“The door is open.”
Then he calmly set the gun directly beneath his chin, drew back the hammer with an audible click, and pulled the trigger.
Blood exploded in a dark red wave from behind his head, splashing everything nearby. Then the video cut to black and the tiny cassette player’s speaker went quiet.
“Jesus,” Chloe said.
I tried to respond, but I couldn’t speak. My mouth was dry, my field of vision suddenly tunneled and blurred. The sound of static roared into my head, and I felt the familiar humming and tingling filling me up, like blood rushing to a limb that had fallen asleep.
The gray feeling was back.
Chloe pulled out her phone and did a quick online search for Minister Jesselman. Dozens of articles sprang up immediately. This video wasn’t some relic of the past, stored in the magnetic tape of an ancient computer system. This was all over the news.
This had just happened. The video we’d been watching was live.
Then, suddenly the monitor flickered on again.
Instead of that press conference footage, there was something new on the monitor. It was a list of Roman numerals followed by a series of names.
It was The Circle.
But this version of The Circle was different. Instead of ending with the Roman numeral for ten, like the most recent versions, here XI flashed at the bottom of the screen.
I looked over at Chloe and then pulled out my phone and texted Baron. I sent him two words and an image. The image was a towel hanging on a rack. The words were: Call. Now.
It looked like the eleventh iteration of the game had officially begun.
NOTES ON THE GAME:
MISSIVE BY HAZEL
（AUTHENTICATED BY BLOCKCHAIN）
How do you play the game? Find the discrepancies, follow the clues; follow the clues and find the discrepancies. Playing is the easy part; what’s harder is knowing if you’re playing or not. There’s no entry fee, application form, or guidebook, and whoever’s in charge isn’t talking. So how do you know if you’re playing the game?
The good news is that if you’re playing Rabbits—actually playing the game, for better or worse—you’ll eventually know it. Something will be off. Something will be different. Something will be wrong.
And everything will be dangerous.
—HAZEL 8
15
WE HAVE A LITTLE FUCKED-UP SOMETHING TO DEAL WITH HERE
“I’m worried about Baron,” I said.
It was ten thirty p.m. and Chloe was locking up the arcade. It had been over twenty-four hours, and Baron still hadn’t responded to our emergency towel text.
“Yeah,” Chloe said as she grabbed her backpack and flipped it over her shoulder. “He’s gonna lose his shit when we tell him about Golden Seal Carpet Cleaning. Maybe he can help us figure out how the hell that ancient computer tape was playing a live video, and then how it managed to wipe itself clean.”
“I think we should head over there,” I said.
“Good call.”
* * *
—
It took us fifteen minutes to get to Baron’s building.
We stepped out of Chloe’s car, and I shivered a little. I’m not sure if it was due to the fact that it was cold outside, or because two of the streetlights in front of Baron’s place had burned out, giving the building a serious retro-horror-movie vibe. It didn’t help that the place used to be a nunnery in the fifties, and as a result, there were some Gothic-style flourishes in the masonry that seriously amplified the Rosemary’s Baby of it all.
We ran across the street and I buzzed his unit.
“No answer,” I said.
“He’s still not answering his phone, either.” Chloe had been calling him repeatedly while I buzzed.
Baron’s apartment was on the ground floor. We tried knocking on his window, calling, and buzzing a few more times, but there was still no answer.
Chloe and I looked toward the side of the building at exactly the same time.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Chloe smiled.
* * *
—
We made our way around the side of the building and stepped through a small wooden gate into the narrow lane that ran along the side of Baron’s place. The lane was maybe four feet wide and overgrown with weeds and wildflowers.
We walked between the buildings past a rusted tricycle, a few old plastic toys, and a patio chair that must have been white at some point but was now covered in an uneven layer of filth.
The weeds eventually gave way to mud and brown grass. Our shoes made almost no sound as we walked, as if the canopy of dark starlit sky above was somehow absorbing all of the sound from the world.