The air on Stage 14 tastes like sugar and metal.
Craft services set a tray of glazed donuts too close to the doors, so the sticky sweetness drifts into the refrigerated soundstage every time someone slips through. Under that, the cold tang of steel beams and rigging cuts across my tongue, familiar in the way an old scar is familiar. The industrial fans hum along with the air conditioning, vibrating through the floor.
“Places for rehearsal!” the first AD shouts, voice amplified by the high ceiling. “Rhea’s fall only, Nora stays by video village.”
I stand by the monitors like they’ve bolted my feet there.
“You sure you don’t want to sit?” the director calls over, half teasing, half concerned. He taps the back of a folding chair with his knuckles. “You’re not even in this setup.”
“I’m in it enough,” I answer. My voice comes out thinner than I like. I roll my shoulders and paste on something close to a relaxed smile. “I’ll breathe better if I can see everything.”
Up on the platform, three stories above the pads, Rhea raises one arm in a little salute. Her harness hugs her torso in black webbing, metal carabiners clustered between her shoulder blades like an exoskeleton. Her dark hair sticks to her temples under the edge of the wig that matches mine.
“We’ve run this gag eight times already,” Elle says quietly beside me. She wears cargo pants and a faded union t-shirt, clipboard tucked under one arm. The lower half of her face is calm; the muscles around her eyes give away nothing. “You’re allowed to trust it.”
I glance at her. “Are you trusting it?”
“I signed off.” She lifts the clipboard slightly. On the top sheet, I catch my own character’s name, then Rhea’s, then a line of technical specs. Her signature slices across the bottom of the page. “And rigging signed off. And safety signed off. That’s three layers. We don’t roll until I can live with it.”
“Okay,” I say.
I rake a thumb over my bottom lip, smearing a bead of full-coverage lipstick that the makeup artist spent twenty minutes perfecting. I ignore the urge to wipe it off on my jeans. Quinn’s voice from yesterday hovers in the back of my head: How many times does this have to happen before you decide which side you’re on?
The PA with the slate jogs into frame down on the set, numbers clacking. The set walls are dressed as the upper level of a burning shopping center—a narrative echo of the mill, but sleeker, shinier, LA-brutalist rather than rusted brick. Fake scorch marks crawl up the drywall. The emergency sprinklers will be added later in CG.
“Remember,” the director calls up to Rhea, “this is still rehearsal. Full-performance fall, but we call it if anything feels wrong. That harness is doing ninety percent of the work.”
“Copy,” Rhea calls back. Her voice floats down, light and steady. She shakes out her arms, then glances past the camera, finds me. “You owe me a green juice after this, boss,” she yells. “Don’t cheap out on the spirulina.”
My throat loosens for a second. “You got it,” I shout back. “Extra algae, zero stunt coordinators.”
A few crew members laugh. Elle smiles with only one corner of her mouth.
“Ready on safety?” she calls into her headset. A chorus of “Ready” crackles back through her comm. She raises one hand toward the platform. “Rhea, on you.”
I grip the edge of the monitor cart so hard my knuckles ache. The screens show a tighter, slicker version of reality: Rhea in character, my character’s jacket on her shoulders, face in three-quarter profile. The world around her falls away to shallow depth of field and warm color grading.
“Three, two, one—fall!” the stunt rigger calls.
Rhea steps off into empty space.
The line goes taut; the harness catches; her body swings in a controlled arc toward the pad. A muffled thump. Crew exhale. My shoulders come down from around my ears.
“Nice!” the director says. “That’s the energy. Let’s do it again for camera. Then we shoot it dirty with Nora in and get everyone out of here for the day.”
They reset. Rhea rides the lift back up to the platform, hitching the harness strap higher on her hips with practiced movements. I watch her fingers as she clips back in, the way she checks each point twice without looking like she’s checking at all. Muscle memory and trained paranoia.
“You okay?” Elle asks me from somewhere near my elbow.
“Fine.” I swallow. “Just… remembering stuff.”
“Mill stuff?” she says, too quietly for anyone else to hear.
My skin tightens. I don’t answer.
The AD rattles through roll call. “Picture’s up! Quiet on set! Lock it, please.”
Doors slam. The sweetness of donuts thins under the stronger smell of fake smoke wafting in from the effects machines prepping for a later shot.
“Camera speed,” the DP says.
“Sound speed,” the mixer replies.
“And—action!” the director shouts.
On the monitor, Rhea hits her pre-fall marks: a stagger back, a hand to her wounded side, my dialogue spoken in my voice from a prerecord, piped through the stage speakers. Her body turns, tracks the imaginary fire line. She backs toward the edge of the platform, toes searching for air.
“Three, two—”
The snap is louder than the cue.
It cracks through the soundstage like someone fired a gun into the rafters. For a half-beat I don’t understand it; the world on the monitor jerks sideways. Then the harness line whips past Rhea’s shoulder, suddenly slack, and her body drops.
Not a swing. Not a controlled arc. A drop.
She twists midair, shoulders pitching forward, legs up. For one crystal frame she’s upside down, wig flying, eyes huge white coins. Then gravity finishes its sentence.
The impact sound is ugly and wet, buried under someone’s scream. Maybe mine.
The stunt pad saves part of her. It doesn’t save enough. Her head clips the edge of a lower scaffolding before she hits the mat. The whole structure shudders.
I let go of the monitor cart and my fingers no longer exist.
“Cut, cut, cut!” the director yells, voice cracking. “Don’t move her! Medics!”
Nobody listens to the second part. Two grips and a medic sprint in, already unhooking the limp harness. Rhea’s arm hangs at an angle my brain rejects. Her chest moves, tiny uneven rises that don’t match the rhythm of my lungs.
The stage erupts. Someone shouts for an ambulance. Someone else yells for a backboard. The AD’s voice climbs an octave over the headset chatter, trying to corral panic into procedure.
I stumble forward into the stew of bodies.
“Nora, back,” Elle orders, appearing in front of me in one step. Her hand hits my shoulder, firm, not gentle. “You don’t want this in your head. Let them work.”
“That’s my head down there,” I hiss. I twist away from her grip, but she holds.
For a second, our eyes lock. Heat burns behind hers, barely contained. Then she lets my shoulder go and uses the same hand to signal more medics in, her voice snapping into crisp commands. “We need neck stabilization now. Check airway. Check pupils. Don’t take the harness fully off yet; cut here and here.”
That voice cuts through the roar, so people listen to her.
I hover just beyond the circle, useless. The chemical bite of fake smoke mixes with the coppery smell of blood. My stomach flips; I swallow it down. On the floor near the pad, a lone glazed donut sits upside down, jelly oozing across the concrete in a slow smear.
They load Rhea onto a backboard. One of the medics keeps two fingers at her throat. Another wraps gauze around her head, white turning pink in a spreading halo. Somebody brings the stretcher; wheels squeak over cable covers.
“I’m riding with her,” I say to no one in particular.
“No, you’re not,” the producer says automatically, then falters when she sees my face. “We’ll have PA—”
“Move,” I snap, and I’m already following the stretcher, my boots sticking slightly with each step where fake blood sprayed in an earlier shot and never fully mopped up.
The drive to the hospital blurs into sirens and plastic and the stale smell of ambulance upholstery. I sit wedged against the wall, knees pressed to the backboard, counting each of Rhea’s shallow breaths. Her eyes don’t open. A faint groan escapes her once when the EMT adjusts the oxygen mask; the sound lodges under my breastbone.
“She’s strong,” the EMT says, either to me or himself. Sweat glints on his top lip under the fluorescent strip light. “We’re close.”
The hospital corridor hums with overused fluorescent tubes and buzzing signage. Everything smells like hand sanitizer and overcooked cafeteria food. I stand under a TV that plays muted daytime news, watching a chyron about wildfires upstate without absorbing a word.
My hands shake too much to hold the coffee Marcus brought me. The cardboard cup leaves a ring of heat on my palm; I toss it untouched into a trash can and miss, splattering brown foam on the tile.
“Sit down,” Marcus says. His tie sits loosened at his throat, his hair still perfect. He must have broken several traffic laws to get here. “You’re burning through energy you’ll need later.”
“She’s burning through energy she’ll never get back,” I answer. My voice sounds like I’ve smoked a pack of cigarettes. I don’t sit.
Our showrunner paces near the far wall, murmuring into her phone. I catch fragments: “…suspending production… of course, safety first… PR will coordinate with legal…”
A surgeon in pale blue scrubs pushes through the double doors at the end of the hall. Time swallows the hallway noise for a second. The only sound left is the squeak of his shoes.
He talks to Rhea’s partner first, a woman in a faded denim jacket with a tiny stunt association pin on the lapel. They stand ten feet away, far enough that I can’t hear the words, close enough that I can’t avoid the meaning. The doctor’s hands stay low, palms open, unhelpful.
The woman’s knees buckle. She catches herself on the plastic chair, then doesn’t bother sitting, just leans forward and presses both hands over her mouth. A thin, keening noise leaks through her fingers.
I rock back on my heels.
Marcus steps in close, his body a wall between me and the worst of it. “Don’t stare,” he mutters. “There will be time to reach out the right way. Right now you need to think about—”
“She’s dead,” I say.
The words hang in the air, heavy and wrong, like I stole them from someone else’s script.
The doctor looks over, reads our faces, and walks toward us next. His expression rearranges into the professional sympathy I’ve seen in hospital dramas for years, softened eyes and careful mouth.
“Ms. Hayes?” he asks.
“Yes.” My voice barely clears my teeth.
“I’m very sorry,” he says. “Her injuries were too severe. We did everything we could.”
My ears ring. The hallway narrows. For a moment, I’m on the mill staircase again, watching a body lie twisted at the bottom while adults swarm around it, voices knotted, hands moving too slowly.
I nod once at the doctor. If I say anything, I might throw up on his shoes.
He talks about head trauma and internal bleeding and time of death, syllables that float around me without attaching to meaning. I track the movement of his lips instead of his words. When he finishes, Marcus thanks him. I don’t know what I do.
Hours later—minutes, days, I lose count—I find myself alone near the far end of the corridor, sitting on a windowsill that looks out over the parking lot. The sky over Los Angeles glows a hazy orange, reflecting off the hospital’s glass facade in smeared rectangles. My reflection hovers over the parked cars: pale, smeared lipstick, eyes rimmed with black.
In the glass, a shape appears behind my shoulder. Elle.
“You shouldn’t be by yourself right now,” she says.
I jump anyway. The jolt sends a ripple through the glass, splitting my reflected face into shards for a blink.
“I’m fine,” I lie. My hands twist in my lap, knuckles white. “How’s the crew?”
“Shaken.” She leans against the wall, arms crossed. The fluorescent lights bleach the color from her skin, leaving sharp shadows under her cheekbones. “We shut the stage down. Rigging is already tearing the setup apart for investigation.”
“Investigation,” I repeat. The word tastes like pennies. “So we can say it was equipment failure in the press release.”
Her eyes cut to mine. “Is that what you care about right now?”
“What I care about doesn’t change the headline,” I say. “You know that.”
Elle exhales through her nose and looks away, jaw tight. For a long moment we sit with the hum of the lights and the distant ding of the elevator.
“I’m going to tell you something,” she says finally. “And you’re going to want to forget I did. Don’t.”
My spine stiffens. “Okay.”
“I did the safety checks on that rig personally,” she says. “Twice. Once yesterday in prep, once this morning before rehearsal. I ran my hands along every line. I watched them load the weight bags. I checked the carabiners, the knots, the anchors. Then our head rigger did his inspection and signed off again.”
I picture her signature, slicing across the form. “So?”
“So harness lines don’t just snap in half mid-take in two places,” she says. Her voice stays low; the words sharpen. “Not when they’re rated for triple the load. Not after they’ve been inspected and tested under controlled weight this morning.”
Cold slides under my skin, a sheet of invisible ice.
“You’re saying someone cut it,” I whisper.
“I’m saying something happened to that rig between sign-off and action,” she replies. “Something deliberate. The break patterns don’t match stress failure.” She uncrosses her arms, hands flexing slowly. “This wasn’t a freak accident. This was a choice.”
My throat closes. “Who would do that?” I ask. The question bends inward even as I say it. Who would do that for me. Who would use Rhea’s body to send me a message.
“Do you want my professional answer or my personal one?” she asks.
“Both.”
“Professionally?” Elle says. “Someone with access and a grudge against production. Personally?” She looks straight at me. “Someone who knows hurting you is easiest if they hit the people around you.”
I flinch so hard my back taps the glass.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she adds. “I’m not your enemy here, Nora.”
“You keep saying that,” I say. My voice cracks. “You said that after the sandbag. After the fire drill. Now Rhea’s dead. How many not-your-enemy accidents do we need before I stop believing in coincidence?”
“I stopped believing after the sandbag,” she says. “The emergency stop being taped over was just confirmation.” Her gaze drifts toward the window, to the hospital’s mirrored facade, then back to me. “You know the pattern. You’ve seen it before.”
The mill slams into my mind, full color: the flickering work lights, the wet rail, Lila’s body at the bottom of the staircase. The fixer’s polished shoes on the stained concrete. The way he said, We’re going to call this an unfortunate accident. For everyone’s sake.
“I was sixteen,” I say. “I didn’t know—”
“You knew enough to sign what they put in front of you,” Elle cuts in, not unkindly. “You knew enough to keep working. To let them spin it.” She pushes off the wall and steps closer, not invading my space, just shrinking the distance. “You of all people understand that ‘these things’ don’t just happen. Not once, not twice, definitely not three times on the same show.”
Heat rises under my skin, a mix of shame and anger and something harder to name.
“What are you accusing me of?” I ask. “Because if you think I had anything to do with that harness—”
“I don’t think you touched the rig,” she says. Her interruption lands gentle, firm. “I think you’re the axis. I think someone is drawing a circle around you in bodies and near-misses and waiting to see when you break.”
I press my palms flat on the windowsill to keep them from shaking. Outside, a helicopter chops through the smoggy sky, lights flickering over the hospital roof.
“Why are you telling me this?” I ask. “Shouldn’t you be telling the police? The union? Whoever handles… whatever this is?”
“I am telling them,” she says. “I’m writing reports, filing complaints, escalating to every acronym I can think of. But you know how this town works. They’ll wait to see where the narrative lands before they decide whether to care.”
I swallow hard. “And you think the narrative is going to land on me.”
“You already have a history you don’t talk about,” Elle says quietly. “A missing girl, a mill, NDAs. A podcast connecting dots. An accident on your last teen show, accidents on this one. Rhea dying on a stunt you insisted on doing ‘for the art’ until they talked you into using a double.”
Guilt punches through my diaphragm. I bend over my hands.
“I told them I’d do it,” I murmur. “Rhea argued me down. She said that’s what she’s there for. That my face is more valuable than my spine.”
“You didn’t push her,” Elle says. “Not this time. She volunteered to be your shadow. That still doesn’t erase the line people will draw when they get bored enough to trace it.”
I lift my head. “So what do I do?”
Her eyes don’t soften. “You stop pretending you’re just unlucky,” she says. “You stop letting other people control the story. And you admit—to yourself, at least—that whoever is doing this understands your past better than your team does.”
The fluorescent lights buzz louder. Or maybe my pulse matches them.
“You talk like you know them,” I say. “Like you know who’s behind this.”
A flicker crosses her face, gone too fast for me to read. “I know their type,” she answers. “I know what happens when someone gets hurt and nobody pays attention until a body shows up.”
She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a folded piece of paper, the edges creased white. She presses it into my hand.
“What’s this?” I ask.
“My formal report about the rigging on today’s stunt,” she says. “Copy for your records. Read it before your manager does.”
I unfold the paper. Her handwriting slices across the lines, precise and controlled. The last sentence stops my breath: Rigging equipment inspected and signed off by coordinator and stunt department lead at 8:17 a.m. Failure consistent with post-inspection tampering.
“This will leak,” I whisper.
“Everything leaks,” Elle says. “Question is whether you want to keep plugging the holes with other people’s bodies.”
She pushes off the wall and walks away down the corridor, boots quiet on the tile.
I stare at my reflection in the window, the report shaking in my fingers. Behind my ghosted face, the glass throws back the hospital’s mirrored facade and, just for a moment, the outline of the mill rises in the dark, rusted and patient.
Rhea fell for me, I think. Lila fell because of me. Whoever’s driving this knows that, and they’re not done.
When the next call sheet lands in my inbox, nobody will believe I’m just reading from it.