Act III Scene XXIV
Hugging Jude feels like coming home and shutting the door after you. It feels like the peace and stillness that follows. In spite of how mad I am at him, my resolve softens, my anger briefly melting away into the warmth of his chest.
But my ribs feel like they’re about to crack, so I wheeze out, “Jude, would you please put me down—”
“Do you know what it is to miss a person for fifteen years?” He tucks his face into my hair. “I’ll put you down when I’m ready.”
The lights flicker again, so I guess Jude’s metaphorical curtain is already closing. Noticing this, he tenses, sets me on solid ground, hands finding my face. “Gods, it all went wrong.” His eyes are bright, restless. “I wasn’t sure you’d make it home.”
I exhale a laugh, but it comes out bitter as I press my palm to my throat. “Yeah, well. I almost didn’t.”
The corners of his smile fall. “That wasn’t supposed to happen. I tried to—well, to stop it.”
He did, just with a different face. Almost dragged me back to the Playhouse and foiled Sil’s carefully laid plans. And in the end, left me with a warning.
Come with me or you will suffer.
“And then afterward,” he says, quiet, “I still listened for you, just in case.”
A blurry memory clicks into place. Nights I couldn’t sleep after the marking, exhausted from pain but alive with a rush of anger. I blamed it all on my so-called curse.
But deep in the quiet, during the longest nights, I heard singing. A soft, rich humming from the drawer of my nightstand, where my mother’s hand mirror hid. One night, I even opened the drawer, pressed my fingers to the glass. As years passed, I grew certain I must have dreamed the whole thing.
“I heard you,” I say, realizing. “It—” Made me feel like I wasn’t alone. “It helped.”
“You were so far away from home, with no idea who you were. And I thought maybe hearing—” Jude stops, shakes his head. “I don’t know what I thought. You were getting weaker and weaker. Then, one night, everything just went silent.”
Galen was furious when he discovered the mirror. Tossed it right out the window.
Jude runs his fingers through his hair, staring off somewhere. “And Michail—gods, he wasn’t supposed to die. I messed it all up, Riven.”
“You stopped him from—” I shiver, not finishing the sentence.
Jude swallows, nodding. “That last performance with Gene. She’d already broken my fourth wall, and she made a big show of telling Sil she’d burn the Playhouse down before shedding her role—as if she could just leave and go live a simple human life.
I think it’s all in the world that she was ever after. She just wanted out.”
Something winds tighter in my chest at the thought. That we can’t go live normal lives. I’m proof enough of that.
And I want out.
The corners of my eyes burn, and it takes me a moment to understand why. I can barely recall who Gene was to me, but something stirs in my heart—the same deep and irreversible sense of loss that caved into my chest when my brother was taken from me.
I realize I’ve stepped away, put space between us, and Jude notices, too. Is looking through me the same way he did that day in the snow, like he’s desperately trying to pluck the magic combination of words out of the air between us to convince me he isn’t some unfeeling monster.
Slowly, I nod at him. Go on.
Jude’s throat bobs. “When she collapsed, I looked up from the stage and saw Michail rise from his seat. Then he took off for the doors.” Jude shakes his head, as if to shake off the memory.
“The curtain fell, and I’ve never run so fast in my life.
I cornered him before he reached the lobby.
I don’t know what he meant to do, but he had a knife in his hands—that same knife you brought in here.
For a moment, it was like there was no script. No lines.”
His eyes wander to a far corner of the terrace.
“He ran, tried to escape. At some point, we ended up here. And I…” He scrubs a hand over his face, not finishing the sentence.
“It was all too late. I’d broken character, badly.
That’s when this started getting worse—” He moves into the last of the torchlight by the ledge, tugs one sleeve up far enough to reveal where nicks of gold mar his skin.
“It spread slowly at first, but the damage was done.”
He drops his hands to his sides and looks pointedly down toward the landing, where Michail’s body was discovered.
“The audience was filing out when they found him. It messed everything up. And after Sil made such a big show of the Peacemaker.” His voice wavers.
“Fear spread. The North declared marking children not long after that. Sil let me out to check on you—make sure you survived, but I…” Attempted to drag me back to the Playhouse instead.
I picture the Player I saw, her voice sweet and conniving, luring me away.
“Well, I might have not exactly followed the instructions.” He tries to laugh, but it comes out hollow as I look to his scarred hand and refrain from reaching for it.
I draw my shoulders in instead, the guilt weighing them down.
I could have hurt him much worse that day.
“Hell, I’d have gone instead, but Sil, he—” Jude grimaces, and I wonder if I’m imagining the shame coating his expression. “Sil didn’t think any of the rest of us would survive that long out there.”
Judging by how quickly Jude fell apart during our little adventure through Syrene, Sil was probably right about that.
It’s quiet for a moment. A familiar, nice quiet.
“Were they good to you?” Jude clears his throat. “Your—your family.” He sounds nervous about the answer, unsure what sort of hands I’d been left in.
“I don’t…” It hurts to think. It all looks different through this lens. I sigh. “You first.”
“My family never existed, now that I think about it.” He shakes his head. “I’m not actually from Thymele. I have all the memories as if I were, though, because Jude is from Thymele. I can’t always tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not.”
That’s often the case in the Playhouse.
I collect my memories—real, true memories.
“I was raised by a mother.” In my mind’s carousel of recollections, her eyes darted away from me more and more as I grew, her lips white with worry.
“But I think maybe she was scared of me, knew something was wrong.” Part of me knows not to blame her, not to be bitter.
After all, I grew up looking like Michail.
At best, I seemed like the evidence of an affair.
At worst, the suggestion of an affair with a Player.
I’m neither of those things. And worse.
But none of it dulls the sting of her stiff, one-word answers to me growing up. The way her shoulders tensed when I passed. The flinch in her expression when I spoke. The way she’d only ever peer above my head and never into my eyes.
“She chose not to be a mother to me either way.”
The words settle between us.
I think harder and decide, “That man planted a Player. In his own home. All for fame and recognition and the obsessive love of another woman—Gene, a character just like me, who never really existed—”
“You exist,” Jude says firmly. “I exist. Just…differently from everyone else.” He looks thoughtful for a moment. “Is what he did so unthinkable? Betraying the world for love.”
I watch him back. “No,” I say. “I don’t think it’s unthinkable at all.”
That’s exactly the problem.
I clear my throat. “But I grew up. Normal, I thought, until they took me to be marked.”
A shadow passes over his eyes. “I thought the marking would kill you. But Sil swore the safest thing we could do was let it play out and trust that you were strong enough to make your way home to us. I still snuck out once more after to check on you, and he nearly had my head for that.” Jude watches the moon, full and bright above us.
“And then I waited, wondering if it was enough. If you were alive or dead.”
This isn’t how I’m supposed to die. That thought sliced through me the night I was attacked at the casting call. Because that wasn’t the end of my story.
Now that I think about it, I know exactly how and when my role ends. I read it ages ago.
A shudder skitters up my spine.
Another torch blows out.
“I watched from the window the night of the casting call, waiting for you to come home. And you did, just like you promised,” he says.
At the memory, I imagine myself standing outside the Playhouse, entranced by that voice that seemed to clasp around my heart like a fishhook and pull my feet forward.
I think I could have listened to it forever. I think I have listened to it forever.
“But you didn’t look anything like you were supposed to.
” He stares down at the gates like he sees something I can’t, his voice breaking.
“You were skin and bones. Your face was gray. And gods, the way you looked at me, like you were terrified and disgusted at once when all I wanted to do was pick you up and never put you back down.”
And I subsequently made it my personal mission to be a thorn in his side. Gods, he didn’t deserve half of what I put him through.
“I thought—” I gather the words, but they sound ridiculous now.
“I thought Craft had poisoned me. Everyone did,” I say, watching another torch start to dim.
“Food never made me full. Blankets never made me warm. And gods, I hated it when anyone touched me…” I trail off, cringing.
“Everyone’s hands were always sharp and cold and—”
“Food doesn’t sustain us; performing does,” he interrupts, clearing his throat.
“Craft is the only thing that can warm your blood, and you were all but cut off from your bridge by that mark. And touch—” He shudders, too.
“You’re a Player, the antithesis to reality.
Humans, though—they’re full with it. They can’t escape their reality.
It’s why they flock to us for distraction. Their touch should repel you.”
I look at him. “I was never cursed.”