[The Story has opened its cover.]

The letters hung in the air over the play mat. Then they thinned out and were gone.

Nobody moved.

Mu-hyeon walked to the door, tried the handle once, and nodded to himself like it had told him something useful. He set the axe down against the shoe cubbies, blade to the wall.

"Locked. So we're here until it's done." He sat down on the mat, cross-legged, huge. "Food first. Fear is worse on an empty stomach. I've watched people prove it."

"You heard the man," Baek-gu said. "Dinner."

That was how eleven strangers ended up eating on the floor of a kindergarten, under warm lamplight, inside a locked game.

* * *

Insik ran the food like a warehouse.

"Crackers, two per person. Fish sausage, one each, we have thirteen so two spares. Water, half a bottle now, half later." He looked up over his glasses. "Objections go through me and are denied."

"I respect this," Chae-a said.

"I fear this," said Dohyeok.

Mrs. Hwang passed things left. Mr. Hwang passed things right. Their free hands stayed together on the mat the whole time, like the hands weren't part of the operation.

Then Insik reached the bottom of the snack box and the room got serious, because there was one banana milk.

One.

"Okay," Haru said, setting down her cracker. "There's a civilized way to settle this."

"I'm bigger," Dohyeok said.

"Rock-paper-scissors."

"I'm faster."

"Rock-paper-scissors."

They squared off in the middle of the mat like it was a title match. Yeonhwa gave the count in her calm midwife voice, which somehow made it worse.

Haru threw paper. Dohyeok threw rock. He stared at his own fist like it had betrayed him.

"Best of three."

"That was best of three," Haru said, already stabbing the straw in. "You lost the first two on the walk over. You just don't remember agreeing to that."

"She cheats," Dohyeok told the ceiling.

"I win," Haru corrected. "It's a resume item. I listed it."

Laughter went around the circle. Real laughter, small and tired, but real.

I sat with my two crackers and my half bottle of water and let it warm me.

The floor was heated. The lamps were honey-colored. A music box somewhere above us played the same slow phrase over and over, and a nineteen-year-old in a yellow windbreaker was drinking a banana milk she had won fair and square.

I knew what this building was. I had read what this game cost, eleven people in, six people out.

I let myself have the warm part anyway. Just for the length of a meal.

"You're smiling weird, receipts guy," Haru said.

"It's my normal smile."

"Then your normal smile is weird."

* * *

The music box stopped in the middle of the phrase.

Not the end of the phrase. The middle. The note just stopped existing.

Every head came up.

At the front of the room, on the ledge of the green chalkboard, a stick of white chalk stood up by itself.

Minseo made a small sound. Nobody else made any.

The chalk pressed to the board and wrote, squeaking, in a round teacher's hand:

[The Story 'Tag' welcomes 12 participants.]

"...Twelve," Insik said.

He counted us. His finger went around the circle, mouth moving.

"Eleven. We're eleven."

He counted again. Eleven again.

Mu-hyeon was already standing. "Then someone is in this building we haven't met. Pairs. Nobody searches alone."

We spread through the kindergarten calling hello into little rooms with little chairs. It was Haru who stopped in the doorway of the nap room and held up a hand.

In the corner, someone had built a fort out of floor cushions. Built it well. Walls, a roof, a gap to see out of.

Inside the gap, low to the ground, two plastic dinosaurs stood guard. And behind the dinosaurs, two eyes.

Haru crouched down slowly, way back, giving the fort its space.

"Hi," she said. "I like your fort. Can I come in, or do I need a ticket?"

Silence. Then a small hand pushed the long-necked dinosaur an inch forward. She seemed to understand this was a ticket, because she crawled the rest of the way and sat by the wall of cushions, and after a minute the wall opened.

A boy. Six, maybe. Dust on his sleeves, a name sticker peeling off his chest.

YOON GUREUM. SUNFLOWER CLASS.

He didn't cry. He didn't talk either. He held one dinosaur in each hand and let Haru walk him out to the light, and the whole circle of adults went quiet in a new way.

Twelve participants.

The game had counted him before we did. He had been here since the first night, alone, in a fort.

Yeonhwa took his wrist gently, two fingers, listening to it. "Eaten?" He shook his head. Insik was already reopening the box. "Reserves exist for this exact reason."

The chalk stood up again.

* * *

It wrote fast this time, filling the board, and the squeak of it was the only sound in the world.

[The Rules of Tag]

[One. The fox seeks when the music rests. Tonight, the music will play three times.]

[Two. Reading corners shelter those within. Each corner shelters once.]

[Three. A participant touched by the fox leaves the Story.]

[Four. Tag ends at dawn, or when the fox's face is found.]

[Five. Those remaining when the cover closes are granted one day. Find the fox's face, and be granted one day more.]

The chalk laid itself back down on the ledge.

"Reading corners," Chae-a said first. She pointed. The alcove by the bookshelf, cushioned, string lights above it. "Like that one. There's another by the window. So the music is the safe time, the rests are the hunts. Three rests."

"And the corners are one-use." Mu-hyeon read the second line again. "Shelters once. It doesn't say once per person. Assume once, total, per corner."

"Touched means leaves the Story," Baek-gu said. "Leaves to where."

Nobody answered him.

Gureum stood in the middle of all of it holding his dinosaurs, and Haru put her hand flat on his head like a hat.

I read rule one over and over.

Three rests. The draft played this game across chapters five through nine, and I could have recited the shape of it in my sleep. First rest, panic, everyone learns. Second rest.

The second rest was the one I needed.

The girl in the yellow jacket did not make it past the second round.

Not this time. All I had to do was say one sentence.

* * *

I got Haru by the coat cubbies while the others argued corners.

"Hey. Listen. In the second round, the fox goes for the..."

The word stopped.

Not in my head. In my throat. Something cold and thick came up from under my sternum and filled it, the way water fills a boot, and the rest of the sentence drowned.

I doubled over and coughed into my hand.

Black.

Fine black droplets on my palm, like sprayed ink. Even as I stared, they faded into my skin and were gone.

"Whoa, whoa." Haru had my shoulder. "Okay, don't die during dinner, that's rude."

"I'm fine." My voice came out scraped. "I need to tell you. Tomorrow, no, tonight, in the second..."

Cold. Rising. My tongue went heavy and wrong, and the taste of it hit the back of my nose. Ink. Fresh ink, the smell off that blank page in my pocket.

I couldn't say it.

I could not physically say it.

...What is this.

I tried a different door. Numbers. "Rounds. Count the rounds. On the second one, you should," and the flood came up so fast my eyes watered, and I turned the last word into a cough.

Haru's face had stopped being amused.

"Paper," I croaked. "Getting paper."

There were crayons and drawing paper in a tub by the cubbies. I knelt, grabbed a red crayon, and wrote HARU. Fine. STAY. Fine. My hand moved to the next word, the word about the second rest, and the red line came out black, bled wide like the paper was soaked, and drowned. A wet black bar where a warning should be. Then even that faded, and the paper was clean.

I knelt there with a crayon in my fist and couldn't breathe right.

I know how this game goes. I know exactly where the fox goes in round two. It's in my head in complete sentences and I cannot get one of them out of my mouth or out of my hand.

Something is holding my tongue.

Something has been allowed to hold my tongue.

"Receipts." Haru crouched next to me, quiet, no jokes. "What was that? The black stuff."

"I don't know." True. Sayable. "Haru. Stay near me tonight. Whatever happens, stay where I can reach you."

That came out clean. Vague, useless, and clean.

"That's either sweet or ominous," she said. "I'll allow both."

* * *

If I couldn't say what I'd read, fine.

The board wasn't mine. The board was everyone's.

I walked back into the circle and pointed at rule two. "Each corner shelters once. That's the rule that kills people. There are two corners and twelve of us and three rests. If we burn corners early and lose track, someone dies at the end doing the math wrong."

Clean. Every word of it, clean. It was written on the wall in front of all of us. I could talk about the wall all night.

Insik was already tearing a page from his pocket notebook. "A ledger, then. Corner one, corner two. Who used what, and when. Every entry goes through me." He clicked his pen like a weapon. "This I can do."

"Then we have a system," Mu-hyeon said. "Corners are for the boy, the Hwangs, and whoever the fox actually chases. Everyone else moves and stays quiet. I'll draw it away if it comes to that."

"You'll what," said Minseo. First thing she'd said in an hour.

"I'm the biggest. Things chase the biggest." He said it like a weather report.

Somewhere above us, the music box started again from the top of its phrase. Slow, sweet, patient.

Playing. Which meant safe. Which meant it was going to rest.

We turned off every light we could reach and sat together in the lamplit dark, twelve of us, a corner ledger, and one plastic dinosaur standing watch on the mat, facing the door.

The music played the phrase eight more times.

Then it began to wind down. The notes stretched. Sagged. The last one hung in the air the way the chalk letters had.

And stopped.

From the stairwell came the knock of wooden sandals on the steps. Clack. Clack. Unhurried. Each one closer.

A voice came through the door. Many voices. Children's voices, dozens of them, pressed together into one shape, speaking as one.

"Are. You. Ready."