“Help! Somebody!”
I glance up at the sound, startled, and my eyes go wide as they fix on the young man across the room, a guy I vaguely recognize from our new hires meeting, currently pinned on the mold-press machine. It’s stamping out patterns for the walls, and his hand is stuck in the brace, the whole contraption currently dragging his fingers, with every deafening stamp, closer to being flattened.
“I can’t get loose!” he shouts, and I don’t have a second to think.
I drop the antlers—ignoring the crack as the clay, which had already started to harden in some points, breaks apart. Instead, I race across the room and grab the guy’s shoulders, yanking him backward hard just before the machine reaches his delicate fingertips.
His hand wrenches free, and he staggers back, until I wrap an arm around his shoulders to catch his full weight. He rebalances after a second, panting, and turns to face me, his whole face bright red. “Thank you,” he wheezes, eyes still wide with shock.
“Don’t thank me,” I tell him, shoving him away none too gently, and reaching past him to snap the emergency release to turn off the machine. It leaves a streak of grease on my gloves, which I wipe against my jeans. “You shouldn’t be using that equipment if you don’t know the proper safety procedures yet. You could have really hurt yourself.”
“I’m sorry.” His face, if possible, goes even brighter. “You’re right. I just got so eager, and I have one a little bit like this at home, so I figured I could guess… But the trapping mechanism is different, and—” He stops himself. “Doesn’t matter. Thanks. I won’t try that again.”
I roll my eyes. “Let me show you how it really works,” I say, pulling off my gloves one at a time. I’m about to demonstrate the proper usage of the machine when the doors to the workroom slide open, and a blonde girl around my age steps inside. There’s something familiar about her. It takes me a second to place her as the girl who walked in on me and John earlier, and my whole face flares bright red, though I suck in a deep breath in order to try and conceal it.
As for her, she doesn’t seem to have noticed anything. If she recognizes me, at least she’s too professional to let it show right now, something for which I’m deeply grateful. “Did I hear someone shouting help?” she asks.
I point my thumb at the guy, who ducks his head and introduces himself as Daniel. “I was using the machine wrong. She was just about to show me the proper way.”
“Mara,” I add, sticking my hand out to shake first Daniel’s and then this new girl’s hand.
“Bianca,” she answers. “Do you need any help?” Her eyes skitter around the room and then land on the disaster that used to be my carefully sculpted antlers. It’s half a pile of unfinished mushy clay and half a pile of shattered antler ends that will be melted down and remolded after I’m finished helping Daniel. “Maybe I could clean up a bit.”
“That’d be great, thanks,” I tell her. She sets off to clean up my area while I instruct Daniel on the proper usage of this tool. To his credit, after that initial mishap at least, he seems to be paying very close attention to every single thing I say. He even takes out a notepad to jot down some of the more important steps. By the time I finish explaining it to him, I’m at the very least not worried that he’s going to accidentally take his fingers off.
It’s still to be determined whether he can work the thing well enough to get some decent designs out of it, especially the kind of delicately shaped ones we’ll need for this particular set, which is half a hunting lodge (hence my antler designs) and half an outdoor scene, which will need not only trees and branches and a forest, but also stars and the moon overhead. It’ll be a tricky set to pull off without crossing over into cheesy territory. The last thing we want is to look like some high schooler’s play with second-rate set designs. I’m pretty sure none of us would last more than a couple weeks on the job if we turned out something like that—no matter how much of an in we might have with the boss.
The thought of that makes my stomach flip again, and I can’t help but steal another glance over at Bianca, who’s moved on to tidying the rest of the room after she finished sweeping up my antler mess. Does she know what she saw? Did she figure out it was me?
As if my situation couldn’t get any more awkward or embarrassing.
Bianca catches me staring at her and smiles, heading over to my side like I summoned her. Maybe I did. I’m still not really sure how this whole setup works. I know I’m supposed to have a couple of assistants on my team reporting to my same manager, to help out with tasks I set them. But I’m not sure if Bianca is one of them, or if she’s just so eager to prove herself on day one that she doesn’t care who’s giving her jobs as long as she can complete them.