Book Five, Chapter 43: The Femme Fatale

Book Five, Chapter 43: The Femme Fatale

"We really cannot risk staying here," I said, but I might as well have been talking to myself because Michael and Andrew could not resist questioning Lila.

My friends seemed to agree that the interrogation was more critical than whatever risk standing at the entrance of the Powerworks Pavilion might hold.

I kept my head on a swivel, looking for Omens. I didn't know of any that would threaten us, but we were certainly surrounded.

So, if one of the Omens turned out to be mobile, we would be in trouble because there were some high-level storylines around us.

If it turned out that the werewolves in the monster lair up the mountain could somehow leave their invisible chains and come down to us, we would be dead.

There were no cool heads among us except perhaps Andrew’s and perhaps Ramona's. What a bad Hysteric.

We were all either scared or confused or angry.

"Why did you do that?" Michael asked, with a fury that was usually reserved for enemies. "You got Logan and Avery killed. You got us killed!"

Lila, much like her surrogate in the storyline, had disappeared into a catatonia that Michael's words could not pierce.

"Lila, talk to me. You've always trusted me. We’ve always trusted each other," Andrew said. "If you have an explanation, please tell us."

They were so preoccupied with their own issues that they were uninterested in us. They tried to break her silence, but it seemed like it was taking forever.

Lila did eventually start talking.

"You don't understand," she said. "I had to."

Andrew, in a tone that was far too calm, said, "Why did you have to do that? You knew where you were leading us, didn't you? You knew there would be monsters there."

"I didn't know exactly," Lila said. "I didn't know it was a monster lair. I just knew I was supposed to take you up the mountain."

A quick scan of Lila's tropes showed me that she did have a powerful scouting ability on par with my own, if not better. But it wasn't clear if it worked on monster lairs. Hers only worked on Omens. Mine at least gave me a clue of other dangers with the anxiety it caused me.

However, her trope also allowed her to find safe paths through Sound Stages to get around the Carousel, a concept that boggled my mind.

"Who told you to take us up the mountain?" Andrew asked.

"I can't tell you. She'll get mad at me."

Andrew tried to pry further to find out who had instructed Lila to lead them up a mountain to their doom.

It was no use; she had gone silent again.

"Alright, wait a minute," Antoine said. "Now you have to talk. What happened to you on the mountain? Werewolves attacked you, right?"

Michael did not take his eyes off Lila and did not answer.

Andrew thought for a moment, took a deep breath, removed his glasses, breathed condensation onto them, and began to clean them.

Then he looked at Antoine.

"She led us up the mountain toward the storyline we were going to run. There's a path—you can barely see it through the trees. As we walked, we found a group of fifteen or twenty NPCs loitering. As far as we could tell, nothing was alarming, no more alarming than Carousel usually is. I believe most of them were KRSL employees. But then we continued to walk, and suddenly the sun went down, and the moon rose, and those NPCs... you can guess the rest. They got Logan and Avery, two of our teammates. But I suppose you already know that because you just rescued us. And if you can rescue us, and you know there are werewolves on the mountain, then you’ve no doubt done some investigating."

He cleared his throat.

"And since you know all I told you, you know that I'm telling the truth. So I hope that you can honestly explain what's going on. I see that my siblings are among your party, but your levels are higher. In fact, your levels are not uniform at all. I expect something traumatic has happened since we were last here."

He spoke matter-of-factly and without any blatant aggression.

"We're the team that got here after you guys got postered," Antoine answered.

Andrew nodded.

"It was my understanding that Rescue Tropes had disappeared. Would you care to explain why we're alive here today?"

Lila, who had remained silent, suddenly struck up a curiosity and looked straight at Antoine. She wanted to know the answer, too, and if she was compromised somehow, it was best that she didn't get it.

"Hold on,” Antoine said. “We're not going to tell you anything while she is listening. I assume you heard the story of Winston Ashwood. We certainly did, and it looks like this is the same kind of scheme he pulled."

Andrew nodded.

"Yes, he was before our time, but we heard the story. Psychic player gone rogue, sending innocents to their deaths," Andrew said. "You're right; this does seem to be the same sort of treachery."

But was it possible she knew another secret, a deeper one?

"Was Roxy doing the same thing Winston Ashwood was?" Kimberly asked. "They knew each other, right?"

"They did. She said as much," Dina said.

"No," I said. "Roxy was only here for a short while when Winston Ashwood was postered, maybe months. But there's no way..."

Why would she keep the truth from me? We shared an important secret already. Why would she not tell me if she had another?

Had she been part of Project Rewind, or had she really learned of it through a trope, as Lila believed?

"She was my friend at first," Lila said. "She helped me learn the game. Eventually, she told me the truth. Please don't tell her I said anything..."

She trailed off, perhaps realizing that she was not in a position to ask for favors.

"I will say this is disappointing," Andrew said, looking at us. "Camp Dyer had never had this sort of drama, but it does figure that something lingered underneath it all. Roxy was always keeping her secrets."

He looked at Michael.

"Like where missing players went," Michael said. "I knew all those fuckers were hiding something."

Antoine glanced back at me.

If we could hide it, it would be best that they never knew that I was part of that exclusive club of Secret Keepers.

As I thought about that, I realized that Roxy had told me that name—Secret Keepers—and it just so happened that that exact phrase had been used in the text of Project Rewind.

She had known something.

What were the odds that dozens of teams of crack players never got a whiff of Project Rewind, despite their powerful Insight Tropes, and one Femme Fatale player was able to crack it?

It made some sense.

The Femme Fatale would have a way of being privy to conspiracies and dark secrets. In fact, they would be very good at keeping some of their own.

There was no telling how many players had picked up tidbits of information with their Tropes and never realized the significance of it—never realized that Project Rewind had required their deaths.

"We should take her back to Camp Dyer," Andrew said. He then turned to Lila and said, "You'll come with us, right? I promise we will do you no harm. We need to get to the bottom of this."

Lila nodded. “I’m sorry,” she started to say.

"Good luck," Isaac said.

"What do you mean?" Andrew asked.

Isaac looked at Antoine and then at me, but of course, he wasn’t going to keep a secret from his brother, not for us.

"All the players at Camp Dyer are dead," Isaac said. "You guys didn’t get very far in your quest, but they sure did."

"Hold on now," Michael growled. "Everyone's dead?"

They began backing away from us—Andrew, Michael, and even Lila had been put on alert.

Isaac stood still as if he didn’t know what to do.

"Wait a second," Cassie said. "We can explain. It had to happen, right, Riley? They had to reset Carousel. It was the only way we could beat the game."

I wouldn’t say that they were acting aggressively toward us, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Michael broke out of his suspicious gaze and put on a harsher one.

"Look," Antoine said. "You said it yourself—we had to do what it took. And we didn’t even know what the cost was until it happened. We didn’t know they were going to die. The people who started the plan rigged it so that we wouldn’t find out until after it was already too late. Look, my name is Antoine Stone. My brother was Christian Stone. You know him. He was at Camp Dyer. He got killed, too, and I would have never allowed that to happen if I had known."

Points to Antoine—it did seem like that was an effective thing to say.

At the very least, things did not escalate.

"You look like him," Andrew said. He glanced at Michael. A signal to take it easy. "I suppose before we act rashly, we need to compare notes."

We certainly did.