By three a.m., the gas station hummed like a fluorescent coffin.
The lights buzzed overhead, washing everything in the same sickly blue: lottery tickets, beef jerky, my reflection in the scratched plexiglass of the counter monitor. My eyes were red-streaked; my ponytail was losing a slow, inevitable fight with gravity. Somewhere in the back, the slush machine coughed to itself like an old smoker.
I pulled my hoodie tighter and watched the security feed: four dead pumps, an empty lot, my own hunched shape framed in grainy black-and-white.
Perfect. My kingdom.
The register drawer thunked shut as the last customer of the hour shuffled out, arms loaded with beer and regret. I checked the time—3:07 a.m.—and exhaled a breath I hadn't realized I was holding.
“Okay,” I muttered, reaching under the counter. “Showtime.”
My laptop slid out from its hiding spot between bulk paper towel packs. I set it on the narrow ledge behind the register, fingers moving on muscle memory: power button, earbuds in, browser up. The store camera above me stayed pointed at the doorway, because whoever installed it was an optimist.
The Shadow Script logo pulsed to life on screen: stark white text over black, the anonymous mask graphic Cassie had mocked when I first designed it.
"Too dramatic," she'd said, laughing, before the studio made sure she stopped laughing.
Now three hundred thousand people waited to see what that mask would say next.
I skimmed the comments flooding the placeholder post for tonight's episode:
shadowqueen_21: SHE’S GOING AFTER HART AGAIN I CAN FEEL IT
hartattackxx: leo did NOTHING wrong omg let him breathe
filmnerd98: drop the receipts already i have class at 8
A jittery pulse of satisfaction threaded through my exhaustion. They were here. They were listening. It was stupid and parasocial and the only time I felt like anything I did mattered.
I opened the export folder. Tonight's video waited: "Golden Boy, Rotten Studio: The Leo Hart Silence Problem." Fifteen minutes and thirty-two seconds of sliced interview footage, contract leaks, and my voice—pitched lower, run through a filter—cutting through the PR gloss like a scalpel.
I clicked upload.
Status bar: 4%... 12%... 37%...
The automatic doors sighed open.
I jolted, snapping my gaze up.
A man stepped in from the night, and for a second my brain filed him as just another LA insomnia victim. Baseball cap. Dark hoodie. Joggers. A face mostly shadowed.
Then he pushed the hood back.
The image snapped into focus the way it did a hundred times a day on movie posters and autoplay trailers: sharp jaw, straight nose, that particular arrangement of features that casting directors and algorithms agreed meant "bankable." Leo Hart, scrubbed of red carpet but still somehow lit from the inside.
My stomach dropped like I'd just missed a step.
No. No way.
He shouldn't be here. Not in my graveyard-shift purgatory where the coffee is burnt and the chips are stale and my whole life fits behind a plexiglass counter.
His gaze swept the aisles in one practiced, casual glance—restless, assessing—and then landed on me.
I became hyper-aware of everything: the hum of the cooler, the sticky spot under my left sneaker, the way my Shadow Script logo glowed traitor-bright from the laptop behind me.
He walked up to the counter.
"Hi," he said.
