“What, your mother?” Sil laughs richly. “Gene is no one’s mother. You belong to no one. No one but me and my Playhouse.”
Each word slices deeper, then twists like a knife. No mother. No father.
Player.
“The fourth wall is there to keep you safe, Riven. As was Gene’s. One of you learns and thenallof you are in danger. And she did just that, shared her discovery with another castmate. Jude. Brokehisfourth wall, begging his help. It spreads like a disease every time it happens.”
Jude.Gods, it’s all of us. We’re all characters.
My heart feels like it’s shriveling in on itself, my lungs too tight.
“You characters are fragile, and that’s all Gene was,” he says. “A costume with too much control over the actor beneath. She began to break, like all characters do. Her hair fell out, her memories faded, her skin peeled right off. The Player beneath came to claim its body back, once she was made aware of her own impermanence.”
His words ring true against my sightings of Gene. Her skin cracking, her eyes hollowed out and hungry. The Player underneath was trying to shed the character it played: Gene Hunt.
A role. Nothing more.
He shrugs. “The character of Gene was written with a soft heart. She was horrified of the truth of what she was. Then, discovering the end of her story, that she would die and give Jude her crown…” He shakes his head. “Thatsent her over the edge.”
Her last performance is well-documented, but most people only ever focus on her death—not the breakdown she had first. Gene, racing at the audience, screaming and screaming,“It’s not real! None of this. Don’t believe it. Don’t believe—”
And then falling to the ground, dying there before the audience.
Not a suicide. A murder.
“You poisonedher,” I seethe.
“It did not kill thePlayer, Riven. It would takemuchmore to kill the Player beneath her skin. It only killed the character she was playing, made it easier for the Player to shed Gene Hunt completely. Or, itshouldhave.”
Viscerally, I know this from my time here, before I was evenme.
Our notorious deaths in the Great Dionysia are just a scripted dance: to shed one character and begin the role of another. Dead roles cannot hold on to their Players. In the Playhouse, we call the shedding of a character First Death.
When I die, I won’t be able to hold on to mine. On to Riven.
Second Death is worse. Second Death is undoable. Second Death means to kill the Player underneath. It’s why we’re all intuitively terrified of Eleutheraen gold. It’s nearly the only thing thatcankill us, wholly and completely.
Well, that and—
Gods. Nyxene.
“I saw Gene,” I argue. “She wasn’t dead.”
Sil’s face grows grim. “Either her Player could not, or would not, shed her. It may have been selfish for me to let Gene haunt the Playhouse like she did, hoping one day the Player beneath her skin would peel off that nuisance of a costume. There are so few of you left, you know. I’ve had Nyxene searching for her for ages.”
Well, Nyxene certainly found her, thanks to me. I ratted her out, gave away her hiding spot to the Playhouse’s Stage Manager, thirsting to rip apart anything that doesn’t belong.
“Gene couldn’t speak.” I lower my voice to a whisper. “She kept trying.”
Riven.The word had come from her lips with the effort of moving a mountain.Script.
She was trying to warn me. Tostopme from playing my role exactlyhow I was meant to, a puppet who hasn’t noticed its strings.
“Of course she couldn’t speak! Gene’s character hasn’t had any lines in ages. She has no scenes left. She isn’t even a person, Riven.” Suddenly, he looks sad. “Characters are easy to kill, flimsy and temporary, like you.”
I wince at that.
“A poorly executed Reality Suspension is enough to killyou, your role. What you saw of Gene was the death of a Player.”
