Preview night is on a Friday, which means that Midtown is even more crowded than usual. There are thousands of people on the sidewalks. There are countless snowflakes spinning above Zara’s head.
She’s supposed to duck into the alley next to the Aurelia. Actors enter the theater through the stage door. That’s part of the magic. Zara should slip in unseen, as if she doesn’t exist until the moment she appears onstage.
Tonight, she breaks the rules. She needs to see the Aurelia, to feel like the theater is on her side. Zara lingers on the sidewalk in front of the wide set of glass doors. The lamps are pricked with points of light, the lobby as red and alive as a beating heart.
She passes through the plush and gilt into the grit and sweat and chaos of backstage. The rush of chorus members and stagehands makes her feel like she’s trapped in a fast-moving stream.
She wades into the dressing room. There are chorus members everywhere, so focused on their reflections that it wouldn’t surprise Zara if they missed a murder happening right behind them. At the far end of the makeup table, Kestrel puts the final touches on her lipstick, a purple shade that makes her look like she belongs in a very glamorous morgue.
Zara stares at Kestrel. She’s lived in close proximity to this girl for nearly two months. Zara wants to believe that if Kestrel was really dangerous, she would know it. But Kestrel is a good actress. Good enough to be Echo.
“Could you come help me with something?” Zara asks.
Kestrel’s head snaps in her direction. “Your hair?” she asks, staring at the hanging mess that should be pinned up by now.
Zara doesn’t answer. She waits for Kestrel to join her in the little dressing room. As soon as the door clicks shut, she thrusts her phone into Kestrel’s hands. Zara takes off her coat as Kestrel studies the picture, squinting her cat-eye makeup into two long, dark lines. “Is that my apartment?” Her voice tilts upward, toward panic. “What’s going on, Zara?”
“That’s what I wanted to ask. I found that when I came home last night.” She takes the phone back and waits to see what Kestrel will say next.
“Do you think I did this?” Kestrel sounds bewildered. “Why would I mess up my apartment? Why would I even go into that room when you’re not there?”
A stray punch of guilt hits Zara. She definitely went in Kestrel’s room without her permission. “Nobody broke into the apartment, so either you did this or it was someone you let in.”
Kestrel crosses her wire-thin arms. Zara takes stock of all the throwable things in the room. “Was it Barrett?”
Kestrel is shaking her bright-red hair. The bones in her chest rise and rise as she inhales. “Zara, I swear on my life. I had nothing to do with this.” She doesn’t deny that Barrett was in the apartment, though.
Kestrel’s breathing goes from bad to worse. Soon she is gasping for air. “Xanax,” she says. “My bag.”
Zara flashes through the outer dressing room and grabs the leather purse from under Kestrel’s makeup station. When she makes it back to the little room, she takes out the prescription vial and spills tiny blue ovals all over the makeup table. She plucks one up between her thumb and forefinger and holds it out to Kestrel, who swallows it with a cough.
They wait for what feels like an endless minute.
That’s when Zara starts to wonder.
She turns back to the pills. They’re all roughly the same color, the same shape. Zara holds up one pill and matches it to another. The word Xanax is on both, but only one is carved with machine-like precision. It’s like looking at a shadow that doesn’t match the person casting it.
“The night of the gala,” Zara says as if she’s watching a scene being lit one set piece at a time. Soon she’ll be able to see all of it — nothing left in the shadows. “That pill didn’t work, did it?”
Kestrel shrugs.
“Someone put fakes in here. Good fakes.” She tries to hand Kestrel a real pill, but Kestrel shakes her head.
And then the shaking spreads — to her shoulders, her hands, her entire body. “Who would do that?”
“Who would be able to?” Zara asks. The answer is right there between them, unspoken.
Someone who makes props.
Zara is worried that Kestrel will start screaming. But she does the opposite. She goes perfectly still and takes one long, careful breath. She closes her eyes and lightly places her thumb and one finger on the lids. It’s the kind of adult gesture that backfires and makes Kestrel look even younger than she is. “Barrett loves me.”
But she can’t say it with her eyes open.
“He comes on to every girl in a mile radius,” Zara says. “You must be able to see that.”
“He flirts. We both do,” she says, but she does it with the kind of delivery that Leopold hates. Flat. Lifeless. Memorized. “Barrett just wants people to like him.”
“He’s a dangerous person, Kestrel,” Zara says. The little dressing room has long been scrubbed clean, but Zara can still feel the words around her — the words that Barrett wrote on the walls.
Zara sat in here with Enna once upon a time, talking with her, listening to how she felt. Enna might have thought terrible things about herself. Maybe everyone does. But she wasn’t a ruined victim. She was imperfect and screwed up and brave. She was still fighting. She told Zara to keep fighting.
“Barrett hurt people,” Zara says.
Kestrel opens her eyes calmly, sucking in her cheeks as if she’s biting them on the inside. “You’re wrong, and he can explain this.”
And then Kestrel is moving, out of the little dressing room, flashing through the larger one and into the hallway. Zara follows. She can’t stop herself — she can’t let Kestrel accuse him alone.
She might get hurt.
They both might.
“Come back!” Zara yells, but Kestrel is quick, and she knows how to dart around the racks of costumes and the stagehands. And maybe it’s stupid or innocent, but as Zara runs, she gets a wild flash of hope. The future plays out in Zara’s head, scene by scene: Kestrel confronts Barrett, he confesses, and the curtain rises, only a few minutes late, on a triumphant Echo and Ariston.
With so much going on backstage, no one notices Zara and Kestrel moving against the tide, slipping into Storage Room Two. The huge door clicks into place behind Zara. Kestrel is only a few steps ahead of her, wading into the catastrophe of props. The space that used to feel like a sort of cathedral now just seems dusty and gray and overstuffed. There are rustling noises toward the back of the room. At first Zara thinks there must be mice.
Then the groaning starts.
“Are you all right back there?” Zara asks, thinking someone must be hurt. These things come in threes. She hears one low groan, a man’s voice, over and over. Then another joins it — higher and louder, like breathy punctuation.
Zara can feel Kestrel’s full-body flinch.
“I know you’re here,” Kestrel says, projecting so that her voice fills the space. “I know what you’re doing.” Her tone is sharp enough to draw blood. “You brought me here, too. Remember?”
Barrett rises up, naked, surrounded by antique umbrella stands. A crew girl with dark hair stands up next to him, tugging down her shirt, quickly urging her pants up over her hips.
“Hello, girls,” Barrett says, not trying to hide what he’s done. Not even bothering to act like he feels guilty.
Kestrel starts hurling things — pillows, old records, insults. She pitches an ashtray. It falls short, smashing on the floor. Zara pins Kestrel’s arms behind her back, as gently as she can.
“Are you kidding me?” asks the dark-haired girl, taking in Kestrel with sad eyes. “She’s a child.”
Kestrel shrieks.
With his clothes halfway on, Barrett runs through the maze of old gramophones and decorative screens. Even if she wasn’t holding Kestrel, Zara wouldn’t be able to stop him. Barrett knows every path through this room. There is the sound of a door yawning open — it bangs shut.
The dark-haired girl passes them with one hand up, shielding her face.
Kestrel melts down to her knees. Her face is lacquered, a layer of tears over the dark eyeliner and purple lipstick.
Zara kneels in front of Kestrel. They have something as good as evidence now. If Kestrel tells the truth, maybe all of this will wash clean. “Tell me everything,” Zara says. “Whatever Barrett told you. Even if it’s small.”
“How about this?” Kestrel asks with a harsh little smile that does nothing to hold back her tears. “Barrett is Leopold’s son.”