I was part of a building’s foundation an hour ago. Now I’m hiding in an alleyway. It’s worse here.

  Two of the four people who dug me out of that hole are still near, which is why I can’t get out of this pile of trash. I don’t recognize any of this red dust, these rusty nuts and bolts, or the crumbs stuck to the empty plastic wrappers that cover me up to my head. I don’t know this town, this urban slot between two great dilapidated rust-coated buildings, all wall-to-wall wrought iron on their exteriors left to oxidize in air for I-don’t-even-know how long. I don’t know why the geodesic dome overhead is so huge—only the tallest skyscrapers get that high, and the panels of hundreds of black opaque triangles don’t let much light into this world. The seams between them glow eerily silver, uniform enough that I thought they were neon tubes, but now I can see spots along the lines where pinpoints shed only darkness. There were dead bulbs up there, perhaps.

  I don’t understand the people, either, but the more I listen, the more I’m picking it up. And the two seem to have lost my trail. From a gap between a vanilla grain bar wrapper and a fallen steel girder, I see the two figures pacing around. Of course, I can’t just ask them where I am or what they’re doing. That one, Fark, said he wanted me ‘voted dead’.

  Whatever he is, he’s not human. He’s a shambling humanoid shape, made of red and yellow and waxy white clumps of what look like stone, with purple beads lubricating his surfaces like ball bearings. His legs are like red sticks with waxy white kneecaps, and his upper body is built like an inverted triangle, a caricature of masculinity that smells like garlic even from here. Plates of yellow and red, like onioned layers of armor, make up his top-heavy mass, leaving more red sticks to be his arms and three-fingered hands. His face is where the caricature ends—his chin is slight, his face being such a mess of different veins of stone in that red-yellow-white spectrum that I can’t tell where his nose ends and his mouth begins. It’s his eyes that strike me the most—sockets completely full of purple beads, bulging like an insect’s compound eyes.

  And he’s pacing.

  “Couldn’t they hide less? I want this over,” he said, stomping in circles around a patch of the metallic street, walking over screwheads like cobblestone, each footfall crunching. His voice’s vowels are inflected, long like he’s belaboring a point. The kind of manner of speaking that never feels like he’s expressed all of his thoughts.

  “They won’t hide forever! It’s almost solved, they’re almost solved, tomorrow!” The other voice is higher pitched, frantic, a woman’s. She’s taking his hand in her own, one just as mineralized, but it’s a different strain of stone—branching arteries of pure white over pale red rock, like she’s but a dark pink skeleton wrapped up all together with overthick spiderwebs, her facial features written over the webs in a striking deep blue the color of the deep ocean. Her eyebrows are painted on, as are her eyes themselves, her mouth, her button nose. The deposits of blue at her hips, and the sway in her walk as she follows Fark, are part of why I’m assuming ‘she’.

  “Adol, dear, sweet—I’ve waited too long to lose one of my friends at the last moment.” He looks through the vacant window of an empty building, its dimensions like a convenience store. I can see flickering silver light inside. He laughs to himself, melodious and snarky, a genuine smile on his face. “I want them where I know where they are. Everyone has to see our new Number Nine. I want to show them around, so everyone knows to keep them in lock and key. The worst, the very worst thing that could happen? Someone dies and Number Nine makes it through the vote alive anyway. But if we catch them, we stop that. The best thing that happens? We all live and Number Nine gets voted dead. And we can go home!” He laughs again, now reaching into the window and rooting around. Adol, the woman with him, watches with a placid smile and not-all-there fixed eyes. I can’t tell if that’s an artifact of how her face is sketched on by the blue material, or what.

  “Fark?” Adol asks.

  “Yes, honey?” He keeps digging in the store, his waist through the window.

  “I don’t want to be a skeleton anymore. Do you remember? Remember when we still had skin?”

  His arms stop moving for a moment. Fark sighs. Finally, he’s standing up straight again, turning back to Adol with a sympathetic smile and a can of soda in each hand. I can tell it’s soda because the cans are stark white with the jet-black word ‘COLA!’ printed over them, brandlessly. “We do this right, and you’ll have some tomorrow night.” Adol smiles back. He hands her a soda, and they pop open their tabs in unison. “I’m looking forward to seeing your face again.”

  They clink their cans together.

  “Fark? If we can’t find Number Nine? Let’s not tell anyone else about them.” Adol takes a sip. “Non-information is revealing. It will reveal the truth, and the Adversary knows to stay outside of the light.”

  Fark gulps down some cola. “A few already know, honey, but I’m listening.”

  “Blood on their hands on the first day is a death sentence for Number Nine. I’m taking a look into the world, the world where Number Nine is the Adversary! They kill tonight, they get voted dead, seven of us go home. I’m taking a look into the world again, where Number Nine isn’t...”

  “They’re the Adversary, Adol.”

  “Yes! And in the world that doesn’t exist, the true Adversary can get a free kill by blaming Sammy...but they only do that if they know Sammy is here! And if they know, but not everyone else knows, then they get their free kill and Sammy dies, but the game continues on...” She drinks, extending a pinky finger. “Everyone who didn’t know is a proven innocent. Proven innocents are thorns, thorns to the Adversary! The only way it is safe...there’s no safety in the free kill unless everyone knows! The longer it takes for everyone to know, the more time that they can’t kill without creating their proven innocents...”

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  Fark cocks a grin. “You’re my favorite clever woman, Adol.”

  “Time to think is neverending!”

  He chuckles. “Been a while since I thought about Adversary logic. Let’s do it your way. Give up the hunt and keep it quiet...none of our friends die, and we can sleep well tonight.”

  They stroll on, out of sight of the alleyway.

  I’m finally alone again. I can keep moving. I can keep trying to learn what the hell is going on in this dome.

  It takes me a long time to find anyone else.

  The problem is that if I run into Fark, Adol, or the other stone-people that were operating that giant hand-powered tunnel-boring machine, they’ll grab me and ‘vote me dead’. Whatever that means. There should be four other people to look for, given that they were calling me Number Nine, when my actual name is Sammy. That means that I have to sneak my way around on the hunt of finding someone else.

  This place looks more appropriate for nine thousand people than nine.

  The dome is about the size of a university campus, the sort that sprawls over half a town. It’s a tiny city of steel and rust, each building only one or two stories tall, all made uniformly of iron. Rivets seal the edges of walls together, though the structures are so flimsy and rust-eaten that I suspect it’s just sheet metal, textured like wrought iron—one could have just as easily bent it into squares and rectangles for people to live in, instead of using rivets. I don’t know what all the fasteners have to do with anything, between the construction work and the screw-studded ground that my sandals stride on. It’s not one subtly wrong problem in an otherwise-normal city, though; everything is weird. Even though I’m walking on metal streets, my footsteps are quiet. Even though rust holes have punched through building after building like urban blight in the form of acid rain, I see only the gray of steel in the far distance; the dome itself is intact. The buildings look like front-facing stores and homes, mixed randomly together, but the storefront signs are illegible placeholders: iron sheets draped over the doors, squiggled over with welds and solders that almost look like text from a distance, but are less legible than my signature when I get close. At least I can navigate around the grid, the streets, on foot. I’m a lightweight. The walk is easy.

  Am I the only human here?

  There’s only so much I can take in. In a few hours of navigation, I get a feel for two major landmarks: one, there’s a big pagoda in the dead center of the dome, with its multiple layered roofs of iron flaking away into oxides. I’ll figure it out later. The other big landmark is the drilling machine, and it’s about the only building-sized structure that looks real and intentional, here. It’s one giant ramshackle camshaft, stood upright over the ruins of some other cored-out fake building, with a bunch of wedges and misshapen steel scaffolding attached to it, chains and a geartrain attaching it to a four-spoked...mill. It’s a mill, the kind that, long ago, horses used to be lashed to and trained to run around in the same circle, endlessly, in thousands of laps, to grind grain. One big heavy puck of steel, four spokes. One person to grab each spoke and push, turning it, and with the force-multiplying power of that geartrain and the weight of the giant camshaft, it had drilled a hole down into the foundations of the fake building. It’s what dug me out.

  I still don’t have a clue how I got there, how I survived being buried under hard-packed sand and the layers of steel resting above it. No one’s attending it for me to ask them the question.

  I find another living soul only by going the opposite way. The digging machine is close to the edge of the geodesic dome, its lights and triangles curving down low enough that I can make out the bead-like strings of silver bulbs in the distance. But there’s an entire ‘city border’ where dome meets ground, one that ensures that I won’t get lost, so I follow that circumference all the way until I hear something new.

  Here, the houses butt up near to the very edge of the dome, a hard wall of stainlessness, connected to the ground with the biggest melted-and-messed-up weld between steels that I’ve ever seen. It’s like a river wound its way around the dome’s edge and somehow stuck to the dome as well, but was spontaneously transformed into iron, keeping all of its ripples and oil-slick discoloration on its surface. There are even giant hex bolts halfway sticking out of the weld-river. Whatever or whoever designed this place, they did not want the dome coming off of the fake city, or any exit points to exist.

  Besides lots and lots of plastic-wrapper litter and cans in the street, I notice more—static fuzz, two voices talking over each other, suspicious pauses and dramatic assertiveness in such muffled tones that I can barely make them out. For a moment, I duck into another alleyway and listen in, closely, trying to pick up whether they’re coming closer or going further away—and for a minute, it’s just that, conversation, staying at fixed distance. Then I finally hear a scare chord, the conversations end, and it’s nothing but jangly music that tries too hard to sound serious. I’m hearing...a television.

  When I come back out of the alleyway, I find the source—two buildings down, in a house even more run-down than the rest of them, a metal box that is more than a shack, but not much. The mesh-like expanded steel over the fence has been moth-eaten with rust, joining many of the diamonds in that sheet-metal grid together. It’s bolted to girders that make up the edges and corners of the shack-box, but the rivets that hold those paired girders together have split, so the walls are sagging outwards and I can see yellow-orange warm light coming from those edges. They’re held almost-vertically by what few rivets remain—and the sheer stubbornness of old metal.

  There’s a welcome mat. The welcome is a scribble on steel. It’s very askew and there’s a ‘BEER!’ can on top of it. I knock on the door. I don’t know why I expected it to sound like ringing a bell. It comes out more like hammering the side of a trash can.

  Finally, mercifully, after a full minute, the still-only-iron door handle clunks, turned ninety degrees, and it’s pulled inward.