Carousel Book Six, Chapter 48

“I would have told you,” she said, tears rolling down her cheeks. "I promise, I would have. I wanted to so much. But the note said that if I told anyone, they would be killed. And I didn't know if that was the blackmailers saying that, or if it was some sort of rule that maybe Carousel would punish me for telling anyone. I mean, after Antoine got killed, I was afraid to risk it. What if they had killed you?"

I had hoped to hear something very much like what she was saying. Blackmailers threatening her not to tell anyone made sense, and it also made sense that she would fear Carousel might enforce those threats.

"So why are you telling me now?" I asked. We were hiding out between two rows of slot machines.

She grabbed my hands in hers and said, "They're trying to kill us now anyway. What could it hurt?"

We didn't have time to argue. I didn't have time to chase down every loose thread. In the distance, I could hear the Chase Scene between the blackmailer named Ed and the rest of our team.

"There's something you haven't told me," I said. "You got a blackmail note, and it told you not to tell anyone, right?"

"Yes," she said gently, sweetly.

"What were you being blackmailed for?" I asked.

She hesitated. It was clear, even in the dark, that she didn't want to tell me.

How strange.

Why would she not want to rat on her character's backstory? Was she feeling some residual hesitation from her real-life character in the same way that I was feeling the emotions of my character?

"My character is a fraud," she said. "She's not really Rachel Hutchins."

Of course. It all made sense. We had heard a lot about how this Rachel character had gone missing as a teenager for years, but I had assumed that those missing years were spent making criminal connections that had led the blackmailers to us.

"Then who are you?" I asked.

She shook her head. "I don't know. I've been trying to figure it out. All I know is that my character posed as Rachel Hutchins, and I think it was so that she could have a home. Maybe she needed money. Maybe she saw how much she looked like this missing girl from a normal family and thought she would take her shot at another life. But everything is catching up with her."

Daphne was crying.

I wanted so much to believe her. In fact, I did believe her. Was that because I judged her honest, or because she had so much Moxie?

"We need to go help the others," I said. Maybe we should have continued our conversation, but I didn't have anything to say that hadn't already been said. "I'm going to trust you, but I need you to trust me."

"I do," she said.

"We need to come up with a strategy to beat this big guy," I said. "He seems pretty dim, so a trap would be best. What I think we should do is—”

"You should pretend to fall under one of those newer model slot machines, the ones with the lightning bolts on their logo,” she said quickly and professionally. “They have tilt alarms connected to an internal backup battery to prevent theft. There's a lead wire running from the bell at the top of the machine down all the way to the bottom. You should be able to reach in once the machine is tilted to disconnect it, fiddle with it, and distract yourself so that you can use Oblivious Bystander and attract him to you. He'll be caught posing for the Oblivious Bystander shot, and I'll sneak up behind him and go for the kill."

Well, damn.

"You've been thinking about this," I said.

"It's just an idea," she said sweetly.

But it really wasn't. I was kind of surprised. Most of my teammates had an idea of what Oblivious Bystander did, but since they were almost never around when I used it, they didn't really get the concept that it was a sort of trap in its own way. That an aggressive enemy would be forced to help film the shot of a distracted potential victim, not knowing that they were in immense danger.

"You know I'm supposed to be the one who comes up with the plans," I said jokingly.

"Against him, I think my Savvy's high enough," she said playfully.

"Let's do it," I said.

It took a while to find one of the new machines with the lightning bolt logos.

That led to a question for me: was the alarm something that she had learned about? Had she seen it in a manual somewhere?

It was likely that she was improvising. It was theoretically possible, especially with her Moxie. Improvising a logical addition to established lore or setting is perfectly normal, and in fact, it was rarely even notable.

If you were hiding out in the average person's house, you could ask someone to go get the scissors from the kitchen, and whether you knew those scissors were there or not before you asked for them, they would be there when the person went to retrieve them.

The audience would have no trouble believing there were scissors in the kitchen.

Those minor, low-stakes improvisations happened easily and with little effort.

With her Moxie, she could perform an Off-Screen improvisation for something much more advanced than a pair of scissors. Theoretically, she could improvise an entire alarm system for these slot machines just by saying that they existed. Carousel would hear her and listen.

Heck, she might have brought the lightning bolt machines into existence altogether.

My first major improvisation was pretty similar, when I had made up an entire security protocol at a KRSL facility based on nothing but the fact that my character should know the security protocol, and the one I made up was reasonable.

That's what had likely happened here. Casual competent improv like that was something the rest of us were always looking to improve at, but Daphne made it look so simple.

She was an enigma.

The problem was, even though her explanation for her odd behavior made sense, my natural distrust neutralized that. When you're cynical enough, you can't be tricked, not because you're clever, but because you always distrust people.

Was I looking for a reason to distrust her, or did I have a good enough one already?

I found my way to prime real estate.

My reunion with Daphne had happened Off-Screen, so she had to slip away before the action started.

On-Screen.

I took a few moments as I waded through the water in the general direction of the chase scene between Ed and the others. I was trying to be sneaky.

Then I tripped, falling into one of the lightning-emblazoned machines, one that didn't have another machine behind it, so it could fall all the way over.

I cursed as I fell down on top of it.

As promised, the machine started going off, its bells chiming, its alarm sounding, and the lightning bolt wasn't just a logo, it was a light that flashed.

Like a good Oblivious Bystander, I didn't become more alert because of my blunder. I panicked, trying to shut off the power or at least pick up the machine so that the tilt sensor would stop going off.

As hard as I tried, I didn't manage to do it. What a clutz. I couldn't pick up the machine, and I couldn't find a button to shut it off.

In desperation, I reached up under the machine, as Daphne had instructed, and found the wire connecting to the internal battery. I spent a few moments pretending that I hadn't found it yet as I waited for Ed to make his appearance.

It didn’t take that long.

I ignored him, of course. Acting oblivious was second nature; heck, it was first nature.

Finally, I managed to grab the wire and pull it from the battery. The alarm stopped. The lights went out.

I stood up, and only then did I turn around to find the hulking behemoth standing behind me.

I went ahead and cursed again.

Where was Daphne? Surely she hadn't run off. For a moment, I thought she had.

But then, impossibly silent, she sprang up onto Ed’s back and drove what looked like a knife into his neck. She stabbed several times, and before he could reach up and grab her, she had maneuvered around to his other side and swung around on his shoulder, slashing him again.

The slash wasn’t as effective as the stabbing, because her knife wasn’t a knife.

It was a letter opener.

Just like the one that Andrew theorized had killed the receptionist.

Daphne had killed that blackmailer in one elegant and efficient jab. And then she acted like she had no idea what had happened.

She landed in front of me with grace and hardly a splash.

Ed barreled forward at her, but I was quick. I grabbed her by the arm and pulled her out of the way, leaving Ed to trip over the machine that I had knocked over.

"Rachel?" I asked, playing confused at having witnessed her remarkable feat of assassination.

"Riley," she said, and we stared at each other in the darkness and kissed. I was shaken and hesitant.

Ed wasn’t going to give us time for more than one.

He was back on his feet and running at us again.

We could easily keep away from him, while he would match pace, he would be one step behind us.

"Let’s go for the stairs," I said. "We need to get out of this mess."

If we could get to the stairs and get to a hallway where he didn’t have any obstacles to destroy, we could outrun him.

I pulled Daphne along, but soon noticed that she wasn’t running with me; she was pulling behind to stare.

I looked back and saw Ed on all fours, trying his best to continue.

My instinct was to take advantage of his fall and grab the meat cleaver I had taken from the kitchen and plant it in his neck.

That wasn’t necessary.

He wasn’t getting back up.

He groaned, but it wasn’t just noise. He was trying to say something.  I listened, trying to make it out as his words became garbled. Eventually, I figured out what he was saying.

"Antidote," he said. He was begging.

As I stared at him and his defenses began to lower, I realized that he wasn’t dying, not in the way I expected. The wounds that Daphne had inflicted on him were not bleeding enough to kill him.

He was asking for an antidote because he had been poisoned. As I stared at him, looking to gain insight, I saw a flicker of his Infection indicator on the red wallpaper. Incapacitation lit up almost solid.

He must have been weak if I was starting to see his statuses.

"Poison?" I asked.

Daphne looked at me. Then she withdrew from her handbag a small vial with all kinds of warnings written on the label.

It was a trope item. It had a Criminal trope on it that allowed the user to imply they had poisoned someone, but that clearly wasn’t what had happened here.

She had dipped her letter opener into it.

"He’s not dying from the poison," I said, realizing what I was watching.

Daphne shook her head.

"At that dose, it’s a paralytic," she said.

He was losing control of his body. That wouldn’t kill him, except for the fact that he was lying face down in a foot of water.

"What do we do?" I asked. As ridiculous as it sounded, killing someone who was killing you was one thing. But watching a man drown, poisoned, somehow affected me differently.

"It’s already done," she said.

He couldn’t hold himself up anymore. He fell into the water and struggled as he drowned.

I played it horrified. I had seen a lot of death, and I had killed bad guys, but this really did affect me differently for some reason. I was very surprised to see Daphne using poison. It was effective, yet somehow, as I looked at her, goosebumps formed on my flesh.

She had been so quick and deadly.

Players typically weren’t. Even at our best, we were usually struggling. It made us sympathetic to audiences, and it came naturally.

Daphne wasn’t afraid. When she looked at me, she was sweet and beautiful, even though all I could see was her silhouette and a gentle outline of her in her wedding dress.

Who was this woman I loved so much?

Why did she seem to revel in the sight of a drowning man?