The theatre smelled like a thing that had been lived in for decades instead of like a building. Sawdust dusted the sash windows; the velvet house curtain smelled faintly of onion from a century of concession stands; a long-forgotten poster for a miscast Hamlet sagged in the corner, its edges softened by hands that had both loved and ignored it. Tess Moreno moved through that smell like a swimmer through familiar water. She navigated ropes and pulleys the way other people navigated streets—by muscle memory, by knowing the cracks.
She knelt on the catwalk above the stage with a flashlight tucked under her chin and a cheater bar in her hands. Her fingers were stripped of their first rawness; there were calluses crescenting her thumbs, the kind that came from wrapping rope and tightening turnbuckles until the steel agreed. She hauled a slack line, threaded it through a jaw, and fed the slack into a new knot with the kind of impatience that only a craftsperson who’d seen a light drop off mid-scene understands.
Finn's voice came like brass rolling across the floor. “You’re making it look tidy enough to fool the director,” he teased, sounding pleased. He sat on an old wooden stool centered under the rigging like a man at the head of his own small table, polishing a porcelain teapot as if preparing a relic for a procession.
Tess glanced down and smiled without looking at him. “You polish that thing more often than you polish—” She stopped. The wrench on his knee glinted. Finn winked. “—the wrench,” he supplied. The lamp caught on a nick in the metal and Tess thought of the way Finn swore to fixes the way other people swore to saints.
Something skittered behind them. A metallic honk, small and indignant, drew both their eyes. Mr. Hux, the theatre's clockwork goose with a crank still jammed somewhere down its side, waddled into view clutching a page in its brass beak—a cue sheet, edged with grease and the footprints of a thousand feet. It scuttled at the base of a hanging drop and performed, with all the dignity of a performing animal, a small pirouette.
Finn tutted and pretended to be scandalized. “There goes my respectability,” he said. He pointed the teapot at Mr. Hux like a judge with a gavel. The goose honked and tucked the paper under its wing as though it had secrets to keep.
Tess laughed—short and surprised, the sound bouncing off the high rafters. It was almost absurd that a clockwork goose could undo the strictness of the place in an instant. But the theatre was full of small absurdities: the teapot alarm Finn swore was an omen; the brass plaque near the box office that insisted, in all-caps, on silence even on Saturdays; the way the concession stand still stocked a peculiar brand of lemon curd that tasted like nothing else in town. Those little, unnecessary things made the theatre feel less like a machine and more like a neighborhood.
She tugged the cue sheet from Mr. Hux's beak with a careful, practiced motion that kept her weight balanced against the catwalk rail. The paper came loose with a soft tear. “He'll eat the lighting notes if we let him,” she told Finn, who only shook his head with theatrical offense.
“You keep him away from the drop, Tess,” Finn said, as if assigning a chess piece a fate. “If he gets into the counterweight pit, I swear—” He didn’t finish; his eyes were already on the rig, and under his breath he began counting off a sequence of checks.
Tess moved in the cadence of someone who had done this before: quick glances, efficient hands, a touch of humor in the way she hooked the goose's crank with a bobby pin and shut its beak so Mr. Hux could be temporarily pacified. The bobby pin was his collar. The old theatre kept broken things going with improvisation and goodwill.
On the way down the aisle, Finn muttered, “How’s school?” like a man who paused at the idea of teenagers at honest labor.
Tess shrugged. “Same as always. Loud. Small. Boring for everyone but me.” She let the last word hang; it wasn't boastful, only factual. She had a section in her chest where pride and loneliness sat side by side, occasionally exchanging notes.
Finn's answer was softer. “Don't let them make you invisible. Not you.”
She blinked. He was half-joking, but his hands tightened on the teapot with a grip that didn't belong to a joke. She felt a small, private part of the world shift—an invitation, not to be famous, but to be noticed on purpose.