I’m still winking, and Lily has her fingers in an adorable V. But this blissful moment doesn’t last long.

  “Yuri.”

  “Yes?”

  “Stop winking.”

  “No, no, no—”

  She pulls open the eyelid to reveal a bulb filled with red.

  ***

  “You’re lucky it’s just the conjunctiva,” the Dragon says. “It looks frightening, but the cut should heal after a few days.”

  I’m resting on a long cushioned ottoman, gazing somewhat blurrily at a network of arched wooden beams on the ceiling. I see Lily’s worried face in one eye and in the other, there’s a pale skin-colored smear; my pillow’s damp, as the Dragon had washed out my wound with saline while I had been lying down.

  He presses a soft cotton bandage on my left eye and the roundish smear soon disappears, though its deep, soothing voice remains. “Change it every evening in pitch darkness; a damaged eye like that will be very sensitive to light. If the pain worsens, then seek immediate medical attention, and by ‘immediate medical attention’ I mean that you should come look for me.

  “I know.”

  Lily scowls. “Do you know, Yuri? Do you? Because it seems to me your idea of ‘seeking immediate medical attention’ is sweeping your hair aside and hiding an eye hemorrhage!”

  “But we had to finish talking to the Rat, right? And we need to give the Horse and Ox the crowbar, too… getting all that done is important if we want to escape within the two hours we have left.”

  “Geez! Then I’ll give the Horse and Ox the tools. I’ll give the Horse and Ox the tools, so take care of yourself for once and get some rest! What the frickety heck is ‘cutting your eye on a vent’ even supposed to mean?”

  She picks up the tools, and her voice trails off as she exits the room in a huff. If ‘cutting one’s eye’ on a vent slat sounded like a heap of nonsense to her, that’s because it is.

  The Rat had attacked me in the elevator, but, like he said, he intentionally didn’t leave a mark. He had wanted to make sure no-one would accuse him of being an attempted murderer and vote him out during the trials ahead.

  So, after demonstrating my deep and profound ‘insanity’ through various threats, I held myself hostage, holding a mop splinter against my eye. While that wasn’t a great location, it was the only place I could feasibly leave a critical injury with such a weapon.

  I had never intended on following through with that threat, which is one reason I took so many actions building up to that desperate ploy. I might be a little morally numb, but even I find it distasteful to pretend to be victimized in order to advance my own interests, even against such a person as the Rat.

  After all, when someone says they’re hurting, emotionally or physically, it’s important to believe them. My own personal experiences have led me to that fact, so I can’t undermine that; if the Rat had stood his ground, I would have just given up.

  I’m not actually the kind of person brave enough to put out my own eye, either, but my hand was literally forced by my own nervousness. I mull over all these thoughts for what feels like a wink of time, resting on the long leather chair.

  “Haa… haa… haa… I’m back.” The disciplinary chair once more emerges through a wooden door. Sweat stains Lily’s blouse and she wipes her cheeks with a red armband; as she pants, she opens her mouth wide, and I can see a little flicks of a pinkish tongue.

  “Already? It’s not like I’m on my deathbed.”

  The pain beneath my eyepatch has already changed to mere a dull throb. Just as Lily sits down next to me, I sit back up, to finally see.

  Lily had taken me to a beautiful library, tucked away at the edge of the second floor. Books dwell neatly in cases that rise all the way to the ceiling, step-ladders providing passage to the soaring rows; wide, tall windows are covered in metal sheets, and while the library is cozy it’s still large enough to get lost within its shelves.

  Encyclopedias and medical references are scattered on the study tables. The Rabbit snoozes on a big dictionary, her pink coat bundled over it like a pillowcase, and the Dragon, having finished his treatment, has his nose buried in another title: THOMSON’S DILEMMA.

  I amble over to this study space. It’s an oak table designed so that many people could use it to work and read all at once, a rectangle that almost extends to the full length of the room. I lower myself into the chair next to him, and he looks up:

  “Feeling better already?”

  “I can be tough when it counts, I think.”

  He nods, and turns a page. He finishes another chapter, I crane my neck to read the words—as he moves the book left and right, so too does my nosy head. He sighs, then closes the novel at a particular sentence: if nothing stops the trolley, then five men will be killed.

  “All the books in this library are at least two or three years old. There’s nothing recent, and it makes me think that the place may have been abandoned around that time, or fitted then for whatever you call this.” the Dragon says.

  “Death Mafia. I call it Death Mafia,” I reply, and he shrugs again. Hey, I thought that sounded quite cool!

  “I would like it if you could be quiet,” he says, politely frowning. “The Rabbit’s trying to get some rest; she’s had some deep trouble with insomnia. And the Pig over there was just yelled at by the Tiger, so she needs some space to relax.”

  Curled up in the fantasy section is a quiet, frumpy, girl focused on a leatherbound book. We slip away to another table further in the back, where Lily joins us, and while this room’s organized, we keep up a fine layer of dust. I’m forced to stifle a cough.

  “So how may I help you?”

  “If I want to heal my eye, then, couldn’t I take that orange pill?” I ask.

  “Don’t take some mystery medicine just cause it’s there,” the Dragon says. “There’s nothing on the label, so what are the odds it’ll help? I’ll do some research on what it might be, and I guess we can try it out if the wound starts to get infected, but I’m hoping there’s an infirmary in the hotel we have still yet to find.”

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “I see,” I mutter, disappointed. This is what I get for trying to make deductions away from my lane; I suppose I should ultimately stick to my expertise in Mafia treatises rather than become a doctor of medicine.

  “Anything else?”

  “Lily,” I pronounce, as she lowers herself besides me. “Ask the question,” are my unspoken words that follow. Isn’t this what you wanted? Why do you look so stressed out?

  “Oh…” Lily gives the best semblance of a smile. The three of us are all sat down on the same side of the table, books and notes scattered in front of us in heaping piles. If one didn’t know any better it’d seem like we were students in the midst of a last-minute cram session.

  “Then, Dragon, where were you when you were kidnapped? If we know what we all have in common, then maybe it’d help us escape,” Lily asks.

  “Very well,” the Dragon says, thinking. “I was walking home from school down Manti East Street. It’s a road with many restaurants and streetcarts, and it smelled strongly of dumplings. That’s what I remember the most…”

  “A busy street? Dumplings? It must be some kind of sign.” Lily’s nearly finished with her notepad. “Maybe the knockout gas came from a dumpling stand.”

  A rustling, like dry leaves, crackles through the room—deep in the library’s depths, someone must have turned the pages of an old book. But the dark haired boy in front of me is completely unreadable.

  “Even if my vision’s damaged, I can still see through your lies,” I say, my chair groaning as I stand. “Dragon, I’m grateful for your treatment, but I must point out that if you were kidnapped there, then the customers and shop-owners on the street would’ve seen it.

  “Then, Snake, what’s your story?”

  “I went to sleep, then woke up here; I had to have been taken from the dorm of my school. I’m sure it wasn’t easy—even that old building requires a keycard and has some CCTV, but at least a determined group could have planned it. Alone in a room, no pedestrians who could wander in, angles that could be measured, cameras that could be hacked or dodged. An indoors abduction just makes more sense.”

  The Dragon smiles toothily. What a great point, the expression seems to say, as though we’re talking over coffee or tea. But there’s only mahogany between us; mahogany and dust.

  “How much do you two know about the mind?” He says, abruptly.

  “My Dad’s a researcher,” Lily says, “so I have some medical background. But I’ve focused much more on school. ”

  A forlorn book lays spread on the carpet, and the Dragon picks it up and shelves it into a gap where it must have once been. “When it comes to memory, the human mind is fragile. Even though we think we may have passed out at one time, we might have passed out later and simply failed to recollect it.

  “With a concussion for example, people rarely remember the moment of impact. They lose seconds, minutes, or even days before the blow and their consciousness leaps to when they wake up again.”

  The Rabbit stirs from where she rests her head, opening half-lidded eyes. “Are we all concussed? That might be why… everyone’s so strange…”

  “No. Just gassed,” Lily checks her notepad, and I look over her shoulder. Each conversation is written in clear, concise script, except for hurried shorthand for the Tiger’s colorfully-languaged account.

  “Concussed, drugged, as long as there’s amnesia, either one makes sense,” I say. “ “I had been wondering about the story of the Horse and Ox. I thought it’d be unlikely for an organization to kidnap people on a city street, because of the risk of unexpected witnesses stumbling upon them and getting caught on surveillance cameras, too.

  “But Lily, doesn’t this mean our notes are completely useless? Sure, we can say that this group probably captured us with Mysterious Gas X or whatever that white mist was. But we don’t really know when or where everyone was taken, even if people tell us where they think they were at the time.”

  The Dragon’s blazer sleeve brushes against me as he looms over our notepad, studying our papers. We don’t have time to think endlessly in circles like this… I know this is more important to Lily than to me, but still…

  “We at least know we’re all around the same age and city,” I complain. “But I don’t see how that’s helpful.”

  “That’s very helpful, Yuri!” Lily says in a preschool teacher’s voice, and for once, I’d rather listen to the Dragon’s soft tones. He speaks again.

  “Row homes on Kawakami East Street, the nicer apartments on Poseidon Avenue by the river’s coastline,” The Dragon sighs. “Jogging from the gym by the river’s east coast, too… we’re not just from the same city, we’re from the same few wards.”

  “Same city, same wards, same difference.”

  The Dragon scrutinizes Lily’s final page: it’s a series of squirming shapes that comprise our island’s city. On each shape, there’s a label. On some, graphite ‘Xs’ for where we were before our abduction; the Xs form a rough oval, and the Dragon places his thumb on the middle ward.

  “Tell me Snake. What’s a municipal district?”

  “A municipal district? Isn’t that just the same as a ward?”

  The Dragon slowly shakes his head. “Every city has multiple fire and police stations, hospitals, and schools. Their placement is incredibly important.

  “We like to think that if a city has two hospitals, then everyone will have twice the healthcare. But when dialing five-one-one, the ambulance arrives quickly if you’re close, and later if you’re far away; what can matter most for a dying man is proximity and location instead.

  “Therefore, a well-run city will divide itself and give each district its own services. Our island’s municipal districts are called ‘wards’ but this general principle applies to every urban area, even if their exact structure uses a different name.”

  “But, my district doesn’t have a hospital. Just a small clinic,” I mutter.

  “Each district might have only smaller services available, but clusters of wards and neighborhoods will still share their major services between them.” the Dragon relaxes his hand, leaving a thumbprint on the page. “We’re all centered around Tenku Ward—and this ward contains all the large public buildings in the northeastern part of the island, by the river.”

  “So, we’ve made another big deduction.We use the same hospital, prison, mail room, police and fire stations!” Lily speaks in her loudest library voice, which is odd and cute and strained.

  “Why are you saying that like it’s some grand epiphany?” I snip back.

  To be honest, this was a waste of time. We should have thought of a concrete escape plan from the start, instead of walking around and asking everyone for their life story. Police station, hospital, prison, mailroom, fire station, or some other service, is it even possible for someone to guess which one links us? All I’ve learned so far is that everyone’s just a little nicer than I thought… which is nice, I guess….

  But without the urgency of weaponry and little prospect for a full solve regarding the mystery behind the game, all adrenaline leaves me, and my thoughts become dull once more.

  This environment magnifies the bleakness that I’m feeling. There’s no natural light in the building, since the windows are always sealed. The dimness depresses me more than the Death Game itself, with the trial chamber being oddly comforting compared to the other rooms.

  Maybe it’s because when I was in my dorm playing mafia, it was the one talent that I had, the one place where I ‘belonged’ even if that talent was completely useless. A top-ten percent academic has the world open to them; a top-ten percent person at a text based game has no life.

  But it’s more than that. It feels like something about the room itself.

  I think back to when I first asked Lily to meet after the vote today. How I could see, just slightly, her sloped silhouette.

  My heartbeat quickens.

  “I’ve thought of something!”

  “Oh? You know why we’ve been brought to play this game?” The Dragon asks, and his smile becomes one of quiet bemusement.

  “Yuri! What are you doing?”

  I scooch next to the Pig by the bookshelf, who is now on her second volume of a romantic fantasy book. She shoots me a glare as I liberate the stepladder beside her.

  “I’m borrowing this. Lily, take the duct tape on the table.”

  “Fine. I’ll sign it out.”

  “Hold on,” the Dragon says. “There’s about forty minutes left before curfew. Where are you going? There’s not much time left to explore..”

  “We’re going back to the trial chamber,” I say, as I try to convey another phrase to the girl beside me, with my one good eye: We’re going to escape.