He laughed. “I mean, imagine we were talking on the phone and I asked that question. What would you say?”
“Depending on the time of day and where I was I—” She stopped. She was so goddamn cute. “You’re telling me I should make something up?” Was she blushing, he heard wry acceptance in her voice. “Um.”
“I’m all ears.” Taylor would’ve pinched him for that.
Georgia’s breathing hummed. “I can’t do it.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not creative enough. I’m the most boring person in the world, Damon.”
He leaned his shoulder into her. “Not buying that.”
“Truly. I’m sorry. I’m so disappointing.”
She was the least disappointing, most intriguing thing in his life, but there were running feet coming their way; they were out of time.
“Damon, Georgia. I’m Jace. Come with me.”
Jace led them. He’d been well briefed by Dalia. He walked slightly ahead and kept up a commentary on where they were, what they could expect. The warehouse was an old paper mill, long abandoned. Dalia had found it and badgered the owner until he leased it to her as a home for her theatre company. Damon had helped her fund renovations with a loan she’d since paid back. Tonight the space had been converted into a set that resembled a cut in half house without the roof. The audience wouldn’t sit, they’d move from room to room following the play’s characters, standing in a viewing bay of whatever room of the makeshift house they happened to be in. They could follow any character in any order and move as often as they wanted to or stay in the one spot. The action was continuous and would go on around them.
Jace walked them through each of the rooms, where stagehands were still moving about setting up
“This is incredible.” He heard wonder in Georgia’s voice. “If you don’t look up you could believe you’re in someone’s kitchen.”
“Can I smell bread baking?”
Jace answered. “Yep, and if you’re an audience member who chooses to follow someone into the bathroom you’ll smell other things not so pleasant.”
Damon laughed. He felt Georgia’s humour in the shift of her arm. “So why does this thing need a narrator?”
“I’ll answer that.” A new voice. “I’m Ed.” Ed was not what he expected. Ed sat to pee. “Dalia thinks the performance might be too disjointed without a central storytelling function. So we have you to narrate the changes in scenes so the audience realises when something major has happened like the murder itself, but tomorrow night we do the whole thing again without the narrator and see what the audience reaction is. Whatever we get the best feedback on is what we’ll stage.”
Typically ingenious Dalia. “Where do I get my cues from?”
“I’ve got headsets for you both. Jace will stay with you on the gantry and I’ll be in your ear with the cues. You got your copy of the script?”
“Yeah.” Dalia emailed it and his dragon software read it to him. It wasn’t complicated and he’d memorised it.
“We’ve had to make some last minute changes. How do we do this?” There was a nervous edge to Ed’s voice, even over the sound of hammering, and was that a baby wailing?
“I can feed Damon his lines.”
He turned his face from Ed to Georgia. That would work. “Too easy. Is there a baby here?”
“Youngest member of the cast,” said Ed.
“Please don’t tell me the baby did it,” said Georgia.
Ed laughed. Jace said, “I’ll show you the gantry. You’ll need to wait up there after sound check.” He led them to a flight of metal stairs.
Georgia hesitated. “There’s a railing, maybe th
irty stairs, straight up, no landing.”
He reached out for the handrail, lifted his foot average step height and stubbed his toe into the edge, before landing on the step. He was right after that. He counted twenty-five and stopped. He’d lost all sense of light now. He was in a black tunnel. For a moment he froze. His eyes were open and he saw nothing, darkness whichever way he turned his head. The wall of his stomach twisted and fluttered in a sudden flare of panic, as if Lina’s moment of reckoning had chosen now to show itself.
“Damon, you okay?”