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Palisades Grand Arena, Los Angeles Summer 2013

IF NOT VICTORY, REVENGE!

It was printed in hot-pink marker on the back of the cubicle door, the lettering neat and precise. Ivy Sewell reached to touch it, her fingertips tentative, tender almost across its surface, as she might in another life have caressed a lover’s cheek.

Her hard blue stare locked on to the affirmation. Ivy’s was a malice years in the making, a shoot green in youth that had turned black through adolescence, insidious and strangling as a weed, so that tonight, here, at last, the instant of her retribution had arrived. In the wings, the truth gasped its final throttled breaths; the old order shrugged off a wilted coil. She was deadly. Lethal. Toxic. Poison. And the world prepared to feel her wrath.

There would be before tonight, and after tonight, and nothing would ever be the same again. In the eleventh-floor washroom of LA’s Palisades Grand Arena, on the most televised event in the entertainment world calendar, vengeance was their apocalypse.

Ivy carved a painted fingernail, danger red, into the print, gouging a nub of plaster.

IF NOT VICTORY, REVENGE!

Victory had never been hers. But revenge? Revenge was in her blood.

From inside the stadium she could hear the muted thrum of beats and the united roar of the fans. Ivy imagined the cries were for her, urging her on, baying for the carnage she was about to unleash. She released her breath, tasting salt and iron, her tongue flicking across the split in her lip where she had bitten too hard in anticipation.

Three women.

Each was here to claim the spotlight. Each was an international superstar, a glittering icon with the world at her feet. Robin Ryder, UK talent-show sensation, the rags-to-riches sweetheart rescued from oblivion. Kristin White, global pop phenomenon with the voice of an angel, who had ditched the princess act after tragedy struck. And Turquoise da Luca, America’s number one female vocal artist and now tantalising toast of Tinseltown.

One of them was going to perish.

At the mega-event better known as the ETV Platinum Awards, Ivy Sewell was concerned with one target and one alone: her twin. The hated sister, born identical and torn towards an opposite fate, who had claimed everything Ivy herself should have been, who had snatched it all from her grasp, who had turned her back and slipped so seamlessly into a life of opulence and glamour, forgetting where she had come from or what had gone before.

Ivy shoved the bag into the trashcan, forcing it down with her fists. Later, when it was discovered, they would know how clever she had been. In it lurked the disguise she’d worn, the orange T-shirt with its Burger Delite! logo emblazoned across the front…a whole person, just like that, folded away in a sack. She stared indifferently at the hands that would carry out this great execution. Wrists pale and brittle, like branches in winter; the fingers thin.

Only when the bullet entered would it be over. Only when that flawless skin was ruptured, that smile erased, that heartbeat frozen, one and the same as hers and yet a universe apart, would it be finished: one life in exchange for another.

A rapturous cry exploded. The show was beginning, the stage lit up to welcome the players, the kings and queens of twenty-first-century music, the alphas and the studs and the bitches and the beauties with their diamonds and their hundred-thousand-dollar gowns.

Ivy closed her eyes. The letters were emblazoned on her lids, bright as fire.

IF NOT VICTORY, REVENGE!

The curtain was up. And now it was show time.