The Circus Tent was larger on the inside than any tent had a right to be. The bleachers rose in concentric rings around a central performance area, the lowest seats close enough to touch the sawdust floor, the highest vanishing into shadow and structural ironwork near the open roof.

  The blood-moon hung directly overhead, its light falling through the open top like a spotlight designed by something that didn’t understand that spotlights were supposed to illuminate rather than contaminate. Everything in the tent was red-shifted—the sawdust, the seats, the faces of the players, all stained the color of a developing wound.

  David and Michael took seats in the Outer Rusted Bleachers: the furthest ring, the cheapest tier, the section where the System had calculated a 5% survival rate and rounded up. The metal seats were corroded and cold, and when David sat down, a fine powder of rust transferred to his coat.

  Viper’s team occupied a cluster of seats two rows ahead, close enough that David could hear them coordinating in aggressive whispers. The silver-haired woman was running some kind of detection talent, her runes pulsing as she scanned the arena for threats. The crossbow-gun wielder had his weapon in his lap, finger near the trigger.

  The other scattered players—those who hadn’t joined Viper’s team—sat alone or in pairs, each maintaining their own version of the mandatory smile. Some were convincing. Most were not. One woman three seats to David’s right was smiling so hard her lower lip was bleeding.

  A spotlight—actual, functional, mounted somewhere in the ironwork above—snapped on, illuminating the center ring.

  A figure stood there. Tall, thin, dressed in a red tailcoat and black top hat. Its face was painted white, with exaggerated features drawn in black and red: arched eyebrows, a pointed nose, lips curled into a permanent, painted-on grin that stretched from ear to ear.

  The Ringmaster.

  Rule 4: Do not make direct eye contact with the Ringmaster.

  David fixed his gaze on the Ringmaster’s chin—close enough to track body language, angled enough to avoid the eyes. In his peripheral vision, the Ringmaster’s eyes were visible as two points of light that seemed to operate independently of the head they were set in, moving with the smooth, predatory tracking of cameras on motorized gimbals.

  "WELCOME!" The Ringmaster’s voice filled the tent without amplification—a sound that seemed to originate from every surface simultaneously, the tent itself functioning as a speaker. "Welcome to the GREATEST SHOW in the Abyss! Tonight, we perform for YOUR delight, YOUR amusement, YOUR survival!"

  The Ringmaster spread its arms. The tailcoat flared.

  "Our first act: THE JUGGLER!"

  From the shadows at the edge of the ring, a figure emerged. It was dressed in motley—the traditional jester’s costume—but the bells on its hat were silent, and the fabric was stained with something that wasn’t dye. It carried six objects that it began to throw and catch in a cascade pattern: three balls, two knives, and a severed human hand.

  The juggling was perfect. Mechanically, rhythmically perfect—each object tracing an identical arc, the timing between catches a precise, metronomic 0.8 seconds. The hand rotated in the air, fingers splayed, dripping intermittently.

  The audience watched. Some in horror. Some in fascination. All smiling, because the alternative to smiling was having their faces removed.

  David watched the juggling pattern and began counting. The cascade was not random—the sequence in which the objects were thrown followed a repeating cycle. Ball, ball, knife, hand, ball, knife. Six objects, six positions, cycling every 4.8 seconds.

  Except—

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  On the seventh cycle, the pattern deviated. The hand was thrown out of sequence, a fraction of a second early, breaking the established rhythm. The juggler didn’t acknowledge the deviation. The audience didn’t notice.

  David noticed.

  The deviation was too precise to be an error. In a system this rigidly designed, an intentional pattern break was a signal—a data packet embedded in the performance, readable only by someone who was tracking the cadence closely enough to detect a 0.2-second timing shift.

  He filed the observation and continued watching.

  The juggling continued for exactly three minutes. Then the juggler caught all six objects simultaneously, bowed deeply, and stepped back into the shadow.

  Silence.

  David started clapping.

  Rule 2: Applaud for exactly 10 seconds after each performance. Not 9. Not 11.

  He had been counting since the moment the juggler stopped moving. His internal clock, calibrated by two years of coding sessions where timing mattered, was accurate to within a quarter-second.

  One-Mississippi. Two-Mississippi. Three—

  Around the tent, other players began clapping. Viper’s team joined in a ragged wave, their timing imprecise, each person starting at a slightly different moment based on their individual reaction time.

  Eight. Nine. Ten.

  David stopped clapping. His hands dropped to his lap with the precision of a metronome marking the downbeat.

  Michael stopped at the same moment—he’d been watching David’s hands and mirroring the cadence. Smart. Not original, but smart.

  Across the tent, the woman who’d been smiling until her lip bled stopped clapping at what she estimated was ten seconds. She was wrong by approximately 1.3 seconds.

  The clown arrived before the echo of her last clap had faded.

  It descended from the ironwork on a wire, moving with the speed of a striking snake. Its painted face was frozen in that flaking smile. Its hands—which were not hands but articulated metal pincers with serrated edges—reached the woman’s face in a single, smooth motion.

  She screamed. The scream lasted less than a second, because the clown’s pincers had already begun their work, and what followed was not a sound the human vocal apparatus could produce once the relevant structures had been separated from the skull.

  The clown retracted into the ceiling, carrying what it had collected. A body slumped in the bleachers. The blood-moon’s light turned the spreading stain on the metal seats a deeper shade of the same red everything else already was.

  Nine players remaining.

  Viper’s team had gone rigid. The crossbow-gun wielder’s weapon was half-raised, his finger trembling on the trigger. The silver-haired woman’s runes flared—a reflexive defensive response that she managed to suppress before it fully deployed.

  "Nobody. Move." Viper’s voice was controlled, but his mechanical eye was cycling rapidly, processing the speed of the clown’s attack and arriving at a number that his combat experience couldn’t reconcile.

  Michael, beside David, was gripping his coin so tightly his knuckles were white. His smile was intact—barely. His eyes were not smiling at all.

  "1.3 seconds off," David said quietly. "The tolerance is zero. Exactly ten or you die."

  "How do you count it so precisely?"

  "Practice. Two years of debugging code that breaks when your timing is off by a single clock cycle." David adjusted his smile—the muscles in his cheeks were beginning to fatigue, and he compensated by shifting the load to his zygomatic major, the muscle responsible for the upper component of a genuine smile. "Stay on my cadence. When I start clapping, you start. When I stop, you stop."

  "Understood." Michael’s voice was tight but steady.

  The Ringmaster stepped back into the spotlight. Its painted grin seemed wider than before, though that might have been the light.

  "MAGNIFICENT! What an opener! And now, for our SECOND act—"

  The blood-moon pulsed. The tent’s shadows deepened.

  "—THE CONTORTIONIST!"

  David kept his eyes on the Ringmaster’s chin and his mind on the pattern deviation he’d detected in the juggling act. The first clue was embedded in the timing break. He was sure of it.

  He just needed to figure out what it meant before the performances ran out and the 5% survival rate caught up with everyone sitting in the rusted bleachers.