Luna Park's Arc

Chapter 14 of 14

The hour after her clean run, Luna sat on the deck with the banner in her lap and watched the replay loop on the crew monitor. The same shot played every time: her back to the camera, the red name in the frosted glass, then her turn. By the third hour the loop had cycled past a hundred times. The early vote bump had flattened. The tally pole still read four and four. The pipeline scout walked over from the wooden broadcast station at the gate and told her plain. The replay was tired. Voters had already seen it. If she did not give the feed something new before midnight, the bump would fade and the rival's mirrored monument would pull the late count. Luna looked across the grounds. The rival's crew had wheeled their reflective glass tower closer to the camera line. Its frost-rimmed dishes threw the work lights in clean slashes, and a small crowd had gathered to watch the bands of white slide across the front. Luna's mirror at the upstage edge looked small beside it. She needed her banner bigger. She needed it where every wide shot of the grounds would catch it without anyone choosing to look. She turned and saw the tall metal beacon at the far edge of the deck, the broadcast tower with the wide crossbeam she had climbed weeks back. Ice crusted its upper struts. The crossbeam ran flat above the whole field. Any camera pulling back for the midnight tally would frame it. She took the banner to the scout and asked for one more change. She wanted to hang it from the crossbeam before the final count. He looked at the tower, at the ice on the rungs, at her cut training shoes. He said the crew would not climb in this cold for a banner. She said she would climb. He marked her name on the access slip and handed her a coil of wire from the prop crate. Luna tied the banner to her belt and started up the ladder. The rungs bit cold through her gloves. Halfway up, the wind pushed the cloth against her leg. She kept her hands on the frame and counted rungs the way she had counted steps on the wooden stage. At the crossbeam she crawled out, threaded the wire through the banner's top edge, and lashed it to the beam. The red name dropped open in the wind, fifty feet above the deck. From the ground she heard the crew shout. She looked down. The wide broadcast camera had already pulled back to catch her on the beam with the banner unrolling beneath her. By the time she climbed down, the feed was running the live shot in place of the old loop. The scout met her at the base and held up the tally board. Her column had taken a fresh notch in the last ten minutes. She was one ahead of the rival, and the midnight count was forty minutes out.