Act III Scene VII
When I burst into my dressing room, I do the one thing I swore I wouldn’t do again.
I call out to Cassia in the mirror, risk of being overheard be damned. There are a hundred pieces snapping together in my head. With each one, the picture grows grimmer.
Something isn’t adding up. Jude has Mimicked and spoken to me as someone else at least twice before I came to the Playhouse.
He made me believe he spotted me at the casting call. That he seized the opportunity to make a show of killing the Peacemaker’s daughter in the arena and reclaiming his name as Lead Player.
Now, though, I don’t think that’s true. Jude has been watching me for a long time.
But when I reach my mirror and press my palms to the glass, it’s not my aunt’s face I see.
It’s Mattia’s.
Sharp nails poised for my throat, she lunges through the glass and tackles me to the ground.
Her razor-like nails rake across the base of my marked throat, and I scream, pain exploding up my neck and sending dots across my vision. I throw her off me and into the small side table that collapses under her weight.
“You aren’t welcome here,” she growls, lifting herself from the rubble with inhuman speed. “And you are certainly no Lead Player.”
Mattia runs at me again, and I throw my arms up in time to stop the jagged edge of an ornate candelabra she’s grabbed from introducing itself to the side of my head.
It drags a nasty cut down my forearm instead.
She wants blood. But I can’t suspend my reality and survive her blows without sending my life into another Player.
Something tells me Mattia is not about to be a willing participant.
She actually means to kill me.
I go for the splintered table leg on the ground and wield it like a stake as she corners me, her sparrowlike eyes honing in on my movements.
“I remember your father, you know,” she says. “Pathetic and desperate. Always watching us from afar under claims of reporting back to your council. But he envied us.” She extracts a blade from her belt. “I think you envy us, too.”
She lunges as my back meets the mantel, nowhere left to go. Her dagger misses my eye by the skin of my teeth.
Instead, the dagger plunges into Gene’s portrait behind me, driving into the painting inches from my face. Mattia sneers as I dive beneath her armed hand, silver slicing clean through the canvas as she frees her blade.
A torrent of paper floods through the open slit of Gene’s painting.
The rustling of pages floating to the ground is peculiar enough to give us both pause, heaving breaths as a storm of sheets darkened with ink fills the space between us.
There are hundreds, like the portrait’s been swollen with them, bursting forth like feathers from a torn pillow.
Mattia watches me, and I, Mattia.
We both dive for the pages.
“Diary entries. Must be. Gene was always too sentimental…” Mattia mutters until her voice cuts into silence, mouth agape.
They aren’t diary entries at all.
RIVEN:
Hello.
SIL:
You might as well come in. The show’s just about to start, you know.
The words slice into my memory, sink into my veins.
I reach for another.
TITUS:
Gods, they’re annoying!
MATTIA:
You’ve barely spoken to a single auditionee yet, Titus.
ARIUS:
They may surprise you yet, Titus. Casting calls bring in all kinds.
My first instinct is to toss them into the fireplace and swear I saw nothing. But when I peer up, Gene’s painted face knowingly stares down at me from the frame, the slit from Mattia’s knife gaping from her hair to her shoulder.
For the first time, Gene doesn’t look like a stranger.
I know you.
Something worse than Mattia’s candelabra smashes through my mind. A dam, broken. My breaths quicken, and my head floods with songs and words, lifting a veil I didn’t know was there. It feels wrong, like a treat I’ve stolen and hidden out of guilt.
Then, flashes. My vision burns red and gold, pain flaring through my temples until I can’t think straight.
Mattia screams. It comes out like a wail, distressed and piercing.
“Stop!” I snap at her. Her calls will reach Sil. It’ll summon the whole damned cast to this room.
But as I take in the mess around me, it occurs to me that may be the least of my worries.
A wisp of a shadow corners around Mattia and curls up the wall. With it, a cold breeze falls over the room. The lights begin to dim. Nyxene.
We aren’t supposed to be here. Mattia isn’t supposed to be doing this, saying this—
We know something we aren’t supposed to know.
“We didn’t see this,” Mattia says shakily under her breath. Her long fingers gather pages into her arms. “Riven? We didn’t.” She tosses the stack into the flames, which flare and spit back as she levels a fierce glare at me. “Now, come help me.”
What have I done? I wonder as Mattia gathers another bundle of pages into her arms.
Burning them won’t undo this.
I grip as many pages as I can and stagger to my feet.
And I run.