They all nodded sheepishly, but no one seemed ready to fess up.

“What is it?” she asked the local lad she’d begun to build a steady affinity for.

“Well, Miss.” He blushed. “We actually did get the message about the observation being cancelled yesterday. We just ignored it on account of wanting to come up here so badly. We figured if we showed up and acted like we were supposed to be here, maybe someone would take pity on us and help us out.”

“Help you out, how?”

He shrugged. “I can’t say it was a full-fledged plan so much as a hope that if we broke the seal, the rest might fall into place.”

“And it did.” The leader laughed. “We got our foot in the door, and we got to see a real movie set and meet an aristocrat who maybe someday will remember us kindly whenever she decides she does want to become a movie producer after all.”

She sighed again, but this time her lungs felt a little lighter. Instead of being annoyed or put out by their brashness, she found herself inspired by it. When she’d called them the future of the region to James moments earlier, she meant it only as a dressing-down for him, but now as she looked each student in the eye, she couldn’t help notice a new emotion stirring in her, little more than a light flutter amid the wreckage of the last few days. She feared any shift in the wrong direction would likely crush the hope completely, but if she did nothing, surely this would die, too, snuffed out like every hope that had come before.

No, she couldn’t withstand another loss. Sophia had awakened something in her that wouldn’t go back to sleep. She didn’t want to fall back into a void, or endless days of colourless obligation. She might not be able to have the life she wanted with the woman she loved, but Sophia had shown her she didn’t have to settle for someone else’s life, either.

The tiny flutter grew wobbly wings, and she fought the urge to cage it by managing expectations or undercutting its potential. Sophia had implored her to fight for herself with the same fervour she used when fighting for her people. What if she could fight for herself at the same time she fought for her people?

The vision remained hazy and the details vague, but a fragile dream was better than none at all. Like a child learning to walk, she fought twin impulses to cling to something solid and to charge wildly into the unknown. Either way, she wouldn’t get where she wanted to go without deciding on a first step, and in a way, she suspected she’d already done so without knowing it.