We were Off-Screen for a while, without anything particular to do. There were no instructions coming from our ArGIS units, as they assumed our characters would be sleeping at the outpost.

We had found our way to the soldiers’ sleeping quarters, but we weren’t quite comfortable. How could our characters sleep after seeing four men whose deaths were unexplainable?

I gave everyone a warning before we were due to go back On-Screen. We each took our places, trying our best to bring out the details of the story we needed in order to grasp our situation.

Cassie lay on one of the bunks, flipping through the Morgenstern’s Book of Fairytales with a look that exceeded mere interest. It was more like amazement, or even pure rapture.

“You shouldn’t be looking through that thing,” Camden said. “That looks like banned reading material.”

In fact, it was banned. There was a red stamp on the front of it that said contraband but it was so faint we worried the cameras would not pick it up.

“My parents had one like it when I was a child,” Cassie said, flipping a page. “It was this exact title, I think, but not this edition. It wasn’t this beautiful. There was this cabinet near the apartment we lived in. It was out of the way in a maintenance corridor. We kept all kinds of books in there, passed down through the generations. Mom used to read it to me, but then somebody reported the cabinet, and it and all the other books got taken away.”

We were building off what we knew about this society.

“It isn’t in the interest of Culver’s Bay that people obsess over children’s stories,” Camden said.

“Yes, I’ve read the posters,” Cassie said. “That if we keep reminding ourselves of the world that was, we will never be able to achieve the world that can be.”

“Exactly,” Camden said. “So throw the book away and let’s get some rest so that we’ll be prepared when the ArGIS gives us new directions. Wherever Command is sending us, it’ll help us get to the bottom of what happened here.”

Cassie smirked. “You really do believe everything Command says, don’t you?”

Camden acted offended as best he could.

“You’re not one of those conspiracy theorists, are you?” he asked. “It is a matter of incentives. Why would Command lie to us? People like to assume that those in charge have secret plans and dark mandates, but the higher I’ve grown in the hierarchy, the more I realized that no one has time for that. We have real problems to deal with. Running a social engineering feat like you people accuse us of would be pointless.”

“Oh,” Cassie said. “What country are we in right now?”

Camden paused and stared at her.

“That’s not what I meant,” he said.

“You don’t know,” she said, “because our ancestors were all told they were being taken to different locations when they arrived at Culver’s Bay blindfolded, so that they didn’t actually spill the secret to anyone who wasn’t invited. And now we don’t know which was the truth. Are we in Louisiana or Australia? Maybe South America somewhere.”

“That’s different,” Camden said. “It was about safety. If people knew where the terradomes were before the bombings, they would have been overrun, and the light of humanity would have been extinguished.”

“Okay, whatever you say, boss man,” Cassie said. “But I prefer my fairy tales over yours any day.”

They had rehearsed that scene for a while, and I thought they nailed it. The choice between believing propaganda and rejecting it, even if that meant not knowing what to believe, fed right into the misinformation theme.

After they got through their lines, I decided to take a walk down the hall where Anna was waiting. Just as Cassie and Camden went Off-Screen, Anna went On-Screen, but all she was doing was staring into a darkened room. There was no expression on her face, except perhaps a longing.

What was interesting was that while she was On-Screen, I wasn’t, even when I stood right next to her, because she was in a daydream, and it was the dream itself that Carousel was filming. How it pulled that off, I didn’t know, but I assumed it had something to do with sound stages and other movie magic.

When I saw that I was about to go On-Screen, I realized she was about to snap out of it, so I decided to time things right for a good little moment.

Three… two… one.

“What are you looking at?” I asked, just as I went On-Screen.

As predicted, Anna jumped in surprise, because she had no way of perceiving me while she was in her daydream.

I looked over in the darkened room where she had been staring.

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s nothing.”

“It’s pretty spooky out here, isn’t it?” I asked.

We both stared into the dark room, but neither of us dared to enter. That strange feeling of not knowing what was in the room started to inflate in my stomach, to the point I was afraid I was going to burst.

“Can’t wait to get out of this place,” she said.

“Me neither,” I agreed.

We both took one last look into the darkened room as we returned to the others.

When we got back all in a group, we had some time before we went back On-Screen, so we tried to get some sleep, though I wasn’t particularly successful. Normally, there was no argument for bringing Out Like a Light into a storyline, but this might have been the exception.

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We stayed there for hours, sleeping in shifts just because it made us feel better, and as we went On-Screen after so long, the scene began with a loud sound in the distance.

It was like something running, a terrible beast making its way through the converted shopping center, but there were conflicting reports on that.

“Soldiers,” Camden said as he sprang awake. “They’re back.”

We were all prepared to hit the ground and run. We didn’t have to spend time collecting any of our belongings.

“What are you talking about, soldiers?” Cassie asked. “There’s a monster out there. Don’t you hear it?”

Camden looked at her, confused.

We paused for a moment, because that’s all the time we had, and as we listened, it was true. The sound in the distance could have been a large monster breaking through the building, or a huge platoon of soldiers marching in unison, their boots echoing off the walls. It was like one of those Internet illusions where you heard whichever word you were trying to hear.

Except in this case, if we picked wrong, we would die.

We burst out of the sleeping quarters and started heading in the opposite direction of the sound, down a very long hallway. Even Camden was hesitant to trust his senses. The loud noise in the distance might have been friendly soldiers returning home, but it could have been anything else.

We ran down the hallway as fast as we could, looking behind us whenever possible, but I never saw what was making the noise. We turned the corner and kept on going, further and further away from whatever was making the sound. Even as it took us down an unlit hallway, we ran, using our ArGIS units as flashlights.

“This way,” Antoine screamed as he tried to guide us through the hallways, hoping to find an exit, but knowing that there wasn’t going to be one. At the very least, we now had guns, which we had picked up off the bodies we found in the pantry. As far as I could tell, none of our characters had actually been trained in the use of firearms, because we were technically civilians.

We would have to pretend like it was our first time firing them if push came to shove.

The lights on our ArGIS units didn’t reach as far as we wanted them to, and that was probably on purpose. It was almost like they hit an invisible wall and then just stopped. Carousel didn’t want us to see what was beyond the light.

But the lights were good enough to see one thing.

A dead end.

“Get ready,” Antoine said, pointing his gun back into the darkness.

I did as he asked.

The noise had found us. How could it possibly have been soldiers marching? But then again, how could it possibly have been anything other than soldiers marching? My brain kept switching back and forth on what I thought I heard. Were those claws scraping up the linoleum? Was that a growl, or the echo of a cough?

I genuinely couldn’t tell. The sound was going crazy through my ears. The audience was going to hate it if they heard it the way I did.

And then suddenly I heard a light switch flip.

Behind us, Anna had found the switch and turned on all the hallway lights one at a time, starting at where we were and moving backward down the dark hallway. And when it got to the place where the noise was coming from, what we saw was nothing.

Nothing at all.

But we still heard something. Undoubtedly, we still heard something. It didn’t sound like marching anymore, and it didn’t sound like a monster. It sounded like static on the radio, and not just the gentle stuff, but loud, uniform noise. Had that been what we thought was the sound of boots marching?

Antoine jogged to the nearest intercom, pushed a few buttons, and then suddenly the static cut out from all the intercoms throughout the building.

“There must have been some kind of timer on it,” Antoine said. “Maybe the message that was supposed to play got garbled.”

“What message?” Cassie asked. “There was something there in the hallway. I heard it. You heard it.”

“It was the intercom on the fritz. It must have been,” Antoine said. “Look, I just turned it off.”

“No,” Cassie said. “No, that’s not it. Come on, you guys heard it too, right? You were running like you did.”

Camden stared at the intercom in disbelief, but then he shook his head. “What else could it have been?” he asked. “There’s nothing there. Don’t you believe what you see with your own eyes?”

Camden was giving a particularly good performance because it was clear that he didn’t believe what he saw with his own eyes. Neither did I. There had been something there in the darkness. I just couldn’t see it, and it certainly wasn’t the intercoms.

“I believe a lot more than what I see with my eyes,” Cassie said.

As I thought about it, an aching pain moved over my mind, something between a headache and a migraine. I tried my best to ignore it. I didn’t know if it was a result of running or something else, but I was leaning toward the latter.

“No,” Cassie continued. “It was some sort of monster, like from the old world, from the books.”

“Those are children’s stories!” Camden said. “Don’t you get that they aren’t real?”

“How do you know?” Cassie asked, a bit unhinged, but sharp as a knife. “Think about it. Why in the world would we bomb our own planet? I think it’s because the monsters from stories like these existed. Are you really going to believe that humans bombed each other? Why would we do that? Something happened, and we’re being lied to. The things in these stories, sometimes you can’t see them with your eyes if they don’t want you to.”

“Are you insane?” Camden asked. “You think that goblins and ghosts are what we just heard?”

“I don’t know what we heard,” Cassie said. “I don’t know what it was, but I know it wasn’t the intercom. I know it was something physical or spiritual, something real.”

Cassie was getting way out of hand. She didn’t just say these lines; she was screaming them like a backwoods preacher with a venomous snake in his hand, and she looked absolutely unstable. This wasn’t a choice of hers. She was under attack. Her Infected status was flickering gently.

“Cassie. Camden,” Anna said. “We are part of the same squad. We can’t be arguing like this. We will find out what’s going on, but until we do, we need to choose to get along, whether it comes naturally or not.”

Cassie took a few deep breaths, as did Camden, and they both turned away from each other.

Anna took a beat and then stared down the hallway like she was preparing to daydream, and as she did, everyone else went Off-Screen.

“Is anyone else getting a headache?” I asked.

“I am,” Camden said.

“A bit,” Antoine said.

“I think there’s an aura or something,” I said. “I think we’re resisting it with our Grit, because of Willpower is Magic, but Cassie isn’t, because her Grit is so low. Cassie, look at me.”

She was doubled over, with her hands on her knees. A panicked look spread across her face. The infection was taking hold.

I went to her, and I grabbed her by the shoulder, and I said, “You need to fight this. You need to use Clarity of Purpose. Remember how we talked about that?”

She nodded her head and then grabbed her temples with both hands and winced, faking pain, just like the rest of us were actually experiencing.

Her Clarity of Purpose trope allowed her to use Moxie as Grit when she was in constant pain. If she could use Moxie as Grit, then she could fight the aura even better than the rest of us, but the downside was that she had to activate it manually by pretending to be in pain. So if something caught her off guard, she might not be able to trigger it in time.

She took a few deep breaths and then said, “I’ve got it. This is going to be tough. You guys did hear something down there, right? It wasn’t just the intercom.”

“No, it wasn’t,” I said. “But I didn’t see anything on the red wallpaper.”

I stared down toward the end of the hallway. Moments earlier, I could have sworn there was a monster, or a swarm of monsters, headed our way, but when the lights went on, it turned out that wasn’t the truth. All the possible explanations for the sound merged into a single explanation.

I was starting to get an idea of what we were up against, and I wondered how we were going to beat it.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep