He had imagined, vaguely, on the plane, that arriving would feel like a movie montage; a wide shot of the skyline, some triumphant music, a taxi ride past the Hollywood sign while he grinned out the window like a man who'd finally made it.

Not quite…

Los Angeles did not welcome Localad. It processed him.

First, it misplaced his suitcase having it re-routed through Phoenix, then it placed him beneath burningly bright fluorescent lighting for forty-three minutes while he tried to sort everything out, and then finally, it released him into the care of a studio driver named Hector, who held a sign reading LOCALAD in lettering so cautiously proportioned that it looked less like his name than a preliminary estimate. And to top all of that, Localad had already sweated through his one good shirt in the terminal heat.

“You the writer then?” Hector asked.

“I think so.”

“Good answer. Most people here need a week before they stop being sure.”

The city spread around them in every direction, vast and sun-struck, a civilisation apparently designed by people who regarded walking as a personal failure. Glass towers rose from car parks. Billboards displayed faces larger than churches. Every third building appeared to contain either a wellness clinic. That or a lawyer capable of suing one. Localad had imagined palm trees and there were palm trees aplenty. He had not however, imagined that they would look faintly embarrassed, planted like feather dusters installed by an empire entirely without birds.

The studio apartment was on the nineteenth floor of a glass building whose windows did not open, presumably because the outdoors had not completed the necessary paperwork to allow it. 

Hector had called it a "corporate unit." Inside were white walls, pale furniture and three decorative books selected for their ability to match the cushions. Localad inspected them. One had no words in it at all. He was in a glass tower in a part of the city that he couldn't have located on a map an hour earlier. It was nicer than anywhere he had ever lived, and it took him three days to stop feeling like he was trespassing in it.

Obviously, the windows didn't open because it was so high up. But from the enclosed balcony, if he contortedly stood at exactly the right angle, he could see just a sliver of the Hollywood Hills between two other buildings, though mostly what he saw was just more buildings, more glass, and more of a city that seemed to go on in every direction with no discernible edges. Nothing like the harbour back home, that ended cleanly, at the water’s edge.

The refrigerator made a low mechanical groan every eleven minutes. By the second night, Localad had named it Trent, although he had not yet met Trent Vance and therefore did not fully understand how prophetic this was going to be.

That evening, Desmond took him to dinner at a restaurant without a sign. In Meridian Cove, any restaurant without a sign was a closed restaurant. Shut down. In Los Angeles, it was exclusive. The maître d’ greeted Desmond by name and Localad by shirt, his good one, still slightly damp from the terminal, with an expression he was too polite to fully commit to.

"You look terrified," Desmond said, once they were seated, not unkindly.

“I’ve just been served a vegetable in smoke.”

“That’s fennel.”

“It knows what it did?”

Desmond smiled, but the smile did not quite reach the exhausted country behind his eyes.

“Tomorrow,” he said, “you meet the studio.”

Localad set down a solid silver fork with too many tines.

“Scared?”

"I am terrified."

"Good. Terrified people ask better questions than confident ones." Desmond ordered the first course for both of them without asking, which Localad found he didn't mind, mostly because he had no idea what half of the menu was actually describing.

"Tomorrow you're going to meet some new people. I want to prepare you for something, and I want you to actually hear it, not just nod like you did the first time I told you."

"Okay. Will they have read the book?”

“Yes.”

“All of them?”

Desmond considered. “They will all have an opinion about having read the book.”

“That isn’t the same thing.”

“You’re learning quickly.”

"Everyone in that room is going to tell you they love it." Desmond said it plainly, watching Localad's face. "Some will mean the book. Some will mean the film they can extract from it. And others, the version that's easier to sell, easier to market, easier to explain in one sentence to a room full of people with more money than patience." 

"Some will even mean the meeting is going well. The important sentence in all of this is never ‘We love it.’ The important sentence begins immediately after.”

“We love it, but?”

“Exactly.”

“You're going to hear the phrase 'we love it, we just think — ' more times this month than you've heard it in your whole life. I need you to know, going in, that the 'we love it' part is often true, and the 'we just think' part is where things can get complicated."

"Is that a warning?"

Desmond considered the question with more honesty than Localad expected. "It's the truth. What you do with it is up to you. I bought into your book because I believed in it exactly as it is. That doesn't mean the version that ends up on screen will look exactly like the version you wrote. It rarely does, for anyone, even people far more experienced than you. The question is how much of it survives the trip, and how much of a fight you're willing to have about which parts."

Localad thought of Harbour Page, where Mrs. Alvarez’s criticism generally began without anaesthetic. He thought about Jasmine at the Wound, about the ending he'd almost thrown away a dozen times, about twenty years of a story that had only ever answered to him. "What if I fight for all of it?"

"Then you'll lose some fights you didn't need to lose, and win some you shouldn't have," Desmond said. "Nobody wins all of them. The people who do best in this business aren't the ones who never compromise. They're the ones who know exactly which three things are non-negotiable, and let everything else be negotiable, so the three things actually survive."

“So, what do I protect?”

“Three things,” Desmond said. “Choose the three things without which, it stops being your story. Fight for those with your life. Everything else is just weather. So, what are your three things?”

Desmond looked toward the restaurant’s open kitchen, where six people were judiciously arranging a single scallop.

“I used to know.” The admission was quiet enough that even Localad nearly missed it.

Localad didn't ask, that night, which three things Desmond thought were non-negotiable in his own book, mostly because he didn't yet know the answer himself. He would spend the following weeks discovering it the hard way; that knowing which three things mattered most turned out to be far harder than it sounded from the outside, and that everyone else in the process had a confident, differing opinion about what his three things should be.

He walked back to the apartment that night instead of taking the car Desmond offered, mostly to feel the city instead of watching it through glass. Sunset Boulevard at ten at night was loud in a way Meridian Cove never was, with music leaking out of bars, a street preacher shouting into a megaphone that had seen better decades, a line of people outside a club that stretched around the corner, all of it lit by a neon glow that never fully dimmed, never gave the sky back its stars. He thought of the Harbour, dark and quiet at this hour, the boats knocking against the pilings, and felt a homesickness so sudden and specific it nearly stopped him on the sidewalk.

That night he called Marjory from within his sealed balcony, which was not a balcony so much as a shelf attached to a building.

“How is it?” she asked.

“Overwhelmingly bright. Busy. Ostentatious. Loud. Even the salad I just ate had architecture.”

“Have you met anyone genuine?”

“Hector the driver maybe.”

“Promising.”

"It’s so bright here. I can't see any stars at all."

"Is that a metaphor or a complaint?"

"Both," he admitted, and she laughed, and for a few moments the distance between them shrank to something a lot more manageable, a phone-shaped bridge across two thousand miles. He reminded her about Desmond's earlier warning, about the three non-negotiable things, and she was quiet for a moment before she answered.

“Jasmine keeps the sword,” she said immediately.

“That’s one.”

“The Wound doesn’t close.”

“Two.”

“And grief doesn’t simply become revenge just because somebody thinks sadness makes for a harder sell.”

Localad looked out over the city, glittering beneath a night sky it had largely outvoted.

“Three,” he said.

Right on cue, the apartment refrigerator groaned inside.

Of course, her choices were right, though it would take him a lot longer than either of them expected, to learn which fights were worth having, and by the time he’d learned it, some of what mattered most to him would have already been gone.

The machine we know as Hollywood was fully warming up now.