“I need you to take these for me,” Phoebe said. “What’s your name?”

“Yes, ma’am. My name’s Brian.”

“I’ll be back in a couple hours. Where will I find you?”

“Right here!”

“Thank you, Brian.”

She breezed past him through the front doors and the bamboo-lined foyer and into the great hall. Then she froze.

Someone had been paid a pretty sum to carve the double-S into a giant slab of granite, nothing like Phoebe had imagined, and now it bore down on her from the middle of the great hall like an Easter Island statue and she was pulverized. She was the rock the ancients had chiseled away while the desired form remained, the dust that disappeared in the rain.

Why did this happen to her every time? Her hands balled up into fists. Her feet turned to stone. She couldn’t count the number of times—in the dark of the theater, or at home in her own living room—that her body betrayed her at the sight of the thing. The double-S logo, the one she’d drawn out on a napkin one night at Bob’s Big Boy while they waited for their fries and milkshakes. Two switchbacks connected vertically, like a snake in the grass, or the headlights of a car racing through the dark night. Inspiration striking—that’s what she’d been going for. Switchback Studios had been the name of the production company they’d been planning to launch. The pact they’d made in college, to switch back and forth making each other’s projects—one for me, one for you—had given Phoebe the idea. But then she left town three months before launch, and Ted had kept the logo and swapped in his own name instead, so at the start of every Stabler Studios film, her vision came to life in a quick graphic, a lit match and then a flame speeding toward powder.

Ted owed Omega Studios the first two Starfighter films as part of the agreement he’d signed when he won the screenwriting award in college, a terrible deal that kept him from sharing in the millions of dollars made in licensing deals. Phoebe, as a producer just starting out, had gotten no points on the back end, just her salary, though Ted had been able to renegotiate a slightly higher fee on the second film. Still, the whole experience had convinced them that they should be in business for themselves. Once they delivered those first two films, they could go out on their own.

Ted had gone on to make so much money that five years later he bought Omega, and the rights to the entire Starfighter franchise, outright.