Something like panic flashes across his face. Then, quick and merciless as a whip, Jude grips the end of the spear before I can pull it from my side, and twists.
“Fight me, Riven!” he roars as the city crumbles, my illusion slipping and breaking as the urge to suspend my reality, to let this body die for a moment, overwhelms my thoughts. Darkness bruises my vision. Above us, cracks in the temple dome spread like tree branches, ready to fall in a hailstorm of rock and debris. Marble splits beneath my back.
My mind begs for rest, to release the illusion and embrace the shadows hovering over my vision, eager to take me. I am so tired of fighting.
Surely, Sil knows by now. Knows something has gone wrong.
JUDE: “Thesecondthing I will have you know before the end of this.” The skin across his left eyebrow is splitting, gold bleeding viciously down the side of his face. His costume tearing more as I push us further and further off script. “There is no true good, and no evil. Only those powerful enough to decide which is which.”
My eyes narrow at the chain around his neck—bare now. The coin gone.
Two sides of a shiny coin used to purchase terrible things.
I will not be used anymore.
In the distance, I hear screams. The roar of the audience. Someone calling my name.
Jude gives the spear a final twist, shouting at me tofight back,but blood roars in my ears over his words.
Then: exactly what Jude wants. Something visceral and unforgiving boils in my blood, rises to the surface. The Player beneath my skin, summoned by the dangerous realization that I’m refusing my role, a marionette yanking on its own strings.
White-hot Craft bursts behind my eyes.
My gaze turns on Jude, and fury frames it.I’m going to kill you.
No.I sever the thought, strangle the overwhelming intention to fight, to kill, to rip the spear from my flesh and slash it across Jude’s throat.
Shadows eclipse my vision, my blood burning through my veins. With a cry, I throw my hand onto the marble and voice to the stone a final command.
Before Jude can react, the dome falls and the ground splits open, swallowing us both.
Act III: Scene XXX
My fingernails scrape at the splintering floorboards, cold and rotting. Then the smell hits me: snow and oak.
Pain cleaves through my side as I push myself up to take in my surroundings, one hand clumsily stanching the blood and discovering shreds of my dress drying into the rapidly healing spear wound.
I’m alone in a cabin. And I’ve been here before.Dorian. I recognize the chair I was tied to in the corner.
Fear bobs in my throat when I notice the bottle, there at the very center, its serpentine silver top. Poison of Echidna.
“Go on,” a voice growls. It sounds like Dorian’s. “Since you loathe your life so.”
I picture the bottle I’d seen, wrapped in layers of satin in Jude’s dressing room. He must have brought it into the arena. Not to force to my mouth, but just to see ifI’ddo it.
Because I almost had, that day Dorian waved the vial in my face. I’d considered it.
Now I grip the poison and hurl it at the wall.
A sparkle of glass sprinkles over the floor like rain as I stagger to my feet and run for the door, grabbing the handle and yanking it open. I hurry outside, the shock of snow pressing into my sandaled toes nearly making me stumble. But I keep running, weaving among twisted branches and jumping over fallen logs.
Night is thick in the air, and everywhere I look, there’s nothing—nothing but the stretch of tall, dark trees and twisted branches along the side of a steep precipice of ice and stone. I slow to catch my breath and walk over to the edge of the cliff, peer down at the rushing black river far below.
I steel myself, but hair rises on the back of my neck and a cold shiver rolls down my spine. I’m being watched. “Where are you?” I call out. The ache of sleet soaks my heels. “Show yourself.”
A long shadow emerges from behind a tree.
My hand presses at my side to stem the flow of blood. A prop metal spear wound isn’t enough to incapacitate me, but my legs have begun to wobble as the figure moves in my direction, slow and deliberate. I dread the light, waiting for it to shine over Jude’s face. But when he steps into the dim moonglow, it’s not Jude.
