Stacia Kane - Sacrificial Magic

Over the curtain, which seemed unusual, but then how else could it go, right? Right. Dust coated the top of the curtain so thick the color of the fabric was no longer visible; Chess only knew it was red because she’d seen it from the floor.

Backstage—well, it looked like every backstage Chess had ever seen. No, she’d never been in any school plays or anything—the very idea was ridiculous—but backstage areas were dark and private, the perfect place to skip class and get high or steal a few naked minutes with whomever she’d felt like giving the privilege to that particular day.

Tall canvas-and-wood flats rested against the wall; old desks and a battered sofa and other odds and ends of furniture braced them up. Boxes of costumes, boxes of props, general dust, and detritus littered the floor. Typical.

What wasn’t typical was the faint odd smell in the air, and what her adjusting eyes could see was a stub of candle and a small tray on the floor.

Shit. She grabbed her camera and snapped a couple of pictures, but what she really needed to do was get down there and look. And she needed to do it without bringing either of the women with her; she didn’t want her discovery of the candle and tray—if they were even related, and not just left behind by some kids who came here to make out or whatever—to be noted. Never let them know you’ve seen anything of interest: one of the first rules of Debunking. That went double for this case, when one Debunker had already been driven away and the potential suspects numbered in the hundreds.

So she’d have to go back to the booth where the catwalk started and get backstage alone. The alone part wasn’t a worry; she had the authority to tell them both to fuck off back to their offices, and she had no problem doing so. But the turning around …

The catwalk narrowed here, and the way it jiggled beneath her as she started to turn made her muscles tense. Had it been that jiggly when she’d first climbed up? It hadn’t seemed so but—maybe it was just the way she was moving.

So, move differently, right? Her feet shifted slowly, her thighs aching, as she gripped the rails harder. Boots were not the best choice for this sort of thing; she would have liked more mobility in her ankles. If she’d known tightrope walking—or, okay, catwalk walking—would be on the menu, she would have worn her Chucks.

But she hadn’t, and she focused on keeping the damn metal from bouncing beneath her feet. It seemed to be bouncing no matter what, though, and no sooner had the thought registered in her mind than another one did, one much darker and more unpleasant, which was that it was bouncing like that because someone was bouncing it.

Even the dim light in the theater was enough to show her that no one stood at the far end, and she was close enough to the back wall—only fifteen feet or so away—to see that no one stood there, either. What the fuck?

She’d shoved her small flashlight into her pocket. Its beam made a pale spot over the plates and bolts connecting the walk to the back wall.

One of the bolts was moving. Someone at some point had scraped off some of the dull patina on the metal, leaving a naked streak that shone bright silver; it caught the flashlight’s beam, spinning in ever-faster circles as she watched.

“Miss?” Monica’s voice, tinged with panic, flew up from the floor below. “Are you okay? The walk is shaking.”

Yeah, no shit. Not just the walk, and not just the bolt. Wires connected the catwalk posts to the ceiling. One wire released with a horrible boing, the kind of sound that was practically an announcement that she was about to die.

The bolt dropped. The catwalk jerked crazily to one side. And Chess, who’d been standing there staring like some kind of fucking moron, started running.

So what if she fell, right? She was going to fall anyway. Maybe running she had a shot at falling closer to the floor. Monica and Beulah’s shouts and screams or meows or whatever the hell useless noises they made just barely hit her ears above the sound of her feet pounding on metal, slipping as the catwalk twisted.

She had just enough time to think that of all the ways she’d ever pictured herself dying, tumbling fifty feet and breaking her back on a fucking chair in a fucking school was one she’d never considered before, when the other side of the walk gave way with a snap that should have been a lot louder, a lot more dramatic, than it was.

She threw herself forward, already bracing herself for the fall. Already picturing the City, already terrified, already furious that she finally had something real in her life besides work and the Church, someone real, some reason for living that wouldn’t disappear after she’d ingested it, when the metal beneath her slipped with an awful groaning sound. The far end broke the curtain rod, knocked it down with a crash, and hit the floor.

Her face hit the walkway itself, the metal grid biting her cheek and slamming her chest hard enough to make her momentarily picture her breasts—what there was of them—exploding like smashed balloons. The air in her chest left in a gasp, and she lay there, fifteen feet or so off the ground, on the catwalk that had now become a ramp.

So much for the impending death. Not that she was sorry or anything, but really. That was it?

Monica and Beulah milled around below; in her dizzied mind it appeared at first there were several of each of them before her vision snapped back into place. For a second she thought Beulah was smiling.

When questions arise, the Church is the first place to which one should turn. Always.

— The Church and You, a pamphlet by Elder Barrett

When she blinked the image disappeared, and there was Beulah, with a look of concern that was either real or a pretty good approximation. And as Chess’s fingers loosened on the metal, she realized her own lips were curved into a grin. Now that she was alive, really alive and not likely to stop being so, adrenaline or relief or whatever the fuck it was coursed through her like the first rush of a line of crushed Nips. As if all at once she’d floated a couple of feet into the air and every nerve ending shivered in pure delight.

Except the ones in her chest and cheek, which still felt like someone had hit them with a hammer. But it didn’t matter so much.

She hauled herself up from the catwalk—catramp?—and picked her careful way down, ending up on the stage, where her joy evaporated. Where quite a bit of her joy evaporated, anyway.

Yes. A candle, and a tray filled with ashes and the charred ends of herbs. Right there where Beulah and Monica could see them.

And they did. Both of them had hurried to meet her, and both of them saw the items at the same time. Neither of them mentioned them. Could be they knew the things existed. Could be they just didn’t think they were important. Either way, they both now knew something had been there, that something had happened, and she still had the presence of mind to be irked about that.

Especially since that unscheduled journey to the floor hadn’t been an accident. She’d watched the damn bolts come unscrewed, for fuck’s sake.

She cut off their worried interrogations. “What’s on the other side of that wall?”

They blinked. Monica started to stammer something, but Beulah cut her off. “Two floors. On the bottom is a science classroom, I believe. The top is the drama room.” Then, anticipating the question before Chess could utter it, “The stairs are there, at the far end backstage.”

Chess wasted a few seconds she really couldn’t afford navigating the fabric and steel now littering the stage floor. Whoever had decided to send her on a ride wouldn’t be in the classroom back there anymore, she knew that. But maybe there’d be someplace nearby they would hide. She flung open the stairway door, flew up the stairs in the darkness to the top, where another door barred her way. Another locked door. Fuck!