Chapter 10

I have never been more wrong about anything in my life. She did not tell me a single lie, which is the part I only understood when the system posted the roles at the end.

I read the line above my own card, and four hours of being clever went out with it.

The first day's vote was where she spent something. It came close, close enough that she counted twice. Felix had made himself the loudest person in the game and therefore the easiest to bury.

He had claimed a role with a public power, used it badly, and then argued for twenty minutes with a man who had read him correctly from the first minute.

When the count came back she closed the day early. Not late, not on a technicality. Early, with the numbers still moving.

Felix lived. Somebody else did not, because that is the price of an early close. The one who got buried instead was a handle I didn't recognize, a man who had spoken maybe six times and whom nobody had bothered to be wrong about.

He came back the next morning with the rest of us. He said very little, and he did not leave.

I noticed it in the middle of the second day, when I would have bet money he would be gone. His name had moved up out of the bottom of the roster, and when someone asked him a question directly he answered it instead of sliding off it.

Whatever kept that man at the table happened when nobody else was listening. There was exactly one person in that game whose job was to make sure it happened. She had closed a vote early for the sake of a friend the day before, and I did not think the two things were unrelated.

Somewhere in the third hour I stopped thinking of it as a game with a host in it, and said the only long sentence I said all night. "The Storyteller knows who the demon is. She's been sitting in this room being helpful for three hours."

Half the channel laughed. She didn't. "I know," she said. "And in four minutes either you will too, or you won't, and it won't be because I said so."

I had nothing to put against that, so I gave her nothing. Felix asked at some point whether I would play again next week. I didn't answer, which was not the same as no. He heard the difference and let it go.

The timer ran out mid-argument, which was the correct place to end it. The system posted the roles. I found out what my neighbors had been, and what I had been, and the noise died and stayed dead for a while.

"All right," Felix said finally, into that silence. Then, to her, "I'm adding you. Same time next Friday?"

"I'll send you the codes. Bring whoever's fun."

The channel emptied. I took the headset off and sat with one hand flat on the desk, then pushed the mic button once more. "You did that very well."

"Thank you," she said. Then she left, and gave me absolutely nothing to hold on to.

I took a shower with the water too hot. Somewhere in the middle of it I reached out of the stall, picked my phone off the ledge, and typed, what are you doing.

I told myself it was to find out what time it was in New York. That was nonsense, because I knew what time it was in New York. Just after ten in the morning there.

in the library, she wrote back, almost immediately. Then: miss me?

I put the phone down. Self-possessed to the last bone. I washed my hair and got most of the way through rinsing before I picked it up again.

send me a voice note.

The dots appeared, stopped, and appeared again, long enough that I stood there dripping. want to hear my voice, she sent. so you're curious about me.

No.

right. not curious. then I won't send one. nobody cares anyway.

I laughed out loud, which was embarrassing, alone in a bathroom in a city where nobody knew where I was.

Threatening me. She was trying to threaten me, and she had gone about it like a woman who had never once had to threaten anybody in her life.

I put an elbow against the wall and typed, you don't have to send it. I can also stop sending you things.

Nothing came back. No dots, no message, no retreat. I could see her face anyway, though I had never seen her face. The flat small calculation of someone who has just been told the price.

Desmond had asked around for me in the first week, before I had any reason to care. Camilla Sterling, Stern business school, fifth in her year and first in ambition.

Two years into positioning herself to take her father's company whole, with a quiet half-sibling somewhere in the columns that explained the rest of it. That was why a girl like her had started writing to a man like me. It was why she had kept writing for a month through every insult I could hand her.

A voice note was nothing. But a month was not nothing, and Camilla Sterling would not spend a month on pride.

The note came through twenty seconds later. I let it sit, then played it.

"Don't be like that," she said. "I was joking with you."

There was a pull at the front of it, a soft sway she used when she wanted something and was pretending she didn't. Under that it was light and quick and warm, the voice of someone smiling at her phone in a library in New York.

I stood there with the phone in my wet hand.

It was not the host's voice. The host had been low and level for four hours, a woman who never had to raise it to hold a room. This one sat higher and softer, half coaxing, with a sweetness at the edge of it that was almost a tease.

Not the same voice. The same ear underneath, though, for where a person's guard was thinnest.

I played it three more times with the volume all the way up, water going cold against my back.