Zara is losing her grip on Echo.
After everything she did to get here, and everything she did to stay, Zara is losing her.
She made it away from Echo’s parents and through the woods. She found Ariston and fell in love. All of that felt right, but now the end is coming. The stark blue water. The fall.
She keeps thinking about Leopold and Meg. The story that she stumbled into, the one that’s bigger than Echo and Ariston but made out of the same fabric — love and death. There’s still so much that Zara doesn’t understand.
She doesn’t have to. Not right now. She just needs to let Echo’s next line bloom from her throat. The words are ready, waiting, wanting to be said. But Zara can only think about Meg and Leopold and love and death.
And Eli — always edging in at the corners of her mind.
Always Eli.
Adrian is keeping a hand on her arm tonight, even when it’s not part of the blocking. He must be able to tell something’s wrong. Zara can feel that he wants her to come back and finish the play. She’s barely onstage with him, even if her feet are planted on the boards.
Adrian lays her down gently, and her mind is there, tangled up in the heat of kissing him and the memory of kissing Eli. And then her mind slips, and it shows her other people kissing. Meg and Leopold, Kestrel and Barrett, Carl and Enna, Toby and Michael — all of them twined up together.
All of them in love, and doomed.
Meg, touching her hands and telling her not to worry. Roscoe falling from the ceiling, Roscoe lying at her feet. Enna, cold on the dressing room floor.
Eli, Eli, Eli.
She was the answer to the question that Leopold asked at auditions: Who do you love most?
Zara just didn’t know it yet. But time has doubled over on itself, and she can see the whole story, laid out beginning to end. Eli was in this room when Zara first stepped onstage. Eli saw Zara with the curtains and thought — something. She never did tell Zara what.
When she makes her next cross, she notices a new terrible thing. Leopold is missing from the spot where she planted him backstage so she could keep an eye on him during the show.
She takes a breath at the wrong time, arrives at the end of a line with nothing left to give. And there are hundreds of people in the audience wanting more. The lights continue to pound and words that Zara used to worship are pouring out of her like sand.
I hate this ending, she wants to tell Eli.
I hate it. Let’s write a new one.
That will never happen. Zara is alone with the part that she wanted so much. She has to get to the end of the play. And then Meg will be arrested and everything will be fine.
But fine is not beautiful, fine is not Eli.
Echo and Ariston’s home by the sea becomes a place for the lovers to huddle together as the story tightens around them like a noose.
With a sick flush, Zara realizes Meg was behind more than just Leopold and the roof. If she could frame him for two murders before he committed suicide, it would change Leopold’s entire story. He wouldn’t be the darling of the theater world anymore. People would see him for what he was. An art monster. Leopold didn’t kill Roscoe or Enna, but using the deaths to expose him as a monster was a twisted, brilliant piece of theater.
A lie that tells the truth.
The blackout comes on fast, and quick as a held breath, a beacon stamps itself onto the dark. A lantern. It’s not coming from the stage, from Ariston. It’s out there in the audience, a lighthouse blink in the ocean of darkness. Zara’s heart flares a single word.
Eli.
Zara runs back to the wings. Cosima is there. Waiting. A stagehand is supposed to help Zara into the binds, but tonight it’s the tiny costume designer, with a new length of rope.
“Last-minute change,” she whispers in a voice that has the same basic properties as a dull pair of scissors. “I tie these on, you go in the water, your hands won’t fly apart. No smashing the wrist again. Good? Good.”
Zara doesn’t have time to agree or disagree. Was that even a real lantern, or did Zara just invent one bright moment out of madness and hope?
“You wait for the blackout, you twist, the ropes come undone,” Cosima says, demonstrating with her own wrists. She turns them halfway around, a swift unlocking motion. “This knot is special,” she says. “It will come apart, no problem.”
Zara nods, hoping her brain has absorbed all of that.
In the final moments of the blackout, Cosima leans forward and whispers, “Leopold killed her. My Vivi. He said she would never be good enough, pretty enough. No one would love her. But I loved her. That girl was as good as my daughter. And he killed her.”
And then, with a shove, Zara is back onstage.
She feels sorry for Cosima and sick for Vivi. Another girl he plucked from nowhere and pushed until she broke.
Zara’s mind splits in two, like forked lightning. One branch is racing through the play, fully present, electrified. The other is reaching for Eli; she is the ground. She is there, past the storm, waiting. She is what Zara needs to touch.
It’s not hard tonight to put on her bravest face while the messenger unspools the story of Echo’s final moment. It’s nothing to climb the stairs and stand at the top, balanced on her toes.
It’s easy, sublime, to leap, because every movement brings her closer to Eli.
In the cold water, she does what she’s supposed to do. She pretends to struggle. The ropes around her wrists seem to shrink with the touch of the water, to bind tighter. And even though she took the deepest breath her actor’s lungs would allow, when the ropes catch, she wants more.
Air. Air. Air.
Now Zara is not so much fake struggling as she is real struggling, and she wonders if anyone in the audience can tell.
She wonders if Eli can tell.
The blackout comes on time, and Zara tries not to let out the rest of her air in a blind panic. She pedals through dark water, feeling her muscles start to prick with fatigue. She turns her wrists, the way that Cosima showed her.
Nothing happens.
Her hands budge less than an inch, and the rope is a tight, wet heaviness, despair turned into something she can touch. The lights are out, which means Zara is allowed to surface and breathe, but with her hands bound like this, she can’t.
The tank lowers into the stage, and now she is away from the audience, and she can’t help feeling like she is slipping into some underworld. But that’s the Greek tragedy talking. As soon as the tank locks into place, there will be a stagehand, and the stagehand will help her up the ladder, and Cosima will show her how those binds were supposed to work, and Eli will be there waiting and —
There is no stagehand to help her out of the tank. There is only Meg, pale eyes locked on Zara as she struggles.
Meg, who is watching her drown.