I Joined a Fake Death Game for My Son's Surgery, and the First Rule Killed a Man novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Square Under the Dome

A former paramedic confirms the death with Jo in the one spot the cameras can't see, Jo hears a loophole in the vote rule, and the pit boss tells her he already has five votes to write her out.

Nobody looked at Eighteen after she said it.

They looked at me.

Twenty-One heaved himself out of his chair and put an arm around Eighteen's shoulders.

"Kid's got a point," he said. "Let's talk about it over lunch, folks."

Six was still sitting on the carpet beside me, staring at the steel door in the kitchen.

I touched his sleeve.

"Come upstairs," I said. "Don't say anything until I do."

A staircase ran up to a balcony that went all the way around the room.

The ten bedroom doors were up there, each with a brass number on it.

At the far end of the balcony hall stood an ice machine, humming, with a camera dome right above it.

I walked Six onto the square of carpet under the dome and stood close to him.

He was a head taller than me and smelled like hotel soap.

"A dome sees everything in the room except straight down," I said quietly. "Right here, we're the top of two heads."

"And the band?" He lifted his wrist. "Contract says it's a microphone."

The ice machine rumbled and dumped a load of ice into its bin with a long crash.

"Talk now," I said.

"Forty's dead," he said under the noise. "I was a paramedic nine years. I know dead."

"I know you do."

"Everybody down there thinks it's makeup."

"I watched tape for a living," I said. "I've seen people fake a fall. Nobody fakes their head hitting the floor like that."

The ice stopped crashing.

We both shut up and waited, standing a little too close, until it rumbled again.

"Why'd you quit?" I asked.

"A bad call," he said. "Six years ago."

He said it, so I let it stay closed.

"What are you here for?"

"My father's house in Brigantine," he said. "The bank takes it in March."

"My son's heart," I said. "He's nine."

"Then sit on the floor a lot," he said, and almost smiled.

The ice stopped.

He looked up at the dome, then back down at me.

"How did he know you knew the cameras?"

"These are Marquee domes," I whispered. "I sat under them for ten years."

Downstairs, Five was making coffee in the big kitchen.

She took one look at me and pointed with the pot.

"I knew it," she said. "You're the girl from upstairs. Tuna on rye at four in the morning."

I laughed for the first time all day.

Five had run change on the Marquee's slot floor for thirty-one years.

Twenty-One, leaning on the counter, had run the high-limit blackjack pit.

"Small world, honey," Five said. "Half of Atlantic City worked at the Marquee."

At noon the Wall came on long enough for us to vote on who asked the house its question.

Twenty-One won, five hands to four.

He stood in front of the Wall with his thumbs in his belt.

"Is Forty okay?" he asked.

Garson Langan touched his bracelet.

"Forty has been written out," he said.

The Wall went dark again.

"See?" Twenty-One said. "He's fine."

Garson Langan hadn't said he was fine.

He'd said the same thing he said before they carried Forty out.

The skinny freckled kid, Three, cooked lunch because nobody else would.

He'd tended bar for years, and he talked the entire time he cut onions.

The tall man in the Phillies cap laughed at every one of his jokes.

It was a big laugh, the kind that fills a room and makes you want to be in on it.

He was One, a developer from Margate, and he never took off that cap.

"Let's keep it friendly tonight," One said. "Nobody here wants to vote anybody out."

"I do," Eighteen said, with her mouth full. "I went viral at eighteen with one video. I know what people vote for."

All afternoon I watched them from the balcony.

From up there, people stop being faces and become hands.

Twenty-One's hand went to Eighteen's shoulder, then the whale's, then One's.

The whale was Twenty-Nine, a thin old man with a tan who wore a silk robe over his jersey.

Twenty-One's hand went last to the shoulder of Seven, the huge quiet man with the cross.

That made five shoulders and five votes, all of them on me.

On my side there was Five, Six, and Three, who'd said he'd go wherever the coffee went.

With me, that made four.

I said the rule over to myself.

"The player with the most votes is written out."

He'd said the player, a single person.

If two people tied for the most, there was no such player.

And every rule he said was the whole rule.

At the ice machine I told Six while the ice crashed.

"Four and four," I said. "If it's four and four, nobody dies."

"And if he reads it the other way?"

"Then two people die," I said. "One of them me."

Six looked at me for a long time.

"You'd bet your life on a single word?"

"I'd bet it on him," I said. "He picks his words with care."

At dinner Three made spaghetti, and Twenty-One sat down in the chair beside mine.

He smelled like cologne and the inside of an old car.

He leaned over my plate and smiled with all his teeth.

"I've got five on you, sweetheart," he said. "And five's the most however you slice it."

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