I heard the door open. “Freeze!” shouted the security guard.
White faces swung in my direction, focused past me. I turned. The guard had followed me and now looked vaguely foolish with nothing to point.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Branwell kept saying, only more loudly now, and more insistently, like an autistic child keeping the world at bay.
Someone to the side of the soundstage moved her head in a tight, clean turn: Kick, standing behind an empty craft-services counter and mostly obscured from view by a sweating man in tight black clothes. She wasn’t wearing her white coat, but striped cotton trousers and sandals and a form-fitting long-sleeved white T-shirt with a neckline that showed her collarbones. Something hung from a black cord around her neck.
I stepped forward but, “Out!” shrieked Peg, and ran at the guard as though she would hack his head off with her clipboard. “Out! Do you have any idea how close you came to—Do you realize—Have you any idea—”
“Hush,” I said, and touched her on the shoulder.
“You,” she said, puzzled.
“It’s all right.”
“He nearly… Three cameras! You have to—I mean—”
“It’s all right.” Joel pulled his headset from his ears until it hung around his neck. He was frowning. A restive ripple ran through the crew. “Don’t let it disturb the shoot.”
“But—Everything’s riding on this, it—”
Once at the races I’d seen a horse buck as it came out of the gate. Four horses had crashed into him, delicate patens snapping. Two had had to be destroyed. The race was canceled. “There now. It’s all right. I’ll take care of it. There now. Look, Joel needs you.”
“What?” But she turned around to look.
“They need you.”
“All right,” she said, and took a half-step backwards. Rusen looked indecisively from his set dresser to his star to the security guard. I made a Don’t let me interrupt you gesture. He hesitated, then nodded.
“All right, people,” he said. “Okay. One more time…”
I turned to the guard. “This way,” I said, and gestured to the open door—the breeze was lovely. “And don’t say a word. If you make a noise when the cameras are rolling the producer will sue you for damages. I’ll also sue you for trespass.” I motioned him through the door. “If anyone tries to get in, stop them, but be polite. Think customer service. Do your job.” I shut the door behind him. Took my jacket off.
The atmosphere began to swell and tighten again, focusing, and the hum of voices, mixed with the occasional Fuck, fuck and Okay, people, all right, began to build.
I tiptoed to a sidewall where I’d remembered there being clothes racks. Now there were piles of stacked scaffolding poles. I was glad to see they were strapped together securely. Rolling steel could be dangerous.
“No need to creep,” Dornan said from a few feet away. “At least not until the klaxon.” His eyes were alight with the kind of intensity I hadn’t seen since before Tammy had left him. For some reason it made my stomach clench.
“Why is everyone so tense?”
“Three cameras,” he said.
“So Peg said.” And it hadn’t meant much the first time.
“The director walked out, as I said, and the main stunt actor, and now Rusen is risking everything on one throw. This is the last day Sîan will be here, and instead of breaking the scenes down to separate angles, he’s going to shoot from three at once for the close-action sequences and dialogue. If we don’t get it in the first or second take, everyone, we’re screwed. The film cost alone is huge.”
We, I thought. We both looked from Branwell, still chanting to herself, seemingly oblivious to the tweakers and powderers, to Rusen.
“Rusen’s directing?”
“Yep.”
“He’s done it before?”
“In film school. The real director walked out. Said he couldn’t work under this kind of pressure.”
We looked beyond Rusen, who no longer looked like a chess prodigy but like a teacher on a field trip with twenty psychopathic schoolchildren, to Kick.
“Who’s that standing with her?”
“Bernard. The stunt guy.”
“He’s not the same one who was here the other day.”
“No. He left with the director. Bernard’s a beginner. Kick says that if she doesn’t babysit him, he’ll bolt. It’s a something-and-nothing scene: jump over a table, roll, pretend to hit someone. But he’s pretty inexperienced.”
Kick was talking intently to Bernard, who was nodding. He was only an inch or two bigger than Kick. I wondered why she didn’t do it. Dornan probably knew; he always seemed to know these things. Without her white coat, the deep V-shape of her torso and the wide shoulders and narrow waist were clear: a high-diver’s body, or a trapeze artist’s. Her hair was clipped up, and tiny muscles in her neck moved under the skin.
She looked different. Better. “She seems… less tired.”
“Yes,” Dornan said.
He sounded almost smug, and I started to feel prickly and restless. “It’s hot in here.”
“The air-conditioning is so noisy we have to keep shutting it down. People keep forgetting to turn it back on again between takes.”
As I watched, Kick mimed a ducking turn for the stuntman, who was looking dubious. She moved easily, a quarter horse to the racehorses: powerful, nimble, responsive, intelligent, present. The thing around her neck swung out and banged back against her breastbone.
“So what’s with the rent-a-cop?” Dornan said.
“Um? No idea. But he won’t be around long. What’s that thing around her neck?”
“A fan. She doesn’t do well with heat. I wish she’d use it.”
I hadn’t known her long but I couldn’t imagine Kick buying something like that for herself. “So is it going well, the filming?”
“Well, yes. I think. People are focused, and Rusen seems to know what he wants. Though they haven’t actually done any filming yet today.”
“No?”
“No. Rusen’s been running everyone through the rehearsals. It’s complicated. The second-biggest sequence of the whole pilot.”
I nodded, not really listening. Kick was now turning her chin into her chest, gesturing to the stuntman, watching him do the same.
“You still don’t know the plot, do you?” Dornan said.
“No.”
“Have you even read the treatment?”
“Whose treatment?”
“The treatment. The story outline.”
“Why don’t you tell me it?”
“And you’ll listen?”
I turned to face him. “You have my undivided attention.”
“Okay.” He seemed mollified. “There’s this woman, Vivienne—that’s Sîan, of course—who wakes up one night and she’s naked, and alone in the middle of a big city.”
I nodded. Wisps of strategic steam.
“She has no idea who she is or how she got there. And she’s just recovering from the shock when she sees the dawn, and as the sun rises, phhttt, she turns into a fox.”