Book Eight, Chapter 71: Remains

The further we went into the jungle, the more carnage we saw. It was like watching a three-dimensional slideshow, a crime scene spread over miles. There had been a great battle here, but not between two righteous armies. It had been brutal and bloodthirsty.

Six or so had been shot. Two had broken necks, and several had been stabbed. We were only On-Screen for some of these revelations, and we didn’t go through the act of burying everyone we found. There were just too many of them, and it was all for show anyway.

The thing was, some of the bodies had rotted to the bone without being touched by scavengers. Others had been torn apart. Why would animals only eat some of them?

“I don’t understand,” Roxy said. “These were my husband’s men. I knew some of them. Why would they turn on each other?”

“Some kind of madness,” Camden suggested as we arrived at the encampment, which was still set up just as it had been six months ago. The weather and time had taken some toll. For the most part, it was unchanged.

“You say madness, I say greed,” I said as I pointed to a wagon cart that was half loaded with gold ornaments in large wooden boxes.

“If they killed each other for the gold, then why is the gold still here?” Camden asked.

Good point. I probably looked foolish right there.

“I imagine they took as much as they could carry,” I said quickly. “If the reports are accurate, that’s what Antoine Stone did.”

“Then why not come back and get the rest?” Roxy asked.

We looked around the encampment. It felt like a ghost town. People had just dropped what they were doing for reasons we knew not, and then they never returned.

“That is the one-million-dollar question,” I said.

Camden got his men to start burying any bodies we found around the camp, just so that they would look busy in the background of the footage that Carousel occasionally deemed worthy of filming.

The two of us worked through the camp, finding all the documentation that I had used my trope to ensure would exist. It was easy enough. It wasn’t exactly hidden from us.

When we were Off-Screen, we had gathered up as much as we could find, and then Camden looked at me and asked, “What are we missing?”

“The footage,” I said. “The film.”

Roxy wasn’t talking out of character. The rules for when paragons could do that or not weren’t exactly clear, but she was definitely in there and aware of what was going on.

Maybe it was for the best, because if she could talk meta, all I would want to do was interrogate her.

“Alright, so if there’s footage,” I said, “there would have to be cases that they would keep their cameras in, right? So spread out and look for the tent where someone’s got a setup like that. There might even be a camera with one of these bodies.”

After all, the footage I had received as a result of using the Props Department Requisition trope had to have been shot by someone, and it wasn’t like Carousel to forget the details. Someone in this encampment shot that footage. Whether they were still there was the question.

We spread out, looking all over, and found nothing.

Not one reel of film, no camera, no extra batteries, nothing.

“Maybe he went further,” I said, “toward the cradle.”

Camden surveyed the area while thinking. “Well, we know that you found his film, so he couldn’t have gone into the cradle, right? How many layers of meta are we trying to keep straight here?”

“Best not to think about the meta,” I said. “I like your logic, though. It’s gotta be around here somewhere.”

So we kept looking, moving further and further in the direction of the ancient ruins where the climactic end of The Sunken Cradle Part One had occurred.

We continued walking, finding the occasional corpse rotting on the jungle floor, but no cameras or footage.

As I walked forward, I just so happened to see a tree with a large knot in it, the kind that would get hollowed out over time. There was a mark on it right next to the knot, three faint lines that looked like they could have been left by bloody fingers six months earlier.

I walked closer to the tree, expecting to go On-Screen but knowing that I wouldn’t because of my Call Sheet trope.

The closer I got, the tighter my chest felt. I found myself not breathing as I crept closer.

“I think they’re in here,” I said.

“Where?” Camden asked. “That hole? I don’t see anything.”

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Somehow, I felt I knew that tree. I ran my fingers along the marks where, months ago, blood had been spread.

Then I reached into the dark hole and felt something hard and square, covered in a cloth.

I pulled out the four videotapes, the whole time my heart was beating out of my chest. We had received three tapes the night before. Not four. It wasn’t a mistake, though, because one of the tape containers was empty. For some reason, that empty tape container really freaked me out. I couldn’t explain to Camden why I felt this way, but he clearly saw something was up.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think I’m sensing a character’s emotions, as silly as that sounds. You know, like Kimberly does. But it doesn’t make sense because there shouldn’t be a character, you know? This was done by a trope, not a real person.”