Before, there had been the beginning of something special with our work. But I’d learned from Lou’s mistakes, and from my own. It was why I was still there, in that office, watching the twilight settle over the city. It was why it wasn’t me six feet under, staring up at the sunset and looking for the living to play the part I’d outlined. The script was all mine now, not some faceless dead woman’s.

Maybe Lou had started out with good intentions, too. Maybe she’d thought she was building a sisterhood, a place for women to take back power using the weapons men haven’t learned how to defend against. That was the dream she’d sold me. Or maybe she’d only needed to protect herself at a moment when she had no other options. Maybe it was both. I’d never know. But her failings had taught me everything I needed to make sure that tiny glimmer of possibility, that glittering picture she’d painted for me one morning in a diner, became the reality. The artificial into the true, the alchemy of Hollywood. I’d take Lou’s vision, and I’d perfect it. And in the end, that would be Lou’s true legacy. In the end, a little piece of her would last forever.

I took a sip of my drink and watched the daylight purple and melt into twilight, become renewed with the dark. The sun was setting earlier these evenings. The heat that had plagued the city for weeks was mostly behind us—or long in front of us, if you wanted to think of it that way.

I went to the balcony at the back of the office and stood in front of the iron railing, drink in hand, and watched the lights of all of the city’s people flicker out, brief and bright, before me. As soon as one blinkered off, another one took its place, so it was never true dark. The night sky was clear and glittered hard, but not with stars. People read so damn much into the stars—star-crossed lovers, love like galaxies, written in the stars, all that jazz. In my city, we’d gotten rid of all that and in its place put something brighter and harder that never went out, so you could barely even see those stars at all.

I preferred it that way.

Acknowledgments