Book Eight, Chapter 40: Dead in the Water

Cutaway Death was a very powerful trope. Being able to walk around and help with the story even after being Second Blood was like getting to have a sixth player waiting in the wings.

The only catch was that there was no guarantee I would actually survive my apparent death. There was no protection from being killed other than the Dead status itself. All that the trope guaranteed was that at the moment it looked like I was about to be killed, the cameras would cut away, and my character would be treated as dead.

If I were, say, trapped inside of a man-eating plant at the time of my apparent death, I could still very much die even after I managed to cut the thing to pieces with half of a pair of hedge shears. After I got the Mettle boost from Sha-Shing, it was easy enough to slice through the plant. I needed to get out as fast as possible because that plant wasn’t just trying to trap me. It was trying to digest me, and even with my Grit, it had a pretty good start.

My shoes and pants were coming apart at the seams. My hoodie tore off of me like it was made of tissue paper, and that was good, because the longer the digestive enzymes inside of that bladder were touching me, the more they burned my skin. Getting my clothes off was life or death. The enzyme didn’t feel like acid. There was little burning sensation. It felt like the inside of my mouth did after eating too much pineapple.

The water cooled my skin to the touch while I could still feel it.

But as I swam away from the pod that I had managed to shred, I noticed a faint trail of blood following me where my legs had become cracked and blistered from the digestion process.

It was a good thing I was underwater. That way, whatever smell was wafting off of my cooked skin and hair was undetectable to me.

But that was not my chief concern.

Just Out Of Shot was still active and allowed me to see where the cameras were looking, and as best I could tell, they were looking above water. I could see the footage of the finale, with Antoine, Camden, and Anna reviewing the footage I had caught underwater.

I realized that if I swam up for air, there was a chance I could get caught On-Screen, and I didn’t know the consequences for that, except that they would be terrible. Wallflowers had plenty of tropes designed to get their characters Written Off, and even though under those circumstances their characters’ reappearance was often plausible, there would be harsh narrative consequences.

And that was just for Written Off. I didn’t know what would happen if I came back from the dead. I didn’t want to.

Though, to be fair, it’s not like the audience would know I was dead for sure.

I tried to think of what to do with the limited air supply I had. Was I seriously going to drown after all that effort to get out of the acidic bladder?

I looked around at the floating graveyard where fish and people alike were being digested all inside their various pods.

My heart sank as I realized that one of those pods was right next to where Cassie had been. Apparently, this massive plant had figured out that it didn’t have to wait for people to reach out and grab the drowning decoy, because Cassie had been caught.

She only had two Grit. She liked to keep it low so that her Anguish trope would be powered up.

Unfortunately, it meant that if she ever came close to death, she would make it over the finish line really easily.

I tried to focus, to drown out the feeling of my burning lungs. I tried to watch the story playing out above me on the red wallpaper thanks to Deathwatch.

They were examining the plant’s structure from the shoddy video I had managed to take on my camera.

It was a pretty neat deal. There was a main plant somewhere down deep at the bottom of the cove, with all sorts of tendrils shooting off of it. At the end of a tendril was one kind of decoy or another. It might have been a Joanne-shaped decoy or just an ordinary fish for the smaller ones.

That was something that Camden seemed to notice, too.

“Look at this,” he said. “This pod, this smaller one over here, has what appears to be a fish that’s struggling to swim at the end of the tendril. Do you see it?”

Antoine and Camden locked eyes.

“The largemouth bass!” they both said in unison, which was a very inorganic thing to say in unison.

“We wondered why the bass kept going missing, why we couldn’t get their numbers up, why they never got to legal size, but the catfish were just fine,” Camden said.

“Bass hunt with their eyes. They’ll bite anything that’s moving. That’s what all their lures are designed to imitate: smaller fish, injured fish,” Antoine said. “But not catfish. They hunt by smell.”

That explained the whole largemouth bass conspiracy.

“Wait, what are you saying?” Anna asked. “Are you saying that this plant learned to fish?”

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I was glad that they were laying it out so simply for any part of the audience that was drunk by this point in the movie.

“But that doesn’t explain why it looks like my sister,” she said.

“It’s mimicry,” Camden said. “Whatever this thing is, it clearly has the ability to see and copy things to change the shape of its lures. This wasn’t natural selection. It happened too fast.”

Anna got quiet.

“What is it?” Camden asked.

“Nothing,” she said quietly. “We have to find a way to get out of here.”

“Good luck with that,” Antoine said. “Our best bet is to try to wait it out till morning when they send out more rescue boats. We try to warn them off before they come close. This whole thing could be a disaster. Rescue boat after rescue boat getting fished into the lake. I have to wonder why this didn’t happen until the tournament.”

“Well, no one was allowed on the lake until the tournament,” Anna said. “No one except for Camden’s team.”

Good question.