The smell of scorched fabric and hot metal didn't fade. It hung in the red light, sticking to the back of Kai's throat every time he inhaled.
Under the metal table, Mori's silver tie clip caught the glare. It was exactly three inches from the front left table leg. Kai kept his eyes on it.
69:45.
Ren was breathing through his mouth. The sound was too loud for the small, sealed room. A ragged, wet rhythm. Nobody asked him to stop.
Saya sat with her weight entirely on the balls of her feet. Her hands were flat on the metal surface, her fingers spread wide, bracing for a physical impact that wasn't coming.
Yuna hadn't moved. She was still gripping her card against her grey sweater. She hadn't looked at the pile of expensive charcoal fabric on the floor.
Every Signal on the table vibrated at once. A long, continuous buzz that rattled the glass against the metal.
Kai looked down.
The screen wiped the voting grid. White text loaded across the black glass, typing itself out line by line.
ROUND ONE COMPLETE.LAYER 2 UNLOCKED.
ALLIANCE MECHANICS ACTIVE.Check the watermark on the back of your card.Players with matching numbers are ALLIED.If one allied player survives, their partner receives +1 Pulse Day.
WARNING: Direct revelation of your number to another player is a rules violation.PENALTY: Immediate Void Call.
Kai didn't touch his card immediately.
He watched the room process the text. The psychological architecture of the game was shifting. Before, they were five strangers hunting a target. Now, they were divided into hidden pairs, incentivized to protect an invisible partner, forbidden from simply asking who that partner was.
Ren flipped his card over. He stared at the back of it, his jaw working.
Saya tilted hers just enough to catch the ceiling light. She laid it back down flat.
Kai lifted the stiff cardboard of his '2' card. He held it close to his chest and angled it toward the red panels above. A faint, glossy watermark shimmered against the dense geometric pattern on the back.
2.
Kai lowered the card. He looked at the pile of clothes on the floor.
Mori had flipped his card face-up before the laser hit him. It had been a black '2'.
Kai's alliance partner was dead. The game had just locked him out of the only safety net the room offered. He was completely, mathematically alone.
"Okay," Ren said. His voice cracked. He cleared his throat and tried again, forcing the volume up. "Okay. We need to figure this out. We need to coordinate."
"Coordinate how?" Saya asked. Her voice was sharp. Brittle. "If you say the number, the ceiling deletes you."
"We don't say it." Ren dragged a hand through his brown hair, messing it up further. The orange of his jacket looked bruised in the light. "We talk around it. If someone was standing at the very beginning of a line, they might want to know who was standing next to them."
Saya stared at him. "The beginning is crowded. I'm already there."
Ren's shoulders dropped a fraction of an inch. The relief was visible, raw and unedited.
They had found each other. 1 and 1.
Kai watched them. A two-person voting bloc in a four-person room. They controlled the board. If Ren and Saya agreed on a target, they couldn't be outvoted.
"What about you?" Ren looked at Kai. "Where are you standing?"
"I'm not in the line," Kai said.
Ren frowned. "What does that mean?"
"It means my partner couldn't keep his mouth shut," Kai said.
Saya's head snapped toward him. Green eyes locking onto grey.
Two seconds.
The room's geometry clicked into place between them. Saya ran the math backward. Mori was a 2. Kai had just admitted he was alone. Yuna was entirely silent.
Saya knew Kai was isolated. Kai knew Saya knew.
Neither of them spoke.
Ren looked between them, catching the current but unable to translate the frequency. "Wait. If you're alone, and we're together..." He turned his head slowly toward the far end of the table.
Toward Yuna.
She shrank back into her chair. Her knuckles were bone-white.
"If she doesn't have a partner," Ren said, the words coming out slow, "and you don't have a partner..."
"Then she holds the Dealer card," Saya finished. Her hands curled into fists on the table. "She's the target."
"No," Yuna whispered. The first sound she had made since they walked in. It sounded like tearing paper. "No, please."
"Show us the back of your card," Saya demanded, leaning forward. "Show us the watermark. If it's a 3, you're clear."
"I can't." Yuna pressed the cardboard harder against her chest.
"You can show the back. The rule said direct revelation of the number is a violation. Showing the watermark isn't saying it." Saya's voice was dropping into that dead, flat register. The sniper aligning the crosshair. "Show the card."
Yuna shook her head, tears spilling over her lower lids, catching the red light.
"She's the Dealer," Saya said to Ren. "We have the majority. We vote her out next round. The game ends."
"We don't know that for sure," Ren said, holding his hands up, palms out, trying to push the tension back down into the table. "She's terrified. We don't execute someone because they're scared."
"We execute them because it's her or us. That's the math, Ren."
Kai stopped listening to them.
The argument was noise. It was the exact argument the room was designed to generate. The game wanted them fighting. It wanted the paranoia.
He looked past Saya's shoulder. At the concrete wall behind her.
The plaster was scarred. 847 marks. Some shallow, scratched with fingernails. Some deep, gouged with metal objects.
Underneath the tally, the faded ink.
They always choose themselves.
Kai let his eyes unfocus. He stopped looking at the words and started looking at the psychology of the person who wrote them.
847 games played in this room. 847 times, a group of strangers had sat in these exact chairs. They had received the same rules. They had watched someone die in round one. They had received the alliance mechanics in round two. They had argued. They had panicked.
And they had voted the Dealer out. Or they had voted wrong and died.
They always choose themselves.
It was a complaint. A bitter, exhausted observation left by someone who had watched 847 groups fail to see the alternative.
If the goal was simply to survive by voting out the Dealer, the sentence didn't make sense. Choosing to vote out the threat was logical. It wasn't something to mourn.
Unless voting out the threat wasn't the real solution.
Kai looked at Yuna. She was hyperventilating now, small, choked gasps, her eyes darting between Ren and Saya. She wasn't an architect of their destruction. She was a casualty holding a piece of cardboard she didn't ask for.
Find the Dealer.
That was the rule.
Eliminated player's card is revealed.Game ends when condition is met.
It didn't say the condition was the Dealer's death. It said find the Dealer.
Kai's mind stalled for a fraction of a second. The architecture of the true game rose out of the dark, cold and perfectly balanced.
It was a trust fall.
If they voted Yuna out, she died, and the survivors gained three days. But if they identified her, and proved they identified her, without killing her...
The timer on his Signal read 50:00.
Ten minutes left until the second voting phase.
"She's a liability," Saya was saying, her tone stripped of all warmth. "If we tie the vote, the game continues. If we guess wrong, we risk a penalty. We know what she is."
"I won't vote for her," Ren said. He planted both hands on the table. Stubborn. Unmovable. "I'm not pulling the trigger on a terrified girl."
"Then you're going to get us all killed."
"Stop," Kai said.
His voice didn't rise in volume. It didn't need to. He dropped it into the exact frequency of a command.
Ren and Saya stopped. They both looked at him.
"The math you're running is wrong," Kai said. He didn't look at Saya. He looked directly at Ren. "Both of you."
"She's the Dealer," Saya said.
"Yes," Kai said. "She is."
Yuna let out a sob, curling inward over her knees.
"Then the solution is obvious," Saya said.
"The obvious solution is what leaves 847 tallies on a wall." Kai finally looked at the wall, nodding his head toward the scratches. "Look at it. Really look at it."
Ren turned in his chair. He stared at the scratches. At the sentence.
"They always choose themselves," Ren read aloud. The words sounded heavier in the quiet.
"This game is categorized as Hearts," Kai said. "Trust exploitation. The system sets us up to murder someone who is just as trapped as we are. It gives us a countdown to force the panic. It gives us hidden alliances to breed paranoia. It wants us to kill her."
He looked back at the table. At the dead black glass of the Signals.
"I'm proposing we don't."
Saya's jaw tightened. "If we don't vote, the timer runs out. We all drop to zero. Void Call."
"We vote," Kai said. "Just not for her."
Every Signal on the table vibrated simultaneously. A hard, violent buzz.
VOTING PHASE INITIATED. 60 SECONDS TO SELECT.
The grid of unmarked boxes appeared on the screens. SEAT 1. SEAT 2. SEAT 3. SEAT 5.
"If we scatter the votes," Kai said, speaking faster now, the rhythm of the words matching the ticking clock in the corner of his screen. "If nobody receives a majority, the rule states no elimination occurs."
"That just delays the problem," Saya snapped. "We still have to clear the game."
"We will. In round three." Kai didn't touch his screen yet. "Right now, we tie the vote. Four players. We each vote for the person to our left. A perfect four-way tie. Zero eliminations."
40 SECONDS.
Ren looked at Kai. "You're sure about this."
"No," Kai said. "I'm calculating probability."
Saya let out a breath through her teeth. "This is insane."
30 SECONDS.
"Seat one votes seat two," Kai said, tapping Ren's box on his screen. "Seat two votes seat three. Seat three votes seat five. Seat five votes seat one." He looked at Yuna. "Do you understand? Vote for me. Seat one."
Yuna stared at him, her chest heaving, but she nodded. She reached out with a trembling finger and tapped her glass.
15 SECONDS.
Saya looked at the ceiling. She held the look for three seconds. Then she looked down and tapped Yuna's box.
Ren tapped Saya's.
VOTING CLOSED.
The grid dissolved. Text loaded in its place.
SEAT 1: 1 VOTE.SEAT 2: 1 VOTE.SEAT 3: 1 VOTE.SEAT 5: 1 VOTE.
TIE DETECTED. NO ELIMINATION.
The timer reappeared. 49:58.
The hum of the ceiling panels returned to the foreground. The red light felt slightly darker.
Kai leaned forward across the metal table. He didn't look at Saya. He didn't look at Yuna. He kept his eyes locked entirely on the orange of Ren's jacket.
"Ren," Kai said, his voice dropping into the lowest register he possessed.
Ren met his eyes.
"I need you to trust me," Kai said. "Specifically. For the next twenty minutes."
Ren didn't blink. He didn't ask for the math. He didn't ask for the guarantee.
"Okay," Ren said.