The contestants would be led into the studio any minute. I hadn't seen Saligia all day.

When I finally got free of Raul who had been making last minute adjustments to my dress, I called out to Myra louder than I had intended.

"Where the hell is Saligia?"

Myra blinked. It took a moment for her to process the fact that such untempered language had been directed at her. There were two people on the show one should never make demands of. Myra and Saligia.

I realized my blunder, and I knew my face had flushed brightly. The whole studio had to have heard my outburst.

"Where she usually is," Myra told me, pointing to the corner. I don’t think it was so much that I was forgiven, as that Myra understood tonight was particularly stressful—especially in light of all she had learned during that meeting earlier in the day when she and a select few had been brought up to speed.

I knew more than a few eyes were on me as I marched up to the light tree positioned at stage left and whipped the cloth aside. Saligia threw up a hand to shade her face from the lights, cowering in her canvas folding chair.

As I let the cloth fall back into place, I heard Myra shout out to everyone that there were twenty minutes until airtime.

Saligia lowered her hand.

“What’s up, Rose.”

“Where have you been?” I whispered so loudly I hurt my throat. “You've been hiding all day.”

“I drank too much last night,” she said.

“There's a plan in place. Please tell me Sy explained it all to you.”

“You mean about August?”

“Of course I mean August! He has to be chosen today.”

Her head dipped and rose in an almost imperceptible acknowledgement that I had spoken, but I needed more from her. I needed to know she was aware of the plan and would follow it.

I didn't care much of Ida, but when she summoned me to the meeting this morning, I was encouraged to learn she at least had a plan to deal with August. I was there with Sy, Michael, Myra, Ed, Valerie, and Morris. Saligia was feeling under the weather—or so Sy said—and he insisted that he'd fill her in on the plan and make sure she was good to go come showtime.

Actually, it was Lydia's absence in that meeting I found most disturbing. She was no where to be found.

Our scheme was simple. Saligia would choose August for the evening's show, and we all would do whatever was needed to get him through one of those doors. When the plan was explained in the meeting earlier, I looked around the room to see if anyone was surprised to hear such an open admission that the selections were not truly random, nor mystically “revealed” to Saligia. But no one seemed to give it a second thought.

The other important part of the plan was to make sure August was sedated. That was why Ed and Valerie were included in the meeting. It was their job to dose August's lunch with a heavy tranquilizer.

I wanted a chance to speak with Saligia and Michael before the show. Things promised to get intense as we dug deep into August's hidden memories. I wanted us all on the same page. Of course there were so many distractions, Lydia’s absence being the most ominous to me. And now with minutes until we began broadcasting, I was convinced August had done something awful to her.

“I need to know you understand the plan,” I said to Saligia, moving around so she could see my face. “This is important.”

"I am a seasoned professional," Saligia said in a small voice.

“It has to happened today. The man's not an idiot. We won't have a second chance. He'll know we drugged him, and he'll be extra careful."

"It will be rough," she said. "I’ve touched on the edges of that man’s mind. And it won't just be me diving into his deep end. Not that I'm worried about Michael. He never really makes a strong emotional connection. But you do. I don't think you really know what it's going to be like."

I could hear, on the other side of Saligia's curtain, the sound of feet on the risers as Ed and Valerie directed the contestants to their seats.

I couldn't let her do this. Not talk herself out of the plan.

"He's a threat, Saligia! Did you know Lydia is missing? No one can find her.”

Saligia closed her eyes and breathed deep. She then leaned back and peered through a gap in her makeshift curtain so she could look at the two doors on the back wall of the set. Door Number One. Door Number Two.

“Morris already checked,” I told her. “There’s nothing behind either one.”

“Poor Lydia,” Saligia said with a sigh. “Too trusting. Probably stuffed in some crawl space on the 28th floor.”

“Saligia! Look, you've got to pull yourself together. Once we've got rid of him, we can figure things out. But until then—“

“I’ve been thinking about this. You know, this death and rebirth business.” Saligia tilted her head and looked into a mirror beside her. With three expert motions, she applied her lipstick. She then compressed her lips together and blotted them on a tissue.

“Sy has this scheme,” she continued. “Door Number Three, he calls it.” She chuckled. What the hell was she talking about? “Ask him to tell you all about it one day. But why do the ones who come to us, come to us? You heard Ida. They are not supposed to send us troubled souls. No one who died violently or by their own hands. Certainly not a murderer. But why then did we get Connie? Or August? Mistakes, I guess. But, mistakes or not, who is it making those decisions?”

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

“Have you started drinking already? Dammit!” I pulled aside the curtain so that we could see him. August. Sitting front row center. I knew Saligia saw him—she flinched. I let the cloth fall back, dropping us into darkness again. “We've got a killer sitting in the audience. And you’re talking philosophy?”

"I know about Lionel," she said. "I remember when he was on our show."

I felt my throat close up.

Of all the times for her to bring this up.

"This isn't the time," I told her, even though I wanted to grab her hand and haul her to the elevator, down to the street, and take her some place safe where we could talk all about it. "After the show. Okay? But we have to deal with August right now." I put a hand firmly on her shoulder. "We can do this."

And I left her there in her shadowy corner.

I looked around. It’d be okay. Nothing bad would happen with all those people around. Just have a good show. I scanned the line of sound technicians and the make-up crew waiting along the side wall. I looked up at Morris in the booth, pushing buttons and talking into his headset. And I even let my eyes rove over the potential contestants seated in the tiered rows in front of me. I didn’t let my eyes settle on August. They just drifted here and there without ever once even registering his presence.

Well, that wasn’t completely true. I knew where he was. I now always knew where he was. Some primal center of my brain kept track of the danger. Proprioception, they call it. That other human sense that lets us always know where a part of our body is in relation to the other bits. It seemed I now had a new limb. One that I was, at the moment, trying to ignore.

I felt nervous, but good. We had a plan. We were being proactive. And, finally, I was closer to getting some answers that had been gnawing at me for so long.

That pivotal night had been almost two years ago. Thursday. Seven o’clock. Marta and I were all ready, like every weekday night, sitting on the sofa. I remember everything, except what we were eating. Probably ice cream. And all ready for Serpientes y Escaleras.

That was back before Michael replaced Willard on the show. So, we sat there in the living room watching on TV as Willard, Bianca, and Saligia acted out moments in the lives of the two contestants. Nothing the least bit unusual.

Not at first.

It came on me slowly that night. The realization that one of the contestant’s stories seemed so familiar. Was it a repeat? That had never happened before. Always new shows.

Then it hit me. One of the contestants. His stories were my brother’s stories. Lionel’s stories.

But not the big one from his life. Not the drugs, not the dishonorable discharge. No mention of the dozens of jobs he had been fired from. Nothing about the car wrecks. No tawdry tales of Juvenile Court. Not our parent’s death. Not even anything about me.

Just little innocent things I knew all about. His shoplifting of candy bars from Walgreens. The time his girlfriend cheated on him with his best friend. The night he won the Karaoke contest.

I was in a strange limbo between shock and fascination.

Marta obviously didn’t see anything unusual. At one point she even became distracted by the toilet running several rooms away. She went off to jiggle the handler. How could she not know? Didn’t any of those stories sound familiar to her?

Of course, they weren’t using his proper name. The contestant was “Leo,” that’s what they called him.

And then I remembered that Lionel always hated his name. When he was a boy he tried to get people to call him Leo. They never did.

But it couldn’t be him. Could it?

The show wasn’t real. The whole thing about sending people off to a new life was just made up.

It had to be.

Besides, that man on the television, that Leo…it wasn’t Lionel.

Was it?

Marta must have still been in the bathroom fussing with the the toilet, because I’m pretty sure she didn’t see me slip to my knees and crawl across the carpet to peer closer, my face inches from the screen.

Was it?

I mean, it could be. The young man, Leo, sat slumped in his chair on that stage, face tilted down. His hair was combed neatly in a part. He had his shirt tucked in buttoned all the way to the collar. Lionel was never so neat. But….

Oh, my god! It might be him.

I wanted so much for this man to look up. So I could see his eyes. But the show ended so quickly. Leo won, and was made to stand, and escorted to Door Number One.

The door closed. Sy played his music. The credits began to roll.

When Marta returned I was there on the floor like a child, crowding the TV.

“Oh no,” she said. “I must have missed something good! It looks like it got exciting.”

I rushed to my room. I wanted to write down everything I could about the show. Before I forgot.

I was him. It was Lionel.

One of the things I wanted to do when I got my job here on the show was to find the video tape of that episode. Watch it again. See if I had missed anything. But I learned that there were no video tapes. None at all. Well, until Ida said they archived the show back at the Network headquarters. In Los Angeles.

Maybe that was where I should be heading. But I had to find out what Saligia knew. She had been here in the studio that day two years ago. With Lionel. She was in his head! Did she remember anything?

All that would have to wait.

We had a murderer to deal with.

And the show was about to start.

As Myra did her ten-second countdown, Michael touched my shoulder as he made his way to his mark for the opening of the show. I looked over and he gave me a thumbs up.

And then it was all applause, music, Sy shouting his opening spiel, and there was Saligia Jones. Radiant. Poised. She had a knack for not only being able to find her light, but to slip slightly to the edge to get the more dramatic and flattering shadows to fall on her face.

If she were drunk, now was not the time anyone would be able to tell. Saligia was, as she had said, a seasoned professional. I’ve discovered that there was an energy that came from performing in front of an audience, and Saligia could harness that energy almost as well as she could work with that more subtle and spooky force that allowed her to not only mentally merge with the contestants, but also bring others in with her.

Sy leaned close to his microphone.

“Saligia, take tight those reigns of your mystical powers and tell the good people at home who tonight’s guests will be.”

Saligia brought her hands up to her temples and closed her eyes. She hummed a long drawn-out note.

I glanced at August. He sat passive, shoulders slumped, eyes unfocused, yet turned in the general direction of Saligia who had lowered her hands until they were reaching out toward the people in the audience as if feeling their auras.

“Darlene,” Saligia said. “Yes. Darlene.” She nodded her head, decisively. Her fingers continued to stir the air in front of her delicately, searching for the next name to call.

From the corner of my eye I could see Ida, arms crossed, watching August with her smug and superior expression.

But my attention was immediately pulled toward August as he sat up straight. Not subdued and docile at all. He smiled directly at me and then he winked. I thought they were supposed to drug him!

“And Helen,” Saligia finally said.

What?

A flutter of white came from the side. It was a sheaf of papers that had slipped from Ida’s hand. She leaned forward, intent on crossing the stage to Saligia—to do what, I didn’t know—but Myra shot out her hand onto Ida’s shoulder to hold her back.

I looked over at Michael, but he had fallen into his role as performer and was grinning to the camera and clapping. There was no time to interrupt the flow, never with live television. I took a deep breath and smiled and applauded along with Michael.

Ed and Valerie brought down the two contestants who had been named. Neither being August. I guess Saligia was too afraid. There was nothing else to do but continue with the show.