Page 39

Chrysalis

When the episode opens, the scene is entirely silent and still.

In the gentle dark, Marsh closes her eyes and takes a deep breath.

SharpTruth599: Marsh? You okay?

For once, the comment box is deserted but for him, and the words hover for longer than she’s used to. Perhaps Marsh has run far enough that the Bubble is still catching up.

“I’m okay,” she says.

SharpTruth599: Thank goodness

SharpTruth599: ... Where are we?

Marsh looks around the quiet room. The familiar wallpaper, the old, ugly carpet.

“My house,” she says. “From when I was a kid.”

It’s funny how small it all looks now. She doesn’t know if it’s simply because she’s older now, or because of everything she’s seen and done as part of All This and More . But she doesn’t mind. Smallness is exactly why she came here. She just needed something manageable. Something safe. A place away from everything. No wild scenarios, no over-the-top adventures, no Chrysalis, no Talia, even no Ren or Harper. A place where she can hide for just a minute.

A place where she can think .

“Ezra,” she says to the quiet living room. “Do you know where Lev is?”

SharpTruth599: I can’t see him right now

“I’m sorry.”

SharpTruth599: I’m sure he’s somewhere

SharpTruth599: He has to be

Marsh hopes it’s true. Even though they got separated in Hong Kong, Lev has managed to survive in the Bubble so far. She’s sure he’s on his way.

“Can you see Dylan?” she finally asks.

The answer is a long time coming.

SharpTruth599: I can’t find him, either

Marsh nods grimly.

She wants to lie down on the couch, pull her mother’s crochet blanket over her legs, and close her eyes to all of this. What she wouldn’t give to let all of this be someone else’s job, someone else’s problem.

But hiding here won’t solve anything. This season is about Marsh and her life.

In the garage, she finds her old bicycle. It still looks the same, a red frame with a green basket, but it’s big enough that she can ride it as an adult. It’s only a few minutes down the road to her old school anyway.

The campus is deserted, but Marsh knows that the side door to the teachers’ lounge is always unlocked. A student accidentally broke it during a prank several years ago, and the school never fixed it.

The halls are covered in colorful flyers and overstuffed bulletin boards, and the linoleum squeaks. It’s strange to be back, after so long. After she was laughed off the stage, she quit theater, and never set foot in the arts wing again. Drama club had loomed like a fortress in her mind, impenetrable and cruel. Now, she can see that it was just a small, slightly damp room. The faint musk of old textbooks and stale socks makes it seem even more benign.

There’s a rustle, and Marsh turns to see her old music teacher, a slightly stooped, graying man with thick glasses and a Santa Claus beard, shuffle into the doorway from the hall.

Except in this episode, he’s taller and younger, and his face looks different. He still reminds her of her old teacher, but he also reminds her of someone else. He looks kind of like Lev.

“Ezra?” she asks, surprised.

Ezra shrugs, a little sheepish. “Best I could do under the circumstances. Sorry.”

“Don’t be.” She marvels. “I’m glad you’re here.”

Ezra looks around. “Your middle school?”

“That’s right.”

It takes him a moment to understand, but Ezra has seen all of Marsh’s bonus footage, including this place.

“You think Chrysalis is hiding within your biggest regret,” he finally muses.

Marsh nods. “Somewhere I’d never want to face.”

She turns, and looks down the long hallway lined with lockers.

“This way.”

Ezra falls in beside her, their footsteps echoing in the quiet.

“Why did it take you so long to reach out to me?” Marsh asks as they walk. “If you knew from the start something was off.”

“I didn’t know from the start,” he answers. “I had my suspicions, but until I was certain, I didn’t want to show my hand. And then, well. You’ve seen how robust the Bubble’s automatic security systems are.”

“Did Lev tip you off?” she asks.

“Yes and no,” Ezra says. “We fought over quantum bubbling’s applications, so we haven’t been on the best terms ever since Sharp Entertainment green-lit Talia’s pilot episode. But when Lev disappeared partway through filming season two, I knew something was off. He’d never do something like that, even if we disagreed. But then when everything folded, I couldn’t find anyone from Sharp to tell me where he, or any of them, had gone. The deeper I dug, the weirder it seemed.”

There’s a fizz of pixels on the wall, but Ezra crushes them back into place with a grimace, and his face is clear again.

“When I heard that RealTV was restarting the show for a third season, I knew I had to get myself hired onto the crew.”

“I’m glad you did,” Marsh replies. “I’m sure Lev is, too. Even if he doesn’t know you’re here yet.”

Ezra sighs.

“The last time we talked was when he showed me season one,” he says. “I mean, you saw it. The world did. It was amazing. But I was still mad, and I couldn’t admit it. We argued, and when he said he was staying on for season two, I stormed out. But then...”

Marsh understands.

“I couldn’t let that be the last thing between us,” he finishes. “I had to right the wrong.”

“I understand,” Marsh says as they pass her old English classroom. “Believe me.”

Ezra smiles and puts his hands in his pockets. He looks around the dark hallway they’ve just turned into.

“So, what are you doing here, exactly?”

“The same as you,” she answers. “Righting a wrong.”

Ezra seems to understand. He’s seen every frame of her recap, every one of her episodes. He remembers the flashbacks to her talent show. “Shouldn’t we be in the auditorium, where the stage is, though?” he asks.

Marsh shakes her head and keeps walking.

“You’ll see,” she says, as she doesn’t resist the memory, for once.

It’s the night of her disastrous talent show performance again. After she’d fled midsong, Marsh was too embarrassed to be seen in the costume, even for a second. The only thing worse than what just happened to her would be to have to run out of the school and all the way home still wearing it, where even more people could laugh at her.

While the next act performed, she changed back into clothes in the drama room as fast as she could. She could barely see for all the tears, but she didn’t make a sound, terrified that someone might hear her and know where she was. Once she was dressed, in her rush to escape, Marsh forgot the rumpled cloud on the floor in the corner.

The next day, everyone in the school had heard the story—and seen the costume. Because the older kids had found it, and hung it up in the gym locker room to taunt her.

“Kids can be so mean to each other sometimes,” Ezra says, shaking his head.

Marsh pushes open the door to the basketball court.

“I’d hoped that if I just kept my head down, I could wait it out,” she says. “I sat alone at lunch, and skipped after-school sports. I even pretended to be sick to stay home for a few days. But the kids just wouldn’t stop. I’d wanted to be noticed, but then all I wanted was to be forgotten. To disappear.”

She sighs.

“Became the story of my life.”

She and Ezra are standing in the locker rooms now. Her costume is hanging in the back of the changing area, impaled on hangers and broom handles high above her head. The last bell rings, and the hallways slowly quiet. Then the lights go off.

At last, behind them, her child-self slips into the room, her breathing quick with desperation. She creeps forward and stares, her eyes stinging.

“A character-defining moment from childhood,” Ezra says as they watch. “Great for ratings. Talia would be proud.”

Marsh snorts, despite the somber scene. “Where is she, by the way?”

“I don’t know. But probably close, if not already here.”

Marsh nods.

“Just wait,” she says. “It’s almost over.”

For a moment, it looks like young Marsh is going to lose her nerve. But she knows that as long as it hangs there, the other kids will never let her live it down.

With a frightened gasp, little Marsh rips it from the hangers and shoves it deep into the garbage.

Marsh waits until her younger version has escaped back out the door, then reaches into the trash. She pulls out the battered, dirty costume and holds it up. It’s so little. It wouldn’t even fit Harper, now.

“Marsh,” Ezra urges, his voice gentle. “If you still want to find Chrysalis, we don’t have much time. Even though you escaped for a moment, Hong Kong was your ninth episode. The next one will be the finale.”

Marsh checks her watch.

There are only thirty minutes left until this one ends.

“So, this is really it, then?” she asks.

“I’m afraid so.”

Marsh takes a deep breath.

“I still have time,” she tells herself.

Time to quash Chrysalis, and save her season. Time to make everything perfect.

She folds the costume and tucks it under her arm.

“Take me back home,” she asks Ezra. “I know where Chrysalis will be.”

Suddenly, she’s not at school anymore, but on her front stoop. Ezra’s gone, unable to follow in his music teacher form, and Marsh is alone again. But this time, the street isn’t as quiet as before. At the far end of the sunny front yard, a pair of landscapers mow the lawn and trim the hedges with unnerving slowness. Rafael and Bryn, the All This and More composer who created the show’s signature song and Talia’s former hairstylist, have the right tools and are standing in the right place, but the two men barely move, and their eyes never leave the house. Across the way, the old location manager and HR director, Mike and Linnea, pretend to gab at their mailboxes, but they were never Marsh’s neighbors, they have never lived on this block.

Get inside, Ezra says, words scrolling across her vision. Lock the door.

Marsh slides the dead bolt for good measure, and dashes up the stairs. She takes them two at a time, in socked feet, the way she used to as a girl. She slams the door and hangs the PRIVATE BEDROOM! KEEP OUT! handwritten sign she once believed would actually deter her parents, then crouches in front of her bed.

Slowly, she pulls out the box.

The sight of it takes her back. It was her mother’s old wedding dress box, made of sturdy cardboard and decorated with a faint floral pattern on all sides. When she was a toddler, she was small enough to curl her entire body inside, which used to make her mother laugh. After she got a little too old to do that, her mother let her have it to use as a treasure chest, to store all of her valuables.

Over the years, it held many things. At first, rocks, seashells, pinecones, and dried flowers. Later, notes from her elementary school crushes, an autographed photo from her first concert, her old college study abroad brochures for Iceland and Hong Kong. The one thing it’s never contained is her cloud costume.

Until now.

Marsh nestles the old outfit inside. As she does, the other items shift, until they’re new. Marveling, she pulls each thing out and studies it. Her law school diploma, her photographs from Iceland, her Un Juego Peligroso masquerade mask. A dozen mementos from the adventures she’s experienced here, the lives she’s led.

And one more thing, most precious of all.

Marsh smiles as she picks up the lawyer’s briefcase that Dylan tried to give her countless times.

She pops the clasp and opens it to reveal a Sharp Purple–colored folder.

A client file? Ezra asks.

“Yes,” Marsh says. “From Mendoza-Montalvo and Hall. It’s mine—for the bid I just won in Hong Kong.”

The title across the top says: Sharp Incorporated.

But Sharp doesn’t exist anymore, Ezra types.

“Exactly. Because it folded during season two,” Marsh agrees. “Which is when Lev thinks that Chrysalis started .”

She taps the folder.

“Whatever happened to Sharp back then, I think it was because of Chrysalis.”

The silence in the room hangs heavy as she and Ezra consider her theory.

Only one way to find out, he replies at last. Ready?

Marsh shakes her head. “Here goes nothing.”

And she opens the folder.

“It’s not just a client. It’s a case,” she confirms as she sees the formatting, the legalese.

Her eyes widen.

“It’s my case.”

It’s true. All of the quick scribbles are in her handwriting, somehow.

She reads as fast as she can.

“It’s a lawsuit,” she says when she realizes it. “The plaintiff is... Claire Sharp herself.”

Claire Sharp, billionaire owner of Sharp Labs, the original discoverer of quantum bubbling technology, and Sharp Entertainment, the original creator of All This and More .

But you didn’t film a case scene in this episode, Ezra says.

“Because the case is old,” Marsh says as she skims. “The hearings all took place during season two.”

She pauses suddenly.

If the suit is from season two, and it was Marsh’s case...

Marsh was a lawyer before?

But that’s impossible.

Wouldn’t she remember?

What else? Ezra urges. What was the suit for?

“Damages to the show,” Marsh continues as she reads. “We alleged that the season two contestant tampered with the Bubble, and that caused it to become too unstable. So unstable... that it collapsed.”

Collapsed? With everyone still inside?!

Marsh nods, looking pale.

“They got stuck here, with no way out,” she says. “Until my season started.”

She covers her mouth, aghast.

It’s true. The crew of season two have been trapped inside the Bubble this whole time.

That would explain why RealTV needed a whole new team for season three, why there was no one from the original crew anywhere to help with the transition, and why they’re all here now.

The silence lingers as they both try to absorb this terrible revelation.

“I can’t believe it,” Marsh murmurs. She’s trying to count everyone she’s discovered so far, but there are too many to keep track. “Alexis in Mexico, Jillian and Charles at the circus, Elyse at the hotel, and Mike, Linnea, Rafael, and Bryn just now...”

And Lev, Ezra adds.

Everyone from the old Sharp crew, imprisoned here and their memories wiped, all so they couldn’t warn RealTV what had happened in season two before it launched Marsh’s episodes...

Marsh puts the paper down suddenly.

“Ezra.”

She can hardly say it.

“And me too,” she whispers. “Right?”

If Marsh was the lawyer for Claire Sharp’s case, then it stands to reason that she also was in the Bubble during season two, somehow.

Which means that she also has been stuck in here with them.

“I might be sick,” she says. “I don’t understand.”

What did happen in that season, that would be worth all this to hide?

Who would go this far?

Keep reading, Ezra begs.

Slowly, Marsh looks back down at the folder.

Just as she reaches for the next page, a sharp, grating tone rings out across her empty house.

Marsh! Ezra types. The finale!

Her eyes wide with terror, Marsh turns the sheet over as fast as she can.

There, on the last page, is the answer to all of her questions. Why Chrysalis has been determinedly inserting itself into her paths, in whatever form it takes. Why it’s tried to influence her choices, no matter how she tried to avoid or thwart it. And why it’s grown only more insistent the closer to the finale Marsh draws, before her chance to change her life forever is complete.

“Ezra,” Marsh says weakly.

She can hardly breathe.

The mysterious season two contestant...

was Ren.

She looks up in horror just as the episode goes black.