The harnesses hang from the rolling rack like limp bodies, straps twisted, metal buckles dull under the studio lights.
I stand just close enough to smell the rubber and cold metal, just far enough that no one can call it loitering. The air conditioning drones above Stage 14, steady and indifferent, pushing a faint draft across my bare wrists. Fake smoke from the last effects test clings to the back of my throat, chemical and sweet, layered over the stale sugar of craft-service donuts.
“Nora, five to blocking,” an AD calls from somewhere behind the mill facade.
I lift a hand without turning. I practice a neutral nod, not the brittle flinch that wants to climb up my neck. The new stunt coordinator’s assistant—a kid with a headset too big for his head—keeps throwing me tiny, guilty glances from the edge of the pads.
Nobody wants to be caught staring at the actress whose double died.
On the wall monitor, a paused frame shows the mill set half-lit, the rust-colored stairs pristine and unreal. In my head, the real Pennsylvania mill rises behind it, damp brick sweating river fog, stair rails slick with a metallic tang that never washed off my skin. I focus on the here: polished concrete, tape marks, the low hum of lights. Not the then.
My mark today is simple. Walk to the edge of the platform. Look down. React to a body already on the ground, off-camera. No falls. No wires.
My feet still will not step onto the mat.
I trail my fingers along a hanging harness strap instead. The material feels waxy, almost tacky from whatever cleaner the rigging team used in the wake of Rhea’s fall. My hand stutters when one of the carabiners knocks against the rack with a soft metallic clack, too close to the sound in my memory of a snap and a scream stopping midair.
“You planning to date the gear or use it?” a low voice asks behind me.
I jump, hand jerking away. The strap swings, a slow pendulum.
Elle stands a few feet back, clipboard under one arm, dark hair twisted into a knot at the nape of her neck. Her T-shirt has the union logo printed small over her heart, sleeves rolled up to show forearms marked with faint scars and impressions from long-lost pads.
“Sorry,” I say, too fast. “I was just…looking.”
“I noticed,” she says. Her eyes flick from my face to my hands, then to the rack. “We’re not rigging you today.”
“I know.” I force a laugh that feels like glass chipping in my throat. “No wire gags, no big falls. Marcus would have a stroke.”
“Marcus isn’t calling the safety shots,” she says. “I am. And I’m telling you, you’re cleared for everything we’re doing… or you don’t do it. Your choice.”
Her voice stays calm, almost bored. No soft sympathy, no whispery condolences. I prefer that. In theory.
“I’m fine,” I say. “I just needed a minute.”
She glances past me, toward the platform, then back. “Do you want to walk it with me?” she asks. “No cameras. No crew. We can just stand up there and look over. The body doesn’t hit the floor unless you say so.”
My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. I imagine stepping up there with her, the set quiet, the ramp firm under my shoes. I imagine my knees locking, my brain replaying the moment Rhea missed the line and the paramedics cut her harness loose.
“I told you,” I say. “I’m fine.”
She doesn’t flinch at the snap in my voice. Her gaze drops to my hands. I follow it and realize my fingers are pressed so hard into my palms that my nails have left crescents in the skin.
“Your body disagrees,” she says.
I uncurl my fists, embarrassed by the tiny half-moons of red. “My body will catch up,” I say. “We don’t really have the luxury of taking a trauma sabbatical.”
The corner of her mouth lifts. “That’s one way to put it.”
The AD’s voice floats over the set again. “Nora to first marks, please. We’re ready for you.”
“Give us five,” Elle calls back without looking away from me.
A pause. “Copy,” the AD says. There’s a different kind of quiet after that, the held-breath silence of crew waiting on one person.
I hate being the one person.
“You know,” Elle says, stepping closer to the rack, “this isn’t the worst set I’ve seen.”
“Comforting,” I mutter.
“I’m serious,” she says. She runs a hand down the hanging harness, fingers sure and gentle. “There are redundancies. There are checks. We documented the hell out of the rig after… what happened. Some places never even get that far.”
I taste bile at the back of my throat. “We still lost her.”
“We did,” she says. No platitudes, no It wasn’t your fault. “You lost your double. A crew lost one of their own. And the studio lost a line item they’ll write off in taxes.”
The bitterness in her voice cuts through the fog in my head like a spotlight.
“You really don’t do the optimism thing, do you?” I ask.
“I do realism,” she says. “Occasionally with jokes.”
The pad under the harness rack squishes faintly when she shifts her weight. The vinyl smells faintly like gym mats and lemon cleaner. A part of me wants to curl up right there and sleep until the season wraps.
“I had an old job,” she says casually, like we’re swapping war stories. “Before intimacy coordinating was a thing anyone wanted to pay for. Before they pretended to care about safety meetings. Different show, different network. There was this abandoned factory we shot in.”
My lungs forget what to do for a second.
“Like… one of those trendy converted lofts?” I ask, though I know that’s not what she means.
“No,” she says. “Real thing. Out by a river. Too damp for condos. You breathe wrong and the walls sweat on you. Rust on everything, railings that tasted like blood and rain when you licked your teeth afterward.”
My whole arm prickles with goosebumps. I remember the taste she’s describing, the way the mill’s rail left a film on my tongue when I bit my lip hard enough to break the skin that night.
“Why would anyone shoot there?” My voice sounds thin.
She shrugs. “It was ‘gritty’ and ‘authentic.’ Cheaper than building a set. They thought it looked great on camera. And there was this girl—young, but not that young. Eighteen, nineteen. Series regular. She had this way of walking into a scene like she owned the building.”
I grip the edge of the rack to keep my hands still.
“One night we were doing this staircase sequence,” Elle continues. “Railings slick from condensation, crew exhausted, director high on his own genius. The girl kept saying the blocking felt off. That the marks were too close to the edge, the angles pushing her toward open air.”
“Then fix the blocking,” I say. I hear the edge in my own voice and I know I’m speaking to a memory as much as to her.
Elle tilts her head. “She asked. More than once. They told her to trust the process. That if she really wanted a career, she needed to stop ‘being difficult.’”
The hum of the AC sharpens in my ears until it’s a whine. My heart taps a rapid rhythm under my ribs. I see Lila—no, I don’t say her name here—standing on the mill stairs, eyes bright with fury, telling me the same thing: They’re going to kill someone here and no one will care until it’s one of us.
“During a late shoot,” Elle says, “they had her do a confrontation scene with another actress. Words get heated. Bodies get closer to the edge than anyone planned. The crew is tired. The director wants one more take. You know the song.”
My throat closes around air.
“And?” I ask, though my body already knows the end of the story.
“And she fell,” Elle says. “Hit a landing hard. Messed up her spine. Messed up a lot of things.”
The fake smoke in the air takes on river chill. I feel the impact reverberate through my own bones, though I was the one still standing at the top.
“Was she okay?” The question comes out hoarse.
“Define okay,” Elle says softly. She taps a knuckle against the metal of the rack. “She worked again, eventually. Not on camera. Not like that. Insurance, medical bills, legal threats—those kept her busy for a while.”
I swallow against a wave of nausea. My vision tunnels, narrowing to the harness buckle she’s touching. It catches a strip of light and throws it back like a shard of glass.
“What about the other actress?” I ask. My tongue feels heavy. “The one she was fighting with.”
“She became a star,” Elle says matter-of-factly. “They spun her into a troubled-but-redeemed narrative. Gave her press training. Cleaned up her search results. Pretended the hurt girl never existed except in sealed paperwork.”
The room tilts. For a second I smell the old mill: mold in the walls, wet concrete, the river’s rotten breath rolling in through broken panes. I hear my own teenage voice spitting words I can’t bear to repeat now. I hear the thud.
“That’s not…” I start, then shut my mouth.
“Not what?” she prompts.
“Not how it works now,” I say, clinging to the updated talking points the studio has drilled into me. “We have intimacy coordinators, stunt coordinators, safety meetings. We shut down when things go wrong.”
“Do we?” Elle asks quietly. “We had a safety meeting after Rhea’s fall. We got a lot of emails. I’m not saying it’s nothing. I’m saying the system adapts to protect itself first.”
I straighten my shoulders, forcing my spine into the posture coaches love. “Things are getting better,” I say. “That’s the whole point of this show. Second chances, accountability, all of that.”
“And you believe that?” she asks. “With a call sheet that squeezes a fatal stunt between press hits? With NDAs that stop extras from talking about sandbags dropping on their heads?”
Her words land with surgical precision. My brain flashes on Quinn’s latest episode, the screenshot of the call sheet blown up on my phone screen, my name in the cast list adjacent to Rhea’s. The hashtags tying me to Lila, to Rhea, to patterns. Whoever hurt Lila is still hurting people.
I lick my lips. They taste like the coffee I choked down in my trailer this morning and the ghost of Pennsylvania water.
“I think some people build narratives they want to see,” I say. “Podcasts, leaks, red-string murder boards. It’s good content.”
Elle studies me for a long beat. Her eyes are unreadable, dark and still.
“Do you think the girl I’m talking about was building content when she begged someone to listen?” she asks.
My skin goes hot and cold at once, a fever that can’t decide which direction to burn.
“I don’t know her,” I say. “I don’t know what happened. Maybe she misremembered. People do, under stress.”
The words taste used, handed down. I hear Marcus, the fixer, that ancient memo I still haven’t read edge to edge. Trauma distorts perception, Nora. We aren’t calling her a liar, we’re saying the truth is complicated.
Elle’s jaw tightens. Then she exhales, the tension sliding off her shoulders like a coat she’s decided not to wear today.
“Maybe,” she says. “Or maybe there were too many people whose jobs depended on her being wrong.”
The studio PA’s walkie crackles near the doors, a burst of static and a garbled cue. The quiet on the stage fractures.
“We should go,” Elle says. “They’re going to start making jokes about the cursed staircase if we keep hovering in this corner.”
“They already are,” I say.
She gives me a long look, like she’s cataloguing not just my words but the twitch in my fingers, the way I’ve backed my body a fraction farther from the harnesses without realizing it.
“For the record,” she says, voice low, “if you ever tell me you don’t feel safe, I shut it down. I don’t care what the call sheet says. I don’t care who’s waiting with a talk-show chair warmed up.”
A picture flashes in my head: Quinn’s missed call, my own finger hovering over Accept, then pulling back. I had someone offering me truth, and I let it ring out. Now I have someone offering me a shutdown button, and the thought of pressing it terrifies me more than another take.
“I’m fine,” I repeat. “Really.”
Her gaze softens, but not with sympathy—more like pity for a person she’s already measured and found fragile.
“Sure,” she says. “Let’s go prove it.”
She turns toward the platform, clipboard under her arm, stride easy. I follow, feet moving through syrup, skin buzzing, stomach a tight, sour knot.
From up here, the crash mats look small. The fake mill rail at the edge of the platform is smooth under my hand, paint still tacky in the heat of the lights. No rust. No river. No broken glass.
“Ready whenever you are,” Elle calls to the AD, without taking her eyes off me.
I paste on the face the world likes, the one Quinn used to call “invincible” in her early recaps. I let my fingers close around the rail, pressure steady, and I stare down at the safe, padded floor where no one is supposed to die.
In the back of my head, the story Elle told loops on repeat, overlapping my own memory until I can’t tell where her version ends and mine begins. I tell myself she’s exaggerating, conflating jobs, feeding on the podcast buzz like everyone else.
Because if I admit I recognize the girl in her story, I have to admit I recognize the other one too—the one who stayed standing at the top of the stairs and walked away.