Five days into filming now, and the afternoon’s work had brought them to the pirate attack.
It was the scene where the truth finally lands on Elijah: that he’s been thrown into the past. The pirates come over the rail a few days after he was hauled from the sea, and the realization arrives at the same moment they do.
Thomas, played by Ian Wright, went down in that stretch. He bought the others their time by squaring off against the pirates himself, calling the captain out for a "brawl," the kind of challenge those men couldn’t turn down, prized among the pirates of the day. It cost him his life, and it gave Elijah, Rose, Alphonse, and young Joseph the opening to break away and run for a boat.
They didn’t get far. A knot of pirates came rushing after them and ran them down, backing the little group into a corner.
Rose was genuinely frightened. She pulled her brother in against her, holding Joseph tight, as though she could keep the whole of it off him with her own body.
The pirate captain was played by Billy, a hairy, thickset actor of about thirty, well suited to the part. He came on slow and sure of himself. "Looks as though the road runs out here for you." He let it hang. "No sense fighting it now. Yield, Rose De Vere. I’ve wanted a taste of a beautiful comedian for a long while."
He stepped in. Rose bowed her head and shut her eyes, afraid.
And that was when Elijah moved.
He’d seemed to hesitate up to that point, weighing something. Then whatever it was settled, and the air around him changed. Something dangerous came off him all at once, in the set of his face, in the way his hand drifted toward his pocket, reaching for something none of them could see. To the men in front of him it read one way only. Threat.
Even Billy and the actors playing the other pirates felt it and went still, their hearts skipping. They knew it was a scene. They knew none of it was real. And still, some instinct under all of it told them the man in front of them wasn’t playing, that his hand was going toward a real weapon, one that could put them in the ground where they stood.
"Don’t you dare take another step." Elijah’s voice had gone cold, stripped of anything warm. "You’ll regret it the rest of your days."
Billy felt his skin crawl. ’I know that voice...’ His stomach turned over. ’It’s never the loud ones you watch out for. It’s this. Flat, quiet, nothing left to prove. That’s a man who’s already done it once, and wouldn’t think twice about doing it again.’ He’d come up in and out of a rough part of town, gangs on every corner for a good stretch of his life, and he knew that register the second he heard it.
His body was moving before his head caught up, a step back, then another. His hands weren’t quite steady.
Woody, Albert, and Jane all looked up and caught how badly Billy was shaken.
Jane’s read on it was simple. ’What is he doing? Is he actually breaking the scene? Amateur.’ It needled her. She was pouring everything into Rose, into real fear, playing it as true as she knew how, all of it aimed at holding her own against whatever Ronan was doing. And now this idiot was wrecking the take.
Beside her, Woody saw it another way entirely. ’Well now. So Billy can actually feel it coming off the kid? Means he’s been near the real thing at some point.’ Woody had come up through the ’90s, when the gangs ran heavy across LA, and he’d seen more than a little of what came with it. So he could feel it too, the thing pouring off Ronan. The same danger Billy was flinching from, except what Woody caught had a different edge to it. Not street. Military. The care of a man trained to it.
’What in God’s name did this kid go through to carry a soldier that cold?’ He kept his eyes on him. ’Is this acting? Because if it is, I’ll be damned. It’s more like watching him live the role.’
Off the set, Henry watched the whole thing on the monitor.
His assistant director, William, stood at his shoulder and put it carefully. "Should we pull the guy up? He’s backing off, playing scared. That’s not in the script."
Henry lifted a hand. "No. Let him run with it."
"But—"
"Quiet." Henry’s eyes never left the screen. "I’m watching one hell of a confrontation here. Look at Ronan. The kid’s so convincing he’s got Billy genuinely spooked. This is going to be a great scene."
William looked where he meant, at Ronan, and sure enough, he felt it too.
Still, they needed Billy back in the part. He couldn’t go too soft on it.
They gave it a few seconds, and finally Billy pulled himself back into character.
He was a background player. He wasn’t in a position to complain. He made himself scoff. "What are you puffing up for, pretty boy? Looking to follow your friend? The one who was so eager to keep the lady safe from me?"
And with that, he came forward.
The instant he did, Elijah drew the gun. A modern piece, out of nowhere and fast, the trigger squeezed on the captain almost before the hand had finished moving.
Billy was ready for it. He was meant to take the shot in this scene, meant to play hit. What he wasn’t ready for was the speed of it, no beat to set himself, no wind-up at all. It came at him as though the thing in Elijah’s hand were real and loaded.
His mind went white. With that dangerous air still pouring off Ronan, some animal part of him was certain the barrel was about to open up on him for real.
Elijah had pulled the trigger just the once. Billy stood frozen, face gone blank.
It was because he believed, down in his gut, that Ronan was actually going to kill him. And that blank, stricken look was exactly what the scene wanted.
[Full-Immersion Effect Detected.]
[Target: Billy]
[Conviction Threshold: 100%]
[The target has completely accepted the Host’s performance as reality.]
[Reality Perception has been influenced.]
[Effect Activated: Fictional Damage → Sensory Feedback]
[Safety Threshold: Active]
[The resulting sensation will not exceed the permitted safety limit.]
[The target will experience the fictional bullet impact as genuine.]
A transparent panel had surfaced in front of Ronan, and even buried in the character, it caught him off guard. He hadn’t seen this coming.
Even now, this far in, he was still finding out what the [Full-Immersion] could do. It kept surprising him.
He watched Billy closely, wondering how the man would take it.
In his eyes, inside the immersion, the bullet had truly left the muzzle. And right about now, it reached Billy.
Sure enough, Billy coughed. He felt the faint bullet pass through him, so quick he barely caught it going, only that it had gone. The pain was nothing like a real round’s, nowhere near, it was an imagined thing. But it was enough. Enough to sell him, all the way, on having been shot.
Faint as it was, he felt it.
He looked down at his own chest. His hand went to it. And with his mind running away from him, he half-believed he could see the blood.
"Ack—what—what is that?" Billy’s head snapped up, and he glared at Ronan, wild with it. "You—you bastard. What did you do?!"
He was furious. Somebody on this set had brought a live gun and put a round in him. He’d heard the stories, the accidents that happened on sets. He’d just never once thought it would land on him.
He opened his mouth to let loose about it, and felt his consciousness slipping away instead. Right there where he stood, Billy went down.
Every soul watching, Henry, William, the crew, the cast, Jane and Woody and the rest, was stunned.
A background player, of all people, had just turned in a performance like that. They’d felt the real anger come off him at the end, watched him take the hit and drop like the life had gone clean out of him.
Henry pulled up the playback, grinning at it. "Ha. I knew it. That scene absolutely works."