The tally on the screen held steady for exactly forty-three seconds. Long enough for the guests to drag Guan Qi back from the gate, his leg a dead weight beneath him, his velvet jacket now a dark, wet red. Long enough for Marcus Albright to kneel beside him, the surgeon's hands moving with automatic precision to assess the damage—compound fracture of the tibia, significant blood loss, shock setting in. Long enough for the woman in the great room, still visible on the screen, to raise her phone and tap it once more.
Then the notifications came again.
This time, the message was different. It read: "A juror has attempted to abstain. Abstention is not permitted. Please cast your vote."
Elena Voss made a sound that was somewhere between a sob and a scream. "I didn't abstain. I already voted. I told you, I didn't mean to press anything. Make it stop." She was shaking her phone as if the device itself had betrayed her, her kale-smoothie composure dissolved into something raw and desperate. Her husband, a software engineer named David who had been silent throughout the evening, reached for her hand and missed.
Kang observed all of this from a position near the tent's entrance, his back to the darkness and his face to the light. The remote was still in his pocket, still warm from his palm, still waiting. But he did not press it. The woman in the great room fascinated him. She had not moved from her spot on the screen, her feet planted on the polished concrete floor of Zinan's showroom house. Her uniform was immaculate, her posture relaxed, her expression as blank as a mannequin's. She was not a caterer. Kang had studied the staffing manifest that Zinan's event planner had uploaded to the agency portal three days ago, and none of the twenty-three hired servers matched the woman on the screen. She was an intrusion, a ghost in the machine, and whoever had sent her had access to the house that even Kang had not fully mapped.
"She's not real," Patricia Molina said suddenly, her voice cutting through the chaos. The real estate agent was pointing at the screen, her finger trembling. "Look at her. She's not blinking. It's a recording, a deepfake or something."
Sixty heads turned toward the screen. Kang counted the seconds. At the seventh second, the woman blinked. It was a slow, deliberate motion, the lowering and raising of eyelids that was almost theatrical, as if she had heard Patricia's accusation from inside the screen and chosen to refute it with her body. A collective shudder passed through the guests, and Patricia Molina took a step backward, crossing herself with a gesture that looked long-unpracticed.
"Not a recording," Marcus Albright said without looking up from Guan Qi's leg. The surgeon had torn a strip of fabric from the tablecloth and was fashioning a tourniquet, his movements efficient and detached. "Someone get me something to splint this. A chair leg, a serving tray—anything rigid."
No one moved. The guests were frozen in a paralysis that Kang recognized, the particular immobility of people who had been asked to act in a situation that their suburban lives had never prepared them for. They were executives and nutritionists and retirees, people who delegated emergencies to professionals, who called 911 and waited for the sirens. But the sirens they had heard earlier were still distant, still approaching, and the gates were still locked.
Leonard Hartwell cleared his throat. The retired actuary had released his wife from his protective embrace and was now standing with his hands clasped behind his back, his posture that of a man about to address a boardroom. "This is clearly a prank," he announced, his voice projecting with the practiced resonance of someone who had once chaired committees. "An elaborate, illegal prank. Someone has hacked the entertainment system and is using it to frighten us. The best course of action is to ignore it entirely. Do not engage with the prompts. Do not touch your phones. Wait for the authorities."
"It's not a prank," Guan Qi whispered from the ground. His face was the color of old paper, his eyes glassy with pain and shock, but his voice carried a terrible clarity. "It's a trial. I told you. It's a trial, and we're all defendants."
"Shut up," Zinan said. The word was flat and cold, and it silenced the murmuring that had begun to ripple through the guests. Zinan had been standing apart from the group, his back to the house, his face in shadow. Now he stepped forward, and Kang saw that his hands were clenched at his sides, the knuckles white. "This is my house. This is an attack on my house. Whoever is doing this will be found, and they will be prosecuted. But until then, we do not give them what they want. We do not participate."
He turned to face the screen, and for a moment, Kang saw something flicker across his features—not fear, exactly, but the recognition of an opponent who had matched him move for move. The jade ring on his right hand caught the harsh white light, and Kang remembered the photograph from the leaked slideshow, the younger Zinan with his arm around a woman who was not his wife. That woman, Kang now recalled, had been wearing a ring that was identical to the one on Zinan's finger. A twin. A set. A secret made tangible in carved stone.
The screen flickered. The woman in the great room raised her phone again, and this time the notification that arrived on every device was accompanied by a sound—a high, piercing tone that made several guests cry out and cover their ears. When the tone stopped, the tally had changed.
EXILE: 2 EXECUTE: 4
"Who keeps voting?" David Voss demanded. He was holding his wife's phone now, his own phone, both screens facing outward as if to prove his innocence. "This is insane. Whoever is pressing execute, you have to stop. You're playing into their hands."
But Kang understood something that David Voss did not. The votes were not being cast by a single person. They were being cast by individuals who, in the privacy of their own screens, believed themselves to be acting alone. The network was a confessional, a dark box where secrets could be whispered without consequence. And the button was there, glowing and red and insistent, and pressing it cost nothing except a tiny surrender of the soul. For some people, that was a bargain. For some people, that was a release.
He looked at the faces around him, searching for the telltale signs: the downcast eyes, the furtive thumb, the flush of adrenaline that accompanied a forbidden act. He found them scattered among the guests like embers in dry grass. The tech executive who had sold his company was staring at his phone with an expression of intense concentration. The nutritionist's assistant, a young woman Kang did not recognize, had her screen angled away from the group. The retired postal worker was sweating, his thumb hovering over the glass.
And then there was Marcus Albright.
The surgeon had finished the tourniquet and was now kneeling beside Guan Qi with his phone in one hand and the carving knife in the other. His face was calm, professionally calm, but his thumb was moving across the screen. Kang watched him for a long moment, and then the screen in the tent updated again.
EXILE: 2 EXECUTE: 5
Marcus Albright slipped his phone back into his pocket and returned his attention to Guan Qi's leg as if nothing had happened.
Kang felt the remote in his pocket, and for the first time that evening, he considered the possibility that he was not the most dangerous person in the room.
Guan Qi was losing consciousness. His eyes were fluttering, his breathing shallow, his skin the color of candle wax. Marcus Albright worked with steady hands, but even Kang could see that the situation was deteriorating. The compound fracture had severed something important; blood was pooling beneath Guan Qi's leg at a rate that the tourniquet could only slow, not stop.
"He needs a hospital," Albright said, and his voice was still calm, still professional, as if he were delivering a routine update to a waiting family. "In the next thirty minutes, or he loses the leg. In the next hour, or he dies."
"Then open the gate," Patricia Molina said. "Someone must have a code. Zinan, you own this place. Open the gate."
Zinan did not move. His face was unreadable, a mask of composure that Kang found almost admirable. "The gates are controlled by the smart home system. The smart home system has been compromised. If I enter the house to reset it, I may be walking into whatever trap has been set."
"Then we all go," Leonard Hartwell said. "We go together, as a group. There are sixty of us and one of her." He gestured at the screen, where the woman still stood in the great room, still watching, still waiting.
"And if the house is rigged?" David Voss asked. "If there are more traps? The gate wasn't an accident. Someone designed it to fall. Someone knew someone would try to run."
The question hung in the air, and Kang felt the attention of the group shifting, searching for a target. He had been careful throughout the evening, speaking rarely, moving little, keeping his face a polite blank. But he knew that carefulness had its own visibility. In a crisis, the person who did not panic was the person who had anticipated the crisis. And the person who had anticipated the crisis was the person who had caused it.
"We haven't considered all the options," Kang said.
His voice was quiet, and it took a moment for the group to register that he had spoken. Heads turned. Eyes narrowed. Kang stepped forward, his hands visible, his posture open and unthreatening.
"The system is asking for a vote," he continued. "It has stated that a unanimous verdict is required for release. Perhaps that is not a threat. Perhaps it is a condition. If we all vote to exile, and the tally reaches sixty for exile and zero for execution, the system may disengage."
"You want us to participate in this farce?" Zinan's voice was incredulous, but beneath the incredulity, Kang detected something else: a flicker of calculation, as if Zinan was running the same probabilities that Kang had already considered and found them equally plausible.
"I want us to survive it," Kang said. "The gates are locked. The police are delayed—the repeater is down, and the nearest cell tower is three miles away. Guan Qi is bleeding out. The woman in the house is waiting for something. Either we wait for her to act, or we act first."
"And if the vote reaches a unanimous exile and nothing happens?" Elena Voss asked.
"Then we have lost nothing except our dignity," Kang replied. "And we have gained a consensus."
He did not say what he was thinking: that the vote was not about exile or execution. The vote was a diagnostic. Every press of a button sent a data packet to the system that controlled the house, and every data packet revealed something about the network's architecture. If Kang could see the votes accumulate, he could trace them back to their sources. He could map the hidden player's infrastructure the way he had mapped the neighborhood's secrets. He could find the woman in the great room and the person who had sent her.
But to do that, he needed the votes to continue.
Leonard Hartwell was shaking his head. "This is madness. We are being asked to condemn someone—or exonerate them—without knowing the charges, without a trial, without any of the protections that—"
"The charges are on your phone," David Voss interrupted. He was scrolling through Courtyard Connect, his face pale. "They've been there all evening. Look. Every post from BanquetWatcher—it's a charge. Against Zinan, against Guan Qi, against half the people here. The system isn't asking us to judge blindly. It's asking us to judge based on what we've been shown."
"And what have we been shown?" Marcus Albright asked. He had finished working on Guan Qi's leg and was now cleaning his hands on a napkin, the carving knife tucked into his belt. "Photographs. Screenshots. A video clip of a woman losing her temper in a coffee shop. If that is sufficient evidence for execution, then every person in this neighborhood is guilty."
"Maybe that's the point," Elena Voss whispered.
The words landed like a stone in still water. The ripple spread outward, and Kang saw the realization dawning on face after face: the system was not designed to identify a single guilty party. It was designed to reveal that everyone was guilty of something. The photographs, the screenshots, the video clips—they were not accusations against individuals. They were a mirror, tilted to show each person their own hidden ugliness. And the vote was not a verdict on Zinan or Guan Qi. The vote was a verdict on the community itself, on the secret judgment that each person passed on their neighbors every day, behind drawn curtains and locked doors and the anonymous glow of screens.
The tally on the screen updated:
EXILE: 4 EXECUTE: 8
"We're running out of time," Kang said, and his voice was still quiet, still calm, the voice of a man who had been waiting for this moment for ninety-seven nights. "The system said ten minutes. We have used six. In four minutes, either we have reached a verdict, or the system decides for us. I suggest we vote."
"And what do you suggest we vote for?" Zinan asked. His eyes were fixed on Kang now, and Kang could feel the weight of that gaze, the pressure of a man who was accustomed to being the smartest person in every room and who was now confronting the possibility that he was not.
Kang met his gaze and held it. "That depends," he said, "on what you believe you deserve."
He pulled out his phone, and he voted.
The screen updated:
EXILE: 5 EXECUTE: 8
Kang had voted for exile. He wanted the game to continue. He wanted to see who would press the red button, and how many times, and with what justifications whispered to themselves in the privacy of their own hearts. He wanted to watch the network do what it had been built to do.
Somewhere in the darkness beyond the gate, the sirens grew louder, and somewhere in the house, the woman in the great room smiled for the first time, a small, private curve of the lips that no one except the camera saw, and that the camera did not transmit to the screen in the tent. She had been watching the tally too. She had been waiting for a particular number.
The number was eight.
And eight, she knew, was exactly halfway to the threshold that would unlock the next phase of the trial.
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