can ask, Jet slides onto the barstool next to her.
“I was hoping I’d catch you,” he says. “You haven’t attended a single club meeting.”
“Those are real?” Dez says. “I thought after the midterm, everything else fell away. We don’t even go to class anymore.”
“Haven’t you ever seen any dark academia movies?”
“I watched Dead Poets Society with my brother.”
“Then you know the students under the most pressure require the darkest and most decadent recreation,” Jet says. “We meet every Thursday to blow off steam and discuss aesthetic quandaries. It’ll make you a better filmmaker.”
“I’m so behind in my work. I don’t think I have the time.”
Jet leans in. “Don’t be afraid to ask for help.”
“Oh, I’ve asked.”
All at once, Jet seems completely attuned to their conversation, spinning to face Dez on his stool. “Has Rafe been neglecting you?”
Dez fears she’s said too much without really saying anything at all.
“He’s just been busy.”
“Of course,” Jet says. “With the frags.”
“What’s Acheron doing with the frags, anyway?” Dez asks, but Jet’s signaling the bartender, as if he didn’t hear her.
“What’s your poison, Jet?” Eri asks.
“I’ll have what she’s having,” Jet says, nodding at the four drinks in front of Dez. “Look, I know you must feel guilty—”
“Guilty?”
“About the films you don’t finish each day. They don’t stop dying, of course. And then the rest of us have to pick up your slack.”
“No one told me that.”
“Rafe’s not the only one here who can help you, Dez.” He smiles at her, his dichromatic eyes twinkling. “All you have to do is ask.”
“Dez, bring the drinks!” Simon calls from a booth across the bar. “Oh, hi, Jet!”
Dez waves at Simon, at Esther and Yael in the booth with him. She turns back to Jet. “But you’re working with Simon.”
Jet lifts a shoulder, sips his drink. “Things can change in a flash.”
She nods, thanks Eri, then grabs her drinks and walks away to find her roommates at their booth.
“Dez, sit,” Esther says. “We’re talking J-horror. Simon and I can’t decide whether bakemono or yurei have more terrifying cinematic potential—”
“It’s a question of shape-shifters or vengeful spirits,” Simon decodes for Dez.
Dez hasn’t had the time or energy to think about real movies in months. Before Acheron, she would have loved to nerd out in the conversation. Now she shakes her head. “I don’t know.”
“How many notches did you put on your Lens today?” Yael asks Dez.
Dez holds up a single finger.
“Ouch,” Simon says, his arm slung around Esther’s shoulders. “Have you ever heard of being good not great? Maybe you’re getting in your own way.”
“You’ll get there, Dez,” Esther says. “Some assignments just take longer. I only finished two today.”
“Really?” Dez says, buoyed by Esther’s solidarity.
“With all due respect, no,” Yael says. “Dez has to speed it up.” She turns to Dez. “I’m here if you need me.”
“Why does everyone keep saying that?” Dez says.
“Who else is saying that?” Yael’s voice is like a whip.
“Rafe promised to be around more,” Dez says, trying to avoid the question, knowing Simon shouldn’t hear of her conversation with Jet at the bar. “I think he’s busy working on something with the frags.”
“I heard about the latest one.” Simon wrinkles his face. “The one that was … not so dead?”
“And I heard you sensed it right before it fell on Rafe,” Esther adds, sounding intrigued. “How’d you do that?”
“I don’t know,” Dez says. “Actually, there is one thing I could use some help with.”
Yael brightens, leans forward in the booth. “Anything.”
Dez moves closer to her roommates. “I’m having the same problem I had with my brother’s film. Like a scene is missing in the Vault.”
“What scene?” Simon asks, licking salt from the rim of his glass.
Dez is thinking of the pier in Ventura, the day she’d spent with Asher. But there’s no way she can tell them that she was looking through a Lifeline that wasn’t even assigned to her.
“The birth of a child,” she says carefully, thinking of Iris’s film. “And I looked everywhere. Obviously, she had a son. She did give birth. I saw her pregnancy. I saw her raise the kid.”
“You’ll find another scene, Dez,” Simon says kindly.
Esther reaches across the table and squeezes Dez’s hand.
Dez nods and finishes off her drink, but inside, she’s certain of something she can’t say aloud to her friends. The missing scene in Asher’s Lifeline is the only scene of its kind.
She needs to know why her day with Asher has vanished. She needs to know where it went.
Yael points at their empty drinks. “Who’s getting the next round?”
Dez casts her gaze toward the bar, sees that Jet’s gone and Eri is cleaning and polishing his glass, turning it round in a dishcloth so that its cut crystal edges catch the light.
“Me,” Dez says, and rises from the table.
At the bar, she places the empty glasses down.
“Another round?” Eri asks.
“And something else,” Dez says, steeling herself.
Eri puts down the glass she was polishing and drops her voice. “What can I do for you?”
“Missing scenes. Can you tell me anything?”
Eri lets out a low whistle.
“You know about them,” Dez says.
“Careful, Desdemona. You’re playing with fire.”
She knew it. “Tell me.”
“Put it this way,” Eri says. “The films you make bring closure. They sell the idea that life has a beginning, a middle, and an end. People like that. It’s comforting.
” She narrows her eyes, leans closer. “But every mortal has at least one moment in their life that does the opposite. That makes them wonder.”
“Wonder what?”
“Whether there’s something … more, beyond the three-act structure. Beyond closure. Something that doesn’t submit. Doesn’t end.”
“You mean, like, a sequel?” Dez says.
“I mean the opposite of whatever it is that makes people ready for death. If my job was to make people feel good about taking the dirt nap, I’d do whatever I could to prevent them from feeling the opposite.”
Dez considers Eri’s words. But it still doesn’t make sense. Could the moment she met Asher somehow make him feel the opposite of closure when it comes time for him to die? Is that why the scene is missing?
Where would it go?
She thinks back to the gala ceremony. Moriah had mentioned the risks of their filmmaking—
“Is this about death-killers?” Dez asks Eri.
Before Eri can answer, the back door swings open. Jet struts back into the bar. He’s still wearing the ski cap, but his sideburns drip with moisture. Eri glances at him quickly, then slides more drinks toward Dez.
“Eri,” Dez pleads.
“Not now,” Eri says quietly.
“Where are those missing scenes?” Dez says through her teeth.
Eri nods at Jet as he sits back down at the bar. She smiles her cryptic smile. “I agree, dives always have the best atmosphere.”
In a bathroom stall at the back of the bar, Dez notices a tiny star-shaped window she’s never seen before. She puts her face to it and sees the forest outside, deep and inviting in the moonlight.
She checks on her friends. They’re still laughing and drinking, oblivious to Dez’s absence, so she slips out through the dive bar’s battered back door.
The night is sharp and cold, and Dez left her parka in the booth. When she skids on a sheet of ice and tumbles down the slope to the forest’s edge, snow seeps inside her socks and the collar of her shirt.
“Dez?” Yael calls from the bar’s back door. “If you’re looking for the river, it’s three miles west.”
Breathing hard from her fallen position in the snow, Dez looks west and sees nothing but thicket and drift.
“And I don’t recommend touching the water once you get there,” Yael says.
“Why not?” Dez asks.
“Because it’ll fry your fucking hand off,” Yael says, moving down the slope toward Dez. She extends her hand to help Dez up. “Don’t you have like a thousand Life Reviews to catch up on?”
“I do.”
“Trust me,” her roommate says as Dez climbs to her feet and the two of them make their way back to the bar. “There’s nothing good for you in that river.”