The rest of the bickering is uneventful, and at some point, Telly tires of North trying to calm Fark down while Adol says supportive-but-meaningless things about him. She leads me back out through the elevator doors, back where we came from.

  “Well. I’d say that went well,” she chuckles, while her feet tread over screwhead nubs in the roundabout. She passes by a fake car and slaps its hood. Her neck cranes back, and she stares up at the dome. “I was prepared to make an ‘I’ll miss this place’ speech, you know?”

  “It didn’t go well and no, I don’t know. I was one vote away from dead,” I say, shivering. I prop my arms up, crossed, on the car hood. “Who all wanted me dead? Fark, Cieze, and...Adol, her, that’s her. What was with the abstainers!? This was important!”

  “You could just ask people.” Telly shakes her head, still smiling.

  “I could. I could, but I was hoping you knew. Do these people abstain a lot?”

  “Eh. North does, I think? Magnolia never gives a straight answer when you ask her. Fark usually abstains, but obviously not today.” Telly combs a lock of metalloid hair with her fingers. “I hear Adol has a system for finding out who voted what, but, good luck.”

  “Then I’m gonna...I need to find out who’s just leaving me to die, because that’s like half of a let’s-kill-Sammy vote. And I’m not okay with that.” I sigh.

  “You had it rough. I get it. Don’t worry, they’ll mellow out.” She laughed mirthlessly. “It’s hard not to.”

  We don’t talk for a minute. All I can hear is footsteps and indistinct conversation, from those leaving the voting palace to another street. For all the artificiality of this dome, it’s at least quiet. There’s a beauty to the stillness, a rest for the ears, where every step is audible.

  “So Cieze is the Adversary, right?” I say.

  “You could make a case for it?” Telly says. “It’s still you, obviously. But I’m not gonna...I’m voting No Death no matter what you say.”

  I tilt my head. “...If you think I’m the Adversary, why are you blasé about it?”

  “You’re just playing the game. As long as you take me out first, it’s all good by me. They’ll find my body, you’ll get revenge voted. I’m the only Bystander who has to die and that’s how I want it.”

  But...that doesn’t make any sense. She knew Fark, Adol, and Cieze were going to vote for me. The guys were loud and proud about it. She could have really easily betrayed my trust to get a fourth vote on me and hoped for at least two abstainers. And then, well, lied about it.

  “What was your vote?” I ask her.

  “No Death, duh. Same vote I make every time.”

  That doesn’t really help me figure her out. She gets walking again, and I follow.

  We’re not very far out of the roundabout and into the streets again when I realize that one of the sets of footsteps is behind me—a fair distance, just out of conversational range.

  “I forget where we dropped off those groceries,” I say, and step into a random alleyway. “Here?”

  “Sammy, you put them next to a warehouse; these are just regular houses.”

  “Houses in air quotes, you mean.”

  “How do you know I wasn’t air quoting? You’re looking the wrong way,” she teased.

  I turn around really quick to try to catch her in the act, but she has her hands behind her back again, smiling with innocence. I walk out of the alleyway, smiling back. This was all just a natural-seeming way to turn around, really; now I can look to those footsteps—

  I see yellow, I see blue lines on Ernie’s face, I see his boxy jaw and aloof eyes on his way to the two of us...he stops walking, now at speaking distance, and says nothing. He’s giving me that look like he’s waiting for me to say something first.

  “Hey.” That’s my opening move.

  “Hey.” He answers back.

  Telly coughs twice into her closed fist. She sniffles, and her feet scuff on the screw studs.

  “Is there a reason you’re following me?” I ask.

  “Because people don’t like you.”

  “...and?”

  “So people don’t break into your house, and you don’t break into other people’s houses.” He’s focused on me, now. “I’m sticking with you tonight.”

  “Thanks?”

  “Don’t mention it. It’s just a thing I do.” We follow Telly, who has started walking again, as Ernie keeps talking. “When an election gets heated, I go sit with whoever’s on fire. Keeps honest people honest, and keeps the Adversary from sneaking around at night to get a kill.”

  “And they can’t kill Ernie, either, because everyone knows what he’s doing,” Telly says, chuckling again.

  “Yeah. Fark’s gotten it so many times that it’s an excuse for poker night together, now,” he says.

  “You have playing cards around here?” I ask.

  “Nope. But we have a bunch of mint can lids that I’ve saved and scratched numbers on the inside of.”

  I can’t help but smile at that. Ernie doesn’t. “I bet you have a good poker face.”

  “I’m shit at it.”

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  I kick a loose screw. “What was your vote at the election?”

  “Like I said, I should have protest voted.”

  Okay, more direct question. “Can you help me vote for the Adversary? I want to get out of here and I want to get my vote right the first time. I need people on my side, not just because of that, but because I don’t want Cieze to convince someone and vote for me and, man, I don’t wanna die. So can you help? Do you think I’m a Bystander?”

  His neutral expression becomes a half-frown; his eyes divert down and to his side, as if catching an ill-behaved dog sneaking up on someone’s dinner. “...No. Obviously.” He follows Telly around a corner; we’re approaching the edge of the dome. “I don’t have a clue who you are. But I’d be a fool not to stay with you either way.”

  “Why?” I’m not used to social deduction games.

  “If you’re the Adversary, you stay put. No one dies. If you’re not the Adversary, the real one can’t make a kill without making it obvious that it’s not you, and you’re the leading candidate that Fark’s pushing.”

  At some point, I collect my groceries from near the warehouse where I left them. Eventually, we make it to the edge of the dome, and on the last street there, I see the comforting glow of the light seeping through the edges of Telly’s broken house. With the way the edge of the dome curves up to cover Telly’s home, tens of stories up, I’m reminded of a giant awning, a cozy cover against whatever might be outside. Freedom, of course. It’s freedom that’s outside. I have to take my comforts where I can get them in this fake world. Without touchstones, I can’t navigate a city. And likewise, without touchstones about Mob Rule, I’m having trouble following Ernie’s logic.

  “I don’t get why what the Adversary does has anything to do with me and you, if we’re not involved in whoever they kill at all,” I admit, walking with Ernie through the threshold into Telly’s house. Telly immediately slots herself into the human-shaped divot that she’s worn into her couch. It’s good to be back. With rust-mottled walls lacking any paint, the cheap unpainted cork ceiling tiles, the yellowish lamps, there’s something autumnal and natural in it. The chips of Telly’s house have fallen as they may, in literal flakes of iron oxide or broken half-rivets, in small piles of beer cans and wrappers, in the rubbed-off patches where black paint once was on her mini-fridge’s handle and its top, in a tower of rectangular cardboard cartons which once held packs of bottled water, in a half-empty bottled water pack being used as an end table in front of the TV, in a metal vase atop it containing rust flakes arranged into the shape of a flower...this place is intentional. This is lived-in, an environment that Telly has chosen and has reshaped itself with wear and the course of daily life. Not like the warehouses, the dog park, the cars. Objectively speaking, I’m sure to cut myself on something and get a medically astounding amount of tetanus. But this is the only place here, so far, that I’m comfortable calling someone’s home.

  Ernie closes the door behind us, and he leans back against the doorframe, arms crossed, looking up towards the ceiling. He smiles to himself. “I’ll answer that in a second. ...It brings me back. Telly?”

  “Yeah, Ern?”

  “Remember before we figured out we had to think like the Adversary?”

  Telly sits up. She puts her hands in her lap and whistles. “Wow. Sammy really is just like that right now, aren’t they.”

  “I am right here, in the room with you two,” I interrupt. “Guys, I already know that I’m missing out on three years of context, minimum, but if you go on a reminiscing tangent every time I ask a basic question, I’m never going to be caught up. I’m sorry, but can I get help? Please? I’ll shut up for the rest of the night if you just answer some questions directly.”

  Ernie’s eyes fix on me, his lips close together. His head tilts.

  “I like you already,” he finally says.

  “That’s two people,” Telly says, grinning and kicking her feet up.

  I let out a whistle-sigh and take my resting post, arms folded atop the back of the couch and my knees on the ground behind it. I’m looking over my shoulder, keeping him in view from the corner of my eye. “Okay. You said the Adversary wouldn’t kill people when you’re guarding me, even if they target someone completely different and don’t have anything to do with me at all. Why would they do that?”

  “One of the ways the Adversary loses is by process of elimination. What they’d want, to win, is to make everyone look Adversarial except for them. You can’t look Adversarial if there’s hard proof that it’s not you. You get too many people with proof that they’re Bystanders, and the Adversary has to start protecting the only few people who could realistically be voted dead instead of them. If there are five people alive and four people are definitely Bystanders, then the Adversary is caught.” Ernie tapped his temple with one finger. “I actually tried staging something like that around Day 60 or 70ish. I started talking a big game about having proof that particular people were Bystanders...Fark, Magnolia, Telly, North. I wanted to see if any of the other three would start protecting each other. That left Cieze, Orbora, and Adol, and they all hunkered together.” He blew a dust mote away from his eyes. “Orbora’s just too...you don’t do that to her. Not anymore. I don’t think I learned anything.”

  I nod along. “I get it. If you think like the Adversary, you can catch them.”

  “Well, no, you can’t,” he deadpans. “The problem is that the Adversary is trying to think like a Bystander.”

  “...so what’s the problem with that?”

  “Just told you. The way that Bystanders are supposed to think is however the Adversary thinks, which is supposed to be how Bystanders think, which is whatever they can figure out about how the Adversary thinks, which is...”

  Telly changes the channel. “Infinite loop navel-gazing. You could also just find something else to do with your time, y’know?”

  Ernie snorts. “But then we’re not getting out of here.”

  “Ern, none of your social deduction theory matters ‘cuz we’re not gonna commit.” Telly cracks open a beer; now she’s looking over at him, too. “You said you weren’t going to vote for Sammy, even though that was your best chance out. I know you didn’t. Neither did I. We don’t kill people here. So fuck it, right? Have a drink.”

  “Thanks, but no thanks.” He closes his eyes and sighs.

  I pick at a loose thread on the sofa between my thumb and forefinger.

  “So if that’s how it works, why doesn’t everyone do what you do?” I ask. “How about you do a buddy system so that no one can make a kill, ever?”

  “It helps, but it doesn’t work if your buddy goes to sleep at night and you sneak out. I just happen to be a light sleeper. I had a guinea pig before all this; if she made a slightly weirder-than-usual noise at one o’clock in the morning, I knew about it.” Ernie sighs. His eyes lower.

  I nod. “So how did you get from ‘before’ to ‘after’?”

  “For me, I got hit with a tranquilizer dart and got dragged here. I know it was dragging, because they ruined my shirt. It was different for everyone, though.”

  “I wished on a star that I didn’t have to think about life’s problems and being broke as shit anymore,” Telly said. “And Orbora said she took bad rave pills and sobered up in here.”

  I don’t remember what I was doing right before this. There wasn’t a defined transition for my memories to hook onto. “I think I need to learn more about the rules of this place,” I decide, standing up. I pace about along the floor. “Maybe there’s a loophole in Mob Rule that can get us out.”

  “We looked for one,” Ernie says. “Couldn’t find anything. There’s no sign of anyone monitoring us, no one to report to—just the TVs.”

  “I still want to look.”

  “Don’t blame ya.” He walks over to the couch and sits atop the minifridge, for lack of space unoccupied by Telly. Ernie laces his fingers together behind his head, his elbows far out to his sides. “Tell you what, it’s a bit of a pain in the ass to get there, but I can show you where the rules of Mob Rule are written down.”

  “That’d be nice. Thanks.”

  “It’s what I do. Say the word and I’ll take you there.”

  “I will. After I eat.” That, at least, I can look forward to.