Chapter 9

Silas's POV:

The run had taken me down along the river and back. By the time I let myself into the apartment my shirt was stuck to my back, and the cold inside stopped me in the doorway for a second.

What I wanted was a shower, then six hours of reading with the door shut. I had already decided the day was finished with me.

Then the game room door banged open and Felix came out at a speed that meant either a fire or a mess he had decided I could fix.

"Silas. You're back. We're one short."

I got out of the shirt on the way past him. "I'm going to shower."

"After." He caught my arm with both hands, cheerful and immovable. "You go in wet and the air conditioning gets you, and you're coughing by Sunday, and then I have to hear about it."

"It's ninety degrees outside."

"It's sixty in here. That's the whole problem." He was already turning me around, one hand flat between my shoulder blades, talking the entire way down the hall. "The host is good. Not good the way they're usually good. Actually good."

"I regret most things."

"You regret nothing. That's your real problem."

The chair was already pulled out. The second monitor was awake, the room was open on it, and my tag was sitting in the join field, which meant he had planned this on the walk over.

He pressed down on my shoulders until I sat, which only worked because I allowed it. He knew that. I let him anyway.

Then he leaned past me, hit enter, and said into his own mic, "There he is."

"Good evening," the host said. "Welcome. You're the last one."

The voice was low and unhurried and warm in a way that had nothing apologetic in it. It was the kind of voice that doesn't ask for the room, because it already knows it has the room. She said my single letter the way people say a name, and it did not sound like a mistake.

I looked across at Felix. He grinned. "I bought her. Two hours. Don't be weird about it."

"You bought a babysitter."

"I bought a professional." He turned back to his screen. "Everyone's here. Let's go."

I put the headset on properly and sat back, and told myself I would give it one round.

I should have left. I don't like party games. I don't like twelve strangers in one channel talking over each other, and I had a shower and a book and a perfectly good reason to be finished with the evening.

"Blood on the Clocktower," she said. "I'm your Storyteller. You'll each get a role in a private message. Read it, don't share it, lie as much as you like. Townsfolk and outsiders want the demon dead. The demon and its minions want the rest of you dead first. I run the nights, I call the votes, and anything you whisper to me stays with me. If you're confused, message me quietly. If you're not confused, message me anyway."

Somebody laughed. The cards went out. The room went quiet the way a room goes quiet when twelve people are all reading at once, and then it came apart into noise.

I have watched better-organized riots. Two players accused each other inside four minutes. A third announced a claim that made no sense and defended it with total confidence. A fourth began, genuinely, to sound hurt about being called a liar.

Through all of it she kept four things and never let go of any of them. She called the end of the day. She said the word, the talking stopped, and nobody argued, because nobody could tell you why she had picked that particular moment. She counted votes herself, out loud, in order, with no opinion attached to any number.

She took the whispers one at a time, and each of us heard only our own. When someone died she announced it as a fact and nothing else. No explanation. No sympathy. No sign that she had thought about it for even a second.

I don't take rulings from people I haven't tested. "You counted before the last hand went up," I said into a gap she had left open. "The vote closed while he was still holding it."

"Two hands went up after I closed, and both were for a man who was already out," she said. No heat in it at all. "If I reopen the count we'll be here until next week and you'll still be wrong, so we're not reopening it."

A small silence. It was the kind that happens when a room quietly redistributes its weight. Felix said something and the noise came back up, but the thing had already happened, and everyone in that channel had heard it happen.

Two sentences. The table had learned whose room it was in.

Later I watched her do the other thing, the one that had nothing to do with rules.

A woman in the channel had been accused three times in twenty minutes. By the third one she had stopped defending herself and started apologizing, which is how a person sounds right before they leave.

The host said something to her privately — I don't know what. Then she said one sentence to the room and moved the day on, and by the next vote the woman was arguing again, and somebody made a joke, and she laughed.

She praised Felix twice that night and I don't think he noticed he had been handled. This woman handed her compliments out and stepped back, and took nothing from anyone, and Felix just thought he had been having a good evening.

Then the private messages came back, and I had something to do.

I was an Empath. Every night I learned how many of the two living players on either side of me were evil. For three nights running she fed me a number and I built a wall out of it.

One, then zero, then one again. When the man to my left died the count moved in a way I could follow, and I followed it.

By the third day I had put the table onto two names with such precision that strangers I had never spoken to were repeating my reasoning back to me in the chat.