In all of her time sitting in theaters, watching stories play out scene by scene, Eli has never had to make it through a performance like the one Zara’s giving. It feels like watching the girl she loves set herself on fire.
Like any good fire, the result is beautiful. Like any fire in the history of fires, standing close to it is scary. Up here in the booth, Eli usually feels safe: there’s distance between her and the stage.
Not tonight.
Eli listens to the stage manager over the headset. She calls the cues to her board op. They’ll reach the end of the play soon, and then Eli can find Zara and help her do a reverse phoenix. Unburn herself. Everything will be fine two scenes from now. Eli just has to keep hitting the cues.
And she has to stop thinking about Zara’s trashed room. About what might have happened if Zara had been in that room instead of rolled up inside a curtain with her.
One scene left before the end. The soldiers come for Echo and Ariston. The love bubble gets burst, every time. They drag Echo away by the roots of her hair while she screams a bright-red scream. The two strongest soldiers pin Ariston’s arms behind his back. Adrian Ward isn’t a movie star tonight. He’s Ariston, in messy doomed love with Echo, and Eli can feel what he’s feeling.
She takes them to black, but there’s no relief in it. The audience can sense the ending coming now. They know where Echo’s story is headed, faster than a falling body.
This is why Eli hates the play, the real reason, the secret that she hasn’t told anyone. Eli is a romantic. And the ending of this play hurts. To wrap herself in those words of love, to watch the flare between Echo and Ariston, and then every night, to see her gutter out — Eli needs to believe that love doesn’t have to end this way night after night.
Echo after echo.
When the lights come back up, the platform is set. The cliffs rise above the stage, fleshed out from a metal skeleton into a harsh outline of rock. The water waits below, dark, blue, patient.
In the corner of the stage, Ariston puts up a fight, but not a winning one. Shouldn’t he be trying harder? If he really loves Echo, shouldn’t he be finding some way to stop the soldiers? But he can’t.
He can’t.
Zara trembles at the top of the platform, her breath a shallow mess. Is she acting? Or terrified? Eli can’t tell. The lines between this play and life have gone past blurry. They’ve vanished.
Eli takes out her Leatherman and pushes the blades around, setting them against her skin without letting them cut. The touch of the metal is a comfort, because it reminds Eli what’s real.
Zara trembles at the edge of the platform. She’s supposed to jump, and then Eli will call the blackout.
But Zara isn’t moving.
The messenger’s voice sounds the final notes of the play, even though Zara hasn’t jumped yet. “She was pulled down, where love could not reach. Her old name died with her, before it could be revealed that she was Echo, the same Echo that Ariston should have wed. He returned to his kingdom and wept every day for a year, and when he had cried enough tears to drown himself, he woke and ruled his people.”
Zara is still standing there, unmoved. She spreads her arms, a bird stretching sleek wings. She takes a tiny step backward. And when she leaps —
“Go,” Eli says.
The board op hits the blackout, and Eli reels in the fresh darkness, an image of Zara burned into her eyes. Zara still on the platform. She didn’t jump. Her toes left the ground, but she never took flight. There’s the sound of a body smacking. Eli drops the Leatherman, which she forgot she was holding. “Houselights,” Eli says to the board op, skipping the last several cues. The play is over, anyway. “Go. Go!” Hard white hits the theater.
She tears off her headset and runs.
Eli’s boots are thunder by the time she arrives backstage. None of the stagehands pay her any attention. They’re all watching the stage, which they’ve just finished resetting, waiting for the cue from the stage manager to start the curtain call.
Leopold made a huge deal about his choice to keep Echo out of the curtain call. It made Eli so angry the first time she heard it. Zara did all that work and Leopold insisted that she stay backstage while everyone else took their bows because it breaks the illusion of her death.
Now Eli is just glad that everyone else is busy and she can get to Zara faster.
Eli rushes for the handle in the floor backstage, the one that opens to the traps below. When she tears it open, Zara is climbing up the ladder, right toward her. She’s favoring one hand, but otherwise she seems okay. Eli breathes for the first time since she left the booth. When Zara sees her, her eyes do that flashburn thing, the one that makes it very, very clear that Zara wants to kiss her.
Eli pulls her up the last step, the water from the pool spreading into Eli’s clothes.
“Are you okay?” Eli asks in low tones, surprised by how husky her voice is. It sounds like she’s been crying.
“Yeah,” Zara says, holding out her left wrist. “I hit the edge of the pool, but it’s just a bruise, I think.”
There are waves of energy coming off Zara. “I have to tell you something,” Zara says. “Not here.” Eli nods, her face a bare inch away from Zara’s. Their bodies barely touch. Their hands linger for a second, then part.
That’s all they can have for now.
It isn’t enough.
It’s too much.
Because when Eli pulls away from Zara, Leopold is rushing toward them through the wings. And if she wasn’t sure whether he saw them, the way he looks back and forth between them, so knowing, so smug, so playful, proves it. Eli swears under her breath in Spanish, the most bristling and barbed words she knows, and hopes that Leopold doesn’t understand.
Actually, she hopes he does.
Eli changes the blocking at the last second. She stands as close to Zara as she wants, presses their arms side by side, knots their hands. If he already saw them together, there’s nothing else to lose.
“Miss Vasquez,” Leopold says. “I’ve been informed by the stage manager that you called your cue early.”
This isn’t what Eli was expecting.
“I should have known you were too young, too inexperienced to take this seriously. I never should have kept you on after Roscoe’s terrible accident.” Eli used to flinch at that word. Accident. Now it batters her like a massive wave. It takes her down. “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask that you leave the Aurelia.”
Last night, Eli thought she couldn’t hate anyone as much as Barrett. But now he has company.
“What?” she asks numbly.
“Leave,” Leopold repeats coldly.
Eli’s been living in fear of those words since the first day she got here, and when they finally come, it’s like a cut: so deep and clean and fast she doesn’t even notice until she starts to bleed.
“You can’t do that,” Eli says.
The stagehands are watching, gathered in a little fringe, a tiny audience. They can’t look away from her misery.
“I can, and I’m afraid I must,” Leopold says. “For the safety of my actors.”
“So that’s it,” Eli says, challenging his truth. “One bad cue?” She knows that she’s being sent away because of what Leopold just saw. She wants him to say it. She wants the real truth, out in the open.
Everyone else should have a chance to see how ugly it is.
“It wasn’t just any cue, my dear,” Leopold says, acting like he’s so concerned for everyone’s well-being. Leopold shakes his head heavily, but there is a glint in his eyes, just for her. A dead giveaway. “Roscoe would be so disappointed.”
“You don’t know shit about Roscoe,” Eli says.
She’s saying whatever she wants now, whatever is true. But Zara’s silence is starting to worry her. At the mention of Roscoe, she goes brittle against Eli’s side. Glass to Eli’s live wire.
“You knew him for a few short months. I knew him for half his life, Eliza,” Leopold says, and it rings so damn false. Nobody calls her that. She is Eli. She is Luzecita. She is Zara’s girlfriend. She is Roscoe’s assistant. His friend. These are her truths. Leopold’s are all the wrong color. Dark as bruises. Dark as storms. “Roscoe would be very distressed to see what has happened here. A lighting designer who jumps the most important cue in the show? Who puts the entire production in danger?”
“I’m not hurt,” Zara says, her voice this weak little thing.
“Please,” Leopold says, his eyes still on Eli. “For the good of the Aurelia, gather your things and leave.”
Eli doesn’t have power here. She never has. But there’s one thing she can do: she turns to Zara and holds the wet tips of her hair in both hands. Zara is as cold and pale as a whiteout sky.
“Come with me,” Eli says.
Zara’s lips part, but the words come from Leopold, as if he’s changed the wiring and he can speak through her now. “Miss Evans is currently under a contract that binds her for the duration of the play. If she were to step away from it now, the consequences would be quite unpleasant.” Leopold digs back into Eli, harder this time. He’s done with the fun and games and now he wants her to know that he means what he’s saying. “This little career you’re trying to build is already in trouble. Fired from a major New York theater at such a young age? That’s not going to sit well with directors. Of course, if I call and give you a reference . . .”
Eli looks him directly in the eyes and says, “Fuck your reference.”
Leopold laughs, as if all the fight in Eli is just a little light amusement before the real show begins. “If that’s the way you feel. I can turn things in a different direction if you’d rather.”
It’s true that Leopold has influence. But there’s no way he controls the entire theater world, like he seems to think he does. This is Eli’s dream and she doesn’t want to lose her grip on it, but right now, it isn’t Leopold that makes her scared.
It’s Zara’s silence.
“Come on,” Eli says, tugging and tugging at Zara’s unhurt arm. “This isn’t real. He can’t hurt us.”
Zara looks at her like she has no idea how wrong she is. “I think you should go,” she mumbles.
“Zara . . .” Eli says.
Zara shakes her head, this tiny brush back and forth, and Eli’s heart does the most predictable thing in the world.
It breaks.
She turns her back on the scene, rushes past the red, red curtains, and bangs through the door that leads out of the backstage area. Just a few more steps and she is away from the Aurelia.
One more door between her and the nettles of snow on her skin. Eli needs the bottomless cold and the fractured pavement. She needs the lights that never turn off, their harsh, predictable glow.
She needs to get away from this story.
This is how it goes: siempre, siempre.