The Sunset Showcase
Cole looked at the folder. Looked at his watch. His thumb tapped the table once, then twice. His voice, when it returned, had been sanded down to something functional, stripped of performance. “You misunderstand the structure of leverage,” he said. “I don’t need to win a court battle. I need to win the next twenty-four hours. The board vote has been moved to tomorrow morning at eight—I have the authority to call it tonight, and I will. By the time your proof-of-concept exists in public, Aldridge will have already secured the franchise through a partnership agreement that dismantles Montclair’s financing. And the custody petition will be heard at nine. In front of Judge Delgado.” He picked up the legal envelope, smoothed its creased corner, and slid it into his breast pocket. “Enjoy the premiere, Mr. Crane,” Cole said, tucking the envelope back into his coat. “By sunrise, Jace will belong to the court—and you’ll be lucky to watch from the street.”
The door clicked shut behind him.
Gideon stood at the table with his hands flat on the surface, pressing hard enough that the wood bit into his palms. He counted the objects in the room to keep himself in his body: a water bottle, a stack of release forms, a bowl of pretzels no one had touched, a screenplay with the corners bent and thumbed.
Evangeline was at the couch, Jace asleep with his cheek on a cushion, his mouth slightly open, his hand curled into a loose fist beneath his chin. She was running her fingers through the boy’s hair, and the gesture was so practiced it carried its own argument.
“Forty minutes,” Gideon said. “If we go now, we can still pull the plug on the whole thing. Play the footage from a secured server, skip the red carpet, control the room.”
“We’re going,” she said. “That’s the plan. We were always going.”
“Cole knows things we didn’t tell him.”
“Cole knows what Victor paid for.” She lifted her gaze to his. “Not everything.”
The Sunset Showcase rose out of the Los Angeles evening like a gilded bruise—art-deco gold and deep crimson, the marquee blazing MONTCLAIR PICTURES PRESENTS in bulbs the size of fists. The street out front was choked with cars and cameras, a crowd three rows deep pressed against the barricades. Gideon counted the security presence out of reflex: four uniforms at the stanchions, two plainclothes at the doors, one man on the roof with binoculars who thought he was subtle.
Victor Aldridge stood at the edge of the carpet, not on it. Hands in his pockets. A smile fitted for a man watching someone else’s car approach a cliff. He didn’t approach. He didn’t need to. He was there to witness.
Gideon gave him nothing. He took Jace’s hand and Evangeline’s hand and walked the gauntlet of flashbulbs like a man heading toward the only thing he had left.
Inside, the lobby smelled of champagne and gardenias. The crowd was the standard blend of power and desperation—executives, agents, critics, a handful of actors hired to keep the paparazzi occupied. Gideon tracked the exits: four doors, two stairwells, a loading bay behind the concession stand.
Beckett’s voice came through the earpiece: “North door clear. Booth’s locked. Master drive is seated. Counted the room twice—three hundred and twelve, and I don’t trust a one of them.”
Gideon touched his earpiece. “You trust me.”
“That’s one.”
They took their seats in the front row, Jace between them, his small shoes swinging above the floor. The lights dimmed. The Montclair logo appeared—a silver mountain against a blue sky—and the opening piano notes of the score rose like smoke from the speakers.
Then the power died.
Not a flicker, not a sag. It stopped. The screen went black. The sound was swallowed by the dark. A silence followed that was the wrong kind of silence, the kind before a stampede.
A woman laughed, tight and nervous. A chair scraped. Somewhere a phone clattered to the floor, and the noise was loud enough to make people flinch.
Beckett’s voice snapped through the earpiece: “Service box is cut. Clean sever. Someone had our electrical blueprints. I’m moving to the booth.”
Gideon was already on his feet, sliding past knees and coats in the dark. “Sorry. Sorry. Need through.”
Behind him, a silhouette crossed the stage. Evangeline had pulled a wireless microphone from the lectern’s emergency drawer, and her voice came through the backup PA, thin but certain.
“Ladies and gentlemen.”
The whispers fell away.
“I know you were promised a film tonight. I know this isn’t what anyone expected.” A pause shaped like a held breath. “But before we get to what happens next, there’s something I need to say.”
Gideon reached the service corridor. Emergency light painted the walls orange. He counted doors until he found the one marked UPLINK—RESTRICTED. Keycard, code, green light. The room inside was no bigger than a closet. Servers hummed in a rack, a single fold-out chair sat beneath three monitors, and the air was warm with the heat of machinery doing its job.
On the middle screen, the projection booth feed. Beckett stood at the door, shoulders squared. A figure in black was working the lock with a slim metal tool.
On the left screen, the theater. The crowd was ghost-lit by phone screens. Evangeline stood at the podium with Jace beside her, his small hand in hers.
“A video was leaked this afternoon,” she said. “Some of you saw it.”
Gideon’s fingers stopped over the keyboard. They’d agreed to let the work speak. She was changing the plan in front of three hundred witnesses.
“A six-year-old boy, having a hard time in a parking lot. A man who looks like he’s failing him. Filmed without their knowledge, posted with a caption that calls my son’s father a liability.”
A beat of static. Then her voice returned, lower, quieter, riding the edge of something hard-won.
“What that video didn’t show: the night before. When our office was broken into. When a man we’d trusted for ten years walked out with our private files and sold them to a competitor. When Gideon stayed awake for forty hours rebuilding our security while Jace burned with a fever of a hundred and two. When the video was taken, Gideon wasn’t failing our son—he was holding him. That’s what you do when you’re a father and the world is trying to take your family apart.”
On the booth feed, the intruder got the door open. Beckett didn’t announce himself. He caught the man with a forearm across the chest, driving him into the equipment rack. The intruder’s hand came up with a blackjack. Beckett rode the blow off his shoulder and answered with a hip throw that put the man on the floor, then a knee on the wrist, then steel cable.
Gideon looked away from the fight. He had work to do.
“The film we made is called *The Isekai Protocol*,” Evangeline said. “It’s about a man who spends his whole life crossing into other people’s worlds. And when he finally finds the door back home, he doesn’t step through alone.”
Gideon pressed the trigger.
The stream went live.
The backup server—pre-positioned on a bonded cellular uplink, QR codes silently collected at every entrance—pushed a notification to three hundred and twelve phones at once. The theater feed showed the crowd looking down at their screens. The comment feed exploded. The metrics on the third monitor began to climb.
The first notes of the score—the real score, full-bodied and soaring—rose from a hundred tiny speakers, thin but unmistakable. And on the screens, an image resolved: a man in a battered coat, standing before a door.
Behind him, a world of smoke and rust. Beyond the door, a world of impossible green hills and untroubled skies.
The man pushed the door open.
Light flooded his face.
He stepped through.
The sound that came out of the theater was not a cheer. It was a release—a guttural, laughing, weeping expulsion of everything the audience had been holding against the dark. People rose to their feet. They held their phones overhead like candles in a church. The door on their screens swung wide, and the hero walked through it, and the room took it personally, as proof that such a door existed.
Someone screamed, “PLAY IT AGAIN!”
Applause came down like weather.
On the uplink monitor, the metrics crossed four thousand, then forty, then two hundred thousand. The comment feed blurred into a single current of fire and exclamation. Gideon’s phone buzzed with a text from Rosa: *Board vote dead. Valuation just crossed nine figures on the live ticker. Cole called the emergency meeting and the directors laughed at him. He’s still in the building. I’m watching.*
Gideon read it twice. He set the phone down and put both hands flat on the table, the way he had in the greenroom an hour ago, but this time the wood didn’t feel like it was holding him up.
The leaked video was still out there—Victor had made sure of that. But the view count had stalled at twelve thousand. The premiere clip had already passed seven hundred thousand. The internet had made its choice, and so had the room.
He checked the booth feed one more time. Beckett had the saboteur zip-tied to an equipment pipe and was patting him down with the calm of a man who had done this before. The master drive sat in its dock, green light blinking, untouched. Beckett leaned in close to the intruder, asked a question, then straightened and spoke into his collar: “Producer’s name. Full list. I’ll send it up.”
The traitor would be found. The name would go to Rosa, and Rosa would know what to do with it.
On the street feed, Victor Aldridge stood on the sidewalk with his phone in his hand and his face the color of wet cement. He looked up at the marquee—MONTCLAIR PICTURES PRESENTS, blazing gold—and for a moment he was just a young man who had bet everything on another man’s ruin and lost.
Then he turned and walked into the dark, and the night closed behind him like water.
The theater kept roaring. The man on the screens kept walking through the door. Gideon sat in the little closet of a room for what could have been minutes or hours, watching six hundred thousand viewers arrive, watching the comments scroll in languages he didn’t speak, watching the montage of lights on the street feed where the crowd outside had started dancing.
It wasn’t over. It was never over. But tonight the door was open, and he was on the other side of it.
He stood. He had a son to find.
Backstage was a maze of curtains and cinder-block walls, the noise of the crowd muffled to a low tide. The greenroom door was cracked open, spilling warm light into the corridor. He pushed it wide.
Jace was asleep on a vinyl couch, curled around his jacket, his tiny suit wrinkled, his face slack with the deep peace of a child who knows he is safe. His hand was open, fingers loose, as if in his dream he had just let go of something heavy.
Evangeline was by the window. She had taken her earrings off and was holding them in her fist, looking at the lights of the city through the glass. She turned when the door opened, and the look on her face was not relief or exhaustion or triumph. It was recognition.
She crossed the room in four steps. She reached up, caught the collar of his jacket with both hands, and pulled him down toward her.
Backstage, with Jace asleep on a vinyl couch, Evangeline pulled Gideon down by the collar and said: “You didn’t just save the studio, Gideon—you finally walked through the door.”