The pattern emerged pretty quickly. A message at Isaac’s place sent us to Kelsey’s place, which sent us to Ramona’s place, which sent us to Anna’s place, our current destination. There were signs of struggle at each location along the way.

But of course, it wasn’t that simple because, within the story, all of those people lived in completely different countries. They were world travelers, so in order to get from place to place, we relied on the private jet Roxy provided, and we hoped that Carousel could cut it together well enough that people wouldn’t question why we all stuck together over what must have been multiple days.

Sure, it made sense for Roxy and me to go. When we were On-Screen, she could say something about how this one additional missing person added to the supposed body count of Antoine Stone, and I could say something like, “Have you considered that maybe Antoine Stone is one of the victims?”

But Camden following us around made less sense, so we decided to just play it up that we were really good friends and that he was in some way part of our security detail or something, though we didn’t have a lot of time On-Screen to establish that.

Cassie was more difficult. She acted a bit unstable, but throughout the whole montage, we were able to establish that she psychically needed to follow us.

We had stuck together in movies with even thinner connections before.

Within the world of the story, Anna lived in a boat in a marina, so while we walked down the docks on our way there, we let Cassie lead us as Roxy tried to wrangle her because we were still too early in the story for our characters to completely buy that Cassie was psychic.

“Something went wrong,” Cassie said as we walked along the docks. She picked up the pace, and we followed.

Camden was holding a map that was supposed to lead to Anna’s place. We had to get it from some character that might have worked for the harbor master, but again, we didn’t have enough time On-Screen to establish any of that.

He held up the map so that I could see it and said, “Right, left, left, right,” as we made our way through the docks, but he wasn’t directing us. Cassie was. She knew which way to go, and he was pointing out how amazing it was that she seemed to be able to do that.

At that moment, Cassie was using her Soul Read trope, which would give her unearned insight as long as she continued to follow it faithfully. In the past, when she had used that trope, she learned it was quite difficult to follow the trope’s lead for too long, but in this story, not only was psychic power very strong, but so far she had been able to follow every instruction it gave her, even as she worked out the directions to Anna’s boat like a bloodhound.

It would have been a lot easier if those docks had been built by a human and not by Carousel.

“She’s nearby,” Cassie said. “There’s something wrong.”

We picked up the pace and ran until even we could confirm there was trouble because, as we approached a large houseboat at the end of a long row of boats in a quiet part of the marina, we saw a splash of red against the white of the boat we were headed toward.

It was blood.

“Those are bullet holes,” Camden said as he took out his firearm. How he got to keep his gun when we crossed from one country to another, I wasn’t exactly sure, but at that point, I wasn’t even sure if we were on a large lake or the ocean. It simply wasn’t important enough for the story to distinguish at that point.

“Cassie,” Camden yelled, “get back here!”

But Cassie couldn’t because her Soul Read ability told her to move forward, and she had to follow it.

There was nowhere for us to hide for cover on this particular row of boats. We didn’t bother. We ran as fast as we could to get to the end. My cameraman was still following us, getting all the footage we would need for the documentary I was going to make, although at that point I wasn’t sure exactly what genre it would be. Would it be crime or history?

“Anna Reed!” I yelled as we approached the boat.

We weren’t at First Blood yet, so while the kidnapping of Isaac, Ramona, and Kelsey made sense because that was the setup of the movie, the fact that they went after Anna should be different. Anna was part of our team. The enemy, whoever they were, shouldn’t be able to capture her this early by default. They would have to work for it.

Moments after I cried out, Anna screamed, “I have a gun. Don’t come any closer!”

“Anna, it’s me, Cassie!” Cassie screamed as she ignored Anna’s warning.

It made enough sense that Anna and Cassie might know each other. Why not?

Anna’s head peeked up from beyond the side of the boat, and she looked from Cassie back toward Camden and me, and then her eyes settled on Roxy for a few seconds as she struggled with the same surprise we had at the presence of the paragon.

“What are you doing here?” Anna asked.

“We came to save you,” Cassie said. “We learned that someone was going to target you, and we came as fast as we could.”

“Yeah, well, you’re a bit late for that,” she said as she lowered her gun and glanced over to the various blood stains on the side of her boat’s railing.

“Are you hurt?” I asked.

I couldn’t tell because she did have some blood on her arms and hands but I didn’t see a wound.

“Not as bad as the other guy,” she said.

We locked eyes for a moment as we tried to decide whether our characters would know each other.

“My name is Riley Lawrence. I’m investigating a recent string of kidnappings. You may have heard something about them.”

She nodded.

Cassie was climbing up the side of the boat already, and Anna reached out and grabbed her so she wouldn’t go any further.

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“We’re not alone,” Anna said. “Bobby,” she called out, “you might want to come out here.”

A few moments later, Bobby made his way out from below deck, climbing up a narrow set of stairs. He had a bandage on his head and a spear gun in his hand.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“An old friend,” Anna said, “and a few strangers.”

We went Off-Screen after a beat, and I was thankful because our characters could catch up and explain the situation Off-Screen without any awkward dialogue.

“What’s going on?” I asked. I had a lot of questions for Bobby, but I needed to know the situation because we only had a few minutes before we went back On-Screen.

“I woke up in the houseboat,” she said. “Thirty minutes later, I was attacked by three men, but I managed to overpower them because I have a ton of weapons down there. They came on a boat of their own. They pulled up right next to mine, and sometime in the fight Bobby managed to get free because they had already taken him, and then we managed to run them off except for one.”

I looked at the blood stains as if to ask, did you kill him?

“No,” she said, reading my gesture. “We have him tied up down below. We were asking him questions, or at least trying to. You all had better come in.”

She turned and looked at Roxy and gave a little wave, but Roxy didn’t respond since we were Off-Screen.

“She’s Andrew’s widow,” I said. “She’s paying me to investigate his disappearance from the first movie, and she thinks all of these recent disappearances are linked.”

“Sounds good,” Anna said.

We all started to climb aboard the boat. It was actually quite large, requiring us to board with a ladder. It might have technically been a small yacht, but I wasn’t sure of the difference.

I knew it was big enough that you could tie a man up in the main living compartment down below and have plenty of space for people to spread out and stare.

“So what’s his deal?” I said as I followed them down below.

The man was tied to a chair in the traditional suspense movie interrogation style. He was dressed in old, worn clothes, nothing fancy, nothing you would expect from a mercenary. If anything, he looked like a house painter.

His hair was dark, and so were his eyes. As best I could tell, he was South American, but when he spoke, he wasn’t speaking Spanish or Portuguese. Whatever he was saying, he was very upset with us. I could tell.

“On the script, it says it’s a dead language,” Bobby said, speaking for the first time. “That’s all it says.”

“A dead language?” I repeated as I mulled over the concept. “That’s fun. Have you gotten anything other than that out of him?”

“Haven’t been able to,” Anna said.

The man was bleeding from his arm and torso where he had gotten on the wrong end of one of the many weapons Anna’s character had laid around her home.

We had two minutes before we went back On-Screen, and I told the others about it so they would be ready. We had to distribute ourselves so that we would work well on camera. It was something you started to do habitually after enough time in Carousel. You couldn’t huddle together. No, you had to stand at uneven distances from whatever you were looking at. Some of you might be off to the side, preoccupied by a prop. Others would be sitting down.

There was an art to it, and we were pros.

My cameraman and assistant didn’t make a peep. They had no problem filming torture. I must have trained them well.

“From what I understand, you’ve had a pretty eventful couple of days, haven’t you?” I asked Bobby.

“You have no idea,” he said. “First, I was kidnapped by one of the characters from a storyline we did a while back, and then suddenly I found myself tied up in the back of a boat during a gunfight.”

Bobby’s recast trope must have activated in some way, allowing him to join the story a bit earlier than the others. I wasn’t sure how that was going to work. He had been in the original movie with Antoine. Was he playing a different character this time?

I didn’t have time to think about it.

On-Screen.

On the red wallpaper, the man’s name was Tacay, and he was an enemy just like the last one we had had. The only trope I could see of his was The Unseen Hand. All of the others were blocked.

He started speaking forcefully in that language I couldn’t understand.

“Riley, I think he just said something about your mother,” Camden said playfully.

“You know I can’t abide that,” I said. “Maybe I should go grab that spear over there and teach him a lesson.”

I didn’t move to go get a spear. I wasn’t actually going to torture the guy. I was speaking and watching to see if he understood what I was saying. I figured that if I mentioned the spear against the wall without looking at it and he understood me, he might glance over at it.

But he didn’t.

“I don’t think he understands us,” I said.

“I could have told you that,” Anna said.

The man continued to talk even as we were speaking to each other. He looked tough, like a warrior, and he spoke as if he could somehow harm us just by being forceful enough.

“He’s repeating himself,” Roxy said.

She was right. I hadn’t noticed it because I was distracted by the tone of his speech, and he was saying it a little bit differently, but whatever he was saying, he was repeating it in that dead language.

Off-Screen.

“We’re back on in a few seconds,” I said. “Move around as if time has passed.”

Everyone understood. I had been wearing a jacket, so I took it off, and others made similar modifications.

On-Screen.

The man continued speaking, saying the same thing in different ways, sometimes louder, sometimes quieter, sometimes faster, sometimes slower.

“We don’t understand you,” Camden said.

And the man didn’t understand us.

Camden had brought his bag along with him, and he had gathered in it a variety of books, including books on old languages, so in the moments we had Off-Screen, he would be able to use his Eureka ability to find the most relevant book among them, but even then, it was no help.

“It sounds a bit like Puqalla, but all the words are wrong,” he said.

Camden had been able to translate languages using the right books since the beginning, but this time it didn’t work.

“If all the words are wrong, then how could it sound like that language?” I asked.

“It just does,” he said. “We deal with a lot of tribes in my work. That’s what it sounds like.”

Meanwhile, Cassie was staying quiet for the most part. Maybe it was too much to hope that her Soul Read trope could function as a translator.

In fact, if anything, she seemed like she was afraid of the man, maybe even more than she ought to.

“We need to call the police,” Roxy said. “They can find a translator, and maybe now that we’ve caught one, they can start taking this case seriously.”

“That’s not how we do things,” Anna said. “I don’t see any reason why we should get the police involved. That could be a real problem for me.”

“With all of these black market antiquities, I could see why,” I said, glancing around the room.

The man continued to repeat what he was saying.

“I can almost get some of it,” Camden said. “I swear it’s Puqalla.”

The man continued to repeat himself, but then suddenly he stopped, and his eyes darted to the stairwell.

“It is Puqalla,” a voice said from that direction.

I looked and saw Antoine, a bit worse for wear, out of breath, with sweat stains on his clothing, actually many different kinds of stains, one of which looked like blood.

“It’s an ancient dialect,” he said. “There are only three scholars in the world who can understand it.”

“Antoine!” Anna called out.

He looked over and acknowledged her.

“You!” Roxy yelled. “You’re going to explain to me what happened to my husband.”

He looked at her with a bit more surprise, but ultimately ignored what she said.

The man tied to the chair repeated what he had been telling us so many times.

Antoine got closer. His face became grave, even more so than it already was.

“Are you one of those people who can understand it?” I asked.

The man repeated the phrase.

“It just so happens I am,” Antoine said.

It also just so happened he had a trope that gave him access to his character’s knowledge based on how far he had traveled and how difficult that travel had been. The trope’s text said it worked on artifacts and ruins. But apparently it also worked on languages.

“The cradle breaths where the sun meets the river,” Antoine said.

Suddenly, the man stopped talking. He just made eye contact with Antoine.

“Is that all he was saying?” Camden asked. “It sounded like it should be more than that.”

The man had been repeating something that sounded like two sentences’ worth of information.

“The cradle calls you back,” Antoine said with a great deal of fear in his voice.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep