The footsteps that did not hurry belonged to Roland Beck.He came down the corridor the way weather comes down a street, and the circle around Julian simply came apart. Assistants remembered errands. Security guards remembered doors. The man with the radio discovered his static was interesting. Six years of silence will do that to a room.Beck stopped at the edge of the scene and looked at the fat unit director, at the blood, at the tooth by the folding chair. His eyes passed over Julian—and stayed, for half a second too long, the way a man looks at a name he has been told to remember. Then the eyes moved on, and chose to know nothing.He did not raise his voice. He did not need to."Not on my floor," Beck said.The unit director's mouth opened and closed like a fish's. He dabbed his split lip with the back of his hand. "Director Beck, I—this one, he assaulted—she threw herself—""I heard," Beck said. "I heard all of it from the end of the corridor. Which is more than I can say for yo

"She's not worthy," Julian said.The words landed on the stage like a dropped sandbag. Genevieve blinked. The unit director blinked. Even the light seemed to reconsider."Excuse me?" Genevieve said."You heard me," Julian said. "She is not worthy of it. Two scenes, a throwaway death, flattering lighting—keep them. She has real work to do, and it isn't standing in your shadow."Genevieve's face went through its inventory of expressions and settled on one she rarely needed: genuine annoyance. But annoyance, for Genevieve, was also content. She flicked two fingers at her publicist—a signal—and two camera phones lifted to record the dressing-down of a nobody. She would want this moment kept. She did not yet know what else it would keep."You," she said, "are ungrateful. I just helped you. I stopped that man's hands, I offered your stray a role, and this is how you repay me?""I didn't ask for your help," Julian said. "His hands stopped on their own. And the role is an insult with a contra

Selina Hart crossed the corridor, and the corridor learned something without being told: the way she walked toward the young man in the cheap coat was the way everyone else in the building walked toward money. A whisper ran ahead of her, fast and low: That's Hart. Selina Hart. Northlight—Company 2's entertainment arm. She is the one who signs.She stopped an arm's length from him. In her head, she was doing what she always did when she saw him: counting the years. Eleven, since a quiet investor with an orphanage's address had bought a dying talent agency for a price nobody questioned. Five of those years spent building half the entertainment industry, brick by brick, loss by loss, for a girl named Genevieve Vance—because the investor had come home one evening with a strange, tired look, and had said: ‘The fifth one wants to be a star. Build her a sky.’Ninety percent of Genevieve's film offers had lost money. Selina had signed the checks herself. The endorsements, the festival seats,

The contract was forty-one pages long, and Aira read all forty-one of them.She read them at the long glass table of Selina Hart's office, one page at a time, the way she read everything important: slowly, and twice. Selina watched her do it with her chin on her hand, and approved a little more with every page. "The last lead I signed did not read a single page," Selina said. "She is currently suing us. Reading is attractive."Julian did not sit at the table. Selina had gestured twice to the chair at the head of the room, the chair with the view, and twice he had taken the last chair instead, near the door, hands in his pockets. "I'm here to watch," he had said, "not to sign."Aira had looked at him then, and he had given her the smallest nod, and she had understood: back row. Where nobody makes you nervous. He had kept the promise before she had even asked for it.On page thirty there was a blank for her name. ARTIST NAME, it said."Aira," she said, when the assistant asked. "Just Ai

The first-floor bedroom looked like a small weather event. Water on the floorboards. Porcelain shrapnel under the bed. Tristan standing in the middle of it with his dead hand cradled and his face arranged into the exact shape of a man who has been wronged by the climate.Victoria had entered ready to scold whoever had caused it. She saw his face, and the scolding died in her throat, because that was what his face was for.She turned to Siska instead. "What happened?"Siska stood by the door with her jacket still on, because she had not planned to stay, and now would not leave on principle. "I have forty-one open cases at the station," she said, in the flat voice of a woman reciting her own chargesheet. "I finally took a day off. One. And I spent it on duty here, because somebody has to be. I brought him water. It was too hot. That is the entire crime. He threw the cup at the wall.""The cup slipped," Tristan said, softly.<