RYLIN FOLLOWED XIAYNE out of the LA train station, which was shaped like an enormous seashell and gleamed a blinding white in the morning sun. She raised her hand automatically to her eyes to shade them, glancing at her new black suitcase, which whirled automatically behind her. Chrissa had given it to her as a congratulations-on-your-internship present. Rylin was so excited that she couldn’t even argue at the extravagance.
“You okay if we head straight to the set? Filming starts in an hour,” Xiayne asked, with a glance at Rylin. He was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt with a single white word on it, though the word was constantly shifting, in alphabetical order. So far this morning Rylin had seen everything from parallel to toast. She wondered how long it took the shirt to cycle through completely and start over again.
The two of them had left early that morning, on the eight a.m. train from New York. But since the cross-country trip was only two hours, it was now just seven a.m. in LA, giving Rylin the curious sensation of having traveled back in time.
“Of course,” she said quickly. She’d barely been able to sleep all night from anticipation. She still couldn’t quite believe she was going to work on an actual holo set.
As they got into a hover and started off, Rylin glued her eyes to the window, desperate with curiosity about this unfamiliar city. Streets fanned out in various directions, the buildings illuminated and softly curved. Rylin had never seen anywhere like it. It seemed so unnecessarily spread out, with people living and working and going to school in all those different buildings. Rylin expected as much from the suburbs, but wasn’t this supposed to be a city? The whole thing struck her as absurdly inefficient.
They passed a luxury apartment complex, shiny and new-looking, with glamorous terraces on each level. It was barely twenty floors, yet clearly had been designed for rich people. Rylin didn’t know a single wealthy New Yorker who would pay for something this low—what kind of views could it possibly have? Her apartment was on 32, and she guaranteed it was cheaper than anything in this entire neighborhood.
“Welcome to LA, the city of dreamers. Beautiful, yet hopelessly illogical,” Xiayne said, as if reading her thoughts. He sounded both sarcastic and oddly proud. “I’m glad you came, Rylin,” he added, and the words traveled pleasantly throughout her body. She smiled.
“Me too.” Suddenly, she thought of Cord’s cruel insinuation, the way he’d said that she was taking teacher’s pet to a new level. She shifted a little farther from Xiayne in the tiny space. He didn’t seem to notice the movement.
“How do people here get around?” she asked, curious.
“Medusa.” At Rylin’s confused look, Xiayne gestured up, so that the hover’s ceiling turned suddenly transparent. “It’s an acronym. The Metropolitan Department of Under-Sphere Airtrams.”
The sky overhead was cluttered with an incredibly complicated, tangled system of monorails. They were all colored bright neon, like a glowing nest of snakes. Far above them she saw the blue arc of the sky.
A cartoon clown face appeared against the azure blue, projected with the words MCBURGER KING! 2 FOR 1 BURGERS ON MONDAYS! Rylin gasped.
“Oh, have the morning ads already started?” Xiayne peered up and shrugged. “They project those on the Bubble.”
Rylin had heard about the Bubble. Back before rain was controllable by hydropods, when global warming was still a concern, Los Angeles had worried about their city growing too hot. So they’d “bubble-wrapped” it—built an enormous supercarbon dome that surrounded the entire city. Years later, once the dome was no longer needed, they refused to take it down. Maybe they’d become too addicted to the ad money, Rylin thought. She pictured the strong clean lines of the Tower, so unlike this cluttered, flashing, chaotic city, and found herself oddly missing it.
“Here we are,” Xiayne said when their hover pulled up to a series of squat interlocking buildings that could only be the studios.
The cavernous soundstage was silent, and empty of people. Rylin stole a quick glance at the set: an enormous throne room with marble pillars and a heavy gold dais. Of course: Salve Regina was a historical film, about England’s final monarch before Britain voted to abolish the whole institution. The lights dimmed, then brightened, then dimmed again as someone, probably the head of photography, tried to perfect the way the light fell on some specific detail. Rylin tried to drink it all in again before Xiayne turned left and walked through a wall—
Her eyes widened, and then she realized that it wasn’t a wall at all but an opaque light-divider, to keep all the messiness out of sight of the cameras. She quickly followed into the backstage world of cheerful, disordered chaos.
Carts whirled past, laden with sleek metal stylers and brightly colored makeup tubes, funny-looking sketches of noses and eyes and mouths scattered like abandoned limbs. Cameras of various sizes and shapes floated, forgotten, in corners. And into every tiny slice of space were crammed an assortment of people—stage managers and assistants talking frantically into their contacts, a full team of costumers checking every detail of the historic attire, and, of course, the actors and actresses in their full makeuped glory.
“Seagren.” Xiayne grabbed the arm of a passing young woman, who had ebony skin and a wispy bun. “This is Rylin, your new assistant. Rylin, Seagren is your boss for the week. Good luck, you two.”
“Okay, thanks. How will I—” find you later?, Rylin started to ask, but Xiayne was already gone, vanished into the horde of clamoring, demanding people. Right, he’s in charge of this whole production, she reminded herself. She didn’t have first claim on his attention—didn’t have any claim at all, really. But she suddenly found herself longing for the last few hours, when it had been only the two of them on the Hyperloop and they’d chatted so easily.
“You’re my new filming assistant? How old are you?” Seagren wrinkled her nose dubiously.
Rylin decided to skirt the truth. “I’m one of Xiayne’s students. He asked me to come help out,” she said, deliberately leaving out the part where she was seventeen. “It’s really nice to meet you,” she added, and held out a hand. She’d hoped that calling him by his first name would help her sound more professional, but Seagren just rolled her eyes, exasperated.
“One of the high schoolers. Great.”
The whole crew actually looked quite young to Rylin; barely anyone here seemed older than thirty. Maybe that was an organic result of Xiayne’s own youth, or maybe he thought having a young crew was crucial to producing a film that was edgy and cool. “What should I get started on?” she asked Seagren, ignoring the dig.
The assistant director rolled her eyes. “Why don’t you organize this?” she said curtly, and flung open the door to a massive closet along one wall.
It was crammed with what looked like generations of accumulated film paraphernalia: old pieces of cameras, lightboxes, discarded props. Rylin was pretty sure she saw an old box of soda pods in there, with one of the dispenser machines. A fine layer of dust covered every surface.
This wasn’t at all what she’d had in mind when she’d agreed to come work as a filming assistant. She’d thought she would at least be on set—holding lights in place, maybe; or fetching coffee, but standing there, watching the action. Rylin looked up at Seagren’s face and saw that she was smirking a little, daring Rylin to challenge her.
I worked my way up from the bottom, Xiayne had said. Well, Rylin could do it too. She’d been the maid for the Andertons, after all; she wasn’t afraid of rolling up her sleeves.
“Sounds perfect,” she said, and walked into the dim closet to get started.
Hours later, Rylin was neck-deep in that impossible closet when she realized with a start that the set had grown quiet. It was later than she’d realized; when had everyone else gone home? She grabbed her suitcase, which was still tucked into a corner, and started toward the doorway, thinking she would head back to her assigned room at the crew hotel.
It had been a long day, filled with grunt work for Seagren: organizing that damn closet and picking up lunch from the craft cart and hunting down missing actors in the various break rooms. But Rylin hadn’t minded it all, especially not hanging out with the actors. She loved watching them, helping them go over their lines, asking them questions about the filming. She’d realized quickly that the actors were the most talkative of anyone, at least once you got them talking about themselves.
A light was still on in one of the edit bays. Rylin hesitated, curious, then walked over to knock boldly at the door.
“What do you want?” came Xiayne’s irritated voice.
“Never mind,” Rylin said quickly, stepping back. “I’ll just—”
“Rylin? Is that you?” The door swung open and Xiayne stood there, looking more agitated than Rylin had ever seen him. He was barefoot, and his hair was sticking out wildly every which way. There was a ketchup stain on his T-shirt, which had frozen on the word yesterday.
“I’m sorry, I thought you were someone else. I didn’t mean to snap like that.” He kept reaching up to push back his hair, which fell forward over his eyes.
“Is everything okay?” Rylin asked, and Xiayne sighed.
“Not really. I’m just reviewing the dailies, and to be honest …” He gave an embarrassed shrug. “They suck.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
Xiayne seemed surprised by her offer. “Sure. Come check them out. You’ll see what I mean,” he warned. When she’d pulled up the chair next to him, he flicked his wrist, and the footage resumed playing.
They watched for a while in silence. The footage wasn’t all that bad, Rylin decided, though it wasn’t as good as Xiayne’s other films. She tried to focus on certain scenes and images, reminding herself that this was just the raw material, not the finished product. She kept stealing glances at Xiayne’s profile. His eyes gleamed in the dimness; the flickering light of the holo picking out his strong nose, his firm jaw. Occasionally his lips moved as he murmured lines of dialogue alongside the actors.
“Okay, look at the prime minister here,” Xiayne said abruptly. “She should seem more important—she’s about to denounce the queen in the next scene. But she just disappears in this shot. It’s that stupid navy suit we dressed her in.” He lifted a hand to his chin, his eyes narrowed. “I kept upping the lighting, but that navy suit absorbs photons like a black hole. It has no texture. I’d reshoot it, but we only have her for two more days, and I still need to get through act three …”
Rylin stood up and walked a slow circle around the room. “What about the queen’s gown?” she asked after a moment. “After she walks in, it throws off a lot of light.”
Xiayne went silent. For a moment Rylin feared she’d overstepped her bounds, but then he twirled his finger, skipping forward to the queen’s grand entrance in her elaborate court gown.
Rylin watched his face as he watched the scene. When he saw what she meant, his eyes lit up with an almost fanatical fervor. “You’re right,” he said wonderingly. “That skirt casts light like a mirror. Look how it brightens the prime minister’s face and hands.”
“Can you use it?” Rylin pressed.
“I’ll grab a few of these stills, track all the beams around the PM and then copy them into the earlier shots. It’ll be a bitch to do, but yeah, it’ll work.” Xiayne stood up and stretched his arms overhead, then took a sudden step toward her. “Rylin, that was a fantastic idea. Thank you.”
For a panicked moment, Rylin thought he was about to kiss her. Her stomach constricted in a wild, fluttering nervousness—because he was her teacher and she knew it was wrong, and yet some tiny part of her wanted him to.
“I knew you were a natural.” Xiayne grinned, then reached for his tablet from the counter behind her and returned to his seat. “I’m ordering coffee. Want anything?”
Rylin blinked, startled. “No, thanks,” she stammered, to hide her relief. Being around all these self-centered actors was clearly messing with her head.
“You should get one. We’re going to be here half the night fixing this. Unless you don’t want to stay,” Xiayne quickly backtracked. “You’ve already worked way more than union hours. But if you don’t mind, I could use the help.”
“Of course I’m staying,” Rylin said firmly, and sat up straighter. “And actually, yeah, a coffee would be great.”
“Awesome.” Xiayne clicked on the tablet a few times to place their orders, then smiled at Rylin as the footage began again.