I take my time at lunch, mostly because Telly is engrossed in an episode of a drama series about rival fireworks manufacturers in the 1800s. Ernie busies himself by getting his playing cards out of his pants pocket—they’re rounded-off rectangles of aluminum with an inner lip, the size of a spoon head, and he plays solitaire quietly. The insides of each ‘card’ have a number and the drawing of their suit, in black and red. I assume colored markers. I’ll definitely need to find some more convenience stores for reasonable meals—eating a whole wheel of brie, plain, gets a lot of cheese glued to my teeth. There’s a tiny coil-burner stove in one corner of the room (“I barely use it”, quoth Telly), so I’m able to cook up some rhubarb on a pan that has plenty of burn marks on it. It’s not my usual lunch, but I really have no idea what foods are going to be widely-available in here. My eating patterns are going to change. Is cheese still an indulgence? I’m not feeling the indulgence right now.

  Once I’m done, I fight all of my civilized instincts and just toss the cylindrical paper packaging around the cheese wheel through one of the open edges of Telly’s house. Ernie doesn’t even watch it happen.

  The episode of the show concludes. “I’m ready,” I report.

  Ernie leads me through the streets, with Telly close behind. This time, he’s well in front of me, and Telly trails well behind; we’d look like random unassociated pedestrians anywhere more populous, but here, there are no crowds to get lost in. Our footsteps clank, towards the center of town: Ernie’s the loudest, Telly’s light. I’m still stuck on moving quietly after the brush with Fark; I avoid loosely-anchored steel on reflex. But we don’t even see any of the other six people. It’s a big place. Lots of ways for an Adversary to hide, yet no ways to stalk on loose metal.

  We arrive at the roundabout surrounding the voting palace. The iron and chain decorations haven’t changed one bit to a long-distance view, but there’s a lot of surface area—there’s something about this time of day, perhaps a daily temperature fluctuation, that’s causing it to shed fine flakes of rust. The flakes are so delicate, so light, that they flutter to the ground not the way rocks fall, but as autumn leaves—matching their color. In the lack of breeze in this closed system of a dome, the cars are intact, spared from any rust flecks that settle on the blanket of orange below. It’s the only truly beautiful thing I’ve seen since waking here.

  There’s a twinkle of gold among the falling not-leaves, on the first floor’s roof, but it disappears behind the building before I can get a good look.

  Without a word, Ernie approaches one of the cars—a truck that looks like a child’s stick-drawing, rendered in iron and with seats installed—and lifts a stepladder from the truck bed. It’s at least nine feet tall, folded-over. There’s no paint, but no rust: aluminum. I let him do his thing, which turns out to be leading us into the voting palace proper, with the ladder under one arm. It’s a lot like last time, in here, minus a lot of people who want me dead, and the TVs are still displaying the results of the election this morning.

  “Since there aren’t stairs, you have to use this,” Ernie says, unhooking the swinging latch between the two halves of the ladder. He straightens the whole assembly over his knee and latches it back together, then sets the ladder up so that it braces against the masonry of the orange bridgeway above me. “See for yourself.”

  I look up the ladder, without getting on, holding in some confusion and indignancy. Too late; the bewilderment slips through. “No stairs, but there’s something up there? Signs that aren’t readable, but the brand names on the wrappers are in perfect font? A Japanese building in the middle of a Western-style city? Why? Why does nothing make sense?”

  “This place was made by a bunch of people who all hated each other’s ideas,” Ernie says, with the low and tired tone of someone who had experienced that work dynamic before.

  “Don’t listen to him. No one knows where the dome came from.” Telly walked over to the pillar of TVs and dusted one of the screens off.

  “Tel. We’ve been over this—what else could it have been? This isn’t a natural formation,” he answers, and I assume it’s for my sake.

  “We’re in Hell, or Purgatory, or some other kind of punishment,” she says, with no conviction.

  If you lock nine people in Hell with incentive to kill each other, and none of them do so for three years, do those people belong there?

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  Telly and Ernie keep arguing while I climb. They go back and forth about the origins of the dome, but it’s all speculation. The ladder clanks and creaks, but it holds my weight, and I swing my legs over the top railing and onto the ring of walkway that passes for a second floor. It’s built like a hallway—there’s actual carpet at my feet, faded and beige, with a set of rusted-shut iron doors on each edge, like the elevator doors at the base of the voting palace, except that the dimensions of the building that I can see from the outside are proof that they don’t go anywhere. The outer wall is lined with bronzed plates as tall as I am, riveted to the wall, engraved like stone tablets from the heavens. I’d have thought they’d all be covered with verdigris by now, but they’re crystal-clear, even shiny. There’s not a speck of finger oil on the ones closest to me.

  Each one has a single rule engraved upon it, in a totally different font than the food labels—serifs galore, precision-machined into place, for maximum legibility. I walk around the second floor.

  There is one Adversary. All other players are Bystanders.

  The Adversary has a blade. Nothing else can harm anyone here.

  The Adversary’s blade loses its power one second after making a kill, until the following morning.

  Every morning, vote.

  Whoever you choose during an election will die.

  If the Adversary dies, you may leave Mob Rule.

  If the Adversary is the only living player, they may leave Mob Rule.

  I check the entire floor, but those are the ones that matter. Some of the plaques contain a lot of boring details about how exactly the elections work—They’re nominally between 8:00am and noon, but votes will be counted until 2:00pm, and anyone who doesn’t show up gets marked as abstaining and not present. I look for a loophole about weird vote results, and I don’t like what I find on the immaculate copper. If there’s a tie, it defaults to No Death. If everyone abstains due to not being present, it’s still No Death, which strikes me as odd. I try to think like an Adversary on that one, like Ernie suggested—isn’t this an exploit? The Adversary could just sneak into the voting palace one morning once everyone had gotten used to not visiting it, cast a single vote, and get someone killed by unanimous consensus, right?

  And the way to prevent that would be to...keep showing up to the voting palace, day after day. Or have someone check in on it, frequently. People are still showing up to these elections after 999+ days of nothing happening.

  I don’t find any details of the Adversary’s blade. It’s only mentioned twice, in those two sentences. Everything about it is written on those few most-important tablets.

  One of the plaques is damaged, I notice—it’s the one defining nighttime hours, from 8:00pm to 6:00am, which seems like a rules artifact to me because nothing else in the rules explicitly depends on ‘nighttime’—just the transition to morning, at 6:00am, defined elsewhere. The damaged plaque has been scored along the text, with scratches drawn-in and dribbles of reflective golden liquid used to fill in some of the engravings. It’s not a great job, but I get what the attempt is. Someone tried to mark out ‘6:00am’ and replace it with another ‘8:00pm’.

  I take a close look, from tablet to tablet, and see similar signs. One of the mounting screws for a plaque is covered in that liquid gold. Another is loose from the wall outright, with its bottom two screws removed, nowhere to be seen. I lift the bottom of the plaque, bending it slightly an inch away from the wall, and peek under it. The backside is scratched-up, too, with thin infills of liquid gold, overspilling crevices wherever they’re applied. It’s not dental-quality cavity-sealing, but it’s functional.

  Well. Now I need to find out if tampering with the engraving of the rules changes the actual rules. This is the same liquid gold of Cieze’s body, no doubt about that. I need to talk to him. There’s nothing more to see on this plaque, so I step away and—

  I wince and grab my left foot, bending it around far enough to see the underside of my toes. Right in that spot where my big toe hangs over the end of my foam sandals, a bronze mounting screw poked me when I put my weight down; it’s right there on the ground now, shiny. Blood wells up on the side of my toe.

  One tiny screw is not the Adversary’s blade. So why have I been harmed?

  I drop it in my pocket and resign to ask more questions. I’ll visit these tablets again later to keep looking for loopholes, but I didn’t find any now—and maybe it won’t matter. I take one last look at the tablet with loose screws; its shiny text tells me nothing more than that food will be provided.

  “Inspecting the goods?” comes a voice from my side.

  I look. The doors are not as shut as I’d expected—through one, Cieze walks in, his eyes narrow and smile knowing. The drawstring of his swimming trunks dangles, blackened from fire, and he buttons up his Hawaiian print shirt. Behind him, the door opens up into second-story air above the city. Ernie and Telly aren’t talking anymore. His flames lick the carpet.