Luna Park's Arc

Chapter 6 of 14

By midmorning of day two, Luna's phone buzzed without pause. The rehearsal hashtag had flipped on her. Fans wanted a live face shot. They wanted a voice. The eleven-minute loop from the tent had been clipped, slowed, and picked apart. A thread with forty thousand views asked why the dancer never turned her head. Another asked if the setlist taped to the wall was even real. Luna sat on a crate behind the cave entrance and read the comments twice. Silence for another full day would finish her. The pipeline scout would see the fraud talk before the rehearsal call sheet cleared. She walked back to the decoy clearing in daylight. The wooden deer still stood at the tent mouth, scarf stiff with frost. Inside, the round mirror she had hung for light bounced was webbed with new hairline cracks from the cold. She touched one crack and it spread under her thumb. The whole illusion felt like that mirror now. One more push and it would shatter on camera. Past the tent, at the edge of the service path, fans had dragged a frozen message board into the snow. The slate read PETITION FOR CHANGE, SIGN HERE. Five names were already carved in. The top line demanded a live rehearsal feed by sundown. Luna made the call in under a minute. She would not show the cave. She would burn the tent instead. She dragged the painted prop shed pieces the supply runner had left for her, two columns and a crate front, and stacked them around the tent as a real-looking stage front. She pulled the cracked mirror down and angled it against a column so it caught the deer and the setlist but not the cave path behind. Then she stepped into frame, untied her sister's scarf from the deer, tied it around her own wrist, and went live. She danced one chorus of Butter, full out, face up, eight counts clean. Forty seconds. She cut the feed before the cracked mirror could show the seam in the canvas behind her. The clip hit two hundred thousand views in an hour. The fraud thread collapsed. The petition board was photographed with a new line carved under the others: SEEN HER, SHE'S REAL. But the pink-jacketed runner had been in the crowd. Luna saw the photo go up on her rival's feed by dusk, zoomed tight on the painted column and the chipped deer. The caption read, FOUND THE SET. Luna had bought back her credibility with forty seconds of real footage. She had also handed her rival the exact coordinates of the decoy, and the cave entrance sat ninety steps behind it.