by Jane Galaxy
Chapter Eighteen
It wasn’t until her hand was turning pink that Sophie realized she’d been looking at her phone so long that the battery was overheating and nearly dead. Looking up, she could see that Tristan had been called to his mark, standing now in a crowd of people who were either messing with his hair, applying something to his face, talking to him about something in the script, or holding up hands to imitate the camera’s viewpoint.
She looked around and saw a phone charging nearby that already had a full battery, unplugged it, and charged hers. This was an emergency, and if the owner came back for it, she’d apologize and go track down another charging opportunity. But she sat next to the outlet and flicked the screen back on.
Sophie had gotten caught in the irresistible vortex of an internet rabbit hole: where once upon a time she’d gone between Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit, and other sites to see what was going on in the world, now she just felt a sense of dread whenever her fingers unconsciously tried to open the apps. It had all been ruined, or if not ruined, she needed a break from the negativity and growing feeling that she was going to be blamed if the movie didn’t come out just the way everyone wanted—Morganna as a sexy bimbo, Morganna as an inclusive feminist, Lucius with an entire arc dedicated to his tragic antihero feelings, Lucius as a genius villain mastermind who was going to destroy the universe, layers upon layers of gambits.
While trying to avoid her usual haunts, Sophie had tried other places: Gizbop, gossip sites, even Facebook. That last one had been a lot of catch-up with people she’d known in high school having babies and posting pictures about babies. And people’s moms and aunts posting political memes. She deleted the app from her phone quickly after that. The remaining places she could remember weren’t any better, since Sophie could feel her eyes quickly scanning each page to see if there was any mention of Imperium, Tristan Eccleston, Gabriella Zahn, or God forbid, Sophie Markes.
She was tired, pretty sure she was experiencing eye strain, and the sense of humming energy still hadn’t waned.
It was like Rufus Eccleston’s presence had given her some weird cosmic case of the yips when it came to life itself. The sane thing to do would be to turn off the screen and go back to her chair and watch the unfolding of her creation come to literal human-and-VFX-life. Her thumb moved for the power button the side of her phone.
A clickbait ad at the bottom of Gizbop showed a picture of Tristan on a red carpet that led her to a site called Simply Sarah. His hair was shaggier, but he made it look relaxed and cool, especially in the fitted cobalt blue suit that was eye-catching without being tacky.
Had she ever seen this one before? He looked so put together yet casual; she wondered what it was promoting. Sophie opened Instagram and went to his profile, scrolling down. Tristan had a management group that curated his grid of photos for cohesion. She didn’t see the same image anywhere—
But halfway down his feed he was standing with Gabriella Zahn and a few others in a photograph from only a year ago. They were at an industry awards show, one of the union ones that wasn’t normally broadcast. Whoever was managing this account obviously wasn’t in the business of rewriting history the way so many younger stars did with their accounts. Gabriella was in a wildly multicolored body-con dress with a flower crown that matched it in color too carefully. Both of them were smiling, and even when Sophie pressed her fingertips together to zoom in, she still couldn’t tell if Tristan’s smile reached his eyes or not. It was just hard to say.
She let go, and the photo sprang back into a thumbnail. God, she was going crazy doing this, like a neurotic headcase. Searching through Tristan’s Instagram wasn’t going to solve the gnawing feeling that things were already starting to taper off, that he was pulling away from her or things just weren’t right after what his father had said.
Sophie reached the power button again, but after her fingers had brushed over the photograph, a tag popped up on the face of a middle-aged man standing next to Tristan and Gabriella, grinning happily with one arm draped triumphantly over Tristan’s shoulder. Sophie tapped on it and was taken to Oliver Jones’s profile, which said he worked with Eastern Lion Studios as a senior editor, formerly at some other studio, followed by a list of random names that must have been films he worked on. His photos were nothing particularly special—a few shots of the ocean from a boat, plates of food.
What caught Sophie’s eye, though, was a selfie that the man had taken with Tristan. It wasn’t immediately visible from the top of his collection of pictures, but it was definitely the two of them, Tristan with his shorter hair and wire-rimmed glasses from a couple of years ago. She opened it to have a closer look at him, without any touchups or makeup on. He looked very happy here, like he was laughing out loud and the camera just happened to catch him.
“Lucky to work with a genius like this,” Oliver’s caption read. He’d set the location to Oracle Films.
He always did seem pretty friendly with the production members, she thought, but something about it stuck in her mind.
Tristan never tagged himself in photos, she discovered. The answer was simple: he had an army of women to do that for him. Everything out there under the hashtag for his name was photo ops with fans, or fans kissing their television screens, or fans excitedly waiting for a movie to start in the theater. Clever sense of marketing from his team—get his name out there, but without wading into the muck, or looking like he was putting in effort to make people like him.
On a hunch, and before she could stop herself, Sophie opened Gabriella Zahn’s Instagram page. Then she opened each photo of the blonde and Tristan with other people, and tapped on each of those strangers’ profiles. If she scrolled down a little ways, a handful of them had taken selfies of themselves with Tristan but not Gabriella, and always at some production office. One person even had one photograph on their grid with the actor, while the next little thumbnail after that was blurred-out pages from a screenplay.
“Fruits of our labor,” the caption read. No tags anywhere on the page.
Another ten minutes of digging through Gabriella’s profile (which was an unsurprisingly predictable blend of moody half-naked closeups, shots of her in exotic locations holding a cocktail glass, artistic pictures of the woman looking down with the fashion piece she was subtly hawking, and of course plenty of sprinkled group shots at important events), and Sophie came across something that made her hands go instantly cold.
On the profile page of a screenwriter named Dylan Clark was a shot of a script’s cover page. Before the Gloaming, it said. One of those big-hat and pond pictures, she thought.
And just to the left of Dylan Clarke’s name was a tag marked with Tristan’s Instagram handle.
“Just like that, one line does it,” read the caption.
Sophie leaned back against the metal wall of the trailer she’d commandeered the charger from and thought for a moment.
Then she opened her phone browser and looked up Tristan’s IMDb page, flicking through his credits. Before the Gloaming was nowhere. She looked up the movie’s page, and sure enough, there was Dylan’s name under the script credit—it wasn’t like the title had changed at some point in the editorial process.
Setting her phone down and wedging it between a pair of walkie-talkies that were charging off the same outlet, Sophie went over to her bag and dug through it for the thing she’d meant to spend the day going over instead of endlessly looping through the same three websites: Rufus Eccleston’s manuscript.
She’d rescued it from the trash can at Tristan’s house. Not her finest moment of respecting another person’s privacy, but it was there, and… Sophie thought it was worth at least looking at. Maybe she’d find something funny to point out that could cheer up Tristan. That, and she was trying to get a sense for what his family was actually like. If she had an outside perspective—even a biased one like Rufus’s—it could be insight into Tristan’s whole life, the mindset of someone who’d been born into fame.
Because t
he truth was, she got the feeling Tristan was putting up walls around her, making a neat little garden that was pretty, but that she could never look out of. Like he wanted to keep her apart from an entire side of himself.
Flipping through chapter after chapter of historical charts, family tree branches, and a very long section about the courtship of Rufus and Madeleine, she came to the first mention of Tristan and his sisters. The two women were entrenched in the traditions of London theater, and each had come up through the ranks with small parts before breaking through with one thing or another. Julia was into experimental plays, which Rufus’s narrative touched on only briefly, while Beatrice was a promising star who’d dedicated herself to the Stratford festival circuit and ensuring the family legacy. Clearly she was the one who needed to inherit it all.
Tristan, meanwhile, was described as “devoted to reading and literature, skilled in writing and the form of expression which Times critic Alistair Penfold compared to that of Sir Basil Davenport, resulting in Tristan’s receipt of an Olivier Award for his role as Pericles at the full age of 19.”
Full age being Rufus’s way of comparing his son to himself—he’d won his Olivier while he was one week shy of turning 19, she remembered. Sophie rolled her eyes the same way Tristan had when he’d told her that, and kept going.
“Of course, owing to prodigious (and humble, and therefore obscured) efforts, Tristan has been described as having ‘won more awards than his name was on.’ He has most recently joined new as-yet unspecified projects abroad.”
Sophie let her phone drop to her lap. The feeling in her chest was like dumping a box of jigsaw puzzle pieces onto the floor, only to have them all fall into their correct positions, just with slight spaces between each. She could see the bigger picture without really having to put any of it together—she felt a heavy sluggishness in her limbs, like she was too tired to bother anyway. But her mind had already worked it out, and it knew.
Still. There was a chance that this wasn’t all heading in that direction. That maybe the pieces would rearrange themselves to be a Magic Eye picture and show something else inside of what was on the surface.
She pulled up Prasad’s contact number, and after staring at the little picture of him with his tongue stuck out and eyes crossed, pressed the dial button. He was back at the London studios that Card One used, working with the editors on the daily footage. The last time they’d talked, he’d said the opening scenes and early VFX work were really impressive. Card One just had that kind of budget. She fidgeted her way through the ringer tone on his end.
“How’s the weather out there?” he said by way of greeting. She looked around, not having been paying attention.
“Cloudy?” Sophie said finally.
“Sounds lovely. What’s up?”
She blurted out the first thing that sprang into her brain.
“I wanted to ask you about Tristan’s line,” said Sophie.
“His what?”
“Line. We got to talking, and I was wondering if you knew what he meant.”
There was silence over the phone connection, and Sophie closed her eyes in a full-on cringe at herself. Finally Prasad said,
“Oh!” And her eyes popped open again. “He means the work he did? But it wasn’t just a line—I mean, he polished the dialogue, sure, but it was the second-act structure that was the biggest help.” He paused. “You don’t mind or anything, do you? I mean—”
“No, no, no,” Sophie heard herself say, too loud and too fast, “I was just curious, that’s all. Thanks,” she said, and before he could say anything, pressed the red disconnect button.
She was almost surprised by how calm she felt. Then her mind seemed to kick back on, and Sophie realized it wasn’t calm, but a feeling of being stunned.
Tristan had lied to her about being involved in reworking scripts.
In rewriting her script.
And it wasn’t just the lying—her mind almost glossed past that altogether, her thoughts flying too quickly to really focus on any one source of potential outrage and process everything. He’d sat in the room when she’d been working with Prasad, when they’d taken meetings with the studio executives, when they’d gone out to celebrate—he’d sat and listened to them talk, listened to her complain about how bad the changes were.
Listened to them redo all of his work, make the corrections she’d insisted on to the point of feeling like she was a burden on Prasad, feeling at some points like maybe it had been a mistake to go out to Los Angeles.
That was the part she couldn’t understand.
He’d never spoken up, or dropped the slightest hint that he’d been behind the changes.
Instead he’d been… what was the word, solicitous, kind in a way that had softened her up a little, made her finally able to tolerate the relentless aura of perfection that seemed to follow him around.
An ugly, nasty thought came into Sophie’s brain, which was that maybe the studio executives had asked him to be patient and listen to all of it, and be nice through all of it, and in the end make sure that the script stayed on its path anyway, kept going in a direction that would please the male comic book fans of the world.
A direction that would make Sophie shrug her shoulders and go along with it just because she was grateful for the opportunity to be in Hollywood. Grateful to be around a big star who looked at her a certain way, who asked her if he could kiss her, and then kissed her, and then—
No. She closed her eyes and forcibly shoved the thought away.
Tristan wouldn’t go that far, and her mind refused to delve into something so dark. She knew him better than that. Did she? She did. She did not. She barely knew him at all except that he was an excellent actor—
Sophie’s eyes squeezed shut on their own and she winced even harder than she had on the phone, trying to drive off the doubt that was washing over her, sticking to her and clouding her feelings.
Tristan was not a bad person.
He’d lied to her, and for reasons she didn’t know or understand, but…
He’d lied to her.
And regardless of what his intentions had been, Sophie had gotten so caught up in the fake relationship that had turned into something more real, had been so distracted by sex and maybe love and the whole feeling in her stomach when he looked at her, it was still just that.
Still just feelings, distracting her from what she’d really wanted.
He’d taken her story, the one she prided herself on so much, and glibly shredded it to bits. It was so casual, so effortless for him that he hadn’t even attached his name to it. This was her whole career. It was barely even a part of his.
Tristan Eccleston could just… snap his fingers and change an entire screenplay, just outdo her, and not even bother to tell the truth.
Look at you, you good little writer, she thought. Now let’s let the man who went to Oxford fix it, that’s a girl, go sit over there.
And then he’d patronized her by sitting idly by and letting her think she was fixing something that had belonged to her, flexing her muscles as a script consultant, as the entire reason she’d gone out to Los Angeles in the first place.
He’d lied to her about fixing her screenplay, but the worst part was that he’d thought her story was bad and hadn’t had the guts to tell her the truth.
Chapter Nineteen
“Lucius, this has to stop. The most we’ve ever managed to achieve as siblings is war, and it will not sustain us when Mordred is gone.” Morganna’s face was etched with a mixture of raw grief and rage as she slowly reached out her hand to him. “I beg of you, brother, take my hand and cast peace between us.”
The look on Lucius’s face was one of tentative curiosity, almost a kind of hope. Right up until the moment that he let go of Morganna, and watched her drop from the edge of the building and plummet to the street below. Then it was replaced only by a cold determination as he turned away from the ledge and strode off in the opposite direction.
It would all
be his.
There was a high-pitched blip, the screen flashed white, then black, and then the lights in the screening room gently came back up.
“Well, the VFX aren’t quite done yet, but I’d say it’s looking pretty good so far,” Prasad said cheerfully as the executives sprinkled in the seats around them began to file out, chatting amongst themselves.
He, Sophie, and Tristan stayed in their seats. Tristan hadn’t been there for the moment when his stunt double dropped Joanna from the rig, so it was interesting to see how it played out from the camera angle. She’d done an excellent job giving just the right expression of anguish and shock. Now the only scenes they had left to film were the resolution when Morganna regained her powers of levitation and rejoined the Protectorate to fend off the impending invasion of Mordred’s army.
That was where Joanna was now—back on a sound stage in Los Angeles with Jax Butler and Holland Matthews, filming a climactic battle for the group Protectorate film. He’d rejoin the main production himself in a few days to sit in a darkened voice booth and do ADR—recite any lines that needed to be crisper, said in a different way, or were too messed up from ambient noises to put into the final version.
Prasad stood and made his way toward the aisle, but stopped when neither Tristan nor Sophie were getting up to join him.
“Coming?”
Tristan looked up at the sound of his voice, and glanced at Sophie. She was still gazing at the screen, deep in thought.
“Er, we’ll stay a bit, I think,” he told his friend. Prasad shrugged and dashed up the stairs to slap one of the departing executives on the back in triumph. Their excited voices faded when the swinging doors quieted the whole of the private little theater to silence.
They’d previewed the ninety minutes of film that had been put together so far, and it was coming together. Still plenty of special effects and computer graphics work to be done, along with stitching the actual ending together, but as far as story structure went, it was rather good.