Page 1 of Under the Spotlight

1

The jet door opened on a city Roxy Blaze had never asked to see, and before her foot touched the top step a man in a headset was already saying her name into his wrist.

"She's deplaning," he said. "Copy. Vehicle's at the bottom of the stairs."

Deplaning. Like she was freight. Roxy pushed her sunglasses up the bridge of her nose, the big ones that ate half her face, and went down into the wet Phoenix Ridge weather with her hood up and her chin tucked, because that was the choreography she had been doing since she was seventeen.

The SUV smelled like new leather and somebody else's idea of her favorite candle. The candle was research, in fact, a scent a focus group had agreed Roxy Blaze would respond to, and she'd stopped correcting the research years ago. It was easier to smell like the idea of herself than to keep explaining the difference. She climbed in, and Tilda climbed in after her, already mid-sentence with three people who weren't in the car.

"No, the riser goes stage left, I sent the diagram twice." A pause. Tilda pressed two fingers to her temple. "Then have him look at the diagram a third time."

Roxy let her head fall back against the seat. Through the tinted glass the arena slid past, a great gray drum of a building wrapped in a banner forty feet tall, and on the banner was a version of her. Her face, airbrushed to a finish no human face had ever achieved, mouth parted around a note. PHOENIX RIDGE VALKYRIES SEASON-OPENING GALA, the banner said. ONE NIGHT ONLY.

"What's the schedule?" Roxy asked.

Tilda lowered the phone half an inch. "Soundcheck's done, they ran it without you. Doors at six. You're on at eight-forty, four songs, then a photo line with the team and the donors, then we're wheels-up by midnight." She lifted the phone again. "No, I'm still here. What now?"

Four songs. A photo line. Wheels-up by midnight. Roxy closed her eyes and let the city carry her the rest of the way, because the nice thing about closing your eyes was that nobody could photograph what was behind them.

Backstage was the same it always was, all black drapes and gaffer tape and a folding table of fruit nobody would eat. Roxy had stood in this exact hallway a hundred times in a hundred different buildings. There were always hands on her in the last ten minutes before a show. Pinning, powdering, tucking, clipping. A half-dozen people touching her at once and none of them touching her, exactly. More handling her like a vase they were on the hook for if it broke. She'd learned a long time ago to go somewhere else in her head while it happened. Tonight the somewhere-else was thin. She'd been running on the same engine for months, sleep to stage to car to jet and back again, and lately the gaps between had started filling up with a quiet she didn't have a name for and didn't want one. A stylist swiped a brush across her cheekbone. Someone clipped a battery pack to the small of her back.

And her phone lit with a face she would have known in the dark.

She answered it because not answering it was worse.

"Roxana." Vivienne Croft filled the screen, silver bob lacquered into place, the London night blue behind her. Half past two in the morning, her time, and not one hair out of order. "You look tired. Tell me they've got a light on you that isn't doing that to your jaw."

"Hello to you too," Roxy said.

"The set list." Vivienne didn't have time for hello; she billed by the second. "You're not opening slow. Open with 'Brighter.' It's a charity crowd, they want to feel generous about themselves. And I'm told you've been asking to cut the bridge on 'Sugar Year.'"

"It's four songs, Viv. Nobody's missing the bridge either way."

"Don't cut things. People notice when you cut things." A rustle of paper off-screen. "And we're locked for the Reeve appearances next month. The gallery opening, then the premiere. He'll fly to you. Tilda has the dates."

There it was. Roxy watched her own face in the little window at the corner of the screen rearrange itself into something pleasant, and she hated how good it had gotten at that, how it didn't even ask her first anymore.

"Sure," she said.

"You'll be photographed leaving together. Smile like you mean it." Vivienne's eyes cut to something Roxy couldn't see. "I have to go. Don't open with a slow song."

The call ended. Roxy held the dead phone a second longer than she needed to.

Reeve Hollis. He was a decent enough man, as it went. They'd done three of these now, the openings and the premieres and the carefully spaced dinners, and he'd never once tried anything, because he was as gay as a maypole and twice as discreet. The arrangement worked because it gave the two of them numbers and gave the world a girl it could keep believing in. Single-ish, the brand said. Looking. Yours, if you wanted her badly enough. Vivienne had built a decade out of that one lie, and the lie had funded the tours and put Roxy's mother in a condo in Boca. Some nights Roxy honestly couldn't have told you where the lie stopped and she started.

Most nights, lately.

"Water," she said to no one, and a bottle appeared in her hand, and she drank half of it and gave it back without looking, then walked toward the place where the dark turned into light.

The roar hit her hard as ever, a physical wall of it, twenty thousand people who had paid to feel exactly this. Roxy walked out into the white blaze and the floor shook and a thousand phones came up at once like a field of little cold stars, and she opened her mouth and gave them the first note of "Brighter," and they screamed as if she'd handed each of them something.

The lights ran hot enough to dry her throat by the second chorus. The in-ears pressed the band right up against her skull, the bass in her sternum and her own voice fed back to her a half-breath late, and sweat tracked down the small of her back under the battery pack. This was the part she could still feel. For about ninety seconds a night, somewhere in the second verse of a song she'd sung four thousand times, the machine fell away and there was only her doing the one thing she had always known how to do. She hit the chorus and the crowd sang it back, every word, and that was love, wasn't it? That had to be a kind of love.

Except love was supposed to happen to a person, and what happened out here happened to a product, to the face on the banner, the voice, the legs and the hair and all the parts of her that had been focus-grouped before she was old enough to vote. They didn't know her. They couldn't. There was nothing of her left to know that hadn't been built to sell. She'd made her peace with that years ago, or she'd told herself she had, which until tonight had amounted to the same thing.

She moved through the first song and into the second. She knew where the cameras were without looking. She knew which side of her face the lighting director favored, knew to find a kid in the third row and sing one line straight at him so he'd remember it the rest of his life. Three songs in, riding the bridge of "Sugar Year" (the bridge she was keeping, thank you, Viv), she did what she always did. It wasn't even a decision anymore. She let her eyes drift to the wings to collect the faces.

The wings were full of people watching her. They were always full of people watching her. Crew, dancers on a break, a cluster of Valkyries players in their team shirts who'd been roped in for the photo op, every one of them turned toward the stage with that tilt of the head that meant they were filming it for later.