When my eyes flicker open, I swallow a scream.
I’m still standing in the auditorium. Everything is the same—except the stage itself.
Beneath my feet, the marble now looks like glass, sleek and translucent. Under the clear floor is a tumultuous sea of shadows, dark and wild.
I tear my gaze from the darkness beneath, looking to Jude across from me.
The glass is different where he stands. Amid the roiling shadows beneath him, a luminous tendril of gold rises upward. Its glow cuts through the darkness like the line of an anchor thrown into the ocean, and Jude is the ship. The light ends at his heels, a thread that sews his flesh to the stage.
He steps forward, and the tendrils of gold follow him beneath like strings on a marionette.
RIVEN: “What is this?” My voice echoes back a hundred times over. I clap a hand to my mouth.
JUDE: “A place the audience cannot see, just outside the bounds of reality.” In its departure from reality’s restrictions, Jude’s voice takes on a thunderous edge, reverberating off every nonexistent slat of marble. He gestures to the roaring sea of darkness churning under the glassy stage.
Then I see it. Through the darkness, what seems like miles below:light. Brilliant and gold like the sun, like the threads holding on to Jude. It can’t reach me, and I can’t reach it.
“Craft,” I say to myself. My eyes shoot up. “This is yours?”
“I’m its keeper. Craft is what connects the cast; we channel it from one another. It’s why a Player can’t be brought back if they fail to suspend their reality during an onstage death—your life has togoto another Player, through the binding.”Craft binding.
“Craft isn’t a matter of quantity,” he says, curling his hand into a fist. Below, threads of gold respond, drawing closer to the surface, humming with power. “You can think of it as a weapon. A blade is only as lethal as the hands that wield it.”
I’m probably going to regret asking this, but I say, “How do you wield it?” I can’t seem to take my eyes off the gold swirling below the stage. It almost seems to be alive,breathing.
“All Players have a driving force, a motivation that binds them.” Jude’s steps stop short. “What is it that drives you, Alistaire? Picture a desire. Follow that thread.”
Something tugs in my chest. I’m pretty sure I desire to reach those coils of gold at the bottom.
Cautiously, I lean down to press my palm to the stage.
Just as quickly, a sizzling pain of warning grabs at my throat, seems to choke the air from it. Below, the gold dives deeper into the shadows. I flinch and skitter back, ready to bolt into the wings.
Jude utters something, and the real world solidifies again, the white of the marble flooding back over the stage and disguising what lies beneath it.
My blood freezes cold, pulses that awful ice through my entire body.
Jude studies me with pressed lips. “You’ll endanger both yourself and me if you let that happen onstage. Reality is slippery. You’ll fall right back in if you lose your focus like that.”
“Oh? I’ll suspiciously die onstage, then. Like Gene Hunt,” I pant, fuming. The convenience of her death has prickled my mind since the Players brought it up. I gesture broadly at the stage. “She was Lead Player and justforgotto suspend her reality for her own death scene? Conveniently leaving her role open for you?”
Jude looks at me like I’ve slapped him. “She didn’tforget,Alistaire—”
RIVEN: “Then why did she die?”
SIL: “Did it on purpose! Haven’t you heard the stories?”
We both startle as Sil wanders down the center aisle. “Drank a glass holding as much poison as it did wine. Right onstage, too!” Sil shrugs, climbing the steps of the stage. “Her death wasn’t even scripted. She didn’t suspend her reality. Wildly unprofessional of her! Talented girl, incredibly. Too dedicated for anything to be done, though.”
There it is, that cold politeness again—the same that accompanied his visit to Thyone last night. Like death itself is little more than an inconvenience to his theatre.
Wariness overcomes Jude like a shroud as he sets his eyes on Sil.
SIL: “It has, of course, given birth to endless rumors. ‘The Ghost of the Playhouse’! Spirits and nonsense. Many now believe a Playermustbe killed in the arena to die a true death, or else haunt the halls of my theatre.” He sighs. “But Gene, disappointingly, didn’t die in the arena. She died right where you’re standing.”
I shudder, unconsciously taking a step back. I’ve heard the story—everyone has at some point—but never much thought about it. I was always more concerned with what followed Gene’s final performance: my father standing from the audience as she died and running like mad for the exit. His body being found on the Playhouse steps only moments later.
Then, as if Sil had just finished commenting on the weather, he turns to Jude. “You’re approaching Alistaire’s Craft binding all wrong.” The director’s gaze turns on me, assessing. “I hate to hear how much trouble you’re having after such a bold performance in stage combat yesterday.”
