Chapter Six: Studio 4

Harlow Lane smelled of coffee, hot cables and nerves. Studio 4 sat at the end of it behind a roller door the color of old teeth, and a girl with a clipboard and a headset stood guard in front of it like a very small, very serious doorman.

“Name?”

“Eliza Sinclair. Nine o’clock.”

The girl’s eyes ran down the list, stopped, and came up with something close to interest. “You’re the clip.”

“I’m the clip.”

“Jules. I sent your letter.” She was perhaps twenty-five, with a ponytail so tight it seemed to be pulling her eyebrows up, and she studied Eliza the way people study a horse they have bet on.

“Mr. Voss is in a mood. He is always in a mood, but this is a loud one. Don’t say sorry. He hears it as a confession.”

“Noted.”

“And don’t be early. You’re early, so that’s already ruined.”

“I’ll make up for it.”

Inside, the studio was a long, dim cave of black walls and hanging lamps, with a pale mat spread across the floor and a table at the far end where three people sat in a row like a tribunal. The one in the middle was lean, silver-haired and furious, with a pair of reading glasses shoved up into hair that was already trying to escape. He was eating an apple as though it had insulted his mother.

Sebastian Voss did not look up when she came in.

“Eliza Sinclair,” he said to the table. “Third audition with us. At sixteen, forgot her lines. At nineteen, dropped a glass of water. At twenty-one, apologized to a chair.”

“It was in the way.”

“It was a chair.” Now he looked up. His eyes were pale and not at all sympathetic. “Why are you here?”

Eliza considered it. The honest answer was a dead girl’s script in a bedroom drawer. “Because someone sent me a letter.”

“Someone sent half the city a letter. Why are you here?”

“Because I want the part.”

“Everyone wants the part. The part is Mira. She’s sixteen, she gets chased across three rooftops by men who want her brother dead, and then she takes a hit she shouldn’t survive. I need someone who can do that without a double. Can you?”

The mat looked soft. The body she stood in was soft too. It had thin wrists, a pen callus and a sprained left wrist that would announce itself the moment she put weight on it. Flora’s mind knew eleven ways to fall off a roof. Eliza’s body knew perhaps one, and that one had killed her.

“Yes,” said Eliza.

“Heart rate, one-thirty,” Rex murmured from somewhere near her ear. “Left wrist, sixty percent. Please do not do anything brave.”

A large man named Doyle walked her through it. Shoulder roll off the low platform, come up on one knee, take the hit, show Mira’s face. He demonstrated once, lightly, the way big men do when they want you to know they could do it harder.

Eliza watched. Then she stood on the platform, breathed out, and stopped thinking like a person who might get hurt.

The roll came off clean. The knee came up. She took the imaginary hit on her shoulder, let her head snap, and found the face Mira needed, the one that said the girl was frightened and furious about being frightened. Her wrist screamed. She let it. When she got to her feet, the studio had gone very quiet.

“Hm,” said Voss.

He had not moved. His apple sat half eaten in his left hand. Without any warning, he threw it.

It came at her head, fast and underarm and meant to be missed.

Eliza’s hand came up and caught it. She hadn’t decided to. It was a reflex from a different life, and it closed around the apple as neatly as around a doorknob.

Nobody said anything. Doyle’s eyebrows had left his face.

“Interesting,” said Voss, very softly.

“It was a good throw,” said Eliza, and wished her mouth would stop.

“Eliza Sinclair doesn’t catch things. Eliza Sinclair drops glasses. Who trained you?”

“Posters.”

Somebody at the table coughed into a sleeve. Voss’s mouth did something complicated, a muscle trying to hold a line it had not been consulted about.

“Out,” he said. “Wait in the corridor. Jules will find you.”

The corridor was narrow and warm and smelled of fried noodles from the stall across the lane. Eliza leaned on the wall and took her weight off her left wrist, which had started up a low, injured hum.

“You caught an apple,” Rex said, with deep reproach. “In front of a director. You could have just dropped it.”

“I’d have felt dishonest.”

“You’re an assassin!”

“A dishonest assassin is just a criminal.”

Heels sounded on the concrete. Lexi came around the corner in a sky-blue coat with a bouquet of white roses in her arms and an expression of tender concern, like a nurse arriving at a bedside. She stopped two feet away, and her face did something quick and careful behind its smile.

“Eliza. You’re here early.”

“So are you. Your call is eleven-thirty.”

“I wanted to support you,” said Lexi, very warmly. “You get so anxious. I thought, what if she freezes? What if she needs me to step in and speak to Mr. Voss, you know, for the family’s sake?”

“That’s thoughtful.”

“Isn’t it?” Lexi lowered her voice. “Eliza. Honestly. If it’s too much, nobody would blame you for going home. It’s only the first one. There’ll be others.”

The door of Studio 4 opened and Jules came out with her clipboard against her chest, looking at nobody until she was well inside the corridor. She stopped, took in the roses, the coat and the long, loving smile.

“Miss Sinclair,” she said to Lexi, “your call is at eleven-thirty. There’s a green room at the end of the hall with a good sofa. Please wait there.”

“Oh, I’m only here to help—”

“Mr. Voss doesn’t like help,” said Jules, kindly. “He thinks it’s a kind of loud.”

Lexi’s smile held. It held the way a rope holds. Then she turned, roses and all, and went down the corridor in a sky-blue flutter. Eliza watched her go and said nothing. Over her shoulder, Rex said something that sounded like a tiny cheer.

“He says callback,” said Jules.

Eliza blinked. “Already?”

“Saturday afternoon, here, with a partner scene.

That never happens on the first day. Last year he told a lead she walked like a lost umbrella.” Jules hugged her clipboard. “You caught his apple. He’s been furious about that apple since you left. That’s a good sign.”

“Saturday,” said Eliza. The Hargrove dinner was Saturday night. She filed it under things to solve later, between the stairs and the cat.

“One more thing.” Jules’s voice dropped. She glanced up the hall as though the walls might be listening. “Callbacks are usually closed. This one won’t be. The financier asked to sit in. He never does. He’s never come to a single one of our auditions. But he watched your clip twice, and he asked specifically about you.”

“Who is he?”

“Blackwood,” said Jules. “Mr. Xavier Blackwood.”

The corridor tilted by a degree, though only for her.

“Oh, no,” Rex said, faintly.

Eliza straightened off the wall. Her wrist throbbed. Somewhere beyond the door, Voss was shouting at somebody about an apple, and out in the lane the noodle seller laughed at something.

She had once spent six months working out how to get close to that man. It seemed rude of fate to deliver him by appointment.