The first take with flame starts with a number.
“Scene forty-six apple, take one!” the second AC yells, slate clapping once, sharp in the refrigerated air. The sound rattles inside my ribs.
“Rolling,” the camera op calls. Red tally lights wink on across the set, little artificial suns glowing from the rig, from the handheld behind the scenes, from the unit covering my close-up at the stairs.
“Fire SFX standing by,” someone says over comms.
Lila’s voice cuts through on the stage speakers. “We’re going hot on A-side only. Flame bars one and two, on cue. No wandering, no improvisation. Hit your marks, breathe through the heat. And remember, this is still pretend.”
The last word lands heavy.
The first AD raises his arm. “Background… and action background!”
Around me, the mill comes alive. Extras in soot-smeared costumes run across the main floor, ducking under hanging chains, coughing on cue as the smoke machines whisper. The hum of the AC fights with the hiss of the smoke and the faint gas breath of the flame rigs, layered mechanical lungs.
“Action!”
I slam my hand against the metal rail, feeling the cold tackiness of fake rust, and let my voice tear out.
“You knew this was coming!” I scream, scripted words bouncing off brick and plywood. “You let it happen!”
My boots pound up the stairs, hitting each taped mark. On my left, low flames bloom along a row of flame bars, gold and controlled, exactly where Lila’s diagram promised. Heat washes my shins, dry and sharp, like opening an oven. The fake smoke curls thicker, tasting sweet and chemical at the back of my throat.
I throw the next line down toward my invisible scene partner. “There were warnings! How many times did they say the place was rotten?”
On the monitors, I know, close-ups of my face will intercut with wide shots of the burning mill. Out of the corner of my eye, I catch a flash of glass: the plexiglass shield around one camera, reflecting my own image back at me, doubled in the orange light. Two Noras, one scripted, one waiting with a folded confession in a bag by the stairs.
“Camera two, push in,” someone says. Footsteps shift on the catwalk above as they adjust.
I reach my high mark on the landing and pivot. The rail digs into my palm, solid and cold. My muscles remember the real mill staircase, the wet iron under teenage hands, the river fog in my lungs instead of this canned chemical haze.
“Cut it!” I shout, on cue and in character this time, voice echoing as part of the script. “Cut the power! Somebody shut this down!”
The line is written as metaphor—my character begging the show’s fictional system to stop steamrolling people. On the page, it’s neat theme work. Out here, my words scrape against something under the surface.
Down on the floor, Lila gives a small hand signal.
The next cue triggers. Flames jump on the opposite side of the set, licking up a fake wall near Exit A. The heat intensifies, but stays within the boundary we rehearsed. Extras rush past, their fear perfectly modulated, eyes finding focus marks on the scaffolding.
“And three… two… bring in the top flicker,” SFX says.
Overhead, new flame bars sputter on, casting moving shadows across the catwalks. The light turns the hanging chains into vertical streaks, like prison bars laid over our faces.
I grip the rail, ready for my next line.
The air changes before the script does.
The first hint is the smell. Under the sugar-plastic scent of fake smoke, a sharper tang knifes through—hot solvent, something oilier, hungrier. My nostrils flare.
The second hint is the sound. Behind the controlled hiss of the flame bars, a deeper whoompf answers, like a giant exhale catching.
Heat punches across my face from the right, far too strong for a cold pass.
I turn my head.
Fire races along the walkway near Exit B, where the oil drums and textile crates cluster. It runs low at first, a fast orange river hugging the floor, then climbs the stacked boxes in a rush. Flames wrap around the door frame that was supposed to be an escape route, devouring tape marks and safety promises.
Extras scream, the sound no longer shaped for performance.
“Cut! Cut, cut, cut!” the first AD shouts, voice cracking. “Kill fire, kill fire, kill—”
“Gas off!” Lila barks into her headset. “Lines one through four, off now!”
The flame bars nearest me go dark. The neat rows of controlled fire vanish in a breath, leaving only the smell of baked dust. For a half-second, silence falls.
The fire at Exit B does not go dark.
It flares higher instead, chewing through set dressing. A crate collapses, spilling burning fabric and some kind of liquid that splashes and ignites in fresh arcs. Heat roars across the floor, a physical force that slaps my exposed skin.
“That’s not us,” one of the SFX guys yells, backing away from the control board. His face shines with sudden sweat despite the AC. “Those pipes are cold!”
I know accelerant when I see it. River town kids learn what cheap gasoline and oily rags do in abandoned buildings. The way the flame runs, the way it clings, looks wrong for the carefully metered gas we rehearsed.
Wrong for accident.
“Who loaded those drums?” Lila shouts at a prop master, eyes drilling into him. “Those were supposed to be empty!”
“Picture’s cut!” the AD screams. “Evacuate! Nearest exit, nearest exit, go!”
The set erupts. Crew drop cables and clipboards. Background actors scatter, some still half in character, coughing and stumbling, bodies pulled by whichever direction fear pushes first.
My heart lashes at my ribs. I grab the rail with both hands, knuckles whitening.
From across the stage, near the monitors, Marcus yells my name.
“Nora! Down the main stairs!” He points at Exit A, which remains mostly clear, though the flame bars there flicker dangerously near foam walls. “Get to the door, now!”
His tie flaps as he strides toward security, already barking into someone’s ear. He looks furious, not scared, like the fire is just another PR flare-up he can outshout.
I don’t move.
Instead, my gaze tracks the fire cutting across Exit B, exactly where I flagged those crates hours ago. The taped arrow on the floor burns, the plastic curling like a peeled sticker. The cold metal tang of the stair rail leaches into my sweat, my hand slick but unyielding.
Lila shoves past a camera operator, reaching for the emergency shutoff on the SFX console. Her fingers slam the huge red button.
Nothing happens.
No overhead sprinklers. No hiss of CO₂. The flames keep climbing, licking higher into the riggings, reaching for the cables that feed the lights.
“Why isn’t the suppression firing?” Lila yells, voice raw. She pounds the button again. “Manual override, now!”
“It’s not responding!” the SFX tech shouts back, his hands flying over the panel. He flips a switch. Another. The only feedback is a sickly blinking LED that dies mid-flash.
My lungs tighten. We’ve been here before—systems meant to save us taped over, redirected, dead.
A background actor trips over a cable ramp near Exit B and goes down hard. Another pulls them up by the arm, both of them silhouetted for a moment against the orange wall.
“Exit A!” the AD keeps yelling. “Use Exit A!”
Everyone surges in that direction. The movement feels messy, not choreographed, bodies jamming the path. The AC hum is drowned by crackling wood and the high whine of metal expanding in heat.
Up on the landing, the smoke thickens. My tongue picks up a new flavor: something synthetic, like burning plastic and melted paint. My eyes sting. Tears spill without emotion behind them, just an automatic flush.
“Nora!” Marcus shouts again. He’s closer now, coming around a camera dolly, suit jacket thrown back. “Get down here!”
I’m halfway to moving when I hear it.
“We’re blocked!” a voice screams from beyond the wall of fire, high and shredded by coughs. “Hey! We’re blocked over here!”
Quinn.
The press box sits on the other side of Exit B, tucked behind a stack of carts that now form part of the obstacle course. In my mind’s map of the set, her zone lines up exactly with the path now wrapped in flame.
“Quinn?” I yell, leaning over the rail. Smoke swirls into my face, driving me back. “Quinn, where are you?”
“Here!” she yells, nearer than I expect but muffled. “They told us to hold, the guard said wait, and now—” Another ragged cough cuts her off. “We can’t get through, the tape area’s boxed in!”
I picture her lanyard, bright against her jacket, the security guard planted near her like a sentry. The same guard who was more focused on her camera than on exits.
“Security!” Lila roars at the cluster of dark jackets near the monitors. “You clear that press zone now, or so help me, I will drag you through that fire myself!”
One of them hesitates, looks to Marcus.
Marcus swears under his breath, grabs the nearest walkie from a PA, and snarls into it. “You get those people out of that corner now. I don’t care if they’re press or props.”
Lila turns on him, eyes wild and streaming. “You moved the burn up,” she spits. “You rushed this. This gag wasn’t scheduled until second unit. What did you think was going to happen?”
“Don’t start with me,” Marcus snaps back. “You’re the one who’s been playing games with danger all season.”
The accusation slams through the air between them, crackling like static. I watch it land in Lila’s posture, a flinch so slight only someone who has stared at her for hours would see it.
A wire pops overhead with a sound like a gunshot. We all duck.
I taste metal again, memories folding over reality: teenage me on an actual mill stair, wind howling through broken windows, the rush of rage and gravity as Lila’s body went over the rail. My present vision stutters, overlaying that night on this set—real river fog on fake smoke, real emergency silence on malfunctioning alarms that refuse to commit fully to either blare or quiet.
An alarm finally starts up, then glitches. A warbling, broken tone pulses from a corner speaker, then dies. The red strobe over Exit A flashes twice and stalls, stuck mid-bloom.
“Of course,” I whisper. “Of course it’s broken.”
The AD turns in frantic circles, headset askew. “We need the house systems on!” he shouts. “Who killed the master?”
No one answers. The answer sits in the pattern of my life: someone always kills the system when truth might hurt profits.
Smoke pours across the upper landing now, turning the mill walls into a smudged painting. Somewhere in that gray, Quinn coughs again, weaker.
“Nora, get down!” Marcus orders, pointing hard enough his hand shakes. “You are not the hero here, you hear me? You get your ass out that door and let the professionals handle this.”
His words hit the old script inside me, the one that says my job is to live, to be the asset, the face. The girl whose survival justifies the cover-up.
But another script wrestles with it—the revision I have been bending myself toward, the one written in red string in a loft and in printed letters in my bag: If I know people are in danger and I stay silent, I’m not surviving. I’m repeating the crime.
I clench my jaw so tight my teeth ache. My fingers dig into the rail until my nails hurt.
“I hear Quinn,” I say. My voice surprises me with how steady it sounds in my own ears. “I’m not walking past that.”
“Nora—” Marcus takes a step toward the base of the stairs.
Another crack from above cuts him off. A section of the ceiling rigging slumps, sending a shower of embers down onto the far side of the set. Polystyrene bricks blacken and slump into molten shapes. The roar of the fire deepens, chewing toward the catwalks.
Lila looks up, calculating paths, distances, the physics of collapse. Her tablet hangs forgotten at her side.
“We’re losing the north catwalk,” she says, more to herself than anyone. Then louder: “Everyone off the upper levels! Now!”
I don’t move toward exit or toward her yet. My body vibrates, caught between directions.
From the smoke-clogged corner beyond Exit B, Quinn’s voice threads through again, hoarse and smaller. “Nora?” she calls. “Is that you?”
The sound slices straight through my hesitation, lodging in the part of me that still believed fan mail meant I’d made something good.
I step away from my mark, away from the path Marcus points to, away from the taped arrow for Exit A. Heat licks higher around the blocked doorway, and the suppression system stays dead, a silent verdict.
The script they wrote for me ended at a safe exit.
I wrap one arm over my mouth, lower my head into the smoke, and move toward the fire instead.