by Jane Galaxy
Okay, let me know when you want to put this together.
He’d waited a couple days before responding.
Got something in the works, I’ll text you when we’re good to go.
Another day, and Jax found himself sprawled across the couch after shooting had gone long, watching a low-budget science fiction movie on cable access. He’d tried starting several texts as the movie had gone on, but nothing seemed witty or interesting enough until he’d come up with
You’d think scientists would figure out that plasmodic radiation could have a bad effect on humans but noooooo
—only realizing, after she didn’t respond right away, that it was after two in the morning.
Dr. Mysterio is an MD though suddenly appeared. They’re assholes by nature so it makes sense
He let his thumb slip too close to the icon of a phone handset, and she picked up on the second ring.
“What are you doing up this late?” he said.
“Going through my photography stuff,” Vanessa replied. Her voice was unusually quiet, like she was trying to hide the call from someone.
“Ah, upping your game for a photo shoot with yours truly, huh?”
He heard her snort into the phone.
“My portfolio got knocked over in the hall closet and all the prints spilled out. I’m going back through them like a weirdo. Jeez, it’s like time traveling.”
Jax watched Dr. Mysterio and his assistant Candi cower from a shadow of a giant spider.
“What’s the best one you’ve taken?”
“Mmm. . . .” She thought a moment. “There’s this one of a smiling dog with one eye and three legs in front of an open fire hydrant that I’m fond of. I almost wish we could have taken him in.” She sighed. “Ugh. Jesus, is it that late? I should let you get some sleep.”
“Wait, before you go,” Jax said.
“Hmm?”
“If you could go anywhere in the world, what’s your top choice to photograph?”
“Mauritius. No. Greece.”
He had hmmed softly.
And now it was the big day.
Jax tapped his phone against his chest, thinking about the favor he’d had Natalie call in with the toy company. He hadn’t woken up this morning with a specific plan in mind—it was more like the idea just sort of coalesced at the right time, the pieces had fallen into place, the universe had said what the hell, sure.
He opened his long list of messages to Vanessa.
Meet me on the Card One lot in two hours. Bring a secret setup for the camera.
Her answer came back after several long minutes.
Do I need some kind of clearance or pass?
He had not given the remotest consideration to that question.
Nope, everything’s cool.
Everything was not cool.
Almost immediately, makeup was trying to corral him back in for a hairstyle change or something, meaning that by the time they were done, he had to commandeer a golf cart to make it to the front gate before it would definitely start to look to Vanessa like he had no idea what he was doing.
She was still there talking to lot security, holding her ten-speed up behind her in the drive-through slot like it wasn’t weird that she wasn’t in a car. Jax slammed on the brakes and jumped out, making both her and Harry, the security guy, look up.
“Hey, there you are!” he said like an idiot, like she was the one who was late.
“Mr. Butler,” said Harry. “This young lady says she’s here to meet with you.”
“And she would be telling the truth,” he said, patting Vanessa on the shoulder. She looked from one man to the other.
Harry waited a moment.
“Does she have a guest pass?”
Hahahaha no.
“Uhh . . . you know, I’m sure it’s fine, because she’s with me, and that’s fine. Right?” Jax turned to Vanessa. “You’re with me, right?”
“Yeah,” she said a bit too loudly.
“Okay, thanks!” Jax said and walked away before Harry could object.
They managed to gingerly fit her bike onto the rear-facing golf cart seat and took off again.
“You just fall upward, don’t you?” Vanessa said to him as they passed the craft truck, but she was smiling as she said it.
“Did you ride that thing all the way out here?”
“You know you can bring a bike onto the subway, right?”
“It’s been a long time since I’ve ridden the New York subway.” He parked shy of the soundstage and turned to face her. “What’d you bring?”
Vanessa pushed a large slouchy bag between the two of them and reached inside to fiddle with something. A fold in the fabric on one side opened, and a circle of black glass moved into place.
“I used to shoot Gabrielle Zahn up at Coopers Beach,” she said. “The families up there don’t like it if you’ve got a telephoto around their precious children.”
Jax lifted his hands. “Looks like you’re the expert. They’re shooting some panicky crowd scenes today, so just wander around like a lost extra. You shouldn’t run into too much trouble.”
“Alright.”
He hesitated as she started to get out of the golf cart.
“Um, if you need to know where I am—”
“Don’t worry, I’ll find you. It’s what I’m good at.”
She hid the bike behind a production trailer and disappeared. Jax backed the cart up and threw it into a heart-pounding top speed of 7mph, racing to get everything in place.
Here is Jax Butler on set, looking handsome and carefree. Here he is giving away Steel Knight action figures to the entire vanload of summer camp children who’ve shown up to take a tour of the set for the day. There’s Logan Peace reuniting with his mother Adriana, the new director and first woman to helm a Card One film.
“What in God’s name are you doing?” she is saying to Jax, who grins and puts an arm around her shoulder. She looks bewildered, but he holds the pose until she glances down at her son, who is happily ripping open the box and staring in awe at the Legends of Card One Steel Knight Battle Suit 12-inch figure and its 5-point articulation and electronic battle phrases.
Jax says goodbye to the kids, waving them off after having answered every question they could possibly have about the Steel Knight’s motivations and efforts to clear The Patriot of any wrongdoing with the United Nations Space Battle Division in the upcoming film.
Here is Jax rehearsing lines and blocking with Tristan Eccleston, the British actor who’ll playing Morganna’s brother Lucius in the Dark Magic movie, coming to theaters late next year. He is here to film a brief cameo. Here is a closeup of Tristan Eccleston. Here is another closeup of Tristan Eccleston. Here is a closeup of Tristan Eccleston running his hands through his thick, grabbable curls. And still another closeup of Tristan Eccleston’s perfectly angled nose, silhouetted pensively against a fully lit backdrop as he prepares to hit his mark. Here is a shot of Jax photobombing the camera with an annoyed expression.
At last, here is Jax Butler standing behind the craft services table, pouring coffee for crew. The crafty girl who was running the table before has given him his very own apron, and in return, he has produced a chair. She isn’t supposed to sit down on the job, she says, to which Jax replies that the studio will get a kick out of the fact that he’s doing some real work for once.
Here is everyone on set laughing together.
Here is Jax grinning directly into the camera, like it’s nothing at all.
“That last one’s cheesy.”
“It’s nice. It’ll make a good feature shot.” Vanessa flicked off the viewfinder and tucked away her camera.
“So what do you do with them now?”
“Have my boss look over them, do a little color and edge clean-up, and offer them to the magazines. Someone might ask for the card.”
“Is that good?”
She shrugged. “It’ll fetch a higher price if I’m handing over my originals.” Vanessa stood,
hoisted her bike from against the wall inside his trailer where he’d finally had a PA stash it, and began walking it down the front steps.
“This was fun,” he said, relaxed now that it was all over. “We should do this again sometime.”
“Sure,” said Vanessa, and poked him in the shoulder. “Keep that reputation teetering on edge and you’ll be begging me for help keeping house all the time.”
He gave her a wry look.
“You’d prefer to be begged, huh?”
She planted one finger into his firm pectoral.
“Hey, you want to roleplay naughty maid, I don’t come free.”
Jax’s eyes widened and he leaned in.
“That’s what I do best,” said Jax, and flashed her a winning smile. Vanessa rolled her eyes with a smile and a bit of a blush, then took a running start, hopped one foot onto the bike pedal, and finally mounted it mid-spin. She waved without looking over her shoulder, and Jax waved back.
When he got to his apartment later, he looked down at his phone in the dark living room.
You won’t Photoshop my teeth crooked or anything like that, will you? ;)
Her response was quick this time.
Naaah, I wouldn’t do that to you. :)
Jax felt better than he had in weeks. Maybe it was possible to rehabilitate.
He’d stripped down and rebuilt everything, and it still wasn’t good enough.
Dirk Masterson knew just enough to be able to fit the right things together, but he wasn’t sleeping well, and whether his hiding out was working . . . well, that was a crapshoot.
This machine was probably the only thing that was going to save him.
There were ways to order the parts he needed—passwords and backdoor entries to his own company’s servers, unaffected in the headquarters explosion—that he could use to cover his tracks. He had fifteen boxes of chemical safety wash bottles sent to a convenience store pickup location six hundred miles away just as a decoy measure, in case someone was trying to track him. He hoped the FBI would send someone that far away, just to waste their time.
Still, there were some things Amazon wouldn’t deliver, and a trans-reactional conductor was one of them.
And that was why Tim Berners-Lee had made the Internet.
Searching the dark web had a learning curve—it had been a few years since he’d gone for stuff like this, but someone in Ojai would sell some plasmodic uranium disks to him for cash at a dead drop. They’d need to have words about that—cryptocurrency was the big thing right now, so who the hell dealt in cash?
Dirk hated the silence of a suburban California night. The crickets weren’t even out at this hour, and he had to take a leak.
A shadow flicked across the building he’d been staring at for the last three hours. His body lurched, and he forced his hand to open the car door slowly, casually.
He came up and over the edge of the highway barriers, every movement a choice by design. The figure hunched over in the shadow was turned away, not that the security light over the building’s front door worked anyway.
Dirk got closer and stopped. He’d been totally silent.
“Is it you?” the figure asked finally and turned.
It was a young black guy clutching a heavy gym bag in one hand.
“Yeah,” said Dirk.
They stood for a moment looking at one another, both holding their respective offers.
“So,” said Dirk. “Is there a password, or something?”
“Oh shit,” said the kid. “I forgot to set one.” He didn’t really sound too concerned. “Let’s see: a bloody war, or a sickly season.”
There was a long pause.
“What—what the hell was that? Was that a poem or something?”
“I don’t know! You’re the one who wanted a password!”
“Just—give it here.”
They swung the bags toward each other but didn’t let go.
“Okay, do I need to count?” Dirk asked honestly.
The young man shrugged.
“Okay, I’ll count to three. One, two—”
“Wait wait wait, do we switch on three, or after three?”
“After, after.” Dirk waved a hand.
“One,”
“Two—”
“Three!”
Chapter Eight
VANESSA COULD FEEL the camera card with Jax’s do-gooding project burning a hole in her bag the whole way back to the FB2 offices. It felt like carrying around a bomb.
Not a bomb bomb, but like a happy bomb, one with glitter and that feeling you got when a summer blockbuster trailer first came out and you realized it was going to be the best movie ever, and who had picked the music for this trailer, because it was perfect for this exact movie even though it had been written decades ago, and everyone was going to be obsessed with this movie for months, and you didn’t dare miss release night.
She maneuvered her bike past unsuspecting commuters and up the staircase in the Manhattan building that FB2 rented for offices. No one knew that she had exclusives of Jax Butler, not Sam or the other paps, or even her boss. It was weird, sharing a secret with the guy she annoyed for a living.
Jax didn’t look bad. In fact, he was easy to capture—she had to give him that. He had a way of tilting his chin at just the right angle in every shot, and he had flowed from one good deed to the next so smoothly, never forcing it. Almost like he was really into it. Amazing how some people had effortlessly looking smoking hot and yet approachable and fun from many angles as an actual career and life skill.
Hot from an objective perspective. Not like, she thought—Vanessa shook her head. Shut up, Reyes.
The only person on the studio lot who’d seemed remotely suspicious of Jax playing nice with the production crew and kids had been Adriana Peace, and even she’d crossed her arms and looked down at her son on the soundstage with a grim quirk of the mouth that might’ve been a smile.
Of course, it had been a challenge to line up the shots correctly, but Vanessa prided herself on professionalism. She’d learned things over the years, the good tricks. There was a reason paparazzi didn’t sign up to be extras in production. Her secret shooting skills from Coopers Beach were only a little rusty—she could afford to be more open about holding up a camera these days, of course. Even though it was pretty obvious that Jax hadn’t bothered to plan anything and wasn’t about to take the heat for her if someone caught on to what was happening, it had been the most fun Vanessa could remember having on a photo shoot.
That thought made her pause, just slightly, in the FB2 hallway. She must have been smiling to herself, because Sam waved to her a few desks away. Vanessa waved back and kept moving toward Trevor’s office.
Maybe it was the illicit nature of it all, sneaking into the Card One lot under the wing of one of her usual targets. The artist formerly known as her enemy. But that didn’t make sense; she was always skulking around where she wasn’t technically supposed to be. There was a thrill somewhere in all of this—and getting turned on by the possibility of Jax betraying her and smugly leaving her to the whims of glorified security guards was too cliché to give her a buzz like this. Or maybe, Vanessa thought, setting her bike up against the wall and adjusting her messenger bag, it was that there had been more interesting faces and more smiles in these photos than any she’d taken in the past two or three years.
That was it—the intimacy of it. All those normal, un-famous people who were probably used to being cynical, caught off guard by something that was honestly fun and nice for a few hours. Jax wasn’t going to change the world or anything, and it was definitely a marketing thing, but. . . .
He’d been kind. He’d stuck around and made smoothies for anyone who wanted one, and played superheroes with the kids who wanted to practice their invisible power band moves on him, shouting dramatic lines about the awesomeness of America and teamwork. He’d made pew pew pew noises and carried a girl around on his shoulders so she could pretend she was the Red Rogue doing pa
rkour on the deadly streets of Vancouver. Jax played along seamlessly. He was kind of . . . good at being good.
Vanessa walked into Trevor’s office with the camera card already out. He had a cell phone in one hand, another on the desk, and was scrolling through something on his laptop. The two televisions on either side of the door she’d come through were thankfully on mute.
She knew in her heart that it was pointless to hope for any respect or recognition from Trevor, apart from the random blessings of the better assignments he’d given her lately. The arrangement benefited her in the long run. She could work better without a micromanaging boss, even if it did mean that she had to hustle harder than the staff guys did.
But today Vanessa was undaunted, even at the mouth of hell itself. She had exclusives—exclusives of Jax Butler being a good boy—and not even Trevor could take that away from her. Well, technically, he could, but he couldn’t erase the actual fact that she’d done the work, that she was more than the token girl, the freelance.
“I’ve got something I want to talk to you about,” she said.
“Uh huh,” said Trevor loudly, and gestured at her oddly with one hand. Vanessa wasn’t sure what this meant but walked over and snapped the card onto his desk anyway.
“These are exclusives from the set of The Protectorate,” she said.
Trevor gave her an exasperated look and glanced significantly at the dark phone screen in front of him.
“Oh,” said Vanessa. Quietly. She smacked herself mentally for sounding so meek and obedient all of a sudden.
“Aurelio, we haven’t got time for this shit,” Trevor said to the phone. “If you can’t figure something out, I’ll have to work it out for you.” He swiped the phone with a thumb and looked up at her. “Damn Portuguese have taken over the LA pap market, and now they’re starting to invade Brooklyn. Bastards climbing up my arse before they even get off the boat. What the fuck is this?”
He was referring to the images on the card, now filling the laptop screen.
“Jax Butler asked me to shoot him—”
“From set?” Trevor frowned at the pictures, or maybe squinted. She couldn’t really tell.
