Harder than Steel

by Jane Galaxy

  DIRK (CON’T)

  Maybe you’ll figure out a new identity on Earth.

  Morganna finally SITS at the bar. They regard each other a moment.

  MORGANNA

  I don’t think I will ever understand you Earthlings.

  He chuckles and clinks his glass to hers before SIPPING. She hesitates, then MIMICS him.

  DIRK

  Even if you don’t, we’ve got things in common. I know what it’s like to do penance for past crimes.

  SEVERAL BEATS while Morganna stares, trying to figure him out. This human understands her inner turmoil? Dirk gets caught up in her open scrutiny of him, slightly transfixed.

  When she does speak, her voice has gone from an all-powerful command to a more human-sounding tone.

  MORGANNA

  How can your life possibly be similar to mine? You cannot know everything, so how can you claim wisdom?

  DIRK

  If there’s one thing I’ve actually managed to learn, it’s that things are tough for everyone. That’s why we do what we do——we’re in this to help everyone, not just ourselves.

  He feels sheepish suddenly.

  DIRK (CONT’D)

  Hey, I don’t know, maybe it’s better if you get the earnest speech about professional do-gooding from Pat, I mean, he’s the one in the tri-corner.

  MORGANNA

  Patriot seems too absent of negativity to understand how light and dark affect one another.

  She stares down into her drink, thinking about Lucius’s last words to her.

  Dirk watches her, poignant and with a growing sense of fellowship, then reaches forward without thinking and brushes a strand of her sparkling blonde hair back from where it’s about to fall into her glass. He realizes too late what he’s doing just as she LOOKS UP.

  BEAT while they look at one another again. CLOSE on Morganna’s face, somewhere between distraught and vulnerable. CLOSE on Dirk as he realizes that with a war-mongering culture, no one has ever been kind or affectionate to Morganna, and even the slightest gesture is monumental.

  Morganna HARDENS, but it isn’t a kneejerk reaction to put distance between them——it’s something different entirely. Like she’s had an epiphany. She FINISHES HER DRINK in one slug, then sets the glass on the bar with careful significance.

  Dirk REALIZES what’s about to happen and makes his choice as Morganna STANDS, squares her elbows flat along the bar, and starts to LEAN IN——

  “Okay, cut!”

  Jax watched as Joanna set her jaw out and closed her eyes, showing an irritation she’d been trying to fend off all night. He tilted his head slightly to let makeup do a tiny adjustment to his hair and dab a bit of clear gel onto his nose. Someone had approached his costar to fluff her hair a little and wipe away a bit of mascara. Joanna’s expression didn’t change; she almost looked like she was trying to fight back rage, or tears, or something other than the flat affect she’d been giving for the last two hours.

  Morganna was supposed to feel passion and humanity for the first time in her life, and it was like Joanna had contracted sleeping sickness or anemia. When Morganna pulled away from the deep kiss with Dirk, the line was So, is this all that lies beyond the timbre of your voice? husky and suggestive. She’d delivered the lines so well in the rehearsal reads, but now, in costume and with the cameras, Joanna was stiff and uncomfortable. Her expression was nonexistent; she kept looking past him at the bottles on the wall over his shoulder. Morganna could have been telling him they were having leftovers for dinner.

  Jax dug deep for a little compassion. Adriana, and therefore everyone on set, was feeling the strain. The crew was professional, but it was bearing down on two in the morning. The director herself was now arguing with one of the cameramen and wouldn’t have many more ways to reassure her skittish lead heroine when she came over.

  “It’s funny how a script by committee can feel so overblown,” he said once the touch-ups had moved away and they were standing alone.

  Joanna didn’t answer, but finally opened her eyes and set her hands on the counter.

  “I mean, I thought they were supposed to all keep each other accountable, but”—he chuckled—“how much direction can they possibly stuff into a few pages? It’s like, I get it, I’m supposed to express some emotions, just get out of the way and let me do it, you know?”

  Joanna lifted her eyes to his very slowly and gave him a tight smile and nod. While he was trying to think of something else, some advice or way to make her feel like at least he was on her side, Adriana broke off the muffled argument and came over. Her hair was matted on one side from being scrunched up: she did that when she was thinking and ran her hands through it, like she’d been grasping at any shortcut or possible solution to just get this done.

  “Okay,” she said. “Joanna.” Adriana took a deep breath and released it, the kind that came up in yoga classes or as a cleansing mechanism under the direction of a therapist. It wasn’t a soothing sound for anyone, although maybe it helped her let out some of her frustration.

  She wasn’t the type of director—the type of person, from what he’d seen—who was any good at handily coddling and charming people into doing what she wanted without ever revealing her hand.

  “I’m going to be straight with you.”

  Joanna dropped her hands to her hips, and Jax watched her press her tongue hard against her bottom teeth, rolling it against them like she was thinking of the nastiest, quickest comeback already.

  They were screwed.

  “Actually, Adriana, do you . . . mind if we just take a second?”

  Both women turned to stare at him, and Jax looked at Joanna.

  “Would that be okay?”

  When they were by the back end of the set, away from everyone, Jax folded his arms over his chest and waited for Joanna to look at him, but she kept glancing around them and down at the floor.

  “We didn’t get to have that conversation you wanted to have before,” he finally said, “and—I’m sorry about that. I definitely fucked up on that whole thing, and if it’s made you uncomfortable to do this. . . .” He trailed, off not really sure how to finish. What was the correct thing to do: offer to quit the picture? They couldn’t really ask for rewrites; the Dirk Masterson/Morganna romance threaded through the rest of the damn series. Jax sighed. “I mean, we can—”

  “You and I have both been doing this for a long time,” said Joanna, and she finally met his gaze. “And . . . I don’t know how it’s been for you; it’s always different for guys.”

  He waited.

  “I mean, this industry is weird, and I’ve had some weird experiences, and you get used to that, but sometimes they’re just flat-out bad. . . .”

  “Joanna, what’s going on?”

  She breathed out, huffed slightly, impatient.

  “Look, maybe this isn’t the time or place to talk about this. We can just finish this and get everybody home before dawn. I’m already a drain on production.”

  “You—you can tell me if you want.”

  “I don’t . . . I don’t think I want to,” she said, and pulled away to throw up her arms when he tilted his head at her. “Let’s just do this, and then we can move on.”

  Forcing this wasn’t going to help, he could see that much.

  “Hey, productions run late sometimes, everybody knows that. These people wouldn’t be here if they didn’t want to make a movie. It’s gonna be fine—maybe we could rehearse some more away from the cameras.” He turned to find Adriana watching them sidelong from across the set. “You know, and all the pressure.” Jax looked back at his costar. “Do you think that might help?”

  Joanna was taller than he was, he realized for the first time. It had always been true, he’d always had to look up at her a little bit, just half an inch or so, but it was like she was always trying to shrink herself down, slouching so she wouldn’t stand out quite so much. When she did nod, it was only after she’d squared her shoulders a little—the slouch didn’t le
ave her body completely, but she stood up a little straighter as if to convince herself.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Fine.” Joanna looked over at Adriana, who pointedly did not pretend like she wasn’t watching them. “What do I tell her?” It was a question more to herself than asking him for advice.

  “She’ll be fine. This’ll benefit the production in the end.”

  Joanna shifted around on her feet and seemed to grow and shrink another half inch.

  “You can come by my place tomorrow evening.”

  “Okay,” said Jax, and watched her head off to her trailer. Jax breathed in, channeling all his charm and appeal, and went to strike a bargain with the director.

  Chapter Fourteen

  SPOTTED: MALCOLM CLARK taking producer’s daughter Sabrina Letts for a spin in his convertible! Have her back before midnight, Mal!

  Vanessa attached the photo she’d caught on her phone to the tweet and set it to drop on Claudia’s celeb sightings account in twenty. There was no point in tacking on an image with better resolution—she wouldn’t be getting any cash from it, and it would only blur that funny shrinking divide between the paps and amateur celebrity detectives.

  Not that she would ever complain about that divide to Claudia. But it was interesting to walk that gap, to play on both sides.

  They changed the password to this account every two weeks on Vanessa’s insistence: she didn’t need someone forcing the lock and finding out that a professional was crossing lines to play in the amateurs’ sandbox.

  Her sister was right: sometimes it was a little satisfying to come up with snarky lines to go along with the shots of celebrities sidling up to each other when they thought no one relevant was around. It was like giving them a constant ping, a reminder that yes, they were being watched all the time. Admittedly, that had to be a weird feeling. Vanessa swiped back over to the Drafts screen and re-read the tweet, then decided that it wasn’t that bitchy a line, all things considered. Malcolm and Sabrina would be fine. Her thumb swiped back to the account’s main timeline.

  Excited about The Protectorate? Joanna Hart’s back in the big time, but is she planning to keep her private life private? So mysterious. . . .

  That tweet had gone out an hour ago and had gotten a few dozen reposts and favorites, but then was lost in the shuffle with no replies so far. Well, apart from an all-caps demand for updates on Tristan Eccleston. She suspected it was partly because Claudia had scheduled other stuff to go out in the meantime, but Joanna Hart just wasn’t attracting a huge amount of buzz.

  Most of the blogs dedicated to the summer franchises were focused on what the Protectorate would be up to, and intimately obsessing over how the Steel Knight and America’s Son would play off each other in their first on-screen pair-up. And rightly so, since they were the lynchpins of the series as a whole. But the biggest thing was that Morganna was going to be introduced into the ensemble while her solo movie was still in pre-production. It was a massive risk, and she would need to prove herself—especially as the first female protagonist in the studio’s slate.

  Vanessa had set up news alerts and started poking around on the Stanford University website to see if there was any trace of Joanna Hart’s stint there as a completely normal college graduate with an IMDb page that put her at 30 acting credits before the age of 16. Not even a school newspaper article about her—just the expected tabloids and blog entries from back in the dark ages with sketchy quotes from classmates who thought it wasn’t fair that she’d gotten a dorm room all to herself and that she was a snob for never coming to any house parties.

  Even her Wikipedia page was listed as a stub. The only links there led to multi-page descriptions of her work projects, like the sitcom that had made her a household name.

  Tomorrow’s a Mystery had been a network staple in the mid-’90s. The premise was that the first family sent to live inside a lunar base had discovered that there was in fact life on the Moon—a little alien girl named Candra. There was never much explanation for why she was living alone on the Moon, but the parents and children, a son and daughter, loved their new friend so much that they informally adopted her and tried, patiently, with good-natured eye-rolling, to teach her how to be like them. Every week, Candra misunderstood some Earth custom, and the parents or kids would have to twist themselves into bigger and more complex lies to avoid alerting the United States government to the fact that extraterrestrial life was less than 250,000 miles away.

  It was empty, repetitive schmaltz that always ended in everyone learning a lesson about love and family, had an average of 30 million viewers a week, and made predictable appearances on television awards nights for six years in a row. Claudia had been a big fan as a little kid.

  Joanna Hart had, of course, been the breakout star in the role of Candra. Her blue wig was cut in an adorable bob that inspired a generation of schoolgirls to wear their hair chin-length, and she had little antennae poking up that spun around like satellite dishes when she tried to tell a lie. She had accepted a jokey “Cutest Alien” award while dressed as Candra the first time the show had been nominated.

  From there, her work was mostly in cable-movie dramas playing younger versions of adult protagonists in flashbacks, younger sisters to teen leads, and best friends who had endless supplies of quippy catchphrases. And then she landed the starring role in Dracula Gave My Computer a Virus on a children’s channel. A girl researching the supernatural loaded a floppy disk she found in a cemetery into her family’s computer and re-opened the doors of our realm to the King of Vampires, who wound up helping her score a date with her middle school’s cute quarterback to the homecoming dance.

  What the Nosferatu himself seemed to get out of this arrangement, according to a very detailed IMDb user review, was help securing proof of ownership documents for his Transylvanian castle so that it wouldn’t be turned into a theme park by two greedy developers. At the conclusion of the movie, the protagonist had a spotlight slow dance and chaste kiss with her hunky crush. Then a surprise musical guest took the stage, which turned out to be Dracula, disguised in neon board shorts and a backwards baseball cap, who then proceeded to rap the movie into the credits, much to the schoolkids’ delight.

  Hart had left the business for a few years, tried college, and then disappeared again, only to resurface in France doing an independent science fiction film with a decidedly cynical worldview that nevertheless captured something for European audiences. She won several awards at Cannes. Hart was firmly back in business.

  Recently, she had been cast as the novitiate of a monastic order of witches in a fantasy miniseries on HBO called Underground in the World. Each episode focused on a different sister, showing flashbacks of their lives outside the cloister and how they had chosen to study witchcraft. And each episode, the threat of violence and the outside world grew stronger and more unavoidable, until finally religious revolutionaries broke down the temple’s front gate and arrested all the women. With a dramatic sham trial, the witches were all sentenced to death. Hart’s character was the youngest, and she was the last sister in line to be executed. She watched all of her friends and mentors die in front of her before mounting the scaffolding herself.

  And now she was set to be Card One’s first female protagonist in a movie with its first female director.

  Vanessa rubbed the bridge of her nose and went to get a drink of water, then sat on the still-plastic-coated couch and stared at the glowing laptop screen from across the room for several minutes.

  Then she stood and opened the Twitter feed again to see if anyone had replied.

  joanna harts one of those actresses you see in everything but stays out of drama, said someone whose profile picture was a close-up of a porn star’s face looking down with her lips parted.

  not enough pics of her but she’s hot tho

  Indeed.

  She wanted to know something substantial about Joanna Hart, not bullshit from horny teenagers. Vanessa took a moment to reflect. It was time to take this a
little more seriously.

  Sam picked up on the fifth ring, just as Vanessa’s finger was moving toward the “disconnect call” button. She could hear party noises in the background and felt the overwhelming urge to hang up anyway and text him to say it had been an accident.

  “Vanessa? Hang on—” The sounds of the party receded. “What’s up?”

  “I’m looking into Joanna Hart. What do you know about her?”

  “Uhh. . . .” He drifted off for a moment. “Why do you want to know about her?”

  “Getting a jump start on the competition. Has Trevor had anyone look into her before?”

  Sam blew air into the receiver in a sigh, and she lifted the phone away from her head for a moment, wincing.

  “I—I think we did open a file on her when she was first cast, but it was really tough to find anything, like. . . .” She could hear the sounds of cars honking from far away, and Sam’s voice started to spin and slide a little. “FB2 paid for some legal docs, I think, but a lot of it had been suppressed or something.”

  “Like what?”

  “Uhh. . . .” He drifted off again. “Something about her stepmom filing for bankruptcy, or something. Or did Joanna file for emancipation? I can’t remember.”

  “Did we ever get pictures of her? Anything in the archives? With a boyfriend or date would definitely help.” She quickly clicked through the open tabs with brief reports that Hart was spending time with Jamie Martin, then Ben Owing, then Simon Kirov—one right after the other, and then That’s all the search results we have for you. Try again?