Now We Are Elites

New York City, December 31. 7:43 PM.

“It’s tonight!”

Isabelle Morgan was having trouble sitting still, and Dominique had known it from the very first minute. From the first time she’d tried to work on her left cheekbone and Isabelle had turned her head to answer something Priya had just thrown out from the couch.

– Isa. Please.

­– What? I’m here!

– You were here. Now you’re somewhere else.

Working on ISA on the night of a major show was, in fact, a discipline unto itself.

Dominique, tall, Peruvian, with short hair dyed far too many colors and an androgynous style that made her look like she was always on her way to somewhere more interesting than wherever she happened to be, set her brush down on the edge of the table with the patience of a woman who had learned not to lose it.

– Look straight ahead.

– I am looking straight ahead.

– No. You’re looking at Priya.

– Because Priya says interesting things.

– Priya’s been saying nonsense for two hours.

Isabelle laughed. Dominique sighed.

This wasn’t the first time this conversation had happened, and it probably wouldn’t be the last.

Tall, slender, with blue eyes and something in the way she carried herself that made people turn around in the street without knowing exactly why, Isabelle had high cheekbones, sharp features, the kind of face that didn’t need to work hard to exist. Her black hair fell over her straight shoulders in a smooth cascade that the team had spent forty minutes constructing and that she threatened to undo at every opportunity.

– Times Square, Isa. Times Square! Priya called from the velvet couch, her third rosé of the evening in hand, her legs crossed over the armrest.

“Times Square!”

– I know. And I’m going to make Times Square bleed.

Everyone laughed. Four women, four glasses, four phones pointed at anything that moved. Priya had been there from the beginning, back when beginnings still meant something. Now Isabelle wasn’t entirely sure what Priya was anymore. A habit. A reassuring presence. An accessory with real opinions.

All three, probably.

Dominique gently lifted her chin, and she let her do it, her eyes half-closed, her gaze drifting across the room through the mirror.

She met Evy’s eyes.

Evangelina Morgan, eighteen years old, whom everyone called Evy because nobody had ever managed to pronounce her first name correctly on the first try, had been sitting in the chair by the door from the start. A few centimeters shorter than Isabelle, with the same high cheekbones but a softer, rounder face, blonde hair tied high and dark eyes that missed nothing, she still had her jacket on and her bag over her shoulder. She scrolled through her phone without really looking at it. Her eyes kept returning to the room, moving across faces, assessing things Isabelle hadn’t asked her to assess.

Evy had always been like that.

A thermometer in human form.

– You okay? Isabelle asked.

– Yeah.

– You sure?

– Yeah.

She wasn’t lying.

But she wasn’t saying everything.

“She doesn’t trust them. She never has.”

Isabelle knew it.

But this wasn’t the time to think about it.

In the mirror, the face looking back at her looked like ISA. Highlighted cheekbones, eyes already performing, jaw fixed in that expression photographers had started calling her look in articles she hadn’t taken the time to read.

Isabelle Morgan, meanwhile, was nowhere to be found in that face.

That was precisely the point.

She was twenty-one years old. A name on everyone’s lips. A first nomination for Female Artist of the Year. Three sponsorship deals signed in the same month. And tonight, Times Square. December 31. One hundred thousand people. Broadcast live all over the world.

The kind of night you imagine in a bedroom in Canada at twelve years old, watching the snow fall.

“I’m here.”

Sometimes she thought about Mr. Moore. Less and less. But in rooms like this one, surrounded by people who wanted a piece of her, something old briefly stirred deep down.

He was in prison.

She was in Times Square.

The equation was acceptable.

– Fifteen minutes, someone said from the doorway.

The room’s energy changed immediately. Priya sat up. Phones came out faster. Dominique ran the brush one last time along Isabelle’s jawline and stepped back.

In the mirror, ISA looked at Isabelle without saying a word.

“Let’s go.”

The stage was bigger than she had imagined.

She had imagined it so many times. Since she was twelve. Since she was fifteen, when she was terrified and discovering what her voice could do to a room. Since she was seventeen, when she was learning that talent alone did not constitute armor. She had built this moment in her mind so many times that she had assumed reality would feel smaller.

It didn’t.

Times Square opened around her like a second sky. Giant screens projected her face forty meters high, that same face Dominique had just perfected over the course of an hour in a dressing room that smelled of hairspray. The crowd was dense, loud, vibrating with that particular intensity that exists nowhere else on Earth. One hundred thousand people who hadn’t known her name six months ago now had it on their lips as though they had always known it.

Midnight was approaching. New year. First major stage.

The kind of coincidence you don’t plan but don’t refuse.

The intro started.

She felt it first in her sternum.

Somewhere in the crowd, she knew, Evy was watching with her jacket still on and her bag over her shoulder. Still measuring.

Still not entirely convinced.

“She’s right not to be,” Isabelle thought, and then the beat dropped and she stopped thinking altogether.

The first forty minutes were perfect.

The kind of perfection that feels earned, that looks like the logical conclusion to every dawn wake-up, every humiliation, every room where someone looks at you like a problem to be managed. She moved through the set with the precision of someone who had rehearsed until rehearsal had become instinct, and the crowd gave back everything she offered, and more.

She was in the middle of the third chorus of Signal when the sky decided to make itself known.

It wasn’t an explosion. Nothing grandiose. Just a load-bearing cable, stage left, that snapped with a sharp crack, clean, almost polite in its brutality. The wrong cable. The one holding the main support structure of the left lighting bridge. And then seventy-five kilograms of steel, metalwork, and stage lights tipped toward the stage in a slow, absolutely merciless arc.

She didn’t have time to think.

Five years of stage-trained muscle memory did the work for her.

She moved.

Not far enough.

The structure slammed into the boards exactly where she had been standing. A spotlight shattered when it hit the floor. A spray of white sparks shot upward to face level. And a fragment of metal twisted by the impact cut through the air at waist height, cleanly, with that absurd precision accidents sometimes have when choosing their target.

The impact was dull. She felt nothing during the first second.

Then the second second arrived.

She collapsed to her knees. Hands on the floor. The pain surged all at once, from her lower abdomen to her throat, like something tearing inside her. She tried to stand. Her arms shook.

The crowd made a sound she had never heard in her life. One hundred thousand people holding their breath at the same time. A wall of silence, two seconds long, before the first scream came from the front row and the rest followed in a cascade.

On the forty-meter screens behind her, the broadcast cameras captured everything in real time.

The entire world would see this before the night was over.

She managed to stand. She didn’t know how. Her earpiece exploded with overlapping voices she couldn’t distinguish clearly. Her lower abdomen was bleeding. She could see security teams converging on the stage from backstage. She could see Evy somewhere in the crowd, arms outstretched, forcing her way against the security barriers, mouth open around a word she couldn’t hear.

She could also see one hundred thousand faces turned toward her.

Nobody knew yet whether she would remain standing.

Neither did she, to be honest.

Then the paramedics came onto the stage. Hands on her shoulders. A voice in her earpiece saying her name. The world began to sway slightly. They guided her backstage. She let them.

Her legs were no longer entirely her own.

In the ambulance, later, someone inserted an IV into her arm. The ceiling lights slid past above her.

Outside, Times Square carried on without her.

“I had known for some time that a choice was approaching. Becoming an Elite requires sacrifices. But even though I never wanted children because of everything I’ve been through, I didn’t know I would have to decide so quickly. Tonight, Times Square asked me the question in its own way. And now I have to answer it.”