Estimated reading time — 36 minutes

The ad appeared between a promoted post for a meal kit service and a video of someone’s cat, unremarkable enough that Freya almost scrolled past it. Paid Research Study, it read. One Week. Two Thousand Dollars. All accommodations provided. Social behavior observation. Apply now.

She stared at it for a long time. Three days ago she had been walked out of the Meridian Group offices with a box of her things and a handshake from HR, and since then she had been sitting in her apartment doing the math on how long she could last before the numbers stopped working in her favor. The answer was not encouraging. She clicked the link.

The application was straightforward. Name, age, contact information, a few multiple choice questions about her general lifestyle. She submitted it, closed her laptop, made herself a cup of tea she didn’t want, and by the time she’d finished it her phone had chimed with an acknowledgment email.

‘Thank you for your interest in the Behavioral Health Associates social behavior study. We will be in touch soon.’

They were in touch four days later. She had been moved to the next stage. Attached to the email was a form that took her the better part of an hour to fill out. Medical history going back to childhood, every medication she had ever taken, every surgery, every allergy. Personality assessments with sliding scales and open-ended prompts. Questions about her sleep, her relationships, her conflict resolution style. She answered everything honestly.

Her phone rang. An automated voice informed her that she had been accepted into the study. It would begin in three days, on Thursday. She would receive an address by email within the hour.

She packed light. Toiletries, a few books, comfortable clothes, her phone charger. The email had mentioned that accommodations were provided, and she took that to mean she was basically walking into a hotel. She didn’t mind. Two thousand dollars was two thousand dollars.

The address led her to a block in an older commercial district of Vancouver, the kind of neighborhood where a stretch of modest restaurants and a print shop sat shoulder to shoulder with buildings that had gone quiet. The facility was one of the quiet ones. It was four stories of pale concrete and rectangular windows, the kind of building that had once housed insurance adjusters or mid-tier accounting firms, the kind of building that existed as pure function with no ambition beyond it. A sign mounted beside the glass front doors read Behavioral Health Associates in clean, modest letters. On every window, fitted neatly into the frames from the outside, were iron bars. Black, evenly spaced, new-looking against the older concrete. Freya stood on the sidewalk and looked at them for a moment, then decided there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for them and walked toward the door.

There were already people gathered on the front steps. Eleven others, it turned out, which made twelve in total when she added herself. They stood in small clusters of two and three, the way strangers do when proximity has been forced on them. A few were talking. Most were doing the same quiet assessment of each other that she was doing of them. They ranged widely in age and appearance. A heavyset man in his forties with a kind face. A young woman about Freya’s age with close-cropped hair and paint still faintly visible on her forearms. A lean older man who stood apart from the rest and watched the street. The doors opened.

Two researchers met them. Both wore plain, dark clothing with laminated badges Freya couldn’t read from her distance. They were professional and pleasant. The participants were welcomed, thanked for their time, and guided inside.

The lobby had been emptied of whatever furniture it once held. The front desk remained but had been repurposed into a check-in station. There, a third researcher smiled at each of them in turn and explained the first order of business. Personal belongings would be retained by the research team for the duration of the study. Phones, bags, books, everything. This was to ensure the integrity of the social observation, to prevent outside influence from contaminating the participants’ interactions with one another. The team would be reachable by other means if needed. Freya handed over her bag and watched the young woman with paint-stained arms hand over a canvas tote with a paperback sticking out of it, and felt the small, reflexive unease of someone who had just given away their keys.

The contracts were distributed. Each participant was given time to read through their copy, and several people did read carefully, flipping back pages, running fingers under lines of text. Freya read hers twice. It was the language she expected: confidentiality around the study’s methodology, acknowledgment of voluntary participation, procedures for early withdrawal. The NDA was specific but not unusual, prohibiting disclosure of proprietary research methods and the identities of other participants for a period of two years following completion. She found nothing alarming in it. She signed.

They were led deeper into the building. The center of the floor had been cleared and reorganized into something that resembled, if not quite a home, then a coherent attempt at one. Twelve office spaces ringed the perimeter, each with a glass wall facing inward that had been frosted to provide privacy; the doors were solid. Inside each, Freya could see through the open doorways as she passed: a single bed with plain white linens, a toilet behind a partition in the corner, a dresser. No mirrors that she could see. No clocks.

The common area that those twelve rooms opened onto was generous, at least. Long folding tables with twelve chairs arranged around them. A kitchen counter with appliances and a pantry door standing open, the shelves behind it dense with dry goods and canned food and a row of first aid kits. A television mounted on one wall. A dresser near the kitchen labeled in masking tape: GAMES. Freya could see the edges of game boxes inside it, the kind of collection you’d find in a cottage. In every corner and at intervals along the walls, cameras were mounted.

They were each assigned a room and told to change. The clothing they had come in was collected by the researchers, folded neatly into labeled bins, and carried away without ceremony. Freya stood in her room in the pull-on pants and medical gown, reassessing if this was still worth two grand. It was.

The researcher who addressed them was a man in his early thirties with a trim beard and the calm, slightly flat affect of someone who had given the same talk several times. He welcomed them again, acknowledged that the accommodations were modest, assured them the week would pass more quickly than they expected. Then he outlined the rules.

The participants were to remain within two zones for the duration of the study: the common area, and their own individual rooms. No one was to enter another participant’s room for any reason. No one was to exit the building for any reason. Meals were self-catered from the pantry. The telephone mounted on the common area wall was a direct line to the research team, available at any hour for questions, requests, or emergencies.

Then he reached into a bag at his feet and removed a book.

It was not a remarkable book. It was the size of a standard novel, with a plain cover in muted gray. No author, no image, no text except one word in simple block letters across the front: ARCANE.

He explained the final and central element of the study. Each day, one participant would hold the role of the Arcane Scholar. The Scholar would be given the book and was the only participant permitted to possess or read it. No other participant was to touch the book or see its contents under any circumstances. What the Scholar chose to do with that information, or whether they shared anything from it at all, was entirely at their own discretion.

Each morning at nine, the group would gather and vote on who the Scholar for that day would be. The outgoing Scholar’s vote counted for four. Every other participant’s vote counted for one. The role could be held by the same person on consecutive days, or transferred by vote to anyone else.

He then informed them that the first Scholar would be selected at random, before the vote structure came into effect. He consulted something in his hand. A man named James, he said. James, who turned out to be the heavyset man with the kind face, looked mildly startled. He stepped forward and accepted the book when it was offered to him, holding it with a kind of careful uncertainty, as though it might be heavier than it looked.

The researcher thanked them all, reminded them of the phone on the wall, before he and his colleagues walked back through the building toward the front. The door at the far end of the common area closed. Freya heard, though she told herself immediately that she might have imagined it, the sound of a lock.

James held the book against his chest with both hands and looked around at the group with an expression that was equal parts sheepish and excited. He told them he was going to his room to read it, or at least start it, and that he’d come back and tell them what it was about. He said he simply couldn’t stand there holding a mysterious book and not open it, that his curiosity didn’t work that way. A few people laughed, and the laughter loosened something in the room. Someone said that seemed fair. Someone else said they’d want to do the same thing. James nodded once, satisfied, and disappeared through his room door.

The eleven remaining participants drifted toward the tables. Chairs scraped. A woman near the kitchen asked if anyone wanted tea and started filling the kettle without waiting for an answer, which turned out to be the right call because several people said yes. They settled in.

Freya learned their names one by one, the way you do in a group, each person emerging from the collective into something individual.

Marcus was thirty-one, a out-of-work line cook with a shaved head and a tattoo of a compass rose on the inside of his left wrist. His voice was gruff, his stature was large, yet he spoke with a kind of softness that made his appearance less threatening.

Sophie was twenty-four, the one with the close-cropped hair and the paint on her arms. She was a student, fine arts, and she said she’d signed up for the study the same way she made most decisions, which was quickly and without overthinking it. Her over the top bubbliness made Freya cringe slightly.

Donna was fifty-three and had recently retired from a career in hospital administration. She had silver-streaked hair pulled back practically and a manner that suggested she was already quietly organizing everyone in the room, whether they knew it or not.

Eli was nineteen and was the youngest of the group by a visible margin. He was slight and wore his discomfort with the gown openly, tugging at the hem of it. He mentioned, unprompted, that he had never done anything like this before, and several people told him none of them had either, which seemed to help.

Renata was forty-six, a recently separated mother of two from North Vancouver. She had warm eyes and an even warmer, motherly attitude.

Carl was sixty-one, the lean older man who had stood apart on the front steps. He was a retired engineer. He had said very little since arriving but when he spoke it was with precision, very direct and to the point.

Priya was thirty-eight and worked in logistics, or had until recently, hence her being there.

Tobias was twenty-nine, lanky, with wire-framed glasses that he kept adjusting. He worked in IT.

Lena was forty-two and had been a high school English teacher until the previous semester. She had a soft voice that nonetheless carried, and she had been the one to make the tea, distributing mugs with the matter-of-fact generosity of someone who found comfort in small acts of provision.

Nina was thirty-five and said very little about herself beyond that she had come from Calgary for this and that two thousand dollars was two thousand dollars. She smiled when she said it in a way that closed the subject neatly, and nobody pushed.

Freya ended up at the far end of one of the tables with Sophie and Eli. Around them, the others had sorted into their own loose groupings. Donna and Renata were talking near the kitchen with the ease of people who had been acquaintances for years rather than an hour. Carl sat alone at the other table with a cup of coffee and seemed perfectly content about it.

“So what do you actually think this is about,” Sophie said, pulling one knee up to her chest. “Like what are they actually watching for.”

“I mean, they said social behavior,” Eli offered. He was picking at the drawstring of his pants. “Which could be anything, really.”

“Right, but it’s specifically the voting thing,” Freya said. “That’s the part that seems designed. The way the scholar’s vote counts more than everyone else’s. They’re watching how people respond to that kind of hierarchy I think. Who defers to it, who pushes back.”

“Power dynamics,” Sophie said, pointing at her. “Yeah. That’s what I was thinking too. Like a stripped-down version of how authority forms in a group from nothing.”

“Could be,” Eli said, though he sounded like he was still working through it. “But then why the book? Why go to the trouble of having a physical object in it at all?”

“Because the book is the power,” Freya said. “The vote is just how the power moves around. The book is what makes it real. Something to hold.”

Sophie looked at her. “That’s kind of unsettling when you say it like that.”

“Everything about this place is kind of unsettling,” Eli said quietly, and then looked like he hadn’t meant to say it out loud.

Freya glanced up at the nearest camera and then back down at the table. “The bars on the windows are a bit much.”

“Security,” Sophie said, though she didn’t sound entirely convinced. “Old building, maybe they rented out. Probably just didn’t want to bother removing them. Or maybe they deal with loonies.”

“They looked new,” Eli said.

Nobody answered that.

“I want to know what’s in the book,” Sophie said, steering them somewhere else. “Like genuinely. What do you think it is? My guess is it’s nothing. Blank pages. They want to see what James does with the power of having something no one else can see, whether the contents even matter.”

“That’s good,” Freya said. “I was thinking it might be, like, instructions. Something that tells the scholar how to behave, how to use their extra vote, and the whole point is seeing whether people follow the instructions or go their own way.”

“I think it’s going to be a self-help book,” Eli said. Sophie and Freya chuckled. “I’m serious, I think it’s going to be something totally mundane and the joke is on all of us for building it up.”

Sophie laughed genuinely. “I would respect that, honestly. I would respect that a lot.”

“Should we do something,” Freya said. “I saw board games in that dresser.”

They found Settlers of Catan, which Sophie declared acceptable. Tobias wandered over in that easy way people do when they can see something is happening and want to be part of it. The four of them spread the board across the table, sorted tiles, and spent ten minutes arguing productively about whether anyone actually remembered the full rules. It was during this argument, warm and inconsequential, that Lena crossed the common area toward James’s room.

She knocked quietly, a knuckle-tap, considerate. “James? Sorry to bother you.”

The door flew open.

James filled the frame. His face was flushed, his eyes were wide, and there was something in them that didn’t track with the kind-faced man who had accepted the book an hour ago with mild surprise. He looked at Lena the way you look at something that has interrupted something important, except more than that, angrier than that.

“What the hell do you want?” he barked.

Lena took a half-step back. Her voice came out carefully. “I just wanted to check in, you said you’d come back and tell us about the book. We were just curious if there was any update.”

James stared at her. The flush in his face didn’t settle. He held the door with one hand and said nothing at all for a brief moment. Then he stepped back, and slammed the door shut with enough force that Freya felt it in her chest from across the room.

Nobody at the table spoke. The game board sat between them with its hexagons and its little wooden pieces and nobody moved to touch any of it.

Lena turned from the door to face the room. Her voice was steady but her hands were not.

“That was completely unacceptable,” she said. “I’m not spending a week in a building with someone who behaves like that. I won’t do it.”

She walked to the phone on the wall and picked up the receiver and dialed. Everyone watched her. After a moment someone picked up on the other end and Lena straightened her shoulders.

“This is Lena Malren, I’m one of your participants. I need to speak to whoever is in charge.” A pause. “I don’t care, transfer me.” Another pause, longer. “Fine. I’m going to be direct with you. One of the other participants just became verbally aggressive with me, and I’m not comfortable continuing the study under these conditions. I want him removed, or I want to leave. Those are my two options for you.”

The rest of them stood or sat and watched her face. Freya couldn’t hear what was being said on the other end. She watched Lena’s expression move through several things in quick succession. Surprise. Irritation. Something harder than irritation.

“That is not an acceptable answer,” Lena said. “You have a duty of care to the people in this building.” A pause. “I understand what the contract says. I also understand what a lawyer says when they look at a situation like this one.” Her jaw tightened. “You better be ready to pay me a great deal more than two thousand dollars for this week. You’ll be hearing from my lawyers.”

She put the receiver down hard..

She turned to the room. “They say no one can leave. That leaving constitutes a breach of contract.” She looked at the door at the far end of the common area, the one the researchers had walked back through. “Watch me.”

She crossed the room and pushed on the door. It didn’t move. She pushed again with both hands, rattled the bar across it, shoved her shoulder into it. Nothing. She stepped back and stared at it.

She went back to the phone.

“Open the door.” Her voice had gone flat. “Right now. Open it or I will pursue every legal avenue available to me and I promise you that two thousand dollars will look like a rounding error on what this ends up costing you.” A long pause. Her knuckles were white around the receiver. She set it back down without saying goodbye.

She stood for a moment with her hand still on the phone. Then she looked up and found Marcus.

“You look like the strongest person here,” she said. It wasn’t a compliment exactly, more an assessment. “Will you help me get that door open?”

Marcus looked at the door, then back at her. He uncrossed his arms and stood up from the table. “Yeah,” he said. “Alright.”

He hit the door with his shoulder first, hard. It didn’t open. He tried the bar handle again, pulling and pushing, testing it in its frame. “It’s locked,” he said. “Properly locked, not just latched.”

He stepped back and kicked it. The sound was enormous in the space, a flat metallic crack that made Eli flinch. He kicked it again. And again. Freya could see the hinges beginning to deform, the frame separating slightly from the wall in small increments.

Then the doors flew open from the other side.

Four men stood in the corridor beyond. They wore body armor and tactical helmets with visors, they carried automatic rifles with the ease of people who had been carrying them for a long time. The one at the front had his weapon raised before the door had finished swinging, and it was pointed at Marcus.

“Get back,” he said.

Marcus raised his hands, stepped backwards, and did not say anything.

The man in front stepped into the doorway and swept his gaze across the room, taking in each person in turn, methodical.

“Nobody leaves this building for any reason,” he said. “And nobody damages anything. If either of those things happen, I will use whatever force is necessary to stop it. Do you all understand me?”

The room was absolutely silent.

“I want to leave.” Lena’s voice came from the side. “I am telling you right now that I want to leave this building.”

“No,” the man said.

“I don’t care about the contract. I don’t care about your instructions. I am a civilian and you have no legal right to hold me here.”

“No,” he said again.

Lena moved. Freya wasn’t sure afterward what she had expected Lena to do, but she hadn’t expected her to actually walk toward the door and try to push past four armed men. She made it two steps past the threshold before the man’s hand closed around the back of her collar before throwing her backward. She stumbled and fell to the floor.

The rifle came up.

She was looking directly down the barrel of it. The man’s voice did not change in pitch or texture at all.

“Don’t make me shoot you.”

Lena crawled backwards. The man held her gaze for a moment longer, then pulled the doors shut. The sound of them closing was solid and final, a sound with no give in it.

Nobody spoke for a while.

They drifted apart slowly, the way people do after something frightening, each finding a radius of space that felt manageable. Freya ended up back at the table with Sophie and Eli. The Catan board was still there from before, untouched, and nobody suggested continuing the game.

“Armed guards,” Eli said, very quietly. “For a social behavior study.”

“Don’t,” Sophie said. Not unkindly.

“I’m just saying it out loud.”

“I know.” She looked at Freya. “You okay?”

“I don’t know,” Freya said, which was honest. “I keep thinking about the bars on the windows.”

None of them had anything to add to that. Across the room, Donna and Renata sat close together and spoke in low voices. Tobias was at the other end of the table with his arms folded, staring at the middle distance. Carl had not moved from his chair against the wall and his face was unreadable. Priya was in the kitchen, and Freya could hear the quiet sounds of her organizing things, the small controlled movements of someone who needed to be doing something with their hands. Nina sat alone and said nothing and looked at no one.

The evening passed in a muted and careful way. People ate without much appetite, pulling things from the pantry and assembling meals that no one commented on. Conversation stayed light and brief, nobody mentioned James, who had not come out of his room since slamming the door on Lena, nobody mentioned the guards, nobody mentioned the contract. By nine o’clock the exhaustion of a strange and frightening day had settled over the room like a weather system, and people began drifting to their rooms one at a time.

Freya said goodnight to Sophie and Eli.

“Hey,” Eli said, as she was pushing back her chair. He was looking at the table. “We’re going to be okay… Right?”

Sophie looked at Freya.

“Yeah,” Freya said. “We’re going to be okay.”

She was not sure she believed it, but she said it in the way you say things that need to be said regardless of whether they are true.

Her room was small, the mattress was thin, and the light coming in around the frosted glass of her door was just enough to see the ceiling by. She lay on her back, listened to the building settle, told herself to sleep, and eventually, without noticing the transition, she did.

She came back up out of sleep hard, the way it does when the sound that caused the waking is still in the air. Shouting. Two voices, both male, one of them high and frantic, one of them low and furious. She was on her feet before she had fully processed being awake, and she pulled open her door.

The common area was lit by the kitchen strip light, which someone had left on. James was in the middle of the room. He had been in the pantry, that much was clear; the door hung open and the floor around him was covered with the evidence of it, crushed crackers and a spilled container of oats and a jar of something that had shattered and spread in a dark stain across the floor. He had a bag of rice in his hands and he was shaking it, scattering it. His eyes were open very wide and his expression was one she had no clean word for.

Marcus had him by the arm and was wrenching at it.

“Stop it,” Marcus said. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Let go of me,” James screamed. His voice cracked on the last word. “Get your hands off me right now.”

Freya could see Sophie in her doorway, Donna standing fully in the common area with her arms crossed over her chest, Tobias behind her, blinking behind his glasses. Eli stood in his doorframe and did not come out.

Marcus got both hands on James and yanked him away from the pantry, stumbling with the weight of him before falling onto his back, taking James down with him. James twisted, got his head down, and bit Marcus on the forearm. Marcus made a sharp, high sound that Freya had never heard from a grown man before. James wrenched free, lurched back toward the pantry, got both hands around a shelf and pulled. Cans and boxes cascaded.

Marcus looked at his arm. He looked at James. Something moved through his face and settled.

He crossed the distance between them in two steps and hit James once, clean, across the jaw. James went down immediately, completely, the way people only go down in movies and, apparently, in real life when something has gone precisely right or precisely wrong.

Marcus stood over him for a moment, breathing. Then he bent and grabbed James by the back of the gown and dragged him across the floor to his room, not gently. He got the door open, shoved him through it and pulled it shut.

He momentarily looked around the common area until he found a chair. He carried it to James’s door, tilted it and wedged it under the handle.

He looked at the door.

“Stay in there, you psycho,” he said.

Then he went to his room, tending his arm, and closed his door.

Freya stood in her doorway and looked at the mess on the floor, the scattered rice, the dark spreading stain from the broken jar, the overturned cans. The strip light hummed. One by one the others retreated. Donna was last, shaking her head once before she disappeared.

Freya went back to bed to lay in the thin dark and listen, but James’s door did not open again.

The armed guards were already in the common area when Freya came out of her room in the morning. Four of them, the same four, standing with the same stillness they’d had the day before. The chair had been removed from James’s door.

The other participants filtered out one by one. James came out of his room, stood against the far wall, and said nothing. His jaw had bruised badly overnight, a deep purple continent spreading from his chin up toward his cheekbone. He didn’t touch it. He looked at Marcus.

He just kept looking at Marcus.

One of the guards was holding a stack of small paper slips. He moved through the room methodically, stopping at each participant in turn, handing them a slip and a pen, waiting while they wrote, then collecting the slip back. His face gave nothing. The whole process had the texture of something that had been designed to feel routine.

Freya looked at her slip. She turned the pen in her fingers. She had no basis for a decision, no clear reason to choose one person over another, and something about that felt like it might be the point. She let her eyes move around the room without settling, and then wrote a name without letting herself think about it too hard. Tobias. She handed it back.

The guard with the slips moved to the center of the room and counted them. His lips didn’t move. He looked up.

“Marcus,” he said.

James’s face opened into a grin. It was wide and warm and it did not belong on the face of the man who had been dragged unconscious across the floor the night before. He crossed to Marcus with something close to eagerness and held the book out with both hands.

“Enjoy,” he said.

Marcus took the book, looked at it, looked at James, and said nothing.

The lead guard stepped forward. “The same rules apply. No other participant is to touch or read the book for any reason.” He looked around the room to make sure this had landed, then nodded to his team. The four of them moved back through the door and pulled it shut.

Marcus held the book at his side. “I’m going to go look at this,” he said to the room, “and then I’ll come back and tell you what it says.” He sounded like he was working to sound normal. He went to his room and closed the door.

James sat down on the floor in the center of the common area. Not in a chair. On the floor, cross-legged, facing Marcus’s door. He began to laugh. It started low and built in an uneven way, rising and subsiding and rising again, and it had nothing of humor in it.

The others moved to the edges of the room. Priya went to the kitchen and kept her back to him. Donna sat at the far table with Renata and they spoke quietly without looking toward the center. Carl had his coffee, his wall, and his expression that gave nothing away. Nina had not come out of her room at all after the vote.

Freya found Sophie and Eli near the games dresser, which was as far from James as the room allowed.

“What the hell was James doing last night?” Eli said.

“I don’t know,” Freya said.

“He was destroying the food,” Sophie said quietly. “Like not eating it. Just destroying it. What does the book say to make someone do that.”

“We don’t know that it was the book,” Freya said, though she didn’t believe that as she said it.

“He was fine before he read it,” Eli said. “Completely normal. He was going to come back and tell us about it.”

They stood with that for a moment. James’s laughter pulsed from the center of the room.

“We need to watch out for each other,” Freya said. “The three of us. Properly. Whatever is going on in this building, we stay together and we watch each other’s backs.”

Sophie nodded without hesitation. Eli did the same, a small tight nod.

“And Marcus,” Freya said. “We need to get Marcus on our side. He’s the scholar now, and he’s the strongest guy here.”

“If he comes back normal,” Sophie said.

“If he comes back normal,” Freya agreed.

James laughed and laughed. An hour passed with the slowness of hours in rooms where something is wrong. Freya drank tea she didn’t taste. Eli had found a deck of cards and was shuffling them repeatedly without suggesting they play anything. Sophie had her knee pulled to her chest again and her eyes on the middle distance.

The laughter stopped.

In the silence, James’s head turned toward Marcus’s door. His grin spread until it showed his back teeth.

The door opened.

Marcus came out. He was moving differently than he had gone in. There was a directness to it, a narrowed purposefulness, and his eyes were already on James.

“Yes,” James said, from the floor. His voice was reverent. “Yes. Do it Marcus. I am so ready.”

Marcus crossed the room.

What happened next was not a fight. A fight requires two people contending with each other. James did not contend. He opened his arms as Marcus reached him, and the first blow landed across his face, snaping his head sideways. He laughed, a bright broken sound.

“Do it!” James shouted.

Marcus obliged.

Freya moved before she understood that she was moving. She heard Sophie shout something behind her. She got both hands on Marcus’s arm and pulled, but it was like pulling at load-bearing architecture, nothing moved. Carl and Tobias reached them a second later, each grabbing an arm. The three of them together slightly slowed Marcus, but did not stop him. Eli had his arms around Marcus’s torso from behind and was wrenching backward with everything he had.

James was on the floor. He was bleeding from his nose and from a split above his eye. He was grinning at the ceiling while he continued to belligerently shout through the blood pooling in his throat.

“Kill me Marcus!”

Marcus dragged all four of them a step forward. He got a hand free and drove his elbow into James’s ribs with enough force that Freya heard the crack from where she stood. James made a sound that was still somehow a laugh. A wet compressed version of one. Marcus stomped on his left knee. James screamed, but the scream kept turning into laughter at the edges even as his body came apart under the assault.

Freya lost her grip. Tobias went down. Carl held on for another moment before Marcus simply turned and threw him away with one arm. Carl hit the table and went over it.

Marcus got both hands around James’s throat, lifted him partially off the ground, then drove his skull straight back down with his full weight. James’s head hit the floor with a crack. He went briefly still before his hands came up, not to fight, but to grip Marcus’s wrists, to hold them there, to encourage them.

“Yes,” James whispered.

Marcus picked him up, and slammed him again. James’s hands fell away from his wrists.

On the second time James’s skull met the floor, something gave. It released a sound like a very large egg being thrown to the floor to be smashed. James’s body went absolutely still. The grin was still on his face. His eyes were open.

Marcus stood over him, breathing in long ragged pulls, his hands at his sides.

The room was silent except for that breathing.

Marcus turned around.

He looked at each of them in turn, moving his gaze slowly around the room the way you sweep a light through a dark space. His breathing had steadied. The blood on his hands was dripping into pools on the floor.

“I’m in charge now,” he said. “All of you. You do what I say, when I say it, exactly how I say it. If you don’t, what happened to him happens to you.” He didn’t look down at James. He didn’t need to. “I want that to be clear to everyone in this room before we go any further.”

Nobody spoke.

“Good. Tomorrow morning when they come with the votes, every single one of you is going to write my name on that slip. Every one. If someone else becomes the scholar, I will kill every person in this room.”

Donna stepped forward. Her voice was careful and measured, the voice of someone who had managed difficult people in difficult rooms for thirty years.

“Marcus, I understand you’re not yourself right now. Whatever was in that book, whatever it did to you, we can talk about this. We can figure out together how to…”

“Shut up,” Marcus said.

“I really think if we just…”

He crossed the room in four steps and hit her with his open hand across the face. The sound was flat and sharp, and Donna went down hard.

Marcus stood over her.

“For the last time, shut up. This is your last warning.” he said again, quietly.

Donna pressed her hand to her face. Her shoulders shook. She stayed silent on the floor.

Marcus looked up. He pointed at Freya, then Sophie, then Renata, then Priya, then Nina. One at a time, his finger moving like he was counting inventory.

“You five,” he said. “There are knives in the kitchen. You’re going to use them on him.” He still didn’t look at James as he pointed to him. “I need the bones clean. All of them. The skull especially. I need the skull clean.”

Freya felt Sophie’s hand find her arm in her peripheral vision.

He turned to the men. Carl, still against the overturned table, one hand pressed to his lower back where he’d landed. Tobias, white behind his glasses. Eli, standing in the doorway of his room looking like he might be sick.

“You three,” Marcus said. “The pantry. Everything in it. Destroy it. All the food, everything drinkable. If I find out anyone ate or drank anything after today, I will kill them.”

He picked up the book from where it had ended up on the floor during the murder. He looked at it for a moment.

“I’m going to read,” he said. “Don’t bother me.”

He went into his room and closed the door. The click of it was somehow the worst sound in a room that had recently contained many terrible sounds, because it was so ordinary. Just a door closing. Just a man going to read.

The remaining participants stood in a loose cluster near the games dresser and spoke in voices that barely qualified as voices.

“We can’t do what he said,” Renata said. “I won’t do what he said.”

“Nobody’s doing what he said,” Priya said.

“So what then?” Tobias asked. He kept adjusting his glasses, a nervous repetition he didn’t seem aware of. “We can’t get out. The guards won’t let us out. We can’t call anyone because the phone only goes to the researchers, and the researchers clearly don’t care that there is a dead body on the floor.”

“What if we each took some food,” Nina said. She was speaking quietly, her eyes on Marcus’s door. “Small amounts. Enough to last. We each take something back to our rooms, hide it. Stay in our rooms with the doors shut. If Marcus tries to break in, the guards would have to respond to that. He’d be breaking the rules.”

“And if the guards don’t get there fast enough,” Carl said. He said it without inflection, just the fact of it, delivered plainly. “He gets through a door, he’s already in the room. Whoever is inside is already dead before anyone comes through that corridor.”

The group went quiet.

“And we don’t know that they would stop him at all,” Freya said. “The guards haven’t done anything about James. There’s a dead man on the floor right now and that door hasn’t opened. We have no guarantee they would intervene for anything short of someone trying to leave the building.”

Another silence. Longer this time.

“So we kill him,” Sophie said.

Nobody contradicted her.

“If we do this,” Carl said, “we need to agree on what comes next. The vote tomorrow morning. Whoever becomes the scholar after this needs to not read that book.”

“You,” Freya said, looking at him. “We vote for you.”

Carl looked at her steadily. “I’ll accept that. And I’m telling all of you right now, I will not open it. I won’t read a single page. Whatever is in it, it stays closed.”

“Anyone who ends up with it should make the same promise,” Tobias said. “Right now. All of us.”

They all agreed.

The group held that for a moment, the weight of what they were agreeing to settling over each of them differently.

They went to the kitchen quietly. The knife block was on the counter beside the stove and they distributed what was there without discussion, each person taking what felt like it fit in their hand. Freya wrapped her fingers around the handle of a chef’s knife and felt the reality of the object in a way she had never felt a kitchen knife before.

They waited patiently, all those bearing knives huddled against the walls adjacent to Marcus’s door.

The door did not open for a long time.

They waited.

Marcus’s room was silent.

Freya kept her eyes on the door handle and breathed slowly.

The handle moved.

Marcus came through the door with the book tucked under one arm and his eyes already scanning the room.

The half-second it took him to register what he was seeing was the half-second Carl drove his knife into Marcus’s side. Marcus made a sound like something mechanical seizing and turned into the blow rather than away from it. Marcus’s fist connected with the side of Carl’s head, the weight of the blow snapping Carl’s fragile neck. His body flew sideways into the wall.

Tobias had come from the right, stabbing him thrice in the side before Marcus grabbed him by the wrist, twisting until something snapped. Tobias screamed, dropped the knife, and was thrown into the table in the same split second. Sophie had mounted his back, driving her knife into Marcus’s spine over and over again before he reached behind him with terrifying flexibility, got a hand in her hair, and tossed her like the others across the room. Freya closed the distance and drove her knife into his thigh. He turned on Freya. She saw his fist coming and got her arm up to block it. The impact was enormous. She felt the bone in her forearm give with a sensation that was more sound than pain at first, a deep interior crack that traveled up to her shoulder. The knife fell out of her hand, she stumbled, went down to one knee, and cradled her arm against her chest, the pain arriving now, white and total.

Marcus reached down and pulled Carl’s knife from his own side. Lena, who had been pressing herself to the wall since the fight began, ran for Marcus, who turned with the knife in his hand and caught her across the throat without looking. Lena fell to her knees. Her hands went to her neck; the sound she made was very small.

Marcus turned his attention to Eli, who was holding his knife defensively rather than offensively. Marcus’s fist came at him like a freight train. Eli slumped to the floor and didn’t move. But the others were back. Sophie had her knife again. Tobias had retrieved his knife with his good hand. Priya had come out of the corner with a carving knife she had taken from a drawer and not shown anyone. Nina had a bread knife. Renata had the kitchen scissors, both blades open. They came at Marcus from every direction at once, and this time there was no coordination to it, no plan, just bodies, blades, and the compressed fury of people who had been made to be afraid.

Marcus eventually fell.

Freya stood with her knife hanging at her side and looked at what the room had become. The others were doing the same, each of them arriving at stillness from different directions, the momentum of the last several minutes draining out of the space and leaving something raw and unsteady in its place. Eli was still on the floor. Sophie went to him first, crouching and pressing two fingers to his neck, then exhaling and saying he’s alive, he’s breathing. The room shifted slightly at that, something releasing. He eventually woke up. The other two people on the floor never did.

They moved the bodies together. Nobody said this needed to happen, it simply became apparent that it did, that having James, Marcus, Carl, and Lena distributed across the floor of the space they would continue to occupy was not something any of them could sustain. They brought the four bodies to the edge of the room under the TV. Someone, Freya never saw who, found a tablecloth in one of the kitchen drawers and spread it over them. It wasn’t large enough. They found a second one and overlapped them. That was better.

Priya took charge of the wounds with the quiet authority she had been quietly storing since the first day when she had inventoried the first aid kits. She set Freya’s broken arm in a splint made from a cutting board and strips of cloth torn from a spare gown, wrapping it tightly enough that the bones held their position. Freya could breathe through the pain if she concentrated. She cleaned the cuts on Sophie’s face and taped them. She looked at Tobias’s wrist, which was fractured rather than broken cleanly, and splinted that too. She checked Eli’s eyes with the flashlight from one of the first aid kits, moving it back and forth, watching his pupils respond, and told him he needed to stay awake for another few hours and that someone needed to sit with him. Sophie said she would.

The food James had not yet destroyed was brought out and distributed evenly. It was not as much as it should have been; what remained was a reduced and irregular collection of canned goods, dry staples, and a few things from the back of the shelves that had been overlooked. It was enough. They portioned it without argument and ate without much conversation, sitting in a loose arrangement near the kitchen with the covered shapes in the center of the room behind them. Renata cried quietly while she ate. Nobody commented on it because there was nothing to say about it that wasn’t obvious.

When the food was put away and the first aid kit repacked, they gathered one final time. The conversation was brief and without dissent. Tobias, they decided. In the morning, every remaining slip would carry his name. He promised he would not open the book, would not read it, would not let it touch him if he could manage it. He said Carl’s name when he said it, acknowledging where the promise had come from. The others nodded. They said goodnight to each other in the dim common area with its cameras and its tablecloths, and one by one the light under each door went dark.

The guards came in the morning with their slips of paper and their pens. When the votes were counted, the lead guard said Tobias’s name without ceremony. He fetched the book from Marcus’s room. Tobias took it with both hands and held it the way you hold something you have decided not to trust. He did not open it.

The tablecloths were not adequately covering the bodies, so they all went to their rooms and came back with their blankets, each person contributing without being asked, and covered them thoroughly. Sophie straightened the edges. Nobody spoke while she did it.

The rest of the third day settled into something that Freya could only describe to herself as a grim ordinary. They ate from the remaining stores in careful measured amounts, Priya overseeing the rationing with a spreadsheet she had constructed in her head and seemed to be running continuously. Tobias sat with the book and did not open it. Eli’s concussion was improving; his eyes were tracking properly by afternoon and the lump above his ear had flattened to a bruise. Freya’s arm hurt constantly and comprehensively but the splint held and she was managing it. They played cards in the evening, the six of them around the table, and the game was slow and distracted but it was something to do with their hands while the hours moved. Nobody laughed. Nobody cried either. They had arrived somewhere past both for the time being.

Freya woke on the morning of the fourth day before anyone else, in the thin gray light that came through the frosted glass of her door before the building’s interior lights came on automatically at seven. She lay still for a moment in the way you do when something has pulled you out of sleep but you don’t yet know what it was. Then she got up and opened her door.

Marcus was sitting in the center of the common area.

He was cross-legged on the floor in the exact position James had occupied on the morning of the first vote, his eyes were open and fixed on the door the guards came through each morning. He was not wearing his gown. His skin, from what she could see of his arms and chest and neck, had been carved. Not scratched. Carved, deeply, the lines dark and deliberate, covering every visible surface in a dense arrangement of symbols she did not recognize. His hands rested on his knees with the palms up. The wounds on them were the same, the symbols running across his palms. His chest rose and fell with slow, even breaths.

The blankets in the corner laid undisturbed.

His eyes did not move from the door.

Freya stepped back into her room, pushed the door shut, and turned the small lock on the handle, which she understood even as she turned it would do nothing meaningful against a man who had absorbed over a hundred stab wounds and was apparently still breathing. She pressed her back against the door, stood in the dark of her room, and listened.

The scream came maybe four minutes later. Renata’s voice, high and short, cut off by the sound of a door slamming and a lock turning. Then silence. The building held its silence with the patience of a building that had been holding it for days now and had learned its shape.

She sat on her bed with her splinted arm across her lap and waited.

The guards came at their usual time. They moved through the door the way they always did, helmets and vests and rifles, and the lead guard announced that all participants were required to exit their rooms for the vote. His voice carried the same flat administrative tone it always had. They all exited their rooms.

Marcus did not stand. He did not turn. He remained cross-legged on the floor in the center of the room with his carved hands resting on his carved knees. When the guard came to him with the slip and the pen, he reached out without looking, wrote a name, and handed it back.

The votes were counted. Tobias again. He looked at the guard with an expression of such naked exhaustion that the guard simply nodded and moved on. The team withdrew. The door closed.

Tobias looked at Marcus.

“I didn’t ask for this, I swear…” he said. His voice was unsteady. “I want you to know that. I didn’t campaign for it or try to take it from you. They voted for me. That’s all that happened…”

Marcus said nothing. His eyes stayed on the far door.

“I’m not going to read it,” Tobias said. “I haven’t opened it once, I swear to you. Whatever is in it, I don’t want it. I was the scholar yesterday while you were… I don’t want any part of it.”

Freya had positioned herself at the kitchen counter with Sophie and Eli, each arming themselves with their knives.

Tobias took a step closer to Marcus. Sophie inhaled quietly beside Freya.

“Please,” Tobias said. “Please just tell me you’re not going to hurt me. That’s all I need. Just tell me that.”

Marcus did not respond.

“Are you going to kill me?” Tobias asked.

The question hung in the air of the common area for a long moment. Tobias’s glasses had fogged slightly as tears formed in his eyes.

Marcus moved.

His hand went under his legs and came back out with a knife. A kitchen knife, one of the ones that had gone into him and had apparently stayed. He held it with the blade pointing toward himself, the handle extended toward Tobias. He turned his head, the first time his eyes had moved from the main door all morning, to look at Tobias.

“If you are so afraid I am going to kill you,” Marcus said, “why don’t you kill me first.”

Tobias stared at the knife.

He took the knife.

Then he turned the knife and drove it into his own neck.

Tobias hit the floor sideways, the book skidding out from under his arm and stopping a few feet away, the knife still in his neck. The blood was immediate and catastrophic, spreading under him in a way that left no ambiguity about what was coming. His legs moved. His mouth moved. His eyes found nothing.

Marcus reached down and pulled the knife free.

The bleeding accelerated. Tobias began to choke on his own blood. Marcus crouched over him with the patience of a man doing work he had planned out in advance, and he set the knife against Tobias’s hairline and began to clean his skull.

Tobias stopped moving long before it was over. That was the only mercy the morning produced.

When Marcus sat back, what remained of Tobias’s head was a clean ivory cap, the skull catching the overhead light with a terrible luminosity. Marcus, satisfied with his work, sat the skull down and began tending to the other bones in Tobias’s body.

Marcus worked through the day without acknowledging any of the other participants. When he finished with Tobias, he simply stood up, walked to the where the other bodies laid, and picked a new set of bones to clean.

By evening the pile in the center of the common area had grown into something that Freya had no category for, a dense and ordered arrangement of cleaned bones from three human bodies, the skulls set at intervals that seemed almost deliberate. Marcus cleaned his knife on the hem of his gown, stood and looked at the pile for a moment. Then he walked to his room and closed the door without a word, without a look at any of them, as though the living people in the room were the least interesting thing in it. James’s was the last body left under the blankets.

The fifth day arrived the way the others had, except that Freya had not slept and was already sitting on the edge of her bed when the light came through the frosted glass of her door.

James was sitting with Marcus.

He was cross-legged the same way Marcus was, his hands on his knees, his palms up. The symbols covered him completely.

The guards came through the door at their usual time and processed the vote with their usual indifference. The lead guard looked at James for slightly longer than he looked at anyone else, then consulted his slips and announced Sophie’s name. Sophie took the book. The guards filed out. The door closed.

Donna turned to return to her room.

She made it three steps.

Marcus moved quickly, taking her down swiftly and pinning her to the floor. James came up beside them. It was time for her to have her bones cleaned. So James got to work while Marcus held her down. Her screaming lasted too long.

Sophie was already in her room. Eli’s door had closed. Freya returned to her room, stood against her door, looked at the wall across from her, and counted her own heartbeats to have something to count.

She did not go out.

The hours passed in a specific way when you are alone in a small room listening for sounds you don’t want to hear.

The banging started in the early afternoon. Renata’s room. A heavy rhythmic impact against the door, patient and persistent, the sound of something that was not in a hurry because it didn’t need to be. Renata started screaming before the door gave, which meant she had been awake, waiting, and listening the same way Freya had. The door gave with a crack of wood before the screaming moved from behind a door to out in the open.

Freya pressed her hands over her ears. She couldn’t keep the screams out.

Nina’s door went in the late afternoon.

Priya’s door went a few hours after that.

Eli’s door went in the early evening.

She sat in the center of her bed in the dark of her room with her splinted arm in her lap. Her whole body was shaking in a way she couldn’t control.

Outside her door, the common area was quiet.

Sleep did not come.

The knock came at seven.

“Participant. You are required to exit your room for the vote.”

“No,” Freya said.

A pause. “Exit your room now.”

“No.”

They had a key. She didn’t fight them. She didn’t have enough left to fight them.

They brought her through her door and into the common area and she saw it all at once.

The pile in the center of the room was larger. Eight skulls on top of a pile of bones. James and Marcus sat cross-legged near the pile, their wicked symbols weeping black tar, their hands on their knees.

Sophie sat in front of them.

She was carving into her own forearm with a kitchen knife, slowly. The symbols were already dense across her hands and up her neck. She was working with the focused attention of an artist in the middle of something. She did not look up when Freya was brought in.

The book sat in Sophie’s lap.

The guard held the slip and the pen out to Freya. She looked at it. She looked at Sophie. She took the pen and wrote Sophie’s name because there was no one else to write. She handed it back.

The guard counted the slips. He looked up.

“Freya,” he said.

Sophie stood. She crossed to Freya and held the book out with both hands, the cover facing up, the single word on it plain and legible in the morning light.

“We need four,” Sophie said. “Three is not enough. It has never been enough.”

Marcus nodded. James nodded.

“The book is beautiful, Freya,” Sophie continued. She said it the way you tell someone about something you love, with a warmth that was almost unbearable coming from Sophie’s face in Sophie’s voice. “You have no idea. No one who hasn’t read it has any idea. It solves everything. All of it. Every problem, every question, everything that has ever been wrong with the world, it’s all in there and it all resolves. It’s the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. It’s Heaven on earth.”

Freya looked at her. She looked at Marcus and James. She looked at the bones in the center of the room.

“Just kill me,” she said. “Just do what you did to the others and be done with it.”

The three of them laughed. It came from all three simultaneously, the same laugh in three different registers.

Freya moved before she had decided to move. The knife was still in her pocket from the night before. She got it out and got it turned and got the point against the soft of her throat below the jaw.

Marcus’s hand closed around her wrist.

His grip was not the grip of something that could be overcome by a woman with one working arm, no sleep, and five days of fear in her body. The knife came away from her throat. She pulled against him and accomplished nothing. He brought her down to the floor and held her there with a hand on each shoulder and his weight across her legs. She could feel the carved symbols on his palms against her skin.

James knelt down beside her.

He picked up Sophie’s knife from where it had dropped to the floor. He looked at Freya’s face and smiled. Marcus held her head still. James removed Freya’s eyelids. Sophie crouched in front of her. She opened the book.

The words were visible whether Freya wanted them to be or not.

She started to read.

–

The club occupied the top two floors of a building in the financial district, the kind of building that did not have a sign outside because the people who needed to know about it already did. The lounge was all dark wood, leather, and the smell of tobacco that had been accumulating in the upholstery for decades. A fire burned in the grate despite the season. Men in good suits stood in clusters or sat in pairs and spoke at the volume of people who had never had reason to lower their voices.

The gaunt man sat alone near the window.

He was very old and very thin in the way that some men become at the end of a long life, the flesh having made its concessions to time until what remained was mostly structure, cheekbone, jaw, and the long architecture of his hands folded in his lap. He held a glass of whiskey he had not touched.

The other man came in at half past eight. He was younger, fifty perhaps, with the careful grooming of someone who understood the importance of appearance in rooms like this one. He crossed the lounge without greeting anyone and sat in the chair across from the gaunt man. He reached inside his jacket and produced a manila envelope and a thumb drive and set them both on the small table between them.

The gaunt man looked at them but did not pick them up.

“How did it go,” he said. His voice was very dry and quiet.

“Four converted,” the man said. “But they weren’t able to complete the ritual.”

The gaunt man closed his eyes for a moment. He shook his head slowly, the minimal movement of someone conserving energy even in disappointment. “What a shame,” he said. “What a terrible shame.”

The gaunt man looked at his whiskey. “The expenses?”

The man settled back in his chair and produced a small leather notebook and opened it to a marked page. “Facility rental and preparation, including the window hardware and room outfitting. Guard contracts, seven days at the four-man rate.” He turned the page. “Research staff for the intake and processing period. Equipment, including cameras, the phone line installation, and the communications setup. Cleanup.” He paused here briefly. “Body disposal and associated documentation.” Another pause. “Miscellaneous containment costs arising from the operational complications on day one.” He closed the notebook and set it on his knee and gave the gaunt man a total.

The gaunt man sat with the number for a moment. He exhaled through his nose, a long quiet exhale, the sound of a man doing arithmetic he finds tedious.

“I’ll wire it tomorrow,” he said.

“Thank you.”

They sat together for a moment in the noise of the room, the cigar smoke drifting, the fire working through its wood. The gaunt man unfolded his hands and reached beside his chair and lifted a bag onto his lap. He reached into it and removed a book. It was similar in size and format to the one Freya had been made to read, but the cover was different, a deeper color, and the text sitting across its face was not the same.

“Run it again,” the gaunt man said. “But with this one this time.”

Credit: Grant Howard

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