“You, with me! You, go to the other door!”
My own voice shocks me. It ricochets around the concrete like it belongs to someone who knows what she’s doing. I jab a finger toward the right corridor where Maya lies trapped, then stab the air at Quinn’s door to my left.
“Headset guy, camera guy, green jacket—right side, now!” I shout. “You three—door, glass, Quinn. Move!”
For a half breath, no one responds. Then the room stirs.
The camera operator I yelled at earlier drops his rig with a pained wince, the expensive glass cracking on impact. He and a grip in a neon safety vest lurch toward me, boots slipping on broken bulbs and melted cable. One of the PAs, headset askew, stares between me and the door like a deer on a freeway.
“You!” I bark, locking eyes with her. Her laminated call sheet flaps against her chest like a tiny flag. “What’s your name?”
“Ana,” she coughs.
“Ana, you’re squad lead on the door,” I say. “Take whoever you can grab. Get Quinn out. Use the extinguisher on the hinges if you have to. Don’t wait for permission from anybody in a blazer.”
Her mouth clamps into a tight line. “Got it.”
She spins, already shouting orders of her own. A second grip and a sound tech peel off toward her, sleeves wrapped around their hands. They cluster at the fire door, tugging at the warped metal. Quinn’s figure shifts behind the glass, a smear of motion and coughing.
I turn and sprint right.
The corridor narrows, heat funneled like a blowtorch. My eyes stream. The chemical sweetness of burning fake wood mixes with the nasty bite of melted plastic. I taste the sugar from craft-service donuts turning bitter on my tongue.
“Maya!” I yell. “Talk to me!”
“Here!” she gasps. Her voice comes from the floor, tucked between twisted rail and plywood. “It’s getting hot—”
“We’re here,” I say, dropping to my knees beside her. The concrete sears through my pants. “Camera guy, vest, help me with this pipe on three.”
The pipe trapping her leg is thicker than my wrist and slick with some kind of hydraulic oil from a busted prop. Fire nibbles at the foam brick wall behind it, licking closer to the frayed edge of Maya’s flannel.
Her face is gray under the soot. Tears carve clean, terrified lines down her cheeks. I can hear her teeth click with each shallow breath.
“What’s your last name?” I ask, grabbing for anything to keep her anchored.
“Velasquez,” she whispers. “Background, day rate, three vouchers, I—”
“You’re Maya Velasquez,” I cut in. “You are not dying on my set.”
I hook my fingers under the hot pipe. Pain bites hard, sharp enough that my grip almost slips. Someone’s hands—vest grip, I think—lock in beside mine, knuckles bulging white. Camera guy squeezes in on the other side, face shiny with sweat and soot.
“On three,” I say through clenched teeth. “One. Two. Three!”
We heave.
My shoulders scream. The pipe doesn’t budge at first, welded to the floor by shock and weight. I groan, muscles trembling, and dig my boots into the glass-strewn ground.
“Again!” I yell. “Use your legs, not your backs!”
We reset. The fire behind the pipe eats deeper into the faux brick, blackening the air. A chunk of set wall gives with a wet crack, sending embers skittering toward us. Heat flares against my cheek.
“Three!” I roar, lifting.
The pipe shifts—an inch, maybe two. Maya shrieks, then clamps a hand over her own mouth, eyes going wider.
“Keep going!” Vest shouts, voice hoarse. “She’s clear if we can get another inch!”
My vision spots at the edges. I dig deeper, past the pain, past the image of Lila’s body at the bottom of the real mill staircase. I picture that cold rail under my hands, the moment I yanked myself away.
This time I don’t let go.
Something in my shoulder pops. Suddenly the pipe breaks free of the debris clamping it, pivoting just enough that Maya’s leg slides out from under it. She lets out a broken sob.
“Got you,” I gasp. “We’ve got you.”
The guys drop the pipe with a clang and stagger back, panting. I drop to my knees again and grab Maya under the arms. Her leg lies at a wrong angle, already swelling under the torn denim. The smell makes my gut lurch: sweat, melted rubber, the faint iron tang of blood.
“Can you feel your toes?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she whimpers. “Does that mean it’s bad?”
“It means you’re getting an MRI and bored out of your mind in a cast for a while,” I say. “On three, we’re dragging you away from the fire. Don’t worry about standing. Let us do the work.”
Vest crouches at her hips, camera guy at her ankles, careful not to jostle the leg more than necessary. I loop my hands under her shoulders again.
“One,” I say. “Two. Three.”
We scoot her backward along the floor in jerks, concrete rasping against her clothes. She screams once, then bites down on it, fingers digging into my arms. Behind us, a beam collapses across the space where her body was a heartbeat ago, sending up a fountain of sparks.
The noise is huge, a metallic thunder that reverberates through my teeth.
“Go, go!” I shout over the sound, adrenaline flooding back in. “Back to the junction! Watch your footing!”
We half-carry, half-drag her toward the fork. Smoke thickens, tasting like hot pennies and cheap paint. I can’t hear Quinn’s coughing anymore over the roar of flame and the groaning rigging, and that absence jabs at me harder than any shout.
“Quinn?” I yell, voice cracking. “Status?”
No answer.
Fear punches a hole in my chest. The script pushes at me again, whispering that this is what happens when you don’t pick, when you get greedy about saving everyone.
“Ana!” I scream as we hit the junction. “Talk to me!”
A shape breaks away from the cluster at the door, backlit by firelight and flickering emergency strobes. Ana staggers into view, hair stuck to her forehead in damp ropes, a fire extinguisher trailing from her hand like a tail.
“We got the lock!” she shouts back, coughing hard. “Hinges are fucked, but—”
She’s cut off when the grip beside her shoulders the door like a tackling dummy. The warped metal gives an inch, then another. A second grip throws his weight in. With a tortured screech, the door pops inward, sending a wave of hotter, darker smoke rolling out.
Quinn falls with it.
She spills through the gap on her knees, then catches herself on all fours, hacking. Her headset dangles from one ear, cord snapped. Her glasses are gone. The front of her shirt is streaked with soot and something darker. She curls around a coughing fit, fist pressed against her chest.
Relief hits me so hard my knees weaken. I nearly drop Maya.
“Keep going,” I rasp to the guys helping me. “Halfway down the other corridor, away from collapse. Find a pocket of cleaner air.”
They nod and maneuver Maya toward a slightly clearer patch where the ceiling vents haven’t fully failed. Fire crackles behind us, closer than before. The suppression system still stays silent, its dead sprinklers tiny glass eyes watching us burn.
I lurch toward Quinn.
“Walk!” Ana yells at her. “We’ve got to move you away from the door, in case the frame goes.”
Quinn nods, jaw tight. She scrabbles for footing, legs wobbling. One of the grips ducks under her arm, lifting her easily against his side.
“I told them we’re not waiting for fire marshals,” he says to me. His face is streaked, eyes red. “We’re getting people to the loading bay now. There’s still a path if we cut across the mezz.”
“Good,” I cough. “Take her. Stay low, stay together. If anything hits the catwalks above you, drop under whatever support looks solid.”
He snorts, half incredulous, half respect. “Copy that, boss.”
Quinn’s eyes find mine over his shoulder.
She looks terrible: lips cracked, cheeks streaked with gray, pupils wide and glassy. But she’s conscious. She’s here.
“You did it,” she croaks. Her voice is shot, but the words still hit with a precise edge. “You didn’t pick. You cast the whole scene.”
I bark out a laugh that sounds like a cough. “The network’s going to hate these dailies.”
“Good,” she wheezes. “Maybe they’ll finally cancel you.”
We both know she doesn’t mean the show.
Ana wraps a hand around Quinn’s other elbow and starts guiding them toward the escape route the grip described. A few more crew stumble in behind, forming a ragged cluster around them. For a moment, the hallway looks like a reverse red carpet: no cameras in front, no flashbulbs, just the quiet, shaking line of people who actually keep the fake world running.
“I’ll get Maya and whoever else is still down there,” I call after them. “Meet you at the loading bay.”
Quinn lifts two fingers in a weak salute, then disappears into the smoke, swallowed by the orange and gray.
I pivot back toward Maya.
She lies where we set her, propped against the wall, head tipped back. The skin around her mouth has gone waxy. She clutches her hands around her thigh like she can hold the leg together through sheer will.
“Hey,” I say, dropping to a crouch. My knees complain. “Stay with me. Ambulances are on their way.”
“My mom’s going to kill me,” she whispers. Her voice shakes. “She only let me move out here because I told her everything was union and safe and—”
A bitter taste floods the back of my throat. How many mothers heard that about my set? About the movies I headlined, the ones with glossy behind-the-scenes reels full of smiling grips and carefully worded safety assurances?
“Your mom’s going to FaceTime you yelling from a hospital room about how famous you are,” I say firmly. “And then she’s going to make me get on the call, and I’m going to apologize to her personally for the rest of my life.”
That pulls a wet, rattling laugh out of her. “You’re Nora Hayes.”
“Yeah,” I say. The name feels different in my mouth now, heavy and usable. “That means I can scream louder than most people and they listen.”
I raise my voice again.
“Anyone still in this wing who can walk, I need a stretcher team!” I shout. “Doors are opening at the loading bay, and paramedics are going to ask where the worst injuries are. Maya Velasquez goes first. She was crushed by our bullshit.”
The last word slips out before I can edit it. For once, I don’t snatch it back.
Two medics in yellow vests appear at the far end, faces half-hidden behind respirators. Behind them, I glimpse daylight bleeding in through an opening door, a strip of cold, clean blue beyond the smoke.
“Here!” I wave my arms until spots dance in front of my eyes. “Here!”
They hustle to us, rolling a collapsible stretcher. One kneels to assess Maya’s leg, hand movements efficient. His latex gloves squeak against her skin. The other presses a mask toward my face.
“Oxygen,” he says. “You sound like you swallowed a barbecue.”
“Later,” I say, shaking my head. The room spins, then rights itself. “There’s a crush victim here and smoke inhalation down that way. And Quinn Hart—podcaster, VIP, but also a person—just headed toward the loading bay with a grip. Make sure she gets checked too.”
“They’re triaging outside,” he says. “We’ll note her. Breathe through this while we move her.”
He cups the mask over my mouth and nose. Cool air floods in, shocking and clean compared to the soup I’ve been choking on. My lungs ache in gratitude. I take three greedy pulls before shoving the mask toward Maya’s face.
“Her first,” I say. “I’ve had practice.”
He hesitates, then nods and seals the mask over her. Her shoulders drop a fraction.
In the distance, the fire finds another pocket of fuel and roars higher, chewing through the fake mill like it has a personal grudge. The AC hum that usually fills this stage has vanished completely. The only sound now is destruction and the ragged chorus of people trying not to be destroyed with it.
As the medics lift Maya onto the stretcher, she grips my wrist. Her fingers are cold and slick.
“You’re not leaving, right?” she whispers. “You’ll tell them I wasn’t just—extra number whatever?”
The question lodges under my ribs.
“You’ll have a name on every form,” I say. “And if they forget it, I’ll remind them on camera.”
Her eyes flutter at that word. She knows what a camera can do in this town, for good or for erasure.
The medics start wheeling her toward the strip of light. I follow, legs jelly, hand braced on the wall. My palm slides over peeling set paint and exposed brick, the fake mill giving way to the soundstage skeleton underneath. It feels like walking through my own layered past: river fog, diner coffee, green juice in recycled bottles, all compressed into one choking corridor.
At the threshold, cold air hits my face.
The loading bay yawns open, spill of daylight harsh after the orange gloom. People cluster outside on the asphalt: extras wrapped in blankets, crew members with blackened faces, executives with their phones out, eyes wild. Beyond the chain-link fence, I spot the shapes of news vans already pulling up, satellite dishes rising like white flowers.
Quinn sits on a low concrete barrier, an oxygen mask over her mouth, blanket around her shoulders. The grip who carried her stands guard beside her like a bouncer at a club nobody wants to enter. When she sees me, she pulls the mask aside.
“Told you,” she rasps. “You cast the whole scene.”
I stagger toward her, breathing hard, the taste of smoke still clinging to the back of my throat despite the clean air. Sirens wail at the studio gates. Phones lift, little rectangles of glass pointed in our direction, hungry for whatever story comes next.
I look from Maya’s stretcher to Quinn’s mask to the cameras lining up like a second fire.
I broke the script inside.
Outside, the unwritten one waits, hotter than the flames I just walked through.