June’s face shivered across the plaster, broken by scratches in the film and the trembling seam of the wall. She was younger, but not softened by it. Her hair was pinned beneath a rain scarf. Water shone on the shoulders of her coat. Behind her, the street lamps made pale coins on the wet pavement.
She looked past the camera first, as if someone stood beside it.
Then she said, “If this reaches Mara, I failed to keep one thing from her.”
Mara did not breathe. The passage smelled of dust, hot wiring, and the mineral damp that rose beneath the stages after rain. Rowan stood close enough that his sleeve touched hers. He had stopped looking at the image and was watching the projector instead, as if June were an armed device that might misfire.
June folded a piece of paper in her gloved hands.
“Alden was alive when I left him.”
The sentence arrived cleanly, without the hiss that ate the next half-second of sound.
Mara’s fingers found the wall. Its plaster flaked beneath her nails.
June continued. “He had been hurt, but he was walking. He told me to take the child and go to the north station. I asked him what he had done. He said it was not what he had done. It was what they would say he had done.”
A click. The image jumped. June’s mouth moved ahead of her voice.
“I thought he was talking about the picture. He was talking about you.”
Rowan’s hand came to the small of Mara’s back. Not holding. Measuring whether she was still upright. She wanted to shrug him off. Instead she watched the projection tremble over the shape of June’s cheek.
“Celeste had found the ledger,” June said. “Alden said she knew there was a child. He said if she could put your name in the wrong place, she could make you vanish without ever touching you.”
The projector gave a dry cough.
Mara turned toward Rowan. “Did you know this?”
“No.”
His answer was immediate. No calculation in it. That made it worse.
On the wall, June looked down at the paper. A dark spot spread across one corner. Blood, perhaps. Or rain.
“I took the negative,” she said. “The one from the final night. Alden told me it was the only thing that would show he was alive after the fire began. I put it where no one would search.”
The beam fluttered. For an instant the woman in the frame wore Mara’s own face with June’s eyes.
“I left him in the projection room with Celeste.”
Mara’s hand slipped from the wall.
The passage seemed to narrow around the words. Left him. With Celeste. Not dead in the fire, not disappeared into one of Alden’s private arrangements, not abandoned by the whole world in the way June had always described bad weather and closed roads. Alive. Hurt. In a room with the woman who now sat in his chair and spoke of him as if he had been a beautiful inconvenience.
June’s voice went on.
“I told myself she would call a doctor. I told myself she wanted the studio more than she wanted him dead. I was wrong about what people want when they believe they are about to lose everything.”
The film burned white.
A thread of smoke lifted from the projector’s vent.
Rowan reached over Mara’s shoulder and killed the lamp. Darkness folded over them, thick and immediate. The motor spun down with a reluctant whine.
“Move,” he said.
Mara did not. “She left him with Celeste.”
“I heard her.”
“You heard a damaged reel.”
“I heard your mother say it.”
“That is not evidence.”
“It is evidence enough for people with guns and a warrant.”
At the far end of the passage, metal struck metal. The vault door. Voices came through the gap, blurred by the brick and the old insulation. One man called for Iris. Another said the lower corridor had to be sealed.
Rowan took the projector from its stand. He did not yank the cord. He wrapped it around his wrist, lifted the machine against his chest, and tucked the reel can under one arm.
Mara stared at him. “What are you doing?”
“Saving the part that talks.”
“The projector is company property.”
“Then invoice me.”
He moved past her, but stopped when she caught the sleeve of his coat. The fabric was rough beneath her fingers, damp from the tunnel wall.
“Leave it,” she said.
His gaze dropped to her hand. “Why?”
“Because it is bait.”
“Could be.”
“June knew the projector would be found.”
“Your mother hid it behind a wall twenty years ago. I doubt she scheduled the search party.”
Mara let go. The place where his sleeve had pressed her fingers remained sharply present, an irritating physical fact. He had lifted the machine before asking whether she wanted it. He had made the decision as if her fear were a loose strap he could tighten for her.
That was the thing she could not stop noticing about him. Rowan never reached for comfort. He reached for the failing part.
The voices grew louder.
“North corridor,” someone shouted. “Check every service door.”
Rowan pointed with his chin. “There.”
A narrow maintenance hatch stood behind a collapsed rack of cue sheets. Mara pulled the rack aside. Paper slid down in a soft avalanche, old schedules and call notices damp at the edges. Rowan wedged the projector through the opening first, then turned sideways and followed. The machine struck the frame. He hissed, not loudly.
“Your shoulder?”
“Door.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“Still attached.”
Mara crawled after him. The hatch opened into a cable trench beneath the rehearsal rooms. Pipes ran overhead, sweating into the black. She kept one hand on the projector’s metal casing as Rowan dragged it along, its weight bumping over concrete.
Behind them, the rack scraped back into place.
A flashlight beam cut through the hatch.
Rowan flattened himself against the trench wall and pulled Mara down beside him. The projector lay between their knees. His palm covered the lens, keeping even its faint residual glow from betraying them.
Boots crossed above.
Mara could hear the thin, frightened sound of her own breathing. Rowan’s was slower. He had a cut at the edge of his jaw, perhaps from the hatch, and a dark line of blood was working its way beneath his collar.
She reached into her pocket for the continuity pencil she carried everywhere. “Hold still.”
He looked at the pencil. “That’s not a bandage.”
“It can stop blood from reaching your shirt.”
“Why do you care about the shirt?”
“Because blood is conspicuous.”
She pressed the pencil’s clean cloth-wrapped end to his neck. He did not flinch. Above them, the searchers paused. Dust drifted from the ceiling in fine grains.
Rowan’s eyes stayed on her face. “Your mother lied to you.”
Mara kept the pressure steady. “That is not a new condition.”
“She said he left her.”
“She said he left everyone.”
“People tell smaller lies when the large one won’t fit through the door.”
The beam moved away. The boots continued.
Mara withdrew the pencil. A red mark remained on Rowan’s skin, neat as a drawn line. “You should have taken the reel without me.”
“I tried.”
“You carried the machine.”
“The machine has no payroll requirement.”
“You could still be free of this.”
Rowan shifted the projector aside and pressed his shoulder to the trench wall. The pain reached his mouth before he hid it.
“No,” he said. “Not now.”
A cable hummed overhead. Somewhere above, a rehearsal piano struck one wrong note and stopped.
They reached the end of the trench beneath Stage Eleven. Rowan found a ladder and climbed first, carrying the projector one-handed. Mara followed into a prop corridor crowded with broken windows, plaster columns, and painted trees from productions no one remembered. A row of emergency bulbs gave everything the colour of old teeth.
The corridor ended at Iris Bell’s office.
Its door stood open.
Mara stopped.
Iris’s desk had been emptied. The drives were gone from the drawer where Mara had left them. A chair lay on its side. On the wall, the glass over Alden’s framed production photograph was starred but unbroken.
Rowan set the projector down. “She got out.”
“Or they got her.”
He touched the nearest drawer. It swung loose on one hinge. “No blood.”
“That is not a guarantee.”
“It’s the best one we have.”
Mara went to the photograph. Alden stood at the centre of the crew, younger than the image in June’s reel and already performing the version of himself the studio had preserved. Beside him, Celeste wore a white suit and one hand on his arm. Her fingers looked proprietorial even under the dust of the cracked glass.
On the desk lay a single sheet of paper.
Mara picked it up.
PAYROLL CERTIFICATION: DAY 12.
The stamp had been pressed in black ink. Beneath it, in Iris’s gravelled handwriting, someone had added: DON’T TRUST THE CLOCK.
Rowan leaned over her shoulder. “That yours?”
“No.”
“Whose handwriting?”
“Iris’s.”
“Then she wants you to know something.”
“She wants me to distrust a clock.”
“Good advice in a studio.”
A telephone rang in the outer office.
Neither moved.
It rang again. A brass bell, old-fashioned and insistent. Mara crossed the room and lifted the receiver.
“Vault and continuity.”
For a moment, there was only breathing.
Then Celeste said, “You have been very difficult to locate.”
Mara looked at Rowan. He had gone still beside the projector, one hand resting on its casing.
“Have I?” Mara asked.
“Your mother made a remarkable film.” Celeste’s voice retained its polished warmth. “Though I would not call it finished.”
Mara’s fingers tightened around the receiver. “Where is Iris Bell?”
“Safe, for the moment. Dorian’s people are less patient than mine.”
“What do you want?”
“What I have always wanted. To keep Morrowglass from being inherited by people who mistake possession for belonging.”
Mara watched Rowan’s face. He heard only her side, but his expression changed at the word inherited. The cut at his neck had begun to bleed again.
Celeste continued, “Bring me the reel and the machine. Come alone. In return, I will release your payroll certification and remove your name from the suspension order Dorian has prepared.”
Mara said nothing.
“Your mother made one error,” Celeste said. “She believed leaving Alden alive was the same as saving him. Do not repeat her arithmetic.”
The line went dead.
Mara lowered the receiver.
Rowan waited. “She knows.”
“She knows about the reel.”
“She knows about your mother.”
“She was there.”
The words came out before Mara could reduce them to something safer.
Rowan looked toward the projector. Then at the open office door. “We take it to Dorian?”
“No.”
“Iris?”
“She is missing.”
“Then we go to the police.”
Mara almost laughed. It would have sounded like a hinge breaking. “With a stolen projector, a disputed archive, a mother who has lied for twenty years, and a payroll clerk who has just been offered protection by one owner while the other prepares to suspend her?”
“Better than handing it to Celeste.”
“Not if Celeste has already made the police part of the production.”
Rowan’s jaw worked once. “You’re keeping something.”
“Yes.”
“What?”
Mara looked at the film can under his arm. The label had been written in June’s block capitals. ROOK. The ink had bled at the edges, but the letters held.
“My mother said she hid the negative,” Mara said. “She did not say where.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“No.”
He came closer. Not enough to touch her. Enough that she could see the fine grit caught in the seam of his knuckles.
“I gave up the settlement,” he said. “I named you in front of both owners. I carried a machine out of a hole because you told me it mattered. Don’t make me guess which part of the floor is going to fall.”
Mara met his eyes. “You are not entitled to every fact because you have paid for some of them.”
His mouth tightened. “That’s Celeste talking.”
“No. Celeste would have called it an investment.”
For one second, something unguarded crossed his face. Not hurt. Recognition, perhaps. Then he reached for the projector.
The outer doors opened.
Celeste stepped into the office in a pale coat, dry despite the rain outside. Two security men stood behind her. She glanced at Rowan’s blood, the reel, and finally Mara.
“Good,” she said. “You saved me the trouble of searching.”
Mara’s thumb found the payroll stamp in her pocket. The black ink had left a damp crescent against her skin.
Celeste smiled at the projector.
“Now,” she said, “let us see what your mother was afraid to finish.”