Luna Park crouched beside a stack of weathered stones at the edge of the plaza, phone clutched in both hands. She refreshed the fan portal again. Her 'Butter' video sat buried under a scrolling wall of comments. Somewhere on that ranking page was her one shot at the BTS tour stage, the dream she had not built any backup for. Across the plaza, a wall of jagged ice pillars rose into the sky, crowned by huge frozen screens. The viral dancer's audition played on every panel, looping in perfect sync. A crowd pressed close, phones lifted, voices rising. Luna's own submission number ticked down the leaderboard with each new view their rival collected. A tall billboard near the monument shifted images, flashing the dancer's name in glowing letters across the frozen sky. Hearts streamed across its surface like snow. Luna watched her view count freeze, then drop. She tapped share. Nothing moved. The wave was too big, and she was standing alone behind a pile of cold rocks. Luna lowered the phone. She pressed her palm flat against the top stone of the cairn and made herself say it out loud: the portal alone would not save her. If she wanted that stage, she would have to be seen another way. She turned her back on the glowing screens and started walking toward the noise.

Luna pushed into the crowd with a rolled bundle under her arm. It was an old red banner her sister had stitched for her years ago, the letters spelling her name in crooked thread. She had grabbed it from her closet before walking out. Tonight every frozen panel above the plaza played the rival's audition on loop, the dancer's spin syncing across four ice screens at once. Fans below filmed the screens and reposted the clips to every channel Luna had been counting on. She needed one channel that the wave had not swallowed yet. She found it at the far edge of the plaza. A tall broadcast tower stood there, its metal lattice crusted in ice, a single antenna pushing above the rooftops. A small knot of fans gathered at its base, phones up, streaming to the one feed the rival had not flooded. Luna pushed to the front. She unrolled the banner and shook it open so the stitched letters faced the cameras. Then she started the 'Butter' choreography on the frozen pavement, no music, counting under her breath. The first eight counts were stiff. By the second run, a girl in the front lifted her phone higher and shouted Luna's name off the banner. Two more phones swung toward her. Luna hit the chorus break clean, snapped the banner across her shoulders like a cape, and kept dancing. The small feed picked her up. A clip went out. Comments began stacking faster than she could see. Someone tied a corner of the banner to the tower's lowest rail so it hung behind her as a backdrop, her name reading straight into every lens. She finished the full routine without a cut, the same way she had filmed the portal video, and the fans around the tower were chanting the count with her by the end. When she stopped, her lungs burned and her hands shook. She checked her phone. The portal number had not moved, but the small channel's clip of her dance was climbing, shared out to feeds she did not recognize. A message sat at the top of her notifications from an account she did not know, asking if she was the girl from the tower and whether she could be at the broadcast grounds tomorrow morning for a scout walk-through. Luna read it twice. She had won the channel. She had also just been pulled out from behind her screen and named in public, and a stranger with the power to advance her now expected her to show up in person, alone, with no plan for what to do when she got there.

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.

The studio room was small and bright. A long table held a wooden chest with leather straps, the lid cracked open. A single crystal inside lit the wood from within. A note rested beside it: take this to the platform outside, hold it up, and the audition begins. The scout was not in the room. Luna stood in the doorway and did not move. The chest could be a real token. It could also be a prop her rival had paid someone to leave. She stepped to the window instead of the table. The broadcast grounds spread out below in pale light. A wooden lookout post stood at the edge of the lot, snow heavy on its platform, boot prints pressed into the planks. Someone had been watching the door from up there. Past the post, near the service path, a torn marker flag leaned on a pole driven into a pile of stones. The fabric was streaked the same dull pink as the slugs nailed to the signpost in the plaza. Her rival's color. Her rival's marker. Whoever had set the chest on the table had walked past that flag to get here. Luna pulled out her phone and opened the small channel. She set it to live. She turned the camera on the chest, on the note, on the window view of the lookout post and the torn flag below it. She spoke once, flat. "Someone left this for me. I don't know who. If the scout is real, come down and say so on camera." She pinned the stream to the same tag the frozen banner had trended under. Within a minute the view counter climbed. Fans from the plaza were already watching. She picked up the chest, carried it to the lookout post, and climbed the ladder with the phone still rolling. A woman was waiting on the platform with a clipboard and a staff badge. She blinked at the camera, then at the chest, then laughed once under her breath. "You were supposed to come up quiet," she said. "That was the test. Half the girls open the box and pose. You brought a crowd." She tapped the badge. "I'm with the tour pipeline. The flag down there isn't ours. We've been trying to find who planted it for two days." She took the chest, lifted the crystal out, and pressed it into Luna's hand. "This is your slot token. You're on the shortlist for the Butter stage. Rehearsals start in three days at the broadcast grounds. Don't lose it, and don't tell anyone the date." Luna closed her fingers around the crystal. The audition was real. The flag at the base of the post was not, and her rival now knew exactly where she would be on rehearsal morning.

Luna climbed down from the lookout post with the crystal token in her fist. The torn pink flag still leaned in the snow at the base of the pole. She did not pull it. If she pulled it, her rival would know the marker had been found and switch to another method. Better to leave it standing and feed it the wrong story. She walked to the service path, phone dark in her pocket now, and looked across the lot. A stone watchtower rose at the far edge, ice clinging to its slits. A small shape moved at the top, then ducked back. Someone with a long lens was already watching the broadcast grounds. Luna had two days to make that watcher report the wrong place. She spent the afternoon at a supply shed two lots over, paying cash for canvas, four poles, and a bundle of zip ties. She picked a clearing on the opposite side of the broadcast grounds, well within sight of the watchtower slits, and set up a white tent with frost already crusting the poles. She walked the boundary three times so the lens upstairs could count her steps. Inside the tent she taped a printed setlist to the inner wall, the word BUTTER large enough to read through thin fabric when the sun hit. Then she carried out a wooden deer decoy she had bought from the same shed, antlers chipped, paint worn. She stood it at the tent's mouth and tied her sister's spare scarf around its neck. From the tower it would read as a mascot. From anywhere closer it would read as junk left in the snow. That night she livestreamed from inside the tent for eleven minutes. She stretched. She counted eight-counts under her breath. She never showed her face clearly, only the setlist on the wall and her shoes on the canvas floor. She tagged the stream with the rehearsal hashtag her rival's bots already tracked. Then she cut the feed, slipped out the back seam, and walked the long way around to the ice cave the pipeline staffer had texted her about an hour earlier. The cave held sound. No lens could see through stone. She rehearsed the full Butter choreography there for three hours, alone, with the slot crystal set on a ledge for light. At sunrise on day one, Luna watched from a service window as a pink-jacketed runner crossed the lot toward the white tent. The runner photographed the deer, photographed the setlist through the fabric, and spoke into a phone. Luna turned away and walked the other direction, toward the cave entrance where the real rehearsal call sheet waited. The tail was chasing the tent. She had her three days. She also knew her rival would learn the trick by day two, and the cave only hid sound, not arrivals.

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.

By dawn of day three, the pipeline scout's message sat on Luna's phone in two short lines. Show me the rehearsal space by noon, or the slot goes back in the pool. The rival's coordinate post had reached the scout's feed overnight. The cave entrance was burned. Luna could not bring the scout there now without confirming the rival was right about everything else. She sat on the crate behind the cave mouth and watched her breath fog the screen. The slot token in her jacket felt like a piece of glass she was carrying in a closed fist. She walked out past the burned tent frame and found the old wooden platform the supply runner had pointed out on day one. Snow sat on the planks in uneven mounds. Two boards had split through the middle. It had been a busking stage once, long before the pipeline pulled performers indoors. No camera had filmed here in years. That was the point. There was no footage of her rehearsing here because no one rehearsed here at all. The empty stage was the shape of her problem. Her proof was supposed to live somewhere, and it lived nowhere a scout could verify. Beside the path stood the scout's frost-veiled pillar, the notch column where pipeline runners cut a mark for every credibility check a performer passed. Her column held one notch from the audition. The rival's column, two paths over, held four. Luna pulled the slot token from her pocket and set it on the planks. Then she pulled out the small hourglass the scout had given her at the audition, the frozen sand suspended mid-fall in its glass. The scout had said the sand would drop when her window closed. The cascade had begun to thaw in her palm; gold grains slid a quarter inch and stopped. She had maybe an hour. She made the call fast. She would not defend the cave footage. She would replace it. She messaged the scout one line: Come to the old wood stage at noon. I will dance the full song, live, in front of you, no cuts. Then she dragged the split boards flat, kicked the snow clear, and tied her sister's scarf to the front post as a marker. If the scout came, the proof would be her body in real time. If the scout did not come, the slot was already gone. The scout came. Luna danced Butter end to end on the broken planks, breath ragged at the bridge, feet sure through the last eight counts. The scout watched without a phone in hand. When Luna finished, the scout walked to the frost pillar and cut a second notch into her column with a short blade. The slot token stayed in Luna's pocket. The hourglass sand finished its fall and settled. Then the scout said one thing before leaving: the showcase lineup posts tomorrow, and the rival had been added to it last night.

The scout left at noon. Luna stayed on the broken planks until her breath slowed. The showcase posted in the morning. She had one notch on her column and one slot to defend, and she could not rehearse here again. The wooden stage sat in open view of every path through the grounds. Any runner with a phone could film her counts and feed them to the rival before the showcase opened. The cave was worse. The entrance was scorched black, beams charred through, icicles hanging from a frame that had bent in the heat. She walked the perimeter once and counted what she had lost. A floor she could not trust. A roof that no longer held. Nowhere to run the song clean. She climbed the lookout tower at the edge of the grounds to see the whole field at once. From the railed platform she could trace every sightline. The wooden stage was visible from three paths. The burned cave was visible from two. Behind the tower, facing away from the trails, sat a small stone hut half-buried in packed snow. She had passed it a dozen times without looking. The door was low. The walls were thick. No windows faced the grounds. She climbed down and stood at the entrance. Inside, the air held still. She clapped once. The sound stayed in the room and died. Luna worked through the afternoon. She dragged two split planks from the wooden stage and laid them across the dirt floor for footing. She hung her sister's scarf over the doorway to break any line of sight from outside. She paced the room corner to corner and found she had just enough length for the Butter floor pattern if she cut the diagonal short by a half step. She ran the first thirty-two counts. Her shoulder clipped the wall on the turn. She adjusted the spacing and ran them again. By the third pass, the pattern held. She ran the full song twice through before her legs gave. No one had seen her enter. No one had seen her leave the planks behind. The hut held the sound the way the cave once had. She sat against the stone wall and pulled out her phone. The showcase lineup had not posted yet. The slot token was still in her pocket. She had a floor, a roof, and a door no camera faced. It was enough to rehearse. It was not enough to perform. The showcase stage would be public, lit, and watched by every feed in the pipeline, and the rival was already on the list beside her. Luna set the phone face down on the planks and started the count again from the top.

Luna left the stone hut before dawn and walked back to her storehouse to take stock. She had been avoiding it for days. The lock hung open. Inside, the shelves were bare. Her costume rack stood in the middle of the floor, every pole empty, every hook traced with hanging icicles where the heat had failed. No gown. No boots. No mic stand. No banner. The rival's runners had taken everything the night the cave burned, and Luna had not let herself count the loss until now. She ran a hand along an empty hook and felt it crack under her glove. She walked to the showcase grounds with her phone in her pocket and the slot token pressed flat against it. A weathered wooden sign sat at the entrance, bracketed in iron, glazed in fresh frost. The notice was new. Strict equipment check at the gate. Every performer must present costume, props, and personal mic for inspection one hour before curtain. No exceptions. Past the sign, the half-circle of stone seating climbed in tiers packed with snow. The floor at its center was swept clean. No racks. No mic stand. No backdrop. The organizers had cleared the space for performers to fill, and Luna had nothing to bring. She sat on the lowest tier and opened her phone. She did not call her sister to ask for money. She did not search for a shop. She opened the pipeline scout's contact and typed one line. She wrote that she would perform with no costume, no props, and no mic, in the clothes she trained in, and that the check should mark her column as forfeit on equipment and pass her to the floor on skill alone. She read it twice. She pressed send before she could stop. The reply came back in under a minute. The scout wrote that the rule allowed a performer to waive equipment if she accepted a one-notch penalty in the final score. Luna typed yes. The scout marked the waiver in the system and sent her a confirmation code for the gate. She walked back to the stone hut and sat on the planks. She still had a floor to rehearse on and a song she could run clean. She had a slot at the showcase and a code that would carry her past the inspection without a single prop in her hands. She had also given up a full notch before she stepped on the stage, and the rival would arrive at the gate with a full rack and a full score. Luna set the phone face down and started the count again from the top.

Luna ran the song clean in the hut three times, then walked to the showcase grounds an hour before curtain. She passed the gate inspection with the waiver code and stepped onto the swept floor in her training parka. The jacket was thermal, fur-trimmed, with reflective ice-blue panels at the chest and pockets. It was the warmest thing she owned and the only thing the runners had not taken. She caught her reflection in the gate glass and saw the problem at once. The blue panels matched the snow on the tiers. The fur trim matched the frost on the rails. She blended into the crowd seating behind her like a shape cut from the same paper. The rival arrived through the far gate and the murmur in the stands lifted. She wore a silver crown set with pale blue stones, spikes catching the light from every angle. The stones threw small bright spots across the floor as she walked. A canopy stood over the center mark, wooden poles braced wide, canvas stretched tight, metal reflectors angled at the performers. Luna watched the reflectors swing toward the rival and catch the crown. The pavilion threw the rival's image onto the broadcast feed in a hard sharp cut. Luna stepped under the same lights in her parka and saw her own face on the feed monitor at the gate. She was a gray smudge against a gray wall. The camera did not know where to look. She had ten minutes. She would not buy a costume she could not afford and could not pass inspection now anyway. She walked back to the gate, asked the inspector for a marker, and signed the waiver line a second time to add one more item to her forfeit column. She unzipped the parka and turned it inside out. The lining was flat black, plain, with no panels and no fur. She pulled it back on. Against the white tiers and the pale floor, the black cut a hard shape. She walked to the swept floor and stood at the center mark. The reflectors swung. Her outline jumped on the monitor. The camera locked. The rival's crown still pulled the eye. Luna had not beaten the crown. She had only made the camera able to find her at all. The scout marked her column at the gate desk, two notches gone now, costume and inspection both. The head scout's runner walked the floor and called first position. Luna took it. She had a body the broadcast could see and a song she could run clean, and the rival had the crown and a full rack and two notches of lead. The count from the canopy started at eight.

The count from the canopy hit four and Luna stepped onto her mark. The swept floor caught the light from the broadcast tower above and threw it back at her in a hard sheet. The stage was polished ice over wood, smooth as glass, sealed for the cameras. Her training shoes were made for a stone hut floor. The rubber was worn flat at the ball and the heel, the stitching split where she had drilled the song three times that morning. She felt the surface under her sole and knew it before the music started. The floor was a mirror. Her shoes were bare. The music started and she ran the opening eight clean by shortening every push. She cut her turns half a beat early and landed flat instead of on the ball. The camera tracked her black outline against the white tier. She held the line. On the sixteenth count she pushed off for the jump that opened the chorus and her back foot slid. She caught it with her hand on the floor, made it look like a drop, and came up on the beat. A small bright patch of cracked surface marked where her heel had skidded, a white star with dark lines running out from the center. She saw it as she rose. There were two more like it from the dancers before her, near the front edge and the left wing. She had two choices. Run the rest safe and forfeit the jumps, and the scout would mark her a third notch for missing the choreography. Or hit the jumps and fall on live broadcast. She chose a third. She moved her marks. She danced the chorus three steps inside her blocking, away from the cracked patches, and aimed her landings at the rough seams where the panels met. The seams gave her grip. The camera followed. She lost the center of the frame but kept her feet. She finished the song upright, hit the final pose half a meter off her mark, and held it while the count ran out. The head scout's runner walked the floor and read the score. Clean run, no fall, one notch off for blocking drift. The rival took the mark next in heeled boots with rubber soles cut for the surface and ran her song center frame without a slip. The board at the gate showed Luna down by three notches now, not two. The pipeline scout came off the canopy stair and stopped at Luna's shoulder. He said the showcase had one round left, a final solo on the crystal platform the next morning, and the platform was the same sealed ice as this one but raised and rimmed with open air. He said she could not dance it in those shoes. He said she had until sunrise to find a pair that would hold, and the storehouse was still empty.

Luna left the showcase floor with the board behind her gate showing three notches against her name. Three tall wooden posts stood at the entrance, each carved with cut slots for the round count. Her column held one notch. The rival's column held four. Snow had settled in the empty slots above her marks. The pipeline scout climbed the ladder of the glass-cabined tower and took his seat behind the rail to watch the platform crew seal the final stage for sunrise. Luna had one round left. Without a clean run on the crystal floor, he would cut her before her solo aired. She walked the rim of the raised platform while the crew worked. Tall cut pillars rose from the deck in a half ring, clear as window glass, throwing back the work lights in cold bands. The deck itself was sealed ice over a stone base, rimmed with open air on three sides. She knelt and pressed her palm flat. The surface gave nothing. Her training shoes would skate on the first push. The storehouse was empty. She had until sunrise and no shoes that would hold. She sat under the tower and took off her shoes. She turned them over and looked at the worn rubber. She thought of the seams between the stage panels that had saved her in the last round. The grip came from the rough edge. She pulled her pocket knife and cut shallow lines across each sole, four crosswise and two long, scoring the rubber down to the tread. She rubbed the cuts with grit from the ice rim until the rubber held a tooth. Then she climbed onto the platform, ran the chorus once at half speed, and pushed off into the jump that opened it. Her foot caught. She landed on the beat. She ran the jump again at full speed. She held the landing. At sunrise the pipeline scout came down from the glass cabin and watched her demonstrate the cut soles on the sealed deck. He marked her clear to perform. The crew opened the gate for the broadcast crowd. Luna took her mark between the pillars with the cut shoes laced tight. She ran the song clean from the first count to the last and held the final pose square on the center. The scout's runner walked the deck and added two notches to her column on the wooden posts. The rival held the lead by one, not three. The pipeline scout came to Luna's shoulder and said the final tally would be set by the live broadcast vote that night, and the rival's crown had already pulled the early count.

Luna walked the broadcast grounds while the crew set the live feed cables. The tally pole stood at the gate, a stack of stone rings hung with frost-laced markers. Her column showed three notches. The rival's column showed four. One notch between them, and the live vote would close that gap or widen it. At the far end of the deck, the rival's crew had raised a tall mirror-faced monument with sharp cut angles. It threw the work lights back at the crowd in clean white bands. People stopped to look at it before they looked at the stage. Luna had a clean run and cut shoes. She had no reason for a stranger to type her name into the vote box. She sat under the tower and tried to think of one. The pipeline scout had said it plain at sunrise: the rival's crown had pulled the early count. A crown was a picture people remembered. Luna had a parka turned inside out. She pulled her sister's banner from her bag and spread it across her knees. The cloth was thin and creased from the tower climb weeks back. Her sister had stitched her name in the corner in red thread. Luna ran her thumb over the letters. The banner had carried her once already. It was the only thing on the grounds that belonged to her and no one else. She found a framed mirror leaning against the prop wall behind the gate, left from an earlier act. Silver frame, frost etched into the glass. She carried it to her mark on the deck and set it at the upstage edge, angled to catch the broadcast camera. Then she tied her sister's banner to the top of the frame so the red name hung in the shot. She walked to the pipeline scout and asked for one change to her run. She would open the song facing the mirror, not the crowd. The camera would see her and the banner and the name together before she turned. He looked at the rival's monument, then at her banner, and nodded once. The feed went live. Luna stood with her back to the crowd and her face in the frosted glass. She held the banner's edge for one count. Then she turned and ran the song clean. The runner walked the tally pole at the end and hung a new marker in her column. Four notches. The rival held at four. The scout came down from the cabin and told her the live vote had broken her way by a thin margin in the first hour, pulled by the banner shot already cut into the replay loop. The final tally would close at midnight. She was tied going into the last count, and the broadcast had a face and a name to vote for.

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.