Second Death. Permanent.
“It grieves me, but it couldn’t be helped,” Sil says. “Some characters are stickier than others, and there was no getting her to come out of her role. Her Player was a great loss.”
The words tingle on my skin. It’s just a matter of time before the Player within me tries to do the same. Peelsmeoff like an old costume.
“And my father?” I wince and correct myself. “Michail?” I need to know ifsomepart of it was true, whether he was my father or not. “What of him? What happened?”
Sil throws me a pitying look. “He became a liability. After Gene’s unfortunate last performance, as you know, he stood and made all sorts of commotion running from my theatre. He nearly made it out, too.”
“But he didn’t,” I say.
“Jude was faster.” The director pulls in a deep breath. “Who’s to say what Michail planned to do—turn himself in? Kill you? Admit to the council what he’d done? Humans and their hearts are unpredictable. It was a risk we couldn’t take. In fact, his death was a damned nuisance for us to deal with. I had to correct your storyline around his absence. Very messy.”
He watches me for a reaction, and I give him none. My chest is too tight. So he goes on.
“Then came marks.” He nods and gestures at my neck. “We didn’t know if we’d see you again after those became commonplace. A drastic measure the council justified with the Peacemaker’s death. But here you are, home, just like you swore.”
Something irks me, a tinge of numbness that splinters down my neck where my mark used to be, trailing through my shoulder. Slowly, I tug at my sleeve to check, and a cry builds in my chest.
Gold blisters from my clavicle to my shoulder cap, eating away at the skin like a disease. It’s spreading.
It looks like Jude’s wound.
“Are these lines?” I say, panicked. “What I’m saying right now?”
“No,” says Sil. Anger slices into his voice for the first time. “You’ve gone entirely off script. Not to mention, you’ve made a habit of breaking the most important rule of the Playhouse.”
“The fourth wall,” I mutter, studying my wound.
“It isn’t an old tradition or myth of the theatre. It’s there toprotectyou,” Sil reminds me, and he closes the last couple of steps between us.
He pulls my hand away from the blistering well of gold bleeding through my skin, like a parent examining a scraped elbow. “Look what happens when you become aware. Characters are little more than skin. They’ll come right off if you aren’t careful.”
I jolt, tugging away.
That isn’t true. I am me. I am Riven. I amnotjust skin.
Even if what’s beneath my skin isn’t me at all.
Act III: Scene XII
“You mean Jude has known who I am. All this time.” The arena echoes my voice back at me.
“But look what his knowledge has cost him!” Sil says, swinging an arm wide to take in the entire stage. “He’s hanging on by a thread. Tearing his costume. Forgetting his lines. We only needed him to last long enough to compete in the Great Dionysia and give you his crown. Then his Player will shed him, too, and begin anew.”
No.The very idea of Jude being torn from himself, being tossed out in favor of a new role, makes rage boil under my skin.
He’s more than that. He’s more than that to me.
My mind races. Everything looks different now. How he forgot my name. Couldn’t recall his own favorite color. Simple things that should be at the tip of his tongue.
His memory is only as good as my own, false and deceitful. Like a prettily painted house whose walls are filled with rot and decay.
Jude didn’t run into me that first night in the Playhouse. He waswaiting. Barely clinging to his set storyline: that of a selfish Player seeking to reclaim his crown.
“Do we all know?” I ask, my voice hoarse. But I think I know the answer.
“Thank the gods, no!” Sil huffs. “Once a fourth wall is broken, it cannot be rebuilt. Characters will start dying from that point forward until the Player sheds them completely.”
