The courtroom lights have gone dark, and even the screens have turned black. In a corner, two figures stand face to face. It’s my awkward self, and Lily—I had asked that faithful girl to stay here just a few minutes more, though I hadn’t known the power would cut out as soon as the trial ended.

  “Yuri, is this about my vote again? I’ll make it up to you, I promise.”

  “No, it’s not that.”

  “Is it about how we can call each other by name? I think it’s a loophole in the rules, that even if we can’t tell each other, we can say them if we know what they are.”

  “That was already more than obvious.”

  “Is it about the orange pill in the fridge? It looks familiar to me, somehow.”

  “No…”

  “Oh! I can tutor you too, if you want some extra help. That offer’s not just for the Horse.”

  “No, that’s not it at all…”

  Lily rises to her tip-toes as she looks up at me; we can just barely make each other out in this faint light. Her eyebrows scrunch together, with her mouth in a thoughtful pout.

  “Go on then. I’ll listen to whatever you have to say.”

  I had lied about being seer, and lied to everyone about her being a villager too; I have to find out what her role is, so I know whether to help the village or to burn it down. “I want to protect you! So just tell me your role.”

  That’s what I should say. Something bold and dashing like that, but in reality… “Hrk! Hak!”

  “Yuri? You’re making a strange sound….”

  I’m not that confident! Isn’t saying something like that pretty much a love confession!

  “A-are you okay! Your face is really red!”

  “Hrk! Hak! Coff!”

  “I’ve never done this before. But don’t worry, I’ll save you.”

  Lily slips behind me and wraps her hands around my stomach, pressing herself close against my back. “I’m Heimlich certified! Bend the person over, have them face the ground—”

  “Hak! Hak! No! No!!! Stop!!!”

  Forget about choking, I’m about to have a heart attack! She clings on ever more tightly as I twist and squirm.

  “Perspiration—great redness—difficulty of speech, all classic signs of respiratory arrest. Stay calm Yuri, stay calm!”

  “I am calm!” I shout. “I’m stressed out from the trial today, and I cough more when I’m stressed, that’s all.”

  “Oh,” Lily sounds oddly disappointed. She moves away, and I’m suddenly disappointed too, though I’d rather not be her Heimlich maneuver guinea pig. My breathing slows, and my eyes gradually adjust to a world without light.

  The room’s darkness morphs into a world of pure geometry, gray rectangles for the monitors, wide cylinders for the rising columns, and a complication of both shapes for the gun-on-the-pole.

  “What I wanted to say is that you’re important to me. That’s all,” I decide.

  Lily’s own gray shape is sleek and flat. Her face crinkles, puzzled, as I lean in closer to her lithe form. “Lily, I know that you’re a villager, and I want you alive so we can win. Okay?”

  “Sure…”

  “Then thanks again. You’re good to leave.”

  She tilts her head, pushing forwards, and now I’m the one who has to move away. A faint light comes down from the ceiling’s painted dome and casts her in almost a halo, and rather than walk away she remains still, a blessed sculpture, and I feel myself in rapture.

  “Yuri, I have something to tell you too. Or rather, I have something I want to ask.”

  Lily’s gentle demeanor makes her a terrible interrogator. But that same innate kindness makes her a wonderful priestess, and I’d feel compelled to confess to her whatever she wishes. Inner darkness? I can see muted sirens, and an extended stay in a hospital bed. Some murders? First, I burst open the Monkey, and later, maybe, I’ll do the same to a certain scrawny, scraggle-haired boy…

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  Dark secrets? My brother did a horrible thing; he stitched me an orca whale, and I sleep with it to this day. For someone of my age, it’s terribly immature, and I think if more people knew they would laugh.

  I have to be careful, I have to resist. I don’t want to change how Lily looks at me— and the girl in question hops on a table ledge, swinging her legs back and forth.

  “Yuri, have you thought about ‘why’ we’re playing this game?”

  “Most people would say having their life on the line is reason enough, but I have a different purpose. I’d rather not say it, but if you really want to know, then maybe I’ll tell you. I… ”

  I’m having another meltdown. I’m having another meltdown. I’m having another melt—

  “Ah! Yuri, that wasn’t what I was asking at all. I meant more why someone would have a dozen students play a game of Werewolf where you if you lose, you die?”

  That was close. I pull myself together, and I have to physically wrap my arms around my chest to stop myself from shaking. But on the whole, my voice is steady and confident and assertive and true: if there’s one thing I know how to talk about, it’s Mafia.

  “If we’re talking about the game itself, we should figure out who the wolves are first: based on what happened in the past two trials, there might already be enough info to deduce all three. The votes, the rules, the roles, their manners of speech, there’s already a few people who are rather suspect—”

  “I’d rather not think too hard about it.”

  “Huh?”

  “Because, silly, what if you’re one of them?” Lily flicks my forehead. “If you want to think about the game in terms of ‘wolves’ and ‘villagers’, feel free to, but I’d like to think about it in terms of people instead. I can’t trust a wolf, but I can always trust in you.’”

  I lean against the marble column, feeling the texture of its stone animals pressed against my back. While the animal bodies are carved from high-grade rock, their eyes are inlaid with smooth, cold, reflective stones that feel like pockets of ice. Yet a faint warmth sparks in my heart, even as chills run through me.

  “Then, Lily, if you’re looking for reasons this game might take place… it could be that some craven tycoons are gambling on us behind the scenes, or an eccentric old man wants to live vicariously through us, or that this could even be the afterlife. This does feel like heaven and hell all kind of rolled into one rundown hotel.”

  “Did you just spoil that drama I was going to watch?”

  “No, these are just common tropes. But somebody’s watching, that’s for sure.”

  All kinds of advances have happened in the past thirty years; in transportation, in construction, and in medicine in particular. They say that the life expectancy of someone born in the last great era was around eighty years old. With the development of recent drugs, it might now be higher than one hundred, at least for those who can afford SkyFarm’s exorbitant prices.

  But though technology marches on … I don’t think there’s such a thing as magic. And the idea of an AI that uses advanced speech and spatial recognition to monitor this game is as implausible as the idea of an omniscient Cat God who enforces the rules of Werewolf through divine thunder.

  On the island city I live on, there’s a certain exciting activity present that’s called an “escape room.” These can be reserved with groups of friends; they’re rooms filled with puzzles and elaborate mechanisms that must be solved in order to find an exit. And if someone doesn’t have many friends… it can be fun to play by yourself, too… but that wouldn’t be me, hahaha…

  A little-known fact about them is that most of them don’t use any motion sensors, even the ones that seem to. Instead, an operator watches the escapees via a hidden camera, and when he witnesses the players make certain puzzle-solving movements, he’ll press a button to unlock the correct safe or door.

  This is Mafia, not an escape room, but the same principles might apply. The trigger for the first trial must have been when everyone took a seat, with a man at the cams playing us a rules video and changing our screens. It’s possible too that we're currently being gambled on by voyeur billionaires using that same hypothetical surveillance system. Though maybe I only think that because it’s a cliche when it comes to games like these…

  Lily puts her hands behind her back. “I want to talk to the others and figure out what we all have in common. The other students might focus on escaping, but at least one of us has to consider the motive too—and figuring out the ‘why’ might just give us a clue on how to fight back.”

  “Or about who the mastermind is,” I mutter darkly. “In these kinds of games, there’s also always a mastermind, a traitor among the players who sabotages the others and secretly runs the game. If I find a way to escape, I’ll tell you and you alone.”

  Lily nods. “You’ll tell me, and then I’ll fetch everyone else. We’re just high schoolers, Yuri.”

  We can all survive. Even when three players are dead, Lily still clings to those words. Even when there might be a traitor. Even when she suggests roaming the grounds, with no allies, all alone in an abandoned hotel.

  She’s right, there’s no guarantee that there’s a mastermind in this game. But if there had to be one, then I wish that I were that mastermind, so I could be someone special to everyone else. I would confess tearily, Lily would forgive me, and together we could draw up a plan to escape, and as we sketch maps and scrawl out diagrams our hands might miraculously touch.

  But since I’m no mastermind, then maybe I could try to impress her by eliminating someone else for her sake, like how I “killed” that glasses-wearing sweater-vested overly-pretentious ape. Or maybe I could simply bring myself to speak…

  “I’d like to help, but I really don’t know much, except that we’re probably all from the country of Elyssia Isle. I haven’t talked much to anyone else outside the trials,” I say.

  “That’s right. You always sleep in. If that’s the case… it’s time to wake up! Let’s go talk to the other students and see what we can find.”

  “We…?”

  “It’ll be much easier to find patterns when it’s two people comparing notes rather than just one person lost in thought. And in a big building like this, it can get a little lonely —don’t stand still, come, come on.”

  She tugs at my hand. “Maybe you’re always late because you always move so slowly.”

  I smile. “Okay, okay, I’lll pick up the pace.”