Book Eight, Chapter 31: The Unwritten Rules

“The circus is in here, but it’s a secondhand story,” Camden said, flipping back through the Atlas, “same as I told you before.”

“All right, well, tell me that story,” I said.

“It’s just a recording of a conversation between two players from different factions,” Camden said, “heavily redacted, by the way.” He flipped to the page in the Atlas and started to summarize what he was reading.

“The other player’s talking about running an apocalypse in order to rescue some teammates,” he said.

“What apocalypse?” I asked.

We weren’t exactly alone as we spoke in the smoking room, but nobody else was in on the conversation. Most people were not soothed by compulsive planning the way that Camden and I were.

“Any apocalypse,” Camden said. “He says he needs to rescue them from the next apocalypse, and apparently, you don’t even need a rescue ticket for that, you just need their poster.”

Rescuing people from the apocalypse was always tempting. We had several Vets from Camp Dyer locked in the purgatory of the missing poster board because of the Black Snow, including Reggie, who had died to save Anna and Camden.

“Okay. So the circus has been run before as an apocalypse, but none of the people who wrote the book remember it?”

“Right,” Camden said. “For some strange reason, whenever the apocalypse showed up, most players don’t stick around long enough to care what kind of apocalypse it was.”

“That makes sense,” I said. “If only we were smart players.”

“If only,” he said. He continued with the story. “This guy is one of the last rogue players around. Most of the other factions have died off by this point,” Camden said as he scanned the text. And then, as he was looking at it, he paused, like there was something there he had never noticed or cared about before.

“What is it?” I asked.

“What did you say the name of this apocalypse was?” he asked.

“Low Top and Co. Presents Ringmaster at the Red Chalk Circus,” I said. Ringmaster was the title. The rest was written in fancy script around the poster.

“For a while there, all of the other Omens were just normal storylines, right? Even after they’d been converted to the circus?” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

When the circus first started, any Omen that took place in that part of town had the whole Low Top and Co. and the Red Chalk Circus parts added to their titles, but they were still just normal storylines. That’s why we weren’t even sure if it was part of an apocalypse yet.

“He says the name of the apocalypse is Low Top and Co. Present The Last Show on Earth at the Red Chalk Circus. It’s about a circus that shows up in town one night, and by the end of the night, everyone in town is dead. It moves from town to town.”

“The Last Show on Earth?” I asked.

“Have you heard of it?”

“No,” I said. “It’s just weird for them to use the word Earth. Carousel usually bends over backward not to.”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“That would imply that there are several different apocalypses that can come from the circus,” I said. “Do we still have any mobile Omens that are functional?”

“As of last night, we do not,” he said. “So much for all that hard work. Even the Omens that took place inside a single dwelling switched over after we got surrounded.”

And we had to spend so much time collecting those things. We never envisioned we would need them to stay clear of an apocalypse, and that was good, because they weren’t going to work for this one.

The circus had spread slowly at first, but then, all of a sudden, it picked up pace so fast that it nearly caught us off guard. The circus spread into a nightmarish plane of repeating patterns and nostalgic festivity, almost like a dream.

Cassie still lay on the couch on the other side of the room, staring up at the ceiling.

While we were looking at the book, the others were concerned with her. She was shaking, begging for distraction. People were talking to her, literally shaking her, as she feared getting lost in thought and drifting into memory.

Camden followed my gaze and looked over at me. “We’re going to have to do something about that,” he said.

I nodded. We all knew what that something was.

If Cassie was now a real psychic, and psychics could trigger the apocalypse into full swing, then sending her to a temporary death made perfect sense. It was logical, and there was no way she would argue with us.

Cassie had taken to dying for others very quickly, even though the first few times it was more of an accident when she got carried away using her Anguish trope.

It would be hours before anyone else brought it up, because no one wanted to be the one to do it.

Isaac would normally be the one to cut right through the nonsense and provide a practical, if cynical, perspective. But this was his sister, and he was doing everything he could to keep her distracted, including trying to tickle her feet, which was successful, though it wasn’t helping her mood any.

Andrew wasn’t going to suggest throwing his sister to the wolves either.

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And Logan was bound by his friendship with Andrew. Plus, his role as a true cynic was powerful; his tropes were mostly used to respond to other people’s plans and make them better. From a meta position, I could see why he would not want to be the first to mention it.

But when Bobby eventually did, when he stood in the middle of the room and said, “So now we have to make the sacrifice for the better of the group, right?” with tears in his eyes after having just watched his wife walk away again, not knowing when he would see her face, the whole group erupted at him with anger.

But the anger didn’t last. It fizzled out almost instantly.

“I can’t keep going,” Cassie said after a few people defended her. “Have you ever tried not to remember something? I feel like I’m going to do it by accident, and we’re all going to die.”

If she remembered her character’s ties to the enigmatic clown ringmaster, the Omen would be triggered. Her psychic powers were piercing the veil, somehow pulling those memories out of the ether. I had experienced it myself, the fear, the anxiety. Knowing that one thought could bring about the end.