Chapter 3: We Make Gods

The girl in the hoodie stopped screaming.

Nobody told her to. It ran down on its own, one long note thinning into a hum and then into wet breathing, and after that there was nothing left in the room except a shoe scraping somewhere to Wes’s left and stopping, and the dripping at the near corner of the table.

Wes counted the drips. Six. Seven. It kept better time than the clock.

His right hand was still up beside his face.

He brought it down and looked at what he was holding. It was about the size of a plum, pale, and it had been warm a second ago. It was still doing something — a flutter against the meat of his palm, small and regular, like a pulse that had lost track of the body it belonged to. Then that stopped too, and it went heavy, and it was only a piece of a person.

He set it back on the table, near the young man it had come out of, and put his hand in his lap.

There was blood under his fingernails. It wasn’t his.

Nobody spoke. The woman in the gray suit had her eyes shut and her lips going, and Wes watched her lips for a while and couldn’t make out a word. The big man was propped on both hands still, breathing through his nose, his shoulders moving more than the breathing needed. The girl’s hands were in her lap and shaking all the way to the wrist. The old man against the far wall hadn’t moved since the sound, and he was the only one in the room who hadn’t.

The man in the white coat was sitting up straight with his hands folded, and he had not looked away from the body once.

Above them the bulb burned flat, and in its cage of wire it didn’t so much as flicker, and the clock on the table went on standing at twelve with a plain white face.

Then the Ram nodded.

“Good,” he said. “Nine of you. I like you better quiet.”

His voice was a hallway voice, and he let it stay that way, courteous and unhurried, a little too glad.

“We should be introduced,” he said. “It’s rude, otherwise.”

He lifted one finger and tapped it against the brow of the mask, twice, beside the left eye hole. The nail was dark.

“I am the Ram. You are Participants.”

He wiped his palm down the front of the mask. The mask got redder. The smell came off him again — wet wool, and under the wool something older and thinner, like a coat left too long in a basement.

“Participants,” the man in the black tee said. “In what.”

“In a game,” the Ram said, “at the end of which we make a god.”

Nobody said anything. The word went into the room and did nothing at all.

“We make gods,” the Ram said. “It isn’t new. We’ve done it before. The last one is finished — went up, didn’t come back down — and there’s a great work waiting on a god to do it, and no god left to do it. So.” He spread both hands, the clean one and the other. “A new one.”

He came a few steps along the table, and the people nearest him pulled their hips back and got nowhere, their legs dragging on the concrete like sacks.

“You should be pleased,” he said. “It’s a great work.”

“What kind of god,” the big man said.

“The kind that’s needed.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the answer there is.”

The big man’s jaw worked once. Then, patient, one question at a time, the way a man tries a lock he means to get through: “Are you a religion?”

“Religion.” The Ram turned his head, and the mask turned with it. “We’re grander than a religion. We have a world.”

He let that sit. Nobody picked it up. The woman in the work shirt drew breath to say something, and it went out of her, and she pinched the inside of her own arm instead.

“A startup,” the tattooed man said. “That’s what this is. A startup.”

The Ram let it go past him without touching it. He turned back to the big man as though there were one person in the room worth turning to.

“What are we participating in,” the big man said.

“You’re not listening.” The Ram’s voice went up, once, and came back down. “A game. Win, and one of you is a god. One of the nine. Any of you, and it doesn’t matter which. That’s the whole of it.”

“And if we lose?”

The Ram turned his hand over and looked into it. There was blood in the lines of the palm. His shoulders dropped, and his fingers quit moving, and he stood there a moment holding his own hand open.

“Then it’s too bad,” he said.

“Say it,” the man in the black tee said. “Go on. Say dead.”

The Ram didn’t say it.

The clock stood at twelve. The bulb burned. Somewhere a long way off past the walls, the bell held off, and the room waited on it and got nothing.

“There’s a name for this one,” the Ram said.

He reached into his coat and brought out a sheaf of paper folded down the middle. He walked the length of the table with it and set a sheet down in front of each of them, and he didn’t hurry, and he squared each one to the edge.

Wes watched them land. One after another, nine of them, and each sheet picked up red where it touched.

Then the pens, out of the same coat. Plastic, clear barrels, the ink standing black inside them.

Wes’s sheet came down in a wet patch near the corner and the red climbed into it from underneath and made a shape he didn’t like. He turned the paper over and wiped the table with the heel of his hand, and the red came up with it and spread, and the paper got redder instead of cleaner.

He put it back down.

“Liar,” the Ram said.

He said it the way a man reads a name off a list.

“Each of you tells me a story. The last thing that happened to you before you came here. What you were doing. Who you were with. What you saw.”

“One story each,” the big man said.

“One each. Nine stories.” The Ram walked back around. “And one of the nine will tell it false.”

The woman in the work shirt made a small sound and shut it off. The old man against the far wall moved his head, once, the first movement out of him, and then stopped moving again.

“One of you is lying,” the Ram said, “and I won’t tell you which one.”

“You’re going to have to tell us more than that,” the tattooed man said.

“You’ll all tell,” the Ram went on, over the top of him, “and when the last one of you has finished, you vote. You write a name on that paper. And if eight of you write the same name and the name is right, then the Liar is out and the rest of you live.”

“And if one of us writes it wrong?” the big man said.

“Then the Liar lives.” Behind the mask something moved. “And the rest of you are out.”

Nobody asked what out meant. Nobody had to.

Wes did the sum in his head anyway.

Eight votes. All eight, on the same name, at the same time, out of nine people who couldn’t agree on how many of them were in the room.

He ran it a second time to see whether the first answer had been a mistake. It hadn’t been.

He had a question. It was about the Liar’s own sheet — whose name went on it, whether it got collected with the other eight or counted at all. He turned it over once in his head.

Then he put it down.

The Ram stepped back from the table, folded his hands in front of his coat, and waited.

Wes counted, starting with himself.

One. Gray suit, two. The big man, three. Black tee, four. The tattooed one, five. Work shirt with her hair pinned up, six. The hoodie, seven. The old man against the wall, eight. The white coat.

Nine.

He counted again, moving his lips, and got nine.

Then his eyes went to the end of the table, where the young man was folded over into his own blood with the top of his head open, and he lost the thread and had to start over, and the second time it came out the same.

Nine sheets of paper lay on the table, one in front of every one of them, going red at the edges.

Wes runs the same sum twice, hoping the first answer was a mistake. It isn’t, and he sets the question down anyway. What’s the last thing you counted twice just to be sure?

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