I push into the heat with my arm over my mouth, the fake smoke turning real in my lungs, bitter and hot. The taped marks on the floor vanish under shoe prints and scattered props. My eyes water hard enough that the world reduces to blurs of orange and black, the soundstage AC swallowed by the roar of fire.
Behind me, the tide of people surges toward Exit A. Headsets, ball caps, branded hoodies—visible labor and invisible labor, all trying to cram through the one door management actually cleared.
One figure fights the current.
“Elle!” Marcus’s voice slices through the noise, hoarse and furious. “Lila!”
I glance back over my shoulder. Through a gap in the bodies, I catch flashes of him: tailored suit darkened by sweat and soot, tie loosened, expensive shoes slipping on ash. He shoves past a PA, one hand clamped around his phone, the other fending off panicked crew.
“Move!” he barks. “Let me through!”
No one listens until he shoulders into them like the river town kids I grew up with, using his whole body to cut across the stream. He doesn’t look at me again.
He’s not heading for the safe exit.
He’s heading toward the far corner, where the secondary door sits half hidden behind scenery flats, where Lila stood earlier with her tablet and her invisible dead-man switch.
I choke once, then turn back toward Quinn’s voice. The taste of craft-service sugar still coats my tongue under the ash, sticky and useless. Ahead of me, a coil of cable smolders, the plastic smoking with that sharp, nauseating smell you only get from modern things burning—PVC and paint and some toxic gloss they never list on the call sheet.
“Nora!” someone yells from the right. I ignore it. Quinn coughs again from the left, the sound thin, which terrifies me more than a scream.
A metal crash behind me jolts through my spine. I spin reflexively.
Marcus has reached the cluster of security near the monitors. He grabs one by the front of his jacket and yanks him close, face inches from the man’s.
“Where is she?” Marcus demands. “Where did she go?”
The guard jerks his chin toward the back corner, by the blocked exit. “Last I saw, she was near the B door, trying the manual control.”
“Then get your people to A and keep them open,” Marcus snarls. “I’ll handle her.”
Those three words dig under my skin like hooks. Even here, under falling things, he still believes this is his to handle.
Lila appears in my peripheral vision, a dark blur cutting across the floor toward that corner. Her headset hangs half-off one ear, her tablet clutched like a shield. She coughs once, hard, then keeps going, boots splashing through a puddle of water from a dropped fire extinguisher.
Marcus goes after her.
For a second, our paths cross at a diagonal, two lines in a rigged geometry problem. He grabs my arm as we intersect, fingers bruising.
“Nora, go out A,” he orders, not slowing. His eyes are red-rimmed, pupils huge. “Do you hear me? You go out A. Do not follow her, do not talk to her, do not—”
“Quinn’s trapped,” I say, pulling free. “I’m going that way.”
“Let security handle it,” he snaps.
“They’re not handling anything,” I say, pointing at the dead suppression system, the blinking light that gave up. “No one’s saving us today, Marcus.”
We stand there for half a heartbeat, the old argument condensed into a single look: his belief that control is salvation, my new, shaky refusal to be managed.
A section of ceiling pops, showering sparks. We both flinch.
“I’ll fix this,” he says, jaw clenched. “You stay alive.”
Then he pushes past me, into the deeper smoke, bellowing, “Lila! We’re not done!”
The words echo off the fake brick, off the rusted skeleton of the mill set, off the real bones of the thing in Pennsylvania that never stopped talking under our silences.
I turn away, toward Quinn’s corner, but Marcus’s silhouette keeps flickering at the edge of my vision, a stubborn ghost still trying to drag the story back into his hands.
When I reach the junction where the set forks—one corridor toward the press platform, one toward the fake loading dock—heat slams into my face in two directions at once. Fire eats up the wall near Quinn; at the other angle, smoke rolls low and heavy where the secondary exit sits.
I hesitate, lungs burning. Through the smoke to my right, Marcus’s voice cuts in again.
“Drop the case, and I can get you out!” he shouts.
I can’t see them clearly yet, only faint shapes. I edge closer to the corner, just enough to peek.
The B door stands a few yards ahead, red EXIT sign above it blinking a lazy, useless pulse. The path is half-blocked by fallen flats, a fake brick wall leaning drunkenly against a metal equipment rack. Flames crawl along the edges, licking at a curtain of cables.
Lila stands in the weird pocket of space between the blockage and the wall, one hand on the manual crash bar of the exit door. She slams her shoulder into it. The door doesn’t budge. Heat curls the paint at its edges.
At her feet, the metal case I saw in her loft—our locked box of receipts—gleams dullly under a dusting of ash.
Marcus reaches her, hacking from the smoke. He slaps his hand over the door bar, tries it himself.
“They sealed this?” he coughs, disbelief shredding his voice. “Who sealed this?”
Lila doesn’t look at him. “Ask the guy who told security to funnel everyone to one door,” she snaps, still driving her shoulder into the bar. “Your people turned this into a trap.”
“My people were trying to keep you where we could see you,” he shoots back. His hand grabs her arm, fingers biting through her jacket. “That case goes out with me.”
She jerks free. The movement makes her sway, just a little; she’s inhaled as much as I have, probably more. Her hair clings damply to her forehead, streaked with gray dust and sweat.
“You still think this is about who carries the box?” she says, laughing once, a dry, broken sound. “You can’t manage a fire, Marcus.”
“I can manage fallout,” he says. His eyes flick from her to the case, calculating. “You walk out with that thing, you scorch everyone. You scorch her. You scorch yourself.”
“That’s the point,” she bites out. She kicks the door, then leans into it again. “Move.”
He plants a hand flat against the doorframe beside her head, boxing her in without touching her this time. Sweat runs in clean tracks through the smudges on his jaw.
“Give me the case,” he insists. “I’ll get it to the right people at the right time. You don’t have to burn with them.”
The words hit something in me like an old bruise. The right people. The right time. His religion.
Lila’s lips peel back in a humorless smile. “You already picked ‘the right people’ once,” she says. “Remember? Lawyers in glass offices. Men who said my name was a liability.”
Marcus flinches, a tiny, involuntary wince. His hand tightens on the doorframe, knuckles pale. For a second, he looks less like a fixer and more like a man pinned under his own choices.
“I was protecting Nora,” he says, choking on my name and smoke at the same time. “She was a kid. You were—”
“Also a kid,” Lila cuts in. “Just not the profitable one.”
Heat presses against my cheeks, a physical shame. The back of my neck prickles under the damp cling of my costume, the fake grime now mixed with real soot.
Another part of the ceiling groans, a low metallic moan. I glance up instinctively. The rigging over their corner sags, bolts shining dully through the haze.
“We have to move,” I shout, stepping closer. My voice comes out raw. “Both of you, now!”
They both look over, twin ghosts blinking through the smoke—one with a headset, one with an expensive watch flashing in the firelight.
For a heartbeat, I’m shoved back to the river town diner, to a memory of them as lines on a rumor timeline: the girl who fell, the manager who cleaned it up. Both of them now trapped in my present, bodies on the same side of the burning door.
Lila’s gaze drops to the metal case, then to Marcus’s hand braced beside her head.
“You still don’t get it,” she says softly. “You can’t curate this anymore. This has to be ugly, or it isn’t real.”
“There’s ugly,” he snaps, “and then there’s suicide.”
A crack like a rifle shot explodes overhead.
All three of us jerk our eyes up.
The main beam above the blocked exit—one of the heavy steel spines that holds the lighting grid—shifts. Bolts shear with screaming sounds. The whole piece tilts, slow in the first second, then picking up speed.
“Move!” I scream.
Marcus’s head whips toward the falling beam, then back to Lila and the door. For a split instant, he’s the man I met at eighteen in a Beverly Hills restaurant, weighing options across a candlelit table: awards potential versus scandal risk, my life versus the girl whose name disappeared.
His body moves before his brain catches up.
He grabs Lila with both hands—one at her shoulder, one at her waist—and hurls her sideways, away from the door and the case. She hits the ground hard, rolling into the narrow gap between the equipment rack and a concrete pillar, out of the direct line of the fall.
The beam slams down where she stood.
Sound detonates: metal on metal, metal on concrete, lights bursting in showers of glass. The impact rattles my teeth. Hot dust billows out in a choking wave, tasting like rust and carbon and something sickly sweet from shattered gels.
I stagger back, arm over my face.
When the dust clears enough to see, my stomach drops.
The beam has pancaked the area in front of the exit. The door is crushed inward, EXIT sign hanging by a wire, still blinking weakly. The equipment cart is flattened. The metal case is half-buried under twisted steel, dented but closed.
And Marcus lies under the beam.
It caught him across the midsection, pinning him against the floor like a specimen. His legs stick out at an angle that makes my throat close. Broken plexiglass from a monitor shield litters his chest, glinting like a spill of fake awards.
The glass motif the industry lives on, finally doing more than refracting light.
Lila scrambles up on hands and knees from the gap where he threw her. Her movements are jerky, disbelieving, like her limbs belong to someone else. Ash sticks to the wet shine on her cheeks.
“No,” she says, voice shredding on the single syllable. “No, no—”
She grips the beam with both hands and pulls. Muscles strain in her forearms, cords standing out. The beam doesn’t budge. It’s not plywood. It’s real steel, even if the brick around it is fake.
Marcus coughs once, then again, each sound wet and bubbling. His eyes find her first.
“Told you,” he rasps, lips dark with blood. “I handle crises.”
It’s a joke with no air behind it. His fingers twitch against the floor, reaching blindly for something.
Lila’s face twists. “You couldn’t just let the universe do this?” she says, half sob, half anger. “You had to choreograph your own martyrdom?”
Her words slap the hot air. She doesn’t move away from him, though. She drops to her knees by his head, hands hovering, unsure where to touch, what contact doesn’t hurt.
I move closer, each step heavy, the heat pressing like a hand between my shoulder blades. My boots crunch glass.
“Marcus,” I say, kneeling on the other side. The floor radiates heat up through my shins. “Hey. Hey, look at me.”
He drags his gaze over, each millimeter of movement a climb. When his eyes land on my face, a flicker of his old assessing look flares.
“You’re still here,” he wheezes. “I told you—”
“I’m not leaving people behind,” I cut in.
His mouth twitches. “Always… so dramatic… on the wrong beats.”
His hand gropes toward my wrist. I take it. His fingers clamp down with surprising strength, nails digging into my skin.
“Listen to me,” he breathes. “You don’t… you don’t say everything. Not names. Not all of it. You let counsel—”
“Stop,” I say, shaking my head. “This isn’t a notes call.”
Lila makes a rough noise. “He’s dying, and he’s still giving you media training.”
Marcus’s eyes flick to her, then back to me. Something raw cuts through the calculation, a crack in the glass.
“I tried to fix it,” he whispers. “Back then. Tonight. I thought if nobody knew, you could… be better than what you did.”
Heat blurs his outline. Sweat burns into my eyes. I blink it away.
“You made me smaller,” I say quietly. “You made her disappear.”
He swallows, throat working against whatever is happening under that beam. “I know,” he says. Two words, scraping out like they cost him more than anything he’s ever paid for.
Lila’s shoulders jerk. She presses the heel of her hand hard into her mouth, like she’s trying to keep something in—rage, grief, both. Her other hand rests lightly against his hair for a second, fingers trembling, then lifts away again, like she’s touched a hot stove.
“Why did you—” She breaks off, then tries again. “Why did you shove me?”
Marcus’s gaze drifts toward her. His breathing stutters.
“No more… bodies,” he manages. “Not for… this story.”
It’s not an apology. It’s not nothing.
A support column nearby shudders. Cracks spiderweb across the fake brick, dust sifting down in a steady stream. Somewhere deeper in the stage, a fresh chorus of screams swells, then fragments into orders, questions, coughing.
Time, always his favorite currency, runs thin around us.
“We have to go,” I say. My voice shakes. “The rest of this is coming down.”
Marcus’s fingers loosen on my wrist. He blinks slowly, eyes glassy now in a way that has nothing to do with screens.
“You go,” he whispers. “For once… don’t… wait for me.”
My chest caves inward around his words. I don’t know where to put my hands, so I smooth his hair back from his forehead, just like I did in a trailer mirror before premieres, when he complained about flyaways.
“I can’t get you out,” I say, the admission tasting worse than smoke. “There’s no way to move this.”
“You get… her out,” he says, pupils fixing on Lila. “Both of you… tell it… yourselves.”
His hand searches, finds empty air, then drops.
Lila stares at him, jaw clenched so tight it trembles. Her eyes flick over his face—cataloguing, maybe, the man who tried to have her removed from set this morning and just threw himself under steel to save her life.
“I hated you,” she tells him, voice low and clear. “You know that?”
No response. His chest rises once, shallow, then barely at all.
Her next words come out broken. “I didn’t want this for you.”
A beat passes.
Marcus’s body sags, whatever thread held him taut finally letting go.
For the first time since I was a teenager in that Pennsylvania mill, there is no fixer left alive between me and the consequences of what I did.
The realization hits like another falling beam. My stomach flips. My hand slips from his hair to the floor, catching myself on hot concrete.
“We have to move,” I say again, more urgently. I grab Lila’s arm. “Come on. He’d be furious if we died here and left him alone with the narrative.”
The line is dark and stupid and exactly the kind of thing Marcus would have snorted at. It cracks something in Lila. A wet laugh bursts out of her, half-sob, half-breath.
She lets me pull her up.
She takes one last look at his body under the beam. Her chin lifts a fraction, some private salute.
“You don’t get to write the ending,” she murmurs to him, barely audible. “Not this time.”
Then she turns away.
Together, we stagger back from the crushed exit, ash swirling around our ankles. The metal case lies among the debris, dented but intact. For a wild second, I consider scrambling for it.
Lila squeezes my arm so hard it hurts. “Leave it,” she says. “We have other copies.”
Of course she does. This was never the only vault.
Heat pushes us toward the junction, toward the fork where the set splits again. The roar of fire drowns out everything for a moment—ear-filling, bone-rattling.
Then, through the chaos, two sounds separate out.
On one side, down the corridor toward the press box, Quinn coughs and cries out my name again, thinner now, fraying.
On the other side, deeper in the maze of scaffolding, a younger voice screams for help—high, panicked, eerily familiar in its pitch to a memory of a girl on a mill staircase.
I freeze at the crossroads, Lila’s hand locked around my elbow, Marcus’s body burning at my back, the weight of his last shove still rippling outward.
For the first time in my life, there is no Marcus in my ear, no crisis memo, no pre-approved talking points.
The next move, and who I reach for first, belongs to me alone.