Act III Scene XI
Sil claps, a proud smile on his lips.
I internally strangle the thing beneath my skin, shoving it deeper and deeper before it can resurface again. But the Player underneath is awake now, aware. It fights me back. For a blink, I struggle to remember my name, grasping at my memories like straws.
“My only Player I would trust with such a role. And you played it well. You nearly broke my old heart when you showed up looking like you did.”
I stare back down at the page crumpled on the floor beside the others. At Jude’s first words to me. “These aren’t records,” I say. “They’re written before they happen. All of it. It was scripted.”
The Script. The book that rests like a breathing entity in Sil’s hands. Director and playwright. Some distant memory hovers at the edges of my mind: of reading the script for this story many years ago. Of signing on for this role.
The role of Riven Hesper. I wanted this. Or, the thing inside me did.
“That can’t be.” Denial throttles my mind. “My father—”
“Michail is not your father,” Sil interrupts. “He was a mortal and a traitor to the North you seem to love so much.”
Dorian’s comment races back to me, chills my blood.
Your Player-worshipping traitor of a father.
He knew my father. Already suspected something was off.
Sil goes on. “Michail Hesper was obsessive. Selfish, bitter! He hungered for fame and notoriety and was willing to do anything for it. He came to my Playhouse—as an emissary, no less. Some vain effort from your human council to get ahead of the treaty years before its expiration.”
“And you…killed him?” I say, unsure how much more of this I can take.
“I made him an offer, Riven. I’d turn him into a hero. Peacemaker, they would call him!” Sil laughs to himself. “Michail returned home with my miraculous agreement. A compromise. A promise to keep my Players contained in the Playhouse. By law.”
His smile makes me sick to my stomach.
“Of course, after losing so many of my Players, I never planned to let any of you out again anyway.”
Why would Sil sign into such a thing? I asked Jude.
Because it was only ever for Sil’s benefit, to ensure the Players stayed contained, controlled, under threat of their lives if they tried to disobey. What worth is a director without his Players?
“But your human council seemed overjoyed, and Michail was renowned for his work as a Peacemaker. Just as I promised.”
His life’s work. I’ve always thought of him as a hero, all of it a lie.
“And in exchange,” Sil says, “Michail would plant you in the North with his own family. A Player in the costume of a child. Convince your mother you were rescued from Revelers, the orphan of distant relatives.”
You look so much like your father, my mother would always say. I often pondered the confusion in her voice. The dip in her brow.
As far as she knew, I was an orphan. I had no right to look like her long-dead husband. It must have hurt her every day, the insinuation of an affair living in her own home.
Even though that’s not what I am.
What I am is so much worse.
“There, you would grow up as one of them and, one day, come home.” Sil grins. “And you would bring the rest of Theatron to our doorstep with you. Willingly.”
Me. A fox in the henhouse.
“But I look like him,” I argue.
Sil scoffs. “You ought to! Your costume was designed after Michail. Notice how it’s captivated your council, to see the Peacemaker’s face onstage? Notice how those from the North trust you in a way they would never trust a Player from South of the Cut.”
I’m the one to scoff now. “Trust? They were scared of me.” And had every right to be.
“Small-town gossip doesn’t concern me, Riven. Though I am sorry your costume wore down so badly after the marking—that must have been a frightful sight,” Sil says without emotion. “Your face in the papers does, though.”
A face all of Theatron will know. With golden eyes.
“So why kill him? Michail,” I press. Surely, his death could only hurt the Playhouse’s image, murdering a famous Peacemaker Sil practically invented.
“That was not supposed to happen.” Sil frowns. “In all his obsessive visits to the Playhouse, Michail did the most foolish thing a person can do.”
I brace myself. I know where this is going. Jude told me. “He fell in love with a Player. Gene.”
“Yes.” Sil’s face falls. “Mortals are not trustworthy or reliable. They fill themselves with guilt over the smallest things.” He feigns sadness.
“After Michail learned the truth, he took it upon himself to break Gene’s fourth wall.
Provide her proof of what she was: a character.
Temporary. Mortals decide love is not love unless it is all true!
But love is man’s own play, in which he often casts the wrong characters. ”
Sil gestures to the fallen pages at my feet, and I follow them. Pages Gene stole.
Did she go mad after realizing what she was?
I look at my hands. What we are. Just speaking the words makes my mind feel like it’s about to snap in half.
“I—” The lurking suspicion that had hung in the back of my mind resurfaces. “I thought maybe she was my…”
“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 then all of you are in danger. And she did just that, shared her discovery with another castmate. Jude. Broke his fourth 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. “That sent 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 poisoned her,” I seethe.
“It did not kill the Player, Riven. It would take much more 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, it should have.”
Viscerally, I know this from my time here, before I was even me.
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 that can kill 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. To stop me from playing my role exactly how 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 kill you, your role. What you saw of Gene was the death of a Player.”
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. Peels me off like an old costume.
“And my father?” I wince and correct myself. “Michail?” I need to know if some part 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 to protect you,” 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 am not just skin.
Even if what’s beneath my skin isn’t me at all.