Siren Queen(64)

“No, you will not,” said Olivia almost gently.

The siren tried to protest, talking about the spires of Atlantis and her dead kin, but Olivia was undeniable. Step by step, she walked towards the siren, who slid farther down her rock until she writhed in the dirt, a worm and not a dragon after all. She was beaten once and for all, and everyone, Olivia, the silent soldier by her side, the audience watching in the dark theater, knew this.

“No,” the siren moaned at last. “Stay away, stay away…”

She begged for her life, promised to leave and crawl away on her belly if that’s what Olivia wanted. She pulled herself away from the advancing angel on her hands, her magnificent tail cut in half behind, dragging dark blood. She abased herself, begging for her unworthy life until she was huddled against a boulder, unable to go any farther. Still unwilling to face her death with dignity, she pleaded and begged until finally Olivia silenced her with a sharp gesture.

The innocent girl had become a hero in her own right, a woman grown who dispensed justice on the end of a blade. She was not the rage of her errant father or the blind mercy of the convent nuns who raised her, but some impossible mix of the two.

First, she kissed the siren, mercy and absolution, and then, when the siren looked up, cravenly hoping for forgiveness for the unforgivable, a small dagger appeared in Olivia’s hand, and she stabbed the monster through the heart.

There were a few pages after that. I skimmed them quickly, seeing that Olivia went off to live happily ever after with her hero, the siren dead on the beach behind them. The end that Whalen Mannheim had envisioned was still execution for the siren, but it wasn’t this.

Jacko’s warning echoed in my ear, and I clenched my fists until I could breathe normally again. For some reason, I thought of my grandfather, crushed under rock and lulled to sleep every night by the lonely trains that ran through Colorado. I reached for some of the cold that lived in his bones, a ghost of the iron that ran in my mother’s blood, and I could stand.

Jacko called everyone together again. It was past noon, late to start shooting, but he had gotten his pictures in under deadline and under budget before by knowing just how far he could push production, that is to say, to its knees and not into the ground. No one was surprised by his instructions—it was going to be the first of many long nights.

“And before I let you go, two introductions,” he said, champing indolently on a toothpick. “First, this is Tara Lubowski, who’s doing all our scripts, but it’s Mr. Moore if anyone asks.”

He pointed towards Tara, who waved to the crowd. She looked as serious as she had at the Pipeline, if less confident. I froze, and I was still half-convinced she wasn’t real when Jacko spoke again.

“And stepping up as our Olivia Nemo, Miss Emmaline Sauvignon.”

As if someone had flipped on a spotlight, Emmaline—who had been standing off to the side, in the shadows of the sound stage—turned so we could see her, and the crowd sighed. She smiled, and you could sense the thing that had made her a star, the ability in her slender hands to reach into your chest, close, and pull.

Her eyes skipped over me, and her smile was pure and still.





V


“You must know that I didn’t. Know, I mean.”

I sipped at my fizz, giving myself time to think before I replied. Tara slid into the booth across from me without asking, taking her hat off to rest it on the table between us.

“Does it matter? You still wrote it.”

“Yes, but I didn’t write it for you,” she said in frustration. “I didn’t know you were the siren.”

“But someone was.”

It was a strange place to plant a flag, I knew. It was safer to protect the siren. I had acted the part for more than two years now. No one else had. Fan letters came to Wolfe Studios in the armloads for Harry, and mixed in, like scanty flecks of pepper in a drift of salt, were always a few dozen for me, or more appropriately, for the siren. Some were disgusting, some were worshipful, and some were girls from Ord Street, from the Chinese American enclaves in New York and San Francisco and from the lonely outposts in between. They saw different things, from glamour to fame to fear that for once they might wield, but most importantly, they saw. Now, thanks to Tara Lubowski, they were going to see humiliation, and while I didn’t have the words to protect myself, I had plenty to protect the siren.

“It’s a good scene,” she said, jutting out her jaw stubbornly. “I know it is. It shows Olivia being strong and merciful, it shows how she’s grown.”

“It’s a good scene for Emmaline,” I said, taking another cold sip of my fizz. “Not for anyone else. Not even for you, Mr. Moore.”

That was the name on the script, Lester Moore. They didn’t want Tara Lubowski any more than they wanted me, perhaps even less.

“It’s my first big script,” she said. “First time for a piece this big, first time it wasn’t just scenes that were too sloppy or where the actual writer was dead drunk and couldn’t sit up at his typewriter. It’s the best I’ve ever done.”

“Do better,” I snapped, downing the rest of the fizz. Without Aguila to order for me, it was mostly water, and when I stood up from the table, I didn’t have any kind of satisfying waver in my vision or my step. I didn’t know why I had come.

I started to leave, but Tara laid her hand over mine. It sent a shiver through me. Real, my brain noted. Not the real of the Friday fires or Harry’s big house in Bel-Air, but real at the Pipeline nonetheless.