Heat presses at my spine like a hand trying to shove me forward, away from Marcus’s body and the crushed exit. Lila’s grip on my elbow is the only cool thing left on my skin, her fingers hard and insistent.
“Go,” she coughs. Her voice rasp vibrates in my bones. “You heard her. Quinn’s still up.”
“And that scream down the other hall?” I choke. Another call for help cuts through the roar, higher, thinner. “That’s somebody’s kid.”
Lila’s eyes gleam dark in the strobe of firelight. For a second I see the teenager from the mill: wet hair, hospital band, fury that never got a camera close-up. Smoke threads around us, tugging at my hair like fingers.
“Then don’t do it alone,” she says. “Find bodies. Use them.”
It’s the most practical note anyone has given me all day. She releases my arm and disappears back toward the main stage, coughing orders at shapes in the haze. I’m left facing the fork, lungs clawing for air that tastes like burned plastic and sugar.
I stumble forward, one arm over my mouth, trying to breathe through my sleeve. Ash grits between my teeth. The hum of the soundstage AC has vanished under the roar of fire and the shriek of twisting metal. Somewhere in there, alarms bleat in glitchy, useless patterns, like a dying PA system.
“Help!” someone yells from ahead. “Please, somebody—”
“Nora!” Quinn’s voice follows, shredded by smoke. “Over here—I’m by the door—”
For a disorienting second, the cries echo off the fake brick and steel, overlapping until I can’t tell direction. The mill in Pennsylvania folds over this one in my mind, fog and river stink bleeding into chemical smoke and hot paint. I press my free hand to the cold metal railing beside me.
No, not cold. The rail is heating up, a slow burn seeping into my palm. I jerk my fingers away, knuckles scraping rust. Even the fake parts of the set find ways to bite.
I reach the junction.
The corridors split in a sharp T: left toward the press mezzanine and the behind-the-scenes rig, right toward the lower level where the background actors clustered between takes. All morning, ADs barked those directions while influencers posed with green juice and union crews rolled cable under their feet.
Now the influencers are gone. The crews who built everything are the ones burning in it.
“Nora!” Quinn again, to the left this time, behind the din. “Door’s jammed!”
I turn my head that way. Through the smoke, I make out the shape of a heavy fire door sunk in the concrete wall, the wired glass half-blackened. A figure blurs behind it, backlit by jittery light: a woman with a headset and messy bun, shoulders hunched as she pounds on the glass with the side of her fist.
A cough double-folds her. She braces a hand on the window, leaving a smear of soot and condensation. The sight punches breath out of me harder than the smoke.
Quinn.
My Quinn. Not mine, not really, but the one who pulled apart my narrative with her podcast and then sat in a loft listening while I dug my own grave into her mic. The one who agreed to run my confession and Lila’s receipts, to leverage her platform toward something like justice.
“Hold on!” I shout, stepping toward the door, boots crunching glass. My voice ricochets off the walls, thinner than I want. “Quinn, I hear you!”
She lifts her head toward the sound. Through the dirty glass, I see her eyes squint, trying to focus. She raises both hands, nails scraping the wire.
“Nora?” she croaks. “The latch—won’t—budge—”
The doorknob on my side glows faintly, metal expanding from heat. My palm sweats just looking at it. To the left of the frame, tongues of flame gnaw at a curtain of hanging cable, the plastic dripping in black globs that hiss when they hit the floor.
I take one step closer.
That’s when the other scream knifes in from the right corridor, high and terrified.
“I’m stuck!” a younger voice shrieks. “Please—I can’t get out!”
I jerk my head toward it. Smoke billows thicker down that hall, but the fire there hasn’t fully swallowed the space yet. I can still see patches: the edge of the lower platform, the base of the fake stairwell where we shot half this season’s trauma.
A section of catwalk has broken away and fallen, dragging lighting rigs and plywood with it. The mess blocks most of the corridor. Through a jagged gap, I spot a body on the floor, half-buried under a pipe and a chunk of wall.
“Hey!” I shout, coughing. “Talk to me. Where are you hurt?”
The kid lifts her head.
She wears the costume from our pilot flashback: thrift-store flannel, ripped jeans, a T-shirt with a faded river-front diner logo. Makeup has streaked down her face in muddy tracks, mixing with soot. Dark hair hangs in a sweaty curtain, clinging to her cheek. Her eyes are huge.
For one dizzy instant, I’m back on the real mill staircase, looking at Lila bleeding below me.
The young actor’s voice cracks. “My leg—” she gasps. “The thing’s on my leg—please, I can’t—”
Fire crawls along the toppled railing behind her, slow but steady, tasting its way toward the synthetic fibers in her shirt. Overhead, the rest of the catwalk groans, bolts whining. A film of heat shimmers in the air between us, warping my view.
“What’s your name?” I call, throat tearing. I can’t just call her Extra Three, Fire Sequence.
“Maya,” she sobs. “I’m—Maya. Please—”
Maya. Not Lila. Not a ghost. A person who probably posted an excited set selfie this morning with a caption about dreams coming true and donuts at craft service.
I pivot back toward Quinn’s door. She slumps against the glass, shoulder to the frame, fighting to keep upright. When she coughs, the sound leaves red streaks at the corner of her lips. The air in her small concrete box has to be worse than out here.
“Nora,” she rasps. Her voice threads through the wired glass. “It’s locked—can you—”
Every call in my life threads into this moment. The PA who whispered that there had been “blood on the railing.” The fan letters that begged me to stay strong and never addressed the girl who vanished from the credits. My mother asking, on a crackling line, whether any of this meant she would lose the house.
Lila’s voice, recorded weeks ago, overlays them all.
“In the script,” she told me, sliding pages across the table, “the actress has to pick. Either she saves the girl who can tell the truth, or the kid the network sees as replaceable. She picks the one with the microphone, obviously. You know the logic. Protect the witness. Sacrifice the expendable.”
The scene on that page had felt ugly but distant, a hyperbolic parable. Now the pages rewrite themselves in the smoke, pressing against my skin from the inside.
I can’t save both of them alone.
That fact lands with a precise, cold weight in my chest. It isn’t a metaphor or moral puzzle, not when I look at distances and fire spread and how fast bodies move under shock.
If I sprint left, I can reach Quinn in maybe ten seconds, less if I don’t slip. The handle will burn, but the frame still looks intact. Breaking the glass with my elbow might work, but the shards will blow inward into her face.
If I sprint right, I can reach Maya in about the same time. The debris on her leg looks heavy but movable, if I get the angle. The fire behind her eats foam and paint but hasn’t reached her hair yet. The rest of the catwalk above her creaks like a loaded question.
The air thins. My vision pulses at the edges.
“Pick one,” the anonymous script whispers in my head. “Pick the story you want told.”
My hands shake. I flex them, feeling the sticky drag of soot across my fingers. Old instincts rise first: protect the person who can testify, who can contextualize, who can make all this pain mean something systemic instead of individual monstrosity.
Save Quinn, and the narrative lives. Save Quinn, and Lila gets her receipts aired by someone the internet trusts. Save Quinn, and maybe the industry has to change, because a white actress and a journalist both screaming on record is harder to bury.
But then my gaze drags back to Maya pinned under the pipe. No followers, no platform, no ten-part series dissecting her life. She’s here because someone in casting thought her face matched the vibe, because she signed up to be set dressing in a story about second chances.
Leaving her would prove everything Lila said about me right.
I can feel my whole body trying to split, half lunging each direction. My feet stay planted, muscles locked. Heat claws at my exposed skin; every breath feels like inhaling ground glass.
“Move, Hayes,” I whisper to myself. I sound like a director under my own skull. “Pick.”
I don’t move.
Quinn slams her palm against the glass again. “Nora!” she wheezes. “You have to choose—”
The words slice clean through me. She doesn’t mean it the way the script does, but they land there anyway, in that old place inside me where cruelty nested next to fear.
My stomach flips. I hear a phantom splash of river water against stone, smell wet rust under the chemical smoke. The mill back home glows in my mind, red-brick bones lit by sunrise through broken windows. I remember the cold metal tang of the stair rail under my teenage hand, the moment I jerked away instead of holding on.
I pushed once. I walked away from one girl’s broken body, believing it secured my own future.
Every award after that night had a glass surface. Every press photo shimmered with reflections. I curated my redemption on transparent walls and forgot who was standing outside, staring in through fingerprints of pain.
Healing wanted privacy. Justice wanted exposure. Marcus built me a glass house and called it both.
I stare at Quinn, my unexpected mirror. She dragged my past into the sun, but she also held a mic to Lila’s version of events. She gave Lila a kind of exposure that didn’t feel like a mug shot.
“Quinn,” I shout, voice cracking. “Listen to me.”
She leans in, pressing her ear to the glass.
“I can’t reach both of you,” I say. “Not by myself. If I come to you right now, that kid—Maya—she dies under that pipe.”
Her eyes widen. Even through smoke and wire, I see the calculation snap into place. She’s a journalist; she lives in cost-benefit charts, in tradeoffs between stories she can tell and people she can’t save. Hearing that math applied to her own life clearly lands like a blow.
She coughs hard, gasps a little, then manages, “Of course—of course you go to her.”
My chest seizes. “I’m not leaving you,” I insist. The word tastes like blood and old lies. “I did that once. I’m not doing it again.”
“Nora.” She slaps her palm to the glass, hard enough to rattle it. “You lead. That’s your job. Get to her. Then pull whoever you can for me. Don’t turn this into some tragic one-girl martyr scene. That’s what they wrote for you. Don’t give them the shot.”
Her words hit like a bucket of cold river water. The script in my head glitches.
She’s right. The old narrative gives me two choices: abandon the expendable or sacrifice myself as an act of heroism that still centers me. Both options keep everyone else reacting to what I do alone.
I taste metal where I’ve bitten my tongue.
“Maya!” I shout, twisting toward the right corridor. “Can you move anything?”
“N-no,” she cries. “My leg’s stuck—I can’t feel my toes—”
A section of drywall sloughs off above her in a cloud of sparks. She flinches and covers her face with her forearms.
“Okay, listen to me,” I call. “Stay low, cover your mouth with your shirt. I’m coming back, and I’m bringing people. Do you hear me? You are not expendable. You are not background.”
The word feels like a spell I’m trying to break.
“Okay,” she sobs. “Please hurry.”
I look left again at Quinn. Her face has gone gray under the soot, lips chapped from heat. She nods, once, a sharp jerk of her chin.
“I’ll keep banging,” she says. “Make noise. Find crew. Use your damn name for something that isn’t ratings.”
A bitter, breathless laugh punches out of me, halfway to a sob. “Bossy,” I say.
“Learned from the best,” she shoots back, then coughs so hard she doubles over.
The ceiling above us pops, sending down a fresh rain of plaster dust and char. The fire doesn’t care that we’re having a moral epiphany in its doorway.
My legs finally unlock.
I don’t run yet.
I turn in a slow circle, scanning through the boiling haze. Shapes move at the edge of visibility: a grip hauling a coil of cable like a lifeline, an extra staggering with a bleeding forehead, a camera operator still clutching his rig like a baby.
Three feet down the left corridor, a red fire extinguisher lies on its side, nozzle bent. Beyond it, the railing drops away into shadow, toward the lower level where other trapped voices might be waiting.
I suck in the hottest breath I’ve ever taken and let it out in a shout that scrapes my throat raw.
“Hey!” I yell. “Anyone who can stand, get over here!”
A few heads turn, slow, disoriented.
“Nora?” someone mutters. “Is that—”
“Yes, it’s Nora Hayes!” I scream, weaponizing the brand I spent a decade polishing. “If you can move, I need you! One group with me to the right, to lift debris off a kid at the stair base! Another group to this door to get Quinn out! You, with the camera, drop it and grab that extinguisher!”
The camera op blinks, then clutches the rig tighter.
“You can buy a new lens,” I snarl. “You can’t buy a new person. Drop it.”
He does.
A tiny surge of power shoots through me, sharp and clean and terrifying. Not the old power of red carpets and trending tags; this is just volume and clarity in a room on fire. It feels less like being above people and more like being right in the center of them.
Quinn lifts her hand in a faint thumbs-up from behind the glass.
“There she is,” she croaks. “There’s the showrunner you kept pretending you weren’t.”
The compliment lands where shame used to live. I don’t fully know what I’m doing, but I know I’m refusing the script that told me the only choices available were who to step on and when.
I focus back on the gathering shapes, counting bodies, judging where to direct them. I can’t guarantee that everyone makes it out; the math still tilts toward loss. The fire doesn’t negotiate.
But I can refuse to be the entire equation.
Heat claws at my exposed wrists. My lungs scream. Both screams—Quinn’s and Maya’s—thread through the noise, demanding an answer.
I plant my feet at the junction, raise my voice one more time, and choose how I’m going to move.
Not by turning my back on one of them.
By refusing to walk down either corridor alone.