Zara takes a step onto the roof and finds that it has started to snow. Not the soft, wayward snow of the gala night. These are driving, reckless flakes that race to see how fast they can land.
They fall on Zara’s arms, burden her like a secret. She brushes them off, not wanting to ruin the white dress. It has nothing to do with being the perfect Echo or making people love her. She doesn’t want to hurt the costume that Cosima worked so hard on — even now, she’s a little afraid of the costume designer.
The snow is so thick it’s almost like a curtain has been drawn. Zara fights her way forward, into the wind. Leopold is on the far side of the roof, standing gently on the stone margin, his palms upturned.
For a moment all Zara can do is appreciate the artistry — the scrawl of the city reduced to a backdrop for an epic scene. Noise and life below them, darkness and eternity above, and Leopold caught between the two.
Even now, he is directing.
Even now, he is maddeningly good at it.
But there’s an emptiness at the heart of his work. He has no idea how to tell a true story. He’s just following the pattern. That’s why he needs his actors to be hollow, to be his. He’s made a little set of puppets to play with, and he uses them to tell the same tired stories over and over again.
Leopold dangles one foot off the edge, into the darkness. The wind up here has muscle and teeth, and it is searching for something to destroy. One moment of grappling with it could send him over the edge.
Zara walks toward him — it’s a wide roof, littered with protruding vents and strange slanted bits. Even taking a few steps feels treacherous. Snow seeps through the fabric of her shoes.
“What are you doing?” Zara shouts into the wind.
Where is the third victim?
Leopold looks over his shoulder like she’s come up here to consult him about an acting note. “Echo,” he says, a tremor in his voice contradicting his body’s calm state. “You should be downstairs. The play is about to begin.”
She takes another step toward him — but what if he is waiting there so he can pull her over the side? What if he set this scene for her, like setting a trap? What if Zara is the third victim? “I’m not coming any closer.”
“Good,” Leopold says. “I wouldn’t suggest it.” He runs his hands through the cold plumes of air, toying with them like ribbons. He dances a few steps forward, then places one foot back to find his balance. “This is it,” he says. “The final act.”
Zara is cold down to her bones, and even farther. There is a pit of cold in the center of her brain. She needs to keep Leopold talking until she figures out what to do. “I know about the first two visions,” she says. “The ones that told you to kill Roscoe and Enna.”
Leopold blinks at her like she’s a mirage. “My visions come true.”
Heat rises in Zara. Her voice should be able to scald the snow into melting. “You make them come true.”
Leopold lifts his arms, as if to summon a different explanation from the night, from the darkness. “You think I wanted them in my head, screaming? You believe I’ve relished the notion of my own death?”
“Your death?” Zara asks.
“What — did you think I was taking a little stroll on the edge of the roof for no reason?” Leopold rattles on, as if all he wants is to be listened to. “The curse took Roscoe and Enna. It’s here for me now.”
“You didn’t kill them?” Zara asks. She feels dizzy, then burning, then numb. She wonders how long it takes frostbite to set in.
“Of course I didn’t.” His eyes are on fire — a terrifying, truthful blaze. “What have I been telling you this whole time? What have you ignored so often? I need this play to be —”
“Perfect,” Zara says, stepping on his line. She can see Leopold’s motivation clearly now. If he knew he was going to die, he would need his final production to be flawless. But — “You hurt people. That’s what you do. Over and over again. Roscoe and Enna are dead. And you want me to think —”
“I don’t care what you think,” Leopold says, his voice blunted by the cold. “Why are you up here again?”
“Meg,” Zara says blankly.
“She told you about my visions, did she?” Leopold asks with a bitter wisp of a smile.
Meg didn’t tell her that Leopold was on the roof, but she obviously knew. She did tell Zara about the visions, about Roscoe and Enna. She never said that Leopold killed them, though. She just led Zara to the cusp of the idea and let Zara push herself over the edge.
“Wait,” she says, her mind suddenly kindled, working against every cold thing about the night. “Meg knew you were going to do this? Come up here and . . . jump?”
Leopold curls a wrist, such a natural movement. Zara wonders how long it took to cultivate. How fully he had to train himself to become the person in front of her, to erase the nobody from Indiana and become a set of careful lies. She thinks back to the costume shop and the hollow set of clothes that looked like Leopold Henneman. That’s all he’s ever been.
“Meg knows everything,” Leopold says.
And the fire inside Zara’s mind starts to rage.
“She told me about the first two visions,” Zara says. “Meg wanted me to think that you killed Roscoe and Enna. But she said you wouldn’t tell her who died in the third vision. She let me think you were going to kill someone else tonight. Probably so I would be afraid and stay away from you.” Every step, every action, every death could have been carefully staged. “I think — I think she made this happen. I think she’s trying to kill you.”
“Impossible,” Leopold says with a smile that calls on all of his old charms. “Meg is in love with me.”
“No,” Zara says. “She isn’t.” The Meg she saw in the little dressing room — that version spoke with honesty and telling flares of emotion. That version is closest to the truth. “Meg despises you.”
Leopold doesn’t seem to hear her, or if he does, it doesn’t dent his belief. In Leopold’s mind, Meg still loves him.
He looks down at his watch, adjusting the dial, squinting at the face in the dark, and the action is so grounded in the ordinary that it almost convinces Zara everything will be back to normal soon. No murders. No impossible choices. No pulse beating so fast that it feels like wings about to take flight.
“It’s time,” Leopold says. “Go downstairs. Take your place.”
Zara’s whole body strains toward the theater. Her dreams are downstairs, waiting for her to play a starring role in them. She could slip into that so easily, like a warm robe, like a full bath, like a kiss.
Zara could let Leopold go over the edge. She has as much a reason as anybody else to want that.
He sent Eli away.
Zara’s skin remembers Eli’s skin. Her lips remember Eli’s lips, spread into a smiling kiss. Her hands remember the first and last times they tangled up with Eli’s, and all the times between.
Her heart remembers everything.
Zara could let him fall.