Chapter 4: One Minute

The Ram raised one finger.

“Before the first story,” he said, “a courtesy. One minute. The nine of you may talk among yourselves — to each other, not to me. Plans, questions, anything you like. It may be spent now. It may be spent after the stories, before the vote. It may be spent once.”

“Now,” the big man said.

“Hold on,” the tattooed man said. “He hasn’t finished telling us—“

“Now.” The big man turned his head just enough to take in the table. Not the end of it. “Later it’s worth less. Later we’ve all told our stories and nobody can say anything without looking like he’s covering for himself. Right now nobody’s said a word about where he was. Right now we can still be nine people who agree about something.”

The Ram inclined his head, stepped back one pace, and put his hands behind his back.

“Then the minute is running,” he said. “I’ll tell you when it’s gone.”

Wes looked at the sheet in front of him, at the red coming up through it. It was the first sensible thing said in this room since the screaming stopped, and it was a bid. The big man hadn’t asked for ideas. He had put nine lives on his own ability to make nine strangers do the same thing at the same moment, and he had put them down before anybody could argue about the price.

“Here’s what we do,” the big man said.

He set both palms flat on the table, bracketing his paper, and he did not look toward the end of the table, where the young man slumped with the top of his head opened against it. He had not looked that way once since he started speaking, and the not-looking had a shape to it, like a man walking around a wet patch.

“One of the nine is supposed to be lying. All right. Then none of us lies.” He let that sit for a second. “Nine stories, told straight. Where we were, what we were doing, who was with us. No cleaning it up, no making ourselves look better than we are. And when the stories are done, we write the same thing on the paper. All nine of us. Nobody lied.”

Somebody breathed out through the nose, hard.

“The rule has nothing to bite on,” the big man said. “Eight votes have to match. Nine of them will match. Nobody dies.”

“Aw, fuck,” the tattooed man said, quietly, into the table, and after that he had nothing to add.

“You want us to agree,” the woman in the work shirt said.

“I want you to write the same word I write.” The big man’s eyes went around the table, taking each of them in turn, skipping the last place. “Agreeing’s optional. Doing it isn’t. When your turn comes, you talk straight, and when the paper comes out—“

“And if somebody can’t?” she said. “If somebody isn’t as good at this as you are?”

“Then it’s a bad minute for them,” the big man said, “and they do the best they can and hope it’s straight enough.”

“Say eight of us write what you tell us to,” the woman in the gray suit said, “and one of us doesn’t. One man, one bad minute. Who decides what happens to him then?”

“Nobody decides. The rule decides. That’s what writing it down is for.”

“It’s what we’re told it’s for,” she said.

The man in the white coat had been holding his pen. He stopped turning it.

“Your plan has one thing holding it up,” he said.

“Go on.”

“It works if you’re not the liar. That’s the premise.” His voice was even, almost kind, the voice of a man reading a label. “If you drew the Liar, then we do as you say. Nine stories, eight of them honest, and nine papers that say nobody lied. No name written anywhere. He told us to write a name — one wrong name and the Liar lives and the rest of us are out. You’d be handing him nine papers with nothing on them and a rule that says that’s a wrong one. And the Liar is the man in front of us, telling us what to write.”

Nobody spoke. The bulb hummed in its cage.

“If I’m the liar,” the big man said, “why open my mouth?”

The white coat didn’t answer.

“No — answer that. Answer it.” The big man’s hands came off the paper and stayed in the air. “If I’m the liar, I don’t have to say one word to any of you. I sit here with my mouth shut and let nine people hand me the room for free. Instead I’m giving you the only plan that gets all of us out. I’m the one spending the minute.”

“You’re the one who asked for it,” the white coat said.

“To use. I asked so I could use it.”

“Yes,” the white coat said. “That’s what I can’t check.”

The big man looked away first. The flush came up his neck, and he let his chin drop and stared at the table in front of him like a man who had dropped something valuable and could still see where it landed.

The white coat turned the pen half a rotation between two fingers, set it down on his paper without a sound, and looked at his own hands.

Wes had a sentence in his mouth.

The plan wasn’t arithmetic. It was a demand for obedience with arithmetic drawn around it. It held up exactly as long as nobody put a question to the man making it, and there was no way on earth to make nine strangers hold, not with a dead man at the end of the table and a minute running down.

Anyone could have said it. Nobody had. The white coat had said something smaller instead, and now the room had no plan at all and no way to get one.

Saying it out loud would have cost him. A man who takes another man’s plan apart in front of nine people has been thinking about the rules longer than the man who wrote them, and in a room where exactly one person was lying, that was the man everybody would look at next.

He looked away from the white coat, at the seam in the wall running down through the gray, and let the minute go.

“Time,” the Ram said.

The big man opened his mouth.

The Ram raised the same finger. “The minute is spent. There is no more of it.”

Two of them started speaking at once and the Ram went over the top of both without raising his voice, and they stopped, because every one of them had watched what his calm was willing to do to a man’s head.

“You’ll want to know what I kept back,” he said. “There is another rule. It comes after this one and it doesn’t replace anything.”

“Then say it,” the woman in the gray suit said.

“I would have said it before the minute, if you’d let me finish. You didn’t ask me whether I was finished. You asked me whether you could talk among yourselves, and I said yes, and I told you the minute could be spent now or later, and one of you spent it.” Behind the mask something shifted. “I set out a menu. You were the one in a hurry.”

The big man’s breathing was audible for a few seconds, and then it wasn’t, and he had swallowed it.

The Ram brought his hand out of his coat with a pack of cards in it. They were small, the size of poker cards and a little thicker than paper. On the back of each, stamped in gold, was a circle with a figure inside it — shallow, smaller than a thumbnail, and not a shape Wes knew. He had the unreasonable feeling that he had been looking at it for years without noticing.

“Identity cards,” the Ram said. “One each. Take them off the table and don’t show anybody.”

“What’s on it?” the man in the black tee said.

“Whose you are.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the answer this game runs on.” The Ram walked the table, setting a card down in front of each of them, square to the edge, and moving on. “One of the nine has the Liar’s card. If it’s you, you lie. Not may. Must. When your turn comes, the lie comes out of you, and it comes out easy — that’s the ugly part of the thing, it always does. The other eight tell it true.” A card went down. “Then you vote.”

“Wait,” the big man said.

“Nine stories,” the Ram said. “One of them a lie, and the liar knows it’s a lie and can’t stop it. Eight true, and the eight who tell them can’t make their stories truer by being convincing or less true by being dull. Then you write a name. Eight names agreeing, and the right name — the Liar is out, the rest of you live. One name wrong — the Liar lives, and the rest of you are out.” He laid the last card down and straightened up. “That’s all of it. That was always all of it, and one of you could have had it for free.”

The big man looked down at the card in front of him, and then at his own hand, the one that had been flat on the table a minute ago.

“You had these in your pocket while I was talking.”

“I did.”

“While I was asking nine people to trust me, you had the whole thing in your pocket.”

“You had a minute,” the Ram said. “You spent it on the wrong thing.”

Nobody laughed. Nobody picked up a card.

Wes reached out and took his off the table, turned it face down in front of himself, and around the table the others did the same, one at a time, like people folding their hands.

Nobody flipped.

The woman in the work shirt had hers in both hands down below the table, out of sight, and her knuckles were pale. The girl in the hoodie held hers by the very corners, thumbs and forefingers, the way you carry a plate you’ve been told not to drop. The man in the black tee worried one corner of his card back and forth against his thumb, once, twice, a dozen times, until the corner had a soft bend in it that was never coming out. The woman in the gray suit looked at the back of her card for a long moment, at the gold circle and the figure inside it, and then put it face down on her paper and left her hand on top of it.

“You can look,” the Ram said. “That’s allowed.”

Wes put his palm over his card.

The card was cool. His palm wasn’t. He drew it toward himself, unhurried, until it sat at the edge of the table in front of him, then got his thumbnail under the corner and turned it up and held it low, near his chest.

Eight names, one room, one moment. It had never been going to happen. He had known that before the cards came out.

He turned it over.

Liar.

Wes closed his hand over it.

Then he looked at the others. The work shirt first, then the hoodie beside her, then the black tee, the tattooed man with his arm on the table, the white coat with his pen still down, the gray suit with her hand flat over her paper, the old man against the far wall who hadn’t touched his, and the big man, last, still looking at his own hand. He did it in order, left to right, all eight of them, and let his eyes come back the same way they had gone.

The Ram was looking at the clock.