Jade rushed to the closest box and peered carefully through the window. The occupants of the box leaned over the railing, staring down into the audience below.
Over the continued screaming, a few panicked sentences made their way through the box’s door to Jade.
“He fell!”
“Is he dead?”
“Where did he come from?”
Jade’s heart dropped, and the contents of her stomach turned tolead.
He.
He fell.
Dead.
Her lungs collapsed as air whooshed out of them as if she’d been punched in the stomach. It couldn’t be...
Theo.
Jade ran back to the door to the wings, the pounding in her ears drowning out the clamor of the audience. Her hurt shoulder lit up with pain as she tore up the ladder, fumbling over the rungs in her desperation.
It couldn’t be Theo. Itcouldn’tbe Theo.
But the last she had seen him, he had been heading toward the flies over the stage. Maybe this hadn’t been the work of the assassin at all. Maybe Theo had slipped.
No.Theo was too skilled to lose his footing like that. But what if he’d come across someone? He could have been running or gotten into some kind of physical altercation.
Jade punched open the trap door and pulled herself up, her eyes still adjusting to the darkness above the opera house as she peered through the rafters. Nothing. She sprinted ahead, running the circumference of the circle that housed the rafters over the boxes, but still, she didn’t find Theo. Her next best option was to go to the fly loft and try to see down from there into the audience below.
Rising nausea choked her at the thought. If Theo was down there, she wouldn’t be able to stand the sight of his lifeless body, broken and twisted, even from that height. But she had no other choice.
Jade dropped back down through the trap door to the platform beside the flies at the top of the wings. She took a slow, steadying breath to try to stop the shaking in her limbs, then stepped out onto the walkway above the stage, where she could see below. The curtains hadn’t closed yet, the performers still on stage apparently shocked into paralysis at the sight before them.
Keeping cat-like balance, Jade floated over the wobbly, suspended walkway. No crew was in sight, so she crept out along it until the audience came into view.
Jade bit her lip and held her breath as she tried to make anything of the scene. So many audience members were crowded around a focal point that she could barely get a good look past them. She took a few more crouched steps, not daring to go too far and potentially expose herself to any of the cast or crew of the opera.
Based on the position of the crowd, Jade didn’t know how it was possible for the victim to be Theo. They were deeper into the audience than he likely would have fallen from close to the stage. Still, until she saw the person and ruled Theo out, she couldn’t rest easy.
A whistle blew, and the crowd began to disperse as a street constable appeared from the opposite side of the opera house, near the entrance. Someone must have run outside to get help.
“Back away, please, back away!” he called as he approached the victim.
The crowd thinned and revealed a man in a green tailcoat and black trousers, his body lying at odd angles in the space before the orchestra pit. A crimson stain underneath him further darkened the red carpeting, soaking into the plush fibers and spreading around the body. He had ashy brown hair and a beard, and though Jade couldn’t discern details of the man’s face, she’d seen enough to confirm it wasn’t Theo.
A rushed exhale escaped her lips as she released the tension that had built with her anxiety.It’s not Theo.It’s not Theo. It’s not Theo.She repeated the mantra to herself like a lifeline, using it to pull herself out of a miry pit. But the twinge of fear returned all too quickly. She still hadn’t found him. Where was he?
She’d already circled the rafters over the boxes and come up empty. When he’d said he was going over the stage, he’d gone to stage left, so that was her next best option.
Jade sprinted like a bird in flight the rest of the way across the downstage fly loft, skidding to a halt and recovering her balance to step out onto the platform above stage left. She glanced through the dark space but spotted no one.
The curtains swooshed shut, and the light from the opera house was extinguished.
Blackness engulfed Jade, save for the small pinpricks of electric light along the walls of the wings to help performers see backstage. Someone—the stage manager, most likely—rounded up the performers and stage crew and ushered them to the stage door.
“Back to the dressing rooms! Come on, come on!” He wasn’t far from Jade’s position, close to directly below her two stories down. “We’ll regroup in the dressing rooms! That may be the end of our show tonight, ladies and gentlemen.”
