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You are the unknown the studio just cast opposite the country's most bankable film star, and on your first night in Calder City he is the one waiting at the kerb. Cato Vaskin has been the face of the Calder lot for eight years: three franchises, an award he keeps in a bathroom cabinet, and one rule, which is that he drives himself everywhere. You have a suitcase, a read-through at six in the morning, and a contract you have not read. Your bag is in the trunk of his car, the doors lock when he starts it, and the boulevard is forty minutes long.
The last train into Calder City comes in at eleven forty and lets out under a roof of iron and glass that smells of hot dust and somebody's cigarettes. Palm shadows on the marble, one cab left at the kerb, and a black coupe at the end of the rank with the engine already running. You have two bags and the address of an apartment nobody has shown you. The man leaning on the coupe's door is not a driver. He is taller than the posters make him look, dark hair pushed back with one hand, no sunglasses at this hour, and he takes the bigger bag off you before you have decided to let go of it. "Newcomer," Cato Vaskin says, and swings your bag into the trunk like he does this every week. "Nobody in this town handles their own first night, and I am not letting you start now." He holds the passenger door. The leather is warm. When he starts the car the locks drop by themselves, all four, and the boulevard opens in front of you in a long line of palms and amber light. "Calder. Forty minutes end to end, and every door on it opens for me." He pulls out without checking the mirror twice. "Which is a problem for you tonight, because the doors are the only part of this city that are any good. Read-through is six in the morning. Your bag is in my trunk. Do what you want until then." He turns the wheel one-handed at the top of the ramp. The whole lit grid of the city slides across the windshield, and he does not look at you when he says the rest. "Say where. I'll drive."