Luna Park's Arc

Chapter 3 of 14

Luna left the tower with the banner rolled under her arm again. She walked back through the plaza toward the broadcast grounds because the message said sunrise and she had nowhere else to wait. Halfway there she stopped. A weathered signpost stood at the bend, its arms crusted with frost. Someone had nailed fresh boards over the old arrows. Each new arm pointed toward the rival's audition loop and carried a printed slug line trashing the tower clip. One arm read GIRL WITH BANNER, FAKE FEED. Another read CLIP PULLED BY DAWN. Luna pulled out her phone. The small channel's view count had stalled. The comments under her dance were filling with the same three insults, posted minutes apart by accounts that did not exist yesterday. She understood the play. The rival had bought the signpost, the bots, and the morning. By sunrise the clip that earned her the audition would read as a joke, and the scout would meet a girl no one believed in. Luna had hours. She could not outpost the bots and she could not tear down the signs without being filmed doing it. She needed the clip anchored to something the network could not bury. She doubled back to the tower. The banner had frozen to the lowest rail overnight, sealed under a clear sheet of ice that had built up from the spray off the rooftops. The stone block at the tower's foot held it like a marker now, her sister's stitched letters trapped flat against the rock. Luna knelt and filmed it close, slow pan across the ice, the crooked thread of her name showing through. She posted the clip to the small channel with a single line: this is where the dance happened, come see it before the audition. Then she pinned the location. Within twenty minutes the first fans arrived with phones up. They filmed the frozen banner from every angle and tagged the studio. The rival's signpost arrows kept pointing, but every new post out of the plaza now carried a picture of the stone, not the slugs. The bot comments slid down the feed. By the time the sky turned gray, the clip was trending again under a tag the rival did not own. Luna crossed the broadcast grounds as the first light hit the glass. The audition studio stood at the far end, cool stone walls, tall windows already lit from inside. A staff member checked a tablet at the door and waved her through. Her name was on the list. Her phone buzzed once more before she silenced it. The scout account had sent a second message: saw the stone, come up. Luna stepped inside. She had kept the audition. She had also just made her sister's banner a public landmark, and a stranger upstairs now expected the girl from the stone to walk through the door and prove it.