The air inside the Louvre's Denon Wing tasted of dust, history, and the cold, unyielding scent of ancient stone. While the cameras were focused on Lindsay's uncanny, clockwork precision in rebuilding the Venus de Milo, and the echoes of Sierra's orchestrated wails bounced off the vaulted ceilings, Izzy stood in the shadows of a fallen pediment.
For the world watching through the lens, Izzy was currently "Explosivo," or perhaps "Brainzilla"—a chaotic blur of ginger hair and manic energy, humming a tuneless song about dynamite. But here, tucked away from the prying eyes of Chris McLean's production crew, the mask didn't just slip. It cracked.
She looked down at a fragment of white marble near her boot. It was a hand—or at least, the three remaining fingers of one—reaching out from the rubble of a forgotten centaur. It was jagged, broken, and utterly still.
Just like me, she thought, the hyperactive buzz in her brain smoothing out into a terrifying, crystalline silence.
For years, Izzy had been a master of the mosaic. She had taken the broken pieces of her own brilliance and rearranged them into the image of a court jester. She had learned early on that the world was frightened by a girl who could calculate the trajectory of a falling star or rewrite a legal contract in her head. A girl like that was a threat. But a girl who talked to spiders? A girl who blew things up because she liked the "pretty colors"? That girl was a character. That girl was safe. That girl got screen time.
She looked across the hall at Lindsay. The blonde girl was moving with a strange, hypnotic grace, fitting arms to torsos and shins to thighs. Lindsay wasn't overthinking it; she was seeing the lines of beauty that connected the fragments.
Izzy felt a sharp, stabbing envy. She wished her own reconstruction could be that simple.
She reached down and picked up a small, sharp shard of marble. She turned it over in her palm, feeling the edge bite into her skin. To the producers, she was a punchline. To her teammates, she was a liability. Even to Noah—the only one whose eyes occasionally narrowed with a suspicion that hinted he saw the ghost of a person behind the prank—she was a chaotic variable to be managed.
"Is the role getting too heavy, Isabella?" she whispered to herself, her voice devoid of its usual high-pitched squeak. It was low, melodic, and weary.
The "role." That was the word, wasn't it? She had come to this show as an audition. She wanted Hollywood to see her range. She wanted the scouts to see a girl who could disappear into a persona so completely that they couldn't tell where the actress ended and the madness began. She wanted to be the next great Method legend.
But as she watched the Venus de Milo rise from the dust under Lindsay's hands, Izzy realized the terrifying truth of the museum: Statues are beautiful because they are frozen. They are perfect because they cannot change. By becoming a "character," she had turned herself into a monument of her own making. She was trapped in stone, condemned to repeat the same frantic gestures and the same manic laughs until there was nothing left of the girl who actually liked the scent of old books and the quiet logic of a chess set.
She walked toward a mirror-polished granite slab near the entrance. The reflection that stared back was a mess of lime-green fabric and wild hair. She looked at her eyes. They were bright—too bright. The pupils were dilated from the adrenaline of the act.
I am a masterpiece of broken things, she realized.
She looked back at the puzzles. She saw how the pieces of the statues were being forced back together with industrial glue and desperation. They would never be what they were before. The cracks would always show.
Suddenly, the weight of the "Brainzilla" mask felt like a physical pressure against her skull, a suffocating heat. She had spent so long building a facade of chaos that she had forgotten how to be still. She had spent so long pretending to be broken that she had actually fractured her soul.
"The mask is the museum," she murmured. "And I've been hiding in the gift shop."
She heard Alejandro's voice from the other side of the hall, smooth and honeyed, directing his team with the precision of a general. He was a mask-wearer too, but his mask was a shield. Hers was a cage.
She looked at the shard in her hand one last time before dropping it. It clattered against the floor, a tiny, insignificant sound in the vastness of the Louvre.
This was Paris. The city of art. The city where old things were preserved and celebrated for their scars. Lindsay was rebuilding a goddess from fragments, proving that even when a thing is shattered, its essence remains.
Izzy took a deep breath, the cold museum air filling her lungs. She felt the first real shift in her heart. She wasn't going to wait for a film scout to find her. She wasn't going to wait for Chris McLean to give her a script.
If she was going to be a masterpiece, she had to stop being a caricature. She had to stop gluing the wrong pieces together just to make people laugh.
She stepped out from the shadows, her face instantly contorting back into a wide, senseless grin. She let out a loud, piercing whoop and did a cartwheel into the center of the room, nearly knocking over a vase.
"Look at me! I'm a spinning top! I'm a tornado of French culture! Wheeeee!"
The cameras swiveled toward her. Chris smirked. The Amazons rolled their eyes. Noah sighed and rubbed his temples.
But as Izzy spun, her eyes remained cold and clear. The performance was perfect—perhaps the best she had ever given. But it was also her final act. Underneath the spinning green blur, the marble was settling. The pieces were shifting.
In a few hours, under the iron shadow of the Eiffel Tower, she would let the statue fall. She would let the world see the cracks. And for the first time in her life, Isabella would be more interesting than Izzy.
She wasn't just a drop of shame. She was an escape artist, and she was finally breaking out of herself.