“Yeah,” I say. “How’d you get up here?”

  “Hop, skip, and a jump from one of the cars onto the first roof,” he says, with a cocksure smile. “What, ya think I have something to hide, Adversary?”

  “Oh, I get it, because you can’t be harmed except by the blade,” I say, trying to riposte in whatever battle of wits he’s trying to start with me. His smile wavers. Something about what I said was a good move. “That means if you fall when you don’t make the jump, it doesn’t hurt you.”

  “Catching on fast. Helps to do your research, don’t it?” He gestures around the second floor, at all of the rules, but he doesn’t break eye contact.

  “It does. I noticed some of the plaques were messed up,” I say, holding his gaze, my shoulders square and my fists at my hips. “That’s your doing?”

  “It is. What about it?”

  I shrug. “Looks like I caught you at the right time. I was just now wondering where to find you, so I could ask you about all this...”

  “Yeah! Sure a coincidence, that.”

  I think about the twinkle of gold I saw. What’s he doing? He fidgets, clenching one hand over and over, like he’s trying to crack knuckles that no longer exist.

  “What are you doing with the plaques? I saw that you were filling in engravings and making new ones,” I ask, not waiting for him to make a proper move.

  “I practice on them on and off,” he says, extending one hand to his side to run his fingers down a tablet. None of his liquid metal sticks to it. “Don’t spring your blade yet, I promise, I have plans. Plans for us.”

  “I’m not the Adversary,” I repeat. “There’s not an election until tomorrow. Ernie and Telly are here, too. No one’s going to attack anyone. I just had questions and the rules floor seemed like the place with answers.”

  He sighs, and it looks like relief, but I’m not sure it’s very much.

  “So what are the plans?” I continue. “Changing the rules?”

  “Changing the rules,” he confirms. “I got no idea if messing with what’s on the metal changes how the dome works, but ya know what they say. Rules, meant to be broken? That.” Cieze is not breaking eye contact, or turning away from me. “Mob Rule gave me this wicked gold fire body. Ya know, it’s a lot easier to bend and scratch metal when it’s heated up.”

  “That's what blacksmithing is.” I nod.

  “Yeah yeah, you’re smart, you got it already; it was tidy when I figured out I can do it myself.” He sighs again. “I’m gonna change the rules, and make it so that we get out of here automatically for free. You gotta give me time, though, I promise. I have to get it right so nothing bad happens if I make a word unreadable, or change its meaning….Magnolia’ll tell you, pal, gotta get every detail right when it’s your life on the line, so please give me the time I need.”

  “There’s not really anything I can do to take the time away from you,” I say. “Bystander, you know.”

  “I do, I do.” No, he doesn’t. He was convinced that I was the Adversary at the election, and moments ago just now. I feel like this is not what Bystanders would do.

  “Yo, Sammy!” Telly calls out from the bottom, her voice loud and slowed. “It’s fine! Cieze does this!”

  I turn and lean over the railing to look; Telly is smiling up and me with her hands cupped around her mouth, even though it’s not that far of a distance, and Ernie is just standing at attention with his neck craned back to match Telly’s. “This is normal?” I ask her.

  “Yeah!” She laughs. “Everyone has a hobby!”

  “It’s not a hobby! I’m not dawdling!” Cieze says. “It’s a real try to get me outta here. A lot better than sitting around pretending to walk dogs.”

  Ernie snorts. “Cieze, get down from there.”

  “I sure will, big guy.” Cieze is looking at my foot. My toe is wet with the drops of blood, and I can see the wheels turning in his head. “Out this way, Sam.”

  He gestures towards the open second-floor door, but he doesn’t lead me. I stand around awkwardly for almost half of a minute before I realize that he’s not going to turn his back to me, so I head out front, letting him follow behind.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  We step out, and our footfalls change from the near-silence of carpet to the clank of sandals and former-sandals on steel roof. Fine flakes of rust continue to fall on the outside like this, and I can see the texture of the roof more closely—it’s corrugated, leaving channels in which the rust flakes collect. They crunch under my sandals as I walk, my heart tight, and puffs of air rise from around each footstep—the trapped gases liberate themselves when my heels pack down their substrate, leaving tiny whirls all about my shins for the few seconds those vortices last in the breezeless afternoon. I’m not very high above the city—plenty of metal boxes are still way above my head—but I can get an idea of the full layout of the streets up here. It’s built wrong. It’s not a cascade of roads and parking lots, but it’s cut through by lots of main arterials that are laid atop one another randomly, like matchsticks shaken out onto a drinking coaster and then traced over into an urban plan, with no rhyme or reason. Cieze comes up alongside me. “What a sight, huh?”

  “The more I see in this place,” I say, “the less I like being here.”

  Cieze laughs while walking, out onto the roof. I follow. “Don’t you worry about that, Adversary. It won’t be like this for a lot longer, now that we know it’s you.” I don’t even bother protesting that.

  Below, I can see where he’s done his hop, skip, and jump. While the very corner of the roof tilts upwards in accordance with the faux-Japanese architecture, curling back like a drying fruit peel, one can walk a few degrees off of the perfect diagonal and get very close to the corner. Below, there’s a facsimile of a cargo van; it even has cutouts in its chassis for the headlights.

  “Go on, jump for it,” he said, grinning.

  “...that’s a pretty far jump,” I protest, quietly. I’d have to leap across a whole room’s worth of distance to land on the elevated roof of the van, and if I made it, I could then step down onto the car’s hood and make it to the street. I can see long-since amalgamated flecks of gold stuck to the van here and there.

  “Sure it is,” he says, “but ya read the rules, didn’t ya? No one gets hurt here, but anything, except that single blade. And, wouldn’t you know it, pal, that car’s not your blade. Neither is the hard ground.” He’s still grinning. “There’s no penalty for failing.”

  Except, there is. My toe drips another drop of blood onto the roof corrugations. Something must have gone wrong with these rules when applied to me—I look over my shoulder to check if I can see the TVs from here, and though the roof and walkways are in the way, I remember what’s on the screens. My name doesn’t show up on the two-by-five grid, just my face, and votes against me gave that error message. What else doesn’t work that I don’t know about?

  “C’mon, take the jump, pal,” he insists.

  “I can’t,” I say. “Something’s weird. Maybe being buried in the sand means that I’m half in the game, half out. I can still be hurt.”

  “Nope, ya can’t,” he says. “Right there in the rules. I’ve looked at those scratchings so many times.”

  He puts a hand on my back, with gentle pressure. Liquid metal sinks into the vivid purple of my shirt, a flowing weight against my back, with the texture of a water balloon filled with steaming-hot water—and the mass of a barbell.

  I’m going to jump, fall, and crack my head open on that steel-hard screw-studded ground. It’ll be my blood all over the van’s rims. My back is heating up; the fumes of Cieze’s fire are like old coins and wooden embers in my nostrils. I try to think of a way out of this. His hand presses harder, and my heels dig into a corrugation. I’ve got to jump, or he’ll make it look like an accident.

  I take a breath and sprint, for those few steps I have to build up speed, and leap.

  I’m only in the air for a second, arms up, eyes wide, legs bent to brace for impact, ponytail fluttering and flying through trace rust flakes, and I realize—I realize how vulnerable I am. Everyone else here is invincible, except to the Adversary’s blade, and it’s only me, me who can be hurt by a long fall or catching tetanus or a step on a sharp beer can to slice a tendon. I’m alone, as something less than Bystander, but without the tools of the Adversary, still learning the ropes of social conduct in a game that’s been evolving for so, so long, and I’m trapped in here just like everyone else. I don’t know if I’m going to survive in the long term. I don’t know if I’m going to survive the next few seconds.

  My sandals bang down and skid on the roof of the van; I windmill my arms for balance and catch my breath, righting myself. My vantage over the city has lowered. I’m here, centered atop a car, and Cieze’s laughter is at my back. “Good job, pal,” he says, mirthful, but that might be a hint of disappointment in his voice. It’s hard to tell the vocal cues of someone whose face you can’t see.

  It’s harder to discern the tone of someone who just tried to assassinate you.

  I dismount the van onto its hood, climbing down in a sliding fashion, my butt as a fifth point of contact the whole way down, until I’m sitting on the screws. Deep breaths, Sammy. It’s over. The attempt failed. I look over my shoulder, in time to see Cieze jump down, too—his feet clang on the van’s top, and he dismounts on the other side, one facing more towards the palace and its elevator doors. “Let’s not see each other around,” he says.

  While sitting, slumped against the side of the van’s cab, one hand on a tireless rim and the other on the screw ground, I listen to his footsteps fade. I can’t lean much on my hand; the cross-cut heads of the screws pinch my skin, a problem that I imagine no one else has.

  I shake my ponytail, freeing the rust that had fallen into it. My face hardens. It’s clear to me, now: it’s Cieze. He thought he could get an easy kill, didn’t he?

  He must have been waiting on the second floor, for me specifically. He knows I’m new. He knows I have to read the rules at some point. So as long as he stays in the voting palace, he can wait there, in ambush, and strike me down. That was his plan, wasn’t it? The only reason he didn’t spring his blade was because Ernie and Telly happened to be there; he’d be seen with two witnesses and be voted dead during the next election for sure. But then he saw how I could be injured. How I could die by ‘accident’. He’d be back to square one, with only seven Bystanders instead of eight...or seven and a half.

  I get up. I have my mission.