I don't move for a beat.
Asher Kane can't be wounded yet.
The syringe is still seven days away. The shoulder he was supposed to take it in is, on this side of the timeline, still untouched.
But there is a bloom of red coming through the gauze taped to his deltoid.
Quinn has the second man flat on the cement and is sliding zip cuffs on him. His voice is low.
Ms. Ashby. In.
The elevator behind the booth chimes. Somebody else is coming down.
I pull the Cayenne's rear door and slide in. The driver — a Lumen security person I do not know — pulls out of the garage as the gate's broken arm sweeps back up.
Asher hands me a folded charcoal coat. I don't take it.
His hand stops in the air between us. After a second he sets the coat across his own lap.
The cabin is quiet in a way that is uncomfortable. He looks worse in light. Eyes red at the rims. Mouth a bloodless line.
I speak first.
The shoulder.
He looks down at the gauze like he had forgotten.
Will you believe me.
Try.
He says, I had a dream. A few hours ago. Somebody put a needle in my shoulder while I was holding a cat. When I woke up there was a puncture wound and bruising along the deltoid. The compound's nurse asked if I'd been in a fight.
Cold rolls down my back.
A return that isn't a reset. The cat-side timeline didn't get erased. It bled.
What else did you dream.
He looks at me.
A cat. It kept clawing me.
I look out the window.
The cat has taste.
In the front seat Quinn makes a small noise that he is going to claim was a cough.
Asher's mouth flickers. The flicker doesn't make it as far as a smile.
Sloane. I know whatever I say to you tonight isn't enough. But for the next seven days, don't go anywhere without one of my people in line of sight.
I keep my voice cold.
Why.
He pulls a manila envelope from the door pocket and lays it across the bench seat between us.
I open it.
Inside is a stack: a power-of-attorney instrument naming me. A signed authorization that hands the credentials for Lumen's legal, PR, security, and audit teams to my email until further notice. A standing letter of authority to his personal banker.
His signature is at the bottom in dry blue ink. Already executed. Notarized this afternoon.
I look up.
Compensation?
His throat moves.
Ammunition.
My fingertip stalls on the page.
That word lands easier than sorry.
I close the file.
The audio goes up tonight.
Quinn turns his head a fraction. If you drop it tonight Ms. Monroe's people will pre-frame it as deepfake. We have until 9 a.m. tomorrow morning before Mrs. Kane uses her board meeting to take provisional control of Lumen on the grounds of Mr. Kane's mental instability. If we move first, we strip her of the venue. If we let her open the meeting, we have her entire board as witnesses when the recording plays. The takedown is worth more from inside the room than from outside it.
I look at Asher.
Your mother.
His eyes go flat. She's at the family home in Bel-Air. Reviewing notes for the 9 a.m.
The board meeting.
In the old timeline that meeting is where the termination press release got authorized.
I look out the window at the LA streetlights blur sideways. A laugh slides up my throat against my will.
Don't stop her.
He turns.
I look back at him.
She wants to tell a room of board members that you are unstable. Let her open the floor. I want to walk her into the room she scheduled and let her demonstrate, in front of her own directors, which Kane in this family is unwell.
At 9 a.m. the Lumen board convenes in the corner conference room on the twenty-second floor of the Sunset & Doheny tower.
I am two doors down in a small audit room with the door shut and a printout of the conference-room AV manifest in front of me. Quinn has rigged the room's primary HDMI input to a laptop with a single button on its desktop. I have three windows up: a live feed of the conference room from the security camera in the ceiling, a forensic certificate of authenticity on the call recording, and the recovered library footage from Mulholland the cat-timeline had captured — the one Quinn quietly grabbed off the house's security DVR before the local sheriff arrived.
Asher is in the chair next to me. His color is no better. I told him to go to Cedars. He said no.
I am done telling him.
On the screen, Margot is at the head of the table. Cream coat. Pearl studs. She has positioned Lacey Monroe in the chair to her right, as Lumen's most senior signed artist concerned about the wellbeing of company leadership. Lacey is in tasteful navy. Her eyes are pink.
Margot's opening volley:
Members of the board. I called this session because the family has become aware of a serious decline in my son's mental and emotional stability. Last night Asher attacked a member of his personal staff and is currently AWOL from a Cedars-Sinai psychiatric hold. We believe the catalyst is his unresolved grief regarding a former Lumen artist who took her own life last spring.
I lift my eyebrows.
She is fast.
She produces a clip. The conference room screen plays a sliced cut of the library footage: Asher sweeping a glass off the desk, knuckles white. The cut excludes Margot's bodyguard producing a syringe. It excludes Margot's confession.
Lacey takes her cue.
I don't want to indict Mr. Kane, she says, voice trembling on the right syllables, but he is — he is treating a stray kitten like a reincarnation of Sloane. He told me on the phone last night that Sloane is back. I don't know what to do.
Around the conference table, three board members shift uncomfortably.
I look at Asher.
Your reputation is gone.
He says, Cheap price.
I am not going to reply to that.
Quinn's voice comes through my earpiece.
Ms. Ashby. Ready?
Go.
The conference-room screen blacks out for one beat.
It returns with a different file playing.
Margot's voice rolls into the room at perfect volume.
Lacey isn't the brightest girl in the country, Asher, but she is at least obedient.
That girl should never have been allowed near you in the first place.
I sent her away. I had your therapist erase the name from your intake.
The board members' faces become a single uniform color.
Margot stands. Turn it off.
Nobody touches a remote.
The audio swaps. Now it is Lacey's voice on a tinny iPhone speaker.
As long as you don't step aside, I can't move up.
The unedited dailies are gone. The post house burned a hard drive last spring.
Asher doesn't have his phone this week. His mother handed it to me at the property.
The conference room is silent the way a chamber is silent.
A board member, older, gray-bearded, the kind who has been on the board since the early Lumen years, smacks the table.
Margot. What is this.
Lacey is on her feet, mouth open.
That's — that's edited. That's not me. That's Sloane setting me up —
I tap the microphone in the audit room. My voice goes through a clean voice-changer into the conference room speakers, gender-neutral, low.
Ms. Monroe. Is the unedited dailies file in a folder on your personal MacBook labeled Moon_Backup. Currently sitting in your D drive, hidden attributes set, last modified six weeks ago. Would you like to confirm or shall we mirror the drive live on this projector.
Lacey's hand twitches toward her clutch.
The clutch is on the chair next to her.
The reach is involuntary. The board sees it.
Margot's voice splinters.
Call the police. There is an unauthorized intrusion into this company's secure systems —
The conference room door opens.
Two uniformed LASD detectives and a tall woman in a navy blazer with a U.S. Attorney's office lanyard step through.
The senior detective speaks.
Mrs. Kane. Ms. Monroe. Please come with us.
Margot looks at the screen. She looks at the camera in the ceiling. She finds it and she looks directly into it.
I look back through the monitor.
I take off the headphones. I lean back against the chair.
First cut.
I don't appear in front of any camera.
I have Quinn push three artifacts from Lumen's verified handles before noon.
The full 19-second exit-cue recording, with chain-of-custody.
The unedited Backlot dailies, timecode visible, raw audio. Lacey going down, my arms catching her, my single line — Stop performing, please — clean and pleasant in the take.
My Last Light Over Carthage callback tape. Three minutes. General Calla on the city wall after the senate has sold her down. The kind of audition you watch with your hand over your mouth.
Wren Ford posts his own op-ed in Variety an hour later. The headline runs:
The Only Calla I Ever Cast Was Sloane Ashby. Here Is What I Saw In Her Callback.
A screenshot of the op-ed goes around X faster than the op-ed loads. By 1 p.m. it is on every entertainment feed.
The comments do not turn slowly. They avalanche.
so we just spent a year canceling a working actress on the say-so of a Lumen-managed sweetheart and a cut of a reality pilot the network never even aired
I owe Sloane Ashby an apology I cannot afford to make properly
Lacey Monroe is the meanest girl in Hollywood and that includes the dead ones
one tearful TMZ exit and a million people line up to bury a real one. we are unwell
Barely.
That last comment, from a film critic who used to like me, has six thousand likes by the time I see it. The caption is a screenshot of a CNN chyron that ran last spring after my death.
Actress Sloane Ashby Was Barely Driven To Suicide By Online Bullies, Mother's Family Says.
I read the word barely.
They don't know I went all the way. They will not know.
My phone buzzes against my hip. My old manager. Producers who muted me a year ago. A boy I dated for three weeks at twenty who once posted a Story calling me extra.
The boy's text: Birdie, I always believed you.
I screenshot a 2023 X post of his calling me deeply unserious and send it back.
He un-sends his message. He goes silent.
Quinn is in the doorway.
Mrs. Kane is refusing to name additional parties. Ms. Monroe is claiming Mrs. Kane directed everything and she was a contractor. The man from your apartment landing — scar across the left thumb-web — is in custody. Shane Kovac. Fifty-two. Former Kane Foundation logistics director. He was on the property when the San Bernardino group home burned in November 2009.
My pulse skips once.
November 2009.
He'll talk?
Quinn glances at the file in his hand.
He has a ten-year-old daughter, Marisol. Pediatric autoimmune disorder. Treatment funded since 2021 by an anonymous trust. The trust traces to a Kane Foundation subsidiary. He'll talk to you.
The interview room at the West Hollywood substation has a fluorescent over the table and two molded plastic chairs. Shane Kovac is gray. He has a face that used to be handsome and isn't.
He looks at me when I come in. The first thing he says is, You didn't die.
Quinn's expression cuts.
I'm a disappointment to a lot of people this week, I say. Sit down.
I put a photograph on the table between us. It is a 2007 staff Christmas snapshot from the San Bernardino group home, before the fire. There are seven kids and three staff lined up in front of a sad plastic tree. I point to a girl at the end of the row with crooked pigtails, six years old, missing both front teeth.
Her name was Acelyn. She died in the fire. Did you know her name when you set it.
Shane Kovac's eyelid twitches.
I look at him.
She was seven.
His mouth begins to shape. I see the apology coming.
Then it doesn't.
He lifts his head and laughs — a single dry thing.
The one that was supposed to die that night was you, Birdie.
Quinn moves toward him. I lift my hand.
Why, I say.
Shane's eyes never leave my face.
Sloane Ashby, he says. You think Mrs. Kane wanted you dead because you got close to her son? Honey. You don't even know whose body you have.