Mara kept her thumb on the projector’s switch.
“Not here,” she said.
Celeste’s gaze moved to her hand. “You are in no position to set the screening room.”
“The machine is in no position to survive one.” Mara looked at the reel, then at the brass housing. “The gate is warped. The emulsion has been stored too warm. If you want the footage, you will let it run at a lower speed.”
One of the security men stepped forward.
Rowan shifted between them. He did not raise his hands. He only put his weight onto his uninjured leg, the way a door settled into a frame before it was forced.
Celeste noticed. “Mr. Saye, you have already demonstrated a poor understanding of your current employment.”
“I understand it fine.”
“You are not employed.”
“No.” He glanced at Mara. “That part’s clear.”
Mara felt the projector’s metal tremble beneath her fingers. She had learned the sound of damaged equipment in the vaults: the dry chatter of a failing sprocket, the low complaint of a belt that had outlived its owner. This machine had been pulled from storage because it was the only one that could take the old reel without threading it through a modern transport. Its shutter was unreliable. Its lamp ran hot.
A bad lamp could turn the past into smoke.
“Let me run it,” she said.
Celeste smiled. “You are asking permission to operate evidence you stole.”
“I am telling you how not to destroy it.”
“Those are often the same thing, in your line of work.”
Rowan’s hand closed around the edge of the projector table. His knuckles had gone white. Blood from his split palm had dried in a dark fan across the metal.
Mara looked at the hand, not his face. He had wrapped it in a strip torn from his shirt, badly and too tightly. The fabric had cut into the web between his fingers. Without asking, she caught his wrist and loosened the knot.
His eyes dropped to her hand.
“Hold still,” she said.
“You’re busy.”
“I can do two things.”
“Can you?”
She pulled the cloth free, folded it once, and tied it again over the wound. The pressure was firm enough to slow the bleeding and loose enough to leave his fingers useful. Rowan watched her hands as if they were a dangerous mechanism he had not yet learned to disarm.
Celeste’s expression did not change, but one of the security men looked away.
“Touching,” Celeste said. “Now step aside.”
Mara released Rowan. The warmth of his wrist remained against her palm, an inconvenient fact with no contractual value.
She opened the projector housing. “No one touches the reel until I say.”
Celeste gave a small nod. “Run it.”
The office darkened when Mara killed the lamps. Rain combed the windows in silver lines. The two security men remained by the door, broad silhouettes against the corridor light. Rowan stood at Mara’s shoulder, close enough that she could hear the careful rhythm of his breathing.
She threaded the film.
The strip clicked through the sprockets. At the first turn, the damaged perforations caught. Mara stopped, backed it out, and trimmed the torn edge with a pair of scissors from Iris’s desk. The cut was clean. A useful cut did not announce itself.
Celeste watched the screen before there was anything on it.
“Where is Iris Bell?” Mara asked.
“Being questioned.”
“By whom?”
“People with a more developed sense of authority than you.”
“Is she hurt?”
Celeste tilted her head. “Concern does not suit you.”
Mara fitted the trimmed edge into the gate. “Neither does evasion.”
The lamp came alive with a soft electrical whine. Dust brightened in its beam. The first image appeared on the sheet they had pinned across the old editing wall: June seated beneath the projection-room window, older than Mara remembered and younger than the woman who had made breakfast that morning. Her hair was pulled back. Her hands lay flat on her knees.
The recording began without sound.
June turned her head toward someone outside the frame. Her mouth formed a word. Then the audio arrived in a rush of static.
“—not take it. He put it in my hands.”
Celeste stood perfectly still.
Mara watched the grain of the image, the tremor in June’s left thumb. She had seen that thumb brace a ladder against a moving truck, had seen it point crews toward safer ground while explosions were being staged behind them. June did not tremble unless she had run out of places to put the truth.
“I told him the fire would be blamed on the electrical room,” June said on the screen. “He said it was already arranged. He said the negative was the only thing that mattered now.”
Rowan leaned forward a fraction.
Celeste’s voice came from behind them. “This is not admissible.”
“No one asked you to review it in court,” Mara said.
“Then you are wasting my time.”
June looked toward the camera. “Alden said I was to take Mara away from the city. He said she was safer if no one knew what she was to him.”
The projector rattled.
Mara’s fingers found the speed control. She lowered it by a notch. The image steadied. On the sheet, June’s face seemed to gather itself from the dust.
“He knew?” Rowan asked.
Mara did not look at him.
June’s mouth tightened. “He knew from the beginning. Not her name only. Everything. He kept the letters. He kept the photographs. He kept the first hospital receipt in a locked drawer because he was afraid that if he carried it, someone would see how often he touched it.”
Mara’s hand slipped from the speed control.
The image juddered. She corrected it.
Celeste crossed the room. “Stop this.”
“Not yet.”
“You do not understand what you are showing.”
“I understand damaged film.”
“You understand a fragment.” Celeste’s voice had lost its amusement. “A fragment can ruin a life and still fail to prove anything.”
On the screen, June lowered her eyes.
“He said the ordinary name was the point,” she continued. “Not a disguise. A chance. He wanted her to have a life he could not buy, and he thought the only way to give it to her was to make sure she could never inherit his.”
Mara forgot the room for one second.
The projector kept turning. Rowan did not move. She could feel him listening beside her, not to the words alone but to the places where she had stopped breathing.
June reached beneath the table in the recording and brought out a small envelope. The image broke into horizontal bands. When it cleared, the envelope was open in her lap.
“Alden wrote the codicil before the fire,” June said. “He told me it would be sealed until the studio was no longer in danger of being used against her. I told him a sealed promise was still a promise made by a man who believed he could control the weather.”
Celeste seized the projector’s power cord.
Mara caught her wrist.
For a moment neither woman spoke. Celeste’s skin was cool, her pulse precise beneath Mara’s fingers.
“Let go,” Celeste said.
“After the end.”
“There is no end you can afford.”
Rowan stepped toward them. One of the security men moved to block him. Rowan stopped, but his body remained angled between Mara and the man, an old reflex with no room for negotiation.
Celeste looked at Mara’s grip. “Your mother lied to you about the night. Alden lied to you about the reason. Do you see the pattern?”
Mara released her.
Celeste pulled the cord free.
The screen went black.
The projector’s fan slowed with a dying whirr. In the silence, film continued to tick over the cooling metal.
Mara stared at the blank sheet. “You cut the power before the final exchange.”
“I prevented further damage.”
“You prevented the end.”
“I prevented you from mistaking an unfinished testimony for a verdict.” Celeste turned to the security men. “Take the reel.”
Rowan moved first.
He did not lunge for the film. He kicked the projector table’s loose wheel, sending the machine slewing sideways. The reel housing struck the edge of the desk. Mara caught it before it fell, but the sudden weight dragged her shoulder down.
The first security man grabbed Rowan from behind. Rowan drove his elbow back, not hard enough to break anything, only enough to make space. The second man seized his injured wrist.
Rowan made a sound through his teeth.
Mara shoved the reel into her coat.
Celeste saw the movement. “Mara.”
The room narrowed to that one syllable.
Rowan twisted against the guard. “Run.”
She did not. Running would mean the reel became stolen property, and the next payroll certification would become an act of charity rather than record. She had spent eleven days making herself ordinary. Ordinary people did not escape with evidence from an owner’s office while two men restrained the studio’s former crisis fixer.
Ordinary people also did not let him be taken because they were afraid of a stamp.
Mara reached into her pocket and pulled out the payroll card.
Celeste’s eyes fell to it.
“Put that away,” she said.
“If you have me charged, the trust’s service requirement becomes contested.”
“Your service requirement is already contested.”
“Not while Iris’s certification stands.”
Something tightened at the corner of Celeste’s mouth. “Iris Bell has been suspended. Her signature is under review.”
Mara had known Iris was suspended. She had not known Celeste meant to erase every record Iris had touched.
The guard forced Rowan’s arm behind him. The bandage darkened.
“Let him go,” Mara said.
“Give me the reel.”
“No.”
Celeste’s voice softened. “You are confusing possession with leverage. I can remove you from payroll before midnight. I can have the archive access logs rewritten by morning. By the time Dorian files his injunction, you will be an unauthorised trespasser with a stolen item in your coat.”
Mara looked at Rowan. He was breathing hard now, jaw locked, his free hand curled uselessly at his side. He had acted without calculating what the act would cost him. That was either courage or a professional defect. She had never decided which.
Celeste extended her hand. “The reel.”
Mara slid it from her coat and held it out.
Rowan’s head turned sharply. “Don’t.”
She placed the reel in Celeste’s palm.
Celeste closed her fingers around it. “There. You can still learn.”
“Release him.”
“Mr. Saye is no longer my concern.”
The guard pushed Rowan toward the door. His shoulder struck the frame. He looked at Mara then, not accusingly. That would have been easier. He looked as if he were checking whether she had secured the harness before stepping off the roof.
Celeste gave the reel to one of the security men. “Take this to Stage Twelve. No projection. Lock it in the dry cabinet.”
Mara’s attention went to the film canister.
A thin strip protruded from beneath the lid. Not the leader she had trimmed. A narrow tail, pale at the edge, marked with a grease-pencil notation.
ROOK—2.
Celeste turned toward the corridor.
Mara stepped after her. “You said the footage was a fragment.”
Celeste paused.
“What is reel two?” Mara asked.
For the first time that night, Celeste looked tired. The expression vanished so quickly Mara might have mistaken the rain-shadow on her face.
“Ask your mother,” Celeste said.
Then the door closed between them.
Through the wired glass, Mara saw Rowan being taken down the corridor. He did not fight the guards now. His blood marked the pale floor in small, deliberate drops.
Behind her, the projector fan stopped.
On the blank screen, where June’s face had been, one square of light remained: a single frozen frame trapped in the gate. Alden’s hand rested on the envelope in June’s lap.
Written across the image, almost erased by age, was a date Mara knew was three days before the fire.
And beneath it, in Alden’s handwriting, two words remained legible.
FOR MARA.