Fall of Light (32 page)

Tobias bumped into Corvus's elbow as they got off; he had tried to occupy space Corvus was already using.

“Sorry,” they both said simultaneously. Corvus made his first frown in his new face. “I see what you mean,” he said to Opal.

“This might not be the best idea I ever had,” she said. “I should do the whole thing. I'm too tired, and it might hurt you, though. I was never big on total transformations, so I'm out of practice. My brother could do a better job.”

“Your whole family has skills?” Corvus asked as they exited the hotel.

“Opal,” said Tobias.

“Sorry, Uncle. Corr, we don't talk about that.”

“I met a bunch of siblings,” he said thoughtfully as they crossed the parking lot. “I—” His eyes glowed green for a second. She would have missed it, but she was still studying the effect of her magic, still trying to reconcile what she knew and what she saw. “Oh, yes. There were three more of you, and two parents, yes?” he said. Though his voice hadn't changed much, she knew Phrixos was the one asking.

She smiled and didn't answer. She had four siblings; one hadn't made the meeting. No need to correct Phrixos's impressions. The less he knew, the better.

Corvus strode ahead to open the door to the IHOP for them. She brushed his arm without intending to. He shifted so there was no more contact.

It took a while for the waitress to notice them. Corvus smiled the whole time. The waitress was Jenny again, and she looked very frazzled. “You movie people?” she asked.

“Not right now,” said Corvus.

“Booth or table?”

“Booth,” said Opal. Less chance of someone bumping into the invisible parts of Corvus if he was in a booth.

Jenny waved toward a booth. It was next to the corner booth where Travis and Bethany were sitting, again, their laptops out, scripts scattered around. They both had headphones on and gave off an aura of not knowing the other existed. They frowned ferociously at their screens, unconsciously mimicking each other.

Opal wondered if they had been on location that evening. Maybe her party should sit farther away from people they knew. The waitress hadn't recognized Opal from earlier—what casual acquaintance would notice Opal when Corvus was with her?—but surely Bethany and Travis would know her . . .

Corvus took her arm gently and steered her toward the booth beside Bethany and Travis's. Tobias followed. Corvus moved in first, pushing the table out with what appeared to be air in front of his stomach. Tobias and Opal slid in on either side of him.

Bethany took off her headphones and tapped Opal's shoulder. Opal turned to look at her over the back of the booth. “Hey, hon,” said Bethany, “whatcha doing here?”

“Need food,” said Opal.

“Were you on location tonight?”

Opal relaxed. “Yeah. You miss the whole thing?”

“Yep. We were right here, reworking some of the kid scenes. What the hell happened? No one answers their phones! But Neil came along and dropped a bunch of changes on us. He wouldn't say anything, either, except the whole script is scrapped, practically!”

“Let me eat, and then I'll try to explain it,” Opal said.

“Okay,” Bethany said, but she looked frustrated, and so did Travis, who hadn't taken off his headphones, but was listening to their conversation. Bethany looked past Opal. “Oh. You've got company. I'm sorry. I'm being rude. But it's like—he's throwing out everything we did! He wants the movie to be romantic! Maybe with a brand-new female lead, but can he give us any background on the new lead? No! I can't believe he's throwing out everything we've done. What about all those days of filming? He didn't seem to care whether he can use any of the stuff he already shot. He can't have talked to the producers. When do they
ever
scrap everything? God, Opal, the whole thing's going to hell!”

Jenny returned. “Have you decided?” she asked, poof-topped pen poised over her order pad.

Corvus ordered a club sandwich. Opal hadn't thought to disguise his voice; the rich words came from his mouth, making the sandwich sound like luxury.

“Hey!” said Bethany.

He glanced over at her and smiled.

“No way!” Bethany said. “Corvus? How can that be you? What the hell?”

17

Travis tore his headphones off and stared.

“I'm not Corvus,” said Corvus. “I'm his shorter brother.”

“You sound just like him. It's eerie!” Travis said.

“No, seriously,” said Beth, “how the hell are you doing that?”

Corvus drank coffee and smiled.

“This is my uncle, Tobias.” Opal pointed to Uncle Tobias. “Uncle Tobias, this is Bethany and Travis. They wrote the script for the movie. Dreams came into Beth's head while she was visiting here, and she wrote from them. She grew up here.”

“Ah,” said Tobias.

Opal turned to Jenny, who was still waiting for their order, though her gaze had settled on Corvus. “Can I get one of those sandwiches, too? Tobias?”

“Just coffee,” he said. “I ate on the way.”

Jenny smiled, nodded, and headed for the kitchen.

“Stop jerking us around,” Travis said, “and tell us what you did to Corr.”

“I didn't do anything to him,” Opal said. She had only altered the air around him; he remained internally intact.

“Corvus, how is that—what happened?” Bethany asked.

“Nonmovie magic,” Corvus said.

“What?” Bethany asked, her voice almost a whisper.

“It's just an illusion, Beth. I wanted to see what it was like to look normal for once. So far, it's very interesting. I'm not used to being ignored. I rather like it. In the short term, anyway.”

“How could you possibly get that to work?” Bethany asked.

“Opal managed it. You do miss out on a lot, not being on the set,” Corvus said.

Jenny put a coffeepot and plates full of sandwiches on the table, and Corvus said to Bethany and Travis, “Excuse us, please. It's been too long since we ate, and we really used up a lot of energy today—”

Opal socked the air near where his arm appeared to be, and hit an elbow. He flinched and smiled, so strange with his smaller face, nearer to hers. It made her wonder how the illusion worked; he could still use his face as an actor did, even though it was far from the face he actually lived in. She had worked with light to create his false self, but hadn't noticed how intimately entwined this atmosphere she had created was with his actual person. She knew what she had done, and still she found him completely convincing.

Bethany and Travis stared at him. Then Bethany waved a hand, and she and Travis put their headphones back on.

“We can't plan strategy here,” Tobias said.

“We'll go back to the room afterward.” Opal ate. The first bite was bliss, the second even better. She had eaten half the sandwich before she knew it, and Corvus scarfed his even faster. She watched him eat. It really looked like the sandwich went into his illusion self's mouth. How on earth was that working? She was a better craftswoman than she knew.

“Why are you staring?” asked Corvus.

“What does it look like from inside?” she asked.

“You're staring at my chest,” he murmured. “Maybe this is what it's like for well-endowed women. I'm imagining you're looking into my eyes, and responding accordingly. Are we making eye contact?”

“Yes. I can't figure out how the food gets into your mouth.”

“How strange,” he said, and stared at his empty plate. “I guess I've had enough.”

“You haven't,” she said. “You've got a lot of self to maintain.” She handed him the other half of her sandwich.

“Thanks. I'll eat it in the room.” He wrapped it in a napkin and made it disappear somehow. She couldn't remember if his robe had pockets.

She ate her fries. He had already eaten his. “Okay. You finished?” she asked Tobias.

Tobias drank the last of his coffee and didn't pour more. Even the parsley had vanished from Corvus's plate. Opal rose. She grabbed her messenger bag. This time, she would pay; Corvus didn't match his ID.

“Hey,” Bethany said. “Not so fast! You promised us an explanation after you ate.”

“We're not going to tell you here,” said Opal.

Bethany packed her computer, headphones, and script pages and was on her feet before Corvus even finished getting out of the booth. Travis, slower on the uptake, stared after her with confusion on his face. “You pay, hon. I'll be back once I find out what's going on. Opal, you're in a little bitty single room, right? Trav and I have a suite. We needed work room, even though we spend most of our writing time over here. You can meet in our room.”

Opal glanced at Tobias, then up where she suspected Corvus's real face was. Both of the men shrugged. “Lead the way,” Opal said.

On the elevator, Opal said, “Are you ready to be yourself again?” to Corvus.

He glanced into the mirrored back wall of the elevator, smiled at his smaller self, turned to Opal with a faint smile still in place. “Okay. Which one?”

She poked his chest and let the illusion dissolve, and then, there he was, taking up a fourth of the available space, dressed in the black robe of his monstrous self. Bethany and Tobias gasped and stepped back against the wall.

“How the
hell
did you do that?” Bethany demanded.

“I forgot how large you are,” said Tobias.

Corvus beamed. “It was educational, wasn't it?”

“Come on,” Bethany said, “that works in movies and onstage, but—how the hell?”

The doors opened and Opal marched out onto Bethany's floor, ignoring the rumble of Corvus's voice behind her. The other three caught up with her when she paused in the hall. She realized she didn't know Bethany's room number. Bethany gave her three eyebrow waggles and walked past to open double doors into a suite with the legend “Senator” over the doorway.

As soon as Bethany dumped her backpack on the coffee table and they all sat on the two couches in the suite's sterile-looking living room, Bethany said, “All right, tell me what happened on location today.”

“What have you heard?” Opal asked.

“Zip! Zero! Zilch! Nada! We're in our usual booth, arguing about how bad to make the kids' trauma, when in walks Neil, his shirt and pants stained in interesting places, his hair sizzling around his head, and his eyes shooting lasers. Bam! He hits the table so hard the coffeepot wobbles. ‘This changes everything,' he says. Travis and I go, ‘What? What?' like dummies, and he says, ‘The film's going in a different direction. We'll know more after we look at the dailies. You people are going to have to be ready for a lot of rewriting. Just so you know.' Like that's any help at all!”

Bethany went to the sideboard and grabbed a bottle of whiskey, whipped off the cap and drank. “This job is already so stressy,” she muttered. “Do something you think works, you're proud of it, it's great, he says it's great, then an hour later somebody else complains about something and then he hates what you've done, and you have to do it all over again, and there's no guarantee any of it's going to work, and it's not because of anything you can control. I mean, I've worked like this before, don't get me wrong, but Neil is the worst slave driver I've ever worked with. All directors piss on your work to prove it's theirs, but he's just a big gushing fountain of urine.” She recapped the bottle and set it on a tray again. “Yesterday, though, it felt like everything was going to work out all right. We were sliding right along toward getting out of here. What the hell happened today?”