It’s late that same night. The voting palace is dark, all but the television screens. There exists a single, peach-colored candle, burning on Cieze’s favorite voting booth. We don’t get candles here. Orbora made one, out of wax from various grocery wrappings. A glass shotglass sits before it, containing a single bead of golden liquid, no bigger than a marble, preserved in plastic wrap.

  Upon wax paper, folded with a single crease to prop it up, is printed his name, in cursive.

  I wasn’t there for the proper funeral; I’ve only now arrived. I spent the rest of the day pacing, gathering my thoughts, about my vote, my actions. If I hadn’t lied, he’d still be alive right now, to...what? Try to kill me again? I know he would have done that—he was convinced I was the Adversary. And, likewise, I was convinced it was him.

  And we were both wrong. Nothing changed. He’s dead, for no reason. I’m still walking my rounds, looking upon the screens. They change their displays slowly, alternating—one minute, those fateful vote totals today, and another, the two-by-five grid. Cieze’s slot has been replaced—no more image of his face, no more of his name. There’s just a large red X, darkening the rectangle behind it.

  No magical portal opened up to let us out of here, no mysterious door that no one noticed earlier. No secret passageway cracked open, nor bulkhead unsealed. Mob Rule continues. In my first two days here, I’ve killed an innocent person, in a game that had been going on in complete peace for years.

  I’m not even sure if I feel bad about it. I keep going back to that rationale, that push. He was trying to kill me. I was justified in defending myself. That had to be it, that had to be the truth. Is it even my fault? I’m not the only one who cast the vote. Ernie. Fark. Adol. Someone abstained, even. Don’t they get some of the blame?

  I remember before I left the election today, Fark had something else to say. New rule, he claimed. No one votes for anyone for any reason, ever again. I don’t blame him. Everyone agreed.

  I don’t know if I’ll ever process this. I might just have to accept that I’m a bad person—for now, and for the future.

  One of the elevator-style doors creak and slide open. I see the fuzzy blue-white glow of the light in the distant sky above the dome, diffusing into the voting palace. In silhouette, there’s Telly, hunched and with both arms on either side of the doorway, her hair dangling, her stance narrow. I hope she has nothing to say about this. I don’t know what I’d be able to say back.

  “Are you coming home?” she asks, weak and hoarse, like she’d lost her voice to a woodchipper.

  I can only nod. “I should go.”

  My steps are the only sharp noises in the palace, echoing into the false floors above, fading into the electrical buzz of the televisions. I approach, closer and closer, and it takes a moment for my eyes to readjust to the dim-but-extant light ‘outside’, for whatever that word means in here, for whatever anything means in here. Blue and white light upon steel and rust fades down. I walk past the cars; so does Telly.

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  Her face is burned—the striations of her metal exterior made good channels for tears, letting them dribble in straight lines down her cheeks, leaving acrid trails of dark purple that stain her skin. The tears aren’t flowing at this very moment, but her face is more purple than gray. All she has is that aloof half-smile, letting her hair hang in front of her eyes, and she’s carrying a wrapper of a fruit and grain bar.

  “Was it you?” she breathes.

  What do I tell her? Do I continue to be a bad person? ...A bad person wouldn’t spare their friend more suffering on such a hard day. I need Telly to trust me, for her sake, and vice versa. Even if she thinks I’m the Adversary, the history books don’t need to say that I’m the one who put Cieze down.

  “No,” I say. “Everyone was arguing with me for No Death, so that’s what I voted to get them off my back.” I sigh.

  “Good.” She wipes a channel of tears from her face. “I guess that means you can’t be the Adversary, after all.”

  “You’d be the first to be convinced.” I give a weak smile. “Not Fark or Adol, either.”

  Telly sighs. She shakes her head, rustling her dreads. “Sammy. Sammy, what I’m telling you. I’m teaching you that I want to be friends. Not that I’m still looking for the bad guy. Honestly, who even cares about them anymore.” She throws the wrapper away, and it spins in the air current from the movement before settling on the street, a piece of litter that no one’s going to pick up. “I am completely prepared to spend the rest of my life here. The rest of my life with my seven best friends, if no one has to die because...because we betrayed them.” She sniffles.

  ‘We’. “Was it you?”

  “Of fucking course not. No Death. No. Death.” She slumps her shoulders, eyes to the ground, facing away from me. I stop walking, next to her. “Hey. Hey, Sammy. Do you know why I asked you, if you were the Adversary, to send me off first?”

  “I...thought it was because you didn’t care about your life that much.”

  “Hehehhhhhhhh yeah, I don’t, I really don’t, friend, pal,” she says; she spins and grabs my shoulders, quick yet gentle. “But the real reason is that I’m not about to sit here and watch my friends die. If it has to be me first so that I never see that...too late.” She wheezes in laughter, the delirium of a circus clown. “Cieze. Cieze was a good guy. Shifty doesn’t mean evil, Sammy.” Her grin is just...way too wide for the situation. “He died for nothing!”

  Gotta calm her down. “Not nothing,” I say, my face hardening. I pick names at random. “We’ve ruled out lots of people as the Adversary, now. Ernie, Adol, Fark. It has to be one of Orbora, North, you, or Magnolia. Three of your friends are permanently safe from votes, Telly. He’s...he’s their guardian angel now, a proof that they’re innocent from beyond the grave.”

  Telly stays hunched-over as she turns away once again, hands dragging on the ground, laughing to herself with bowed knees. “If you say so. Don’t you make empty promises on me!” She smiles to the sky.

  “I won’t. I remember our promise.”

  She stares up at the dome lights for a minute or so, before shaking her head and stumble-striding off down the street. “Come on.”

  I’m not about to tell her ‘no’, and I need time to lay down, too. I wonder how strong that beer is.