“Assassin?” The hoarse man – Four – from the lava cages choked out the word. “There’s an assassin here with us?”

Several people seemed to be trying not to look towards number Eleven.

“Proves we aren’t here at random,” Seven spoke up for the first time. Compared to the others in the room, she looked worn out and tired. “It’s just an excuse.”

“Why, are you the assassin?” Ten asked sarcastically. She tapped her chest between the long sandy locks falling to either side. “I’m the programmer. I worked on this Initiative. You think I’d be in here if it wasn’t fair?”

All eyes in the room shifted as Eight rose to her feet. “This was you? You’d better hope you’re eliminated in this round, or I’ll kill you myself.”

“What if she’s actually the assassin?” Three piped up. He was a narrow man with multi-lensed glasses in different translucent shades. “Hasn’t she effectively killed us all?”

Eleven threw back her head and laughed.

“I’d be a stupid assassin,” Ten threw back. “There were thousands of us who worked on the system. And not all of us in here will die, unless you manage to screw up so badly you deserve to anyway.”

“You’re not including yourself in that statement? So then you recognise you’re guilty,” Three said.

“They’re two different people, numbskull. And the same logic could be applied to the politician in the room,” Ten snapped back. “I was doing my job. They proposed the decisions. The challenge knows. It reads our histories and classifies us according to a range of predetermined factors.”

“It could be a trick,” said Three. “A mind game.”

“It’s not. And it doesn’t matter who the assassin is. If we vote for them, they’re dying.”

Number One cleared his throat from across the room. He had a clean-shaven face with subtly-applied makeup and elaborately shaved hair. “Maybe we should think this through more before making a decision.”

“You’d risk putting yourself on the line?” Six asked Ten. “What if the system really thinks the assassin is you?”

Ten sighed, rolling her eyes. “Anyone else here a programmer?”

On reflex I glanced towards Two, still sullenly glaring at his hands. Pre-death Reins generally gravitated to fields adjacent to games or programming, if the occupation existed on their worlds. If it didn’t, they tended to lean towards office work or strategy. It was one of their uncanny commonalities.

As if aware I was watching, he glanced up and met my eyes, then slowly raised a hand.

Three snapped his fingers. “I knew it,” he said. “Mind games.”

“For the love of –” Ten said, visibly struggling to control her temper. “He’s probably the engineer. There’s overlap. I can answer technical questions if you want, but there are better ways to spend our limited time.”

“He could be the assassin trying to lie,” Nine spoke for the first time. She wore heavy makeup, now running around the eyes, with bright red tips in her dark hair. “I would.”

Ten put her head in her hands. “For Sektyn’s sake.”

Four shot her a sympathetic glance. “It’s obvious. We all vote for the assassin.” He raised a hand and selected one of the green buttons in front of him. It turned an ominous red.

On my own screen, a small numeral ‘1’ appeared next to the Assassin.

A few nods finally appeared from around the room, Ten among them, and the number rapidly rose to 7.

What do you have in mind? I thought at Near Miss. It didn’t do much to stop the sinking feelings collapsing together in a tide. I saw no easy way out of this, unless the system did have different ideas of my occupation than I did. No one had accused me of being the assassin, but Ten was right: it didn’t matter.

“So when she gets recycled,” One said, fiddling with the hem of his sleeve, “we receive her skills. That’s how it works, right?”

Eleven snorted and folded her arms.

“Essentially,” Ten responded, lowering the hand from her forehead. “But only one, and it’s determined by the algorithm. It may not be what you expect. It’s just as likely to turn us into sociopaths as it is to teach us firearms. We tried for more originally, but it created a number of issues. Copy too much, it starts taking over your personality. And that’s just one.”

Intrigued, I leant forward. ‘Recycling’ hadn’t just been a euphemism, then. I’d landed on another System world, which made sense with a post-death Rein, or at least some early prototype variant thereof. Was this how these programs began?

“An assassin’s skills would be useful,” Seven contributed slowly. “If we’re to survive.” She pressed her button, and the number rose to 8.

“We’ll all receive it, bear in mind,” Ten said. “It keeps the playing field level.”

A number ‘1’ appeared next to ‘Politician’ on my screen, and I looked over to see Eight taking her finger off a button.

“Fuck them,” she said simply in return to the stares. “I don’t care about skills. If I can’t survive, I want to live long enough to see one of those government bastards die.”

Sounds of agreement followed her around the room, and the balance of votes shifted 6 to 3, still in favour of the assassin.

“Do we have to vote?” I asked Ten.

“No. But it improves your chances.”

I nodded and held off. At this point, who I chose didn’t matter.

The only other participants who hadn’t made a selection were Six and Eleven. The former sat with his hands by his sides, eyes downcast and not even watching the list. Tears streamed down his face. The latter was eying me, which admittedly I found unnerving. Her sly smile only made it worse.

Attention in the room shifted as a commanding voice broke the tension. “There’s an alternative,” Two said. He stood up. “We could vote off one of us now, leaving the rest to die in future rounds. But there are twelve of us and a provision for a tie. By splitting our votes evenly, we could increase that number up to half. The six participants remaining will receive six skills each, earlier than the program would have anticipated. It would have accounted for an average death rate in the first round. Assuming that average is higher than one, voting only one contestant off now puts us on the back foot. Isn’t that right, Ten?”

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The programmer looked taken aback. “Yes, technically. But –”

“Then voting more people off provides multiple benefits. First, all survivors will head into the next round at a statistical advantage, increasing the likelihood of gaining skills with which to beat the Initiative at its own game. Secondly, it will cut short the number of rounds in the game, allowing survivors to conserve energy.”

“That would be asking us to murder six of our own,” Four wheezed, eyes widening. “Only a monster would do that.”

“All but one of us will die anyway,” Two replied coolly. “At least in this round, we know it will be relatively humane. What’s worse: dragging it out and making us watch each other die? Or sparing fifty percent of us that fate? The only real hope we have of changing that is to break the challenge, and we have a better chance of doing that with more skills.”

“We have those skills already,” Eight growled at him. “In people who are alive.”

I pursed my lips and kept quiet. First-tiers were forbidden from interacting with post-death Reins, even during introductions, but it didn’t stop gossip from flowing down the grapevine. Accounts varied, but almost universally agreed on one thing:

Reins weren’t nice.

They didn’t even value nice. They valued strength, intellect and reason, regardless of how warped it might be. Above all, they valued winning.

Arguably it was these traits – even more than their growth ability – that allowed them to save universes. Acquiring power by building a stair out of people to step on and subsequently leave behind wasn't nice, but it was effective. With Fate supporting their every move, they rarely questioned their decisions and assumptions that just happened to turn out to be right. Supreme confidence built through lack of failure and belief in their own infallibility snowballed into an ability to make reinforcing, ever-bolder decisions until the world itself became an oyster in their palm.

Vaguely obnoxious though he’d been, Jarome had occasionally managed a certain degree of charm, especially after the indignity of finding himself trapped in his suit.

So far, I didn’t like Two at all.

“He’s not wrong,” Eleven said, somewhat predictably. She smiled. “And it reduces the competition. The only question is who we vote off.”

“It could have legs,” Three mumbled slowly. “We could eliminate everyone responsible for putting us in this situation.” He drew a finger slowly down his list. “Politician, Assassin, Fighter, Engineer, Programmer. And one more. Theocrat, maybe. I doubt the gods care enough to save us.”

One point moved from Assassin into Programmer. 5-3-1.

Ten stared at him incredulously. “You can’t eliminate me,” she said. “I’m the only one here who knows anything about what we could be facing.”

“It’s your fault we’re here at all!” Three countered. “You deserve worse.”

“You won’t be completely gone,” Seven added. “Right? We’ll get your skills after you die.” A second point joined Programmer. 4-3-2. If I added my vote to Politician now, there was a chance they would overtake me. Seeing the draw might be the tipping point the group needed to see.

“You don’t even know if it will be useful,” Ten snapped. “I am far more helpful alive, as anyone with a brain should be able to see.”

Eleven laughed, a ringing peal reverberating off the hard walls of the chamber. “Finally someone said it,” she announced, pacing around the outside of the circle of participants. “'Useful'. This isn’t a mind game. It’s a regular game in which you’ve all misinterpreted the rules. They said it right in the introduction: the objective of the game is cull us down to someone who fits into their stupid social ideals.” She wagged a finger. “They want us to cull the undesirables and take their skills, but it’s the skills themselves we should be thinking about. Pitting us against each other for our battle prowess would make sense if they were creating super soldiers, but why would they want that? Why would they make a group of people who hate them and give them a nice little power bump?”

“Because they don’t,” answered Two in the tone of someone achieving enlightenment. “They want to weed them out in favour of the most productive and compliant. Fattening the scared little sheep who’ll carry on the cause.” He looked at Seven, who quailed. “We can safely assume later rounds will be geared towards that. This isn’t a fight or a battle of wits. It’s a social cull.”

“Exactly,” said Eleven. “The skills of a fighter or assassin sound useful, but in reality they’re the opposite of what we’ll need. The skills we should be selecting for in this challenge are the ability to work like a dumb slave and pretend we enjoy it.” She stabbed a finger at her list. “Theocrat. Farmer. Artist. Engineer. Nurse. Politician. Those are the smart picks. If you want to survive. Ms Programmer can stay because she’s right. I think I’m going to choose… Nurse.”

A ’1’ appeared next to the occupation in question. 4-3-2-1, with myself still in the lead.

Six seemed to wake from his stupor. “Never in my life have I heard anything so vile,” he managed to get out. “I don’t know what to say. If this kind of world is what I have to go back to, then maybe it’s best that I do die here.”

“Good,” said Eleven. “That makes it easy. Which one are you? Farmer, I bet. You don’t look pasty enough to be a bed-watcher. Go on. Two of you voting Assassin need to put your votes into Farmer. At this point, it’s a mercy.”

“You’re sick in the head,” Eight snarled at her. “Hurting you might be forbidden during this round, but they said nothing about after. This is a transparent grab to save yourself because you know it’s your only chance.”

“Hah,” said Eleven. “You keep thinking that.”

A movement in the numbers captured everyone’s attention as the Assassin ticked down from 4 to 3, increasing the Nurse’s count to 2. I hadn’t seen who it was.

3-3-2-2.

“What?” stammered Four, life draining from his face. “Why?”

“Look at that. We found the Nurse,” said Eleven. “Now unfortunately it seems we have two abstainers, so the best we can hope for is a tie of five.” She looked at me. “Unless you want to take someone down with you, Fix.”

I blinked back in shock, wondering how she’d realised, until it occurred to me she might think I was the politician. ‘Fancy dyes and fancy voice.’ Or maybe my new body really did just come across as a killer.

“I don’t,” I replied. “I’m not a plant.”

“You don’t look as worried as you should be,” Two commented. “Which means you either know something we don’t, or you’re not on the shortlist.”

Quite a lot, actually. But it did help having a handful of augments up my sleeve. “Well, I am,” I returned.

Another number ticked over on everyone’s screens, interrupting the conversation. It wasn’t hard to figure out who did it. One’s finger still hovered over the button, mucus and tears making a mess of his face.

He’d taken his vote off the Assassin and onto the Engineer. “I’ll take you with me,” he said. “Someone willing to murder half an allotment to save themselves deserves to die no matter what rationale. It only needs one person to take their vote off me, and we’ll take two monsters out of the planetary gene pool, not just one.”

“And there’s the Politician,” grinned Eleven. “I’ll be honest, I didn’t pick it. Shame.”

2-3-2-2-1, in favour of the Politician. For an unconventional definition of ‘favour’. I breathed a silent, shaky breath. Near Miss coming through against all rational explanation - for me, at least - though there was still time for that to change.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Eight. “This is the ideal outcome. Nobody change anything, and poetic justice will be achieved.”

The votes changed again, as Twelve – quiet and unassuming, who hadn’t uttered a word – pressed the button condemning four people to death.

2-2-2-2-2.

Five people, one of whom was me. That everyone thought the Assassin was Eleven didn’t make it much better. And one of whom was the Rein the universe was depending on.

This world definitely needed saving.

Thirty seconds remaining, the collars announced.

If I believed Chapel hearsay, the other annoying thing about Reins was that they tended to be right despite all odds and a tendency to make wild jumps to conclusions. No doubt due to the influence of Fate. It was almost like having a dedicated augment, really. Which meant that if we wanted to get out of this, we had to break the rules against the spirit of the game.

There was a way to do that without sentencing five people to die. Hating myself for it, I closed my eyes and took a breath. I had a chance of getting out of this, at least.

I had no idea who Eleven really was. I could have picked the Politician.

Instead, I chose the Assassin.