The Pantheon appeared around him the same way it had the first time, light rising from nowhere, platforms materializing, the room made with the corporate precision of a space that had never been improvised.

Proxy recognized it immediately.

Same floating platforms, same ambient light from below, same service bot logic drifting between tables with champagne glasses he had not asked for. He had been here before, which meant he knew what was going to descend from the center of the space in approximately one minute.

He checked his surroundings. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝓮𝒘𝙚𝙗𝒏𝙤𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝒐𝙢

Nyx was beside him, as expected. She was already awake and already looking at him, the satisfied smile from the maintenance floor still present.

The wish existed between them in exactly the form it had before everything went black, and he did not mention it directly.

He looked at the lobby instead.

"Why she’s with us?" Nyx said in annoyance.

Jinx was, in fact, on their platform. She sat at the far end of the table in one of the chairs, awake and already in the process of identifying what kind of situation she had woken up inside.

The expression on her face was doing rapid environmental analysis with specific anxiety.

She looked at the two of them.

She looked at Nyx specifically, at the glow Nyx was wearing, the warm and satisfied expression of it, the particular way it sat on her.

Then she looked at Proxy.

She opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. "Okay."

She stopped and looked at Nyx with all the specificity that made very much obvious she thought they had a particular steamy and intimate moment before the upload.

Proxy ignored her and looked across the room at the contestant layout.

"There are fifteen other platforms," he said. "Not counting ours."

Jinx’s bewildered expression dropped slowly.

Nyx watched Jinx with the patience she had when she was considering to throw someone of a platform, or not.

Jinx looked between them once more.

Then she made a decision about whether she was going to pursue the subject, and the decision landed clearly on the side of no.

"Cool," she said. "Great."

Meanwhile, Proxy confirmed the count.

Eighteen contestants total, including themselves.

The platforms were distributed across the space in the corporation’s loose ring, some solo, some paired, some carrying three, the groupings reflecting whatever the surveillance had read as meaningful proximity over the past several days.

He found Vex on a northwest platform. The woman that had put a gun at the back of his neck days before.

The corporation still read her as unallied, which meant she had not committed to anyone visibly enough to trigger the grouping logic.

He found Watcher two platforms over from Vex.

He had not had a name for them until the race results, when Athena had announced them after they crossed the finish line.

The rest of the field was presences and postures across the room.

Eighteen survivors of the same killing game, familiar in the way that much shared proximity to death tends to make people familiar, even without names.

Athena descended.

She arrived from above, in the unnecessary way, carmine dress catching the ambient light, the blue pulse at her collarbone ticking with precision.

The smile was composed, warm, and completely manufactured.

She occupied the stage at the center of the room with ease looked up at the platforms with the kind of pleasure that was not for the contestants.

"Welcome back."

Athena said. "We have been told that this encounter feels like a milestone, and we agree that it does, in the sense that what follows is going to be rather more interesting than what came before."

"She is such a bitch," Nyx said, low and with a snicker.

"Mm," Proxy said.

Athena clasped her hands and continued. "Your next game takes place in a prison. A specific kind, an island facility surrounded by cold water with currents that have not learned to be polite about it. The facility has been built for absolute imprisonment, and it remains very good at its purpose."

"What’s the objective?" Proxy said, loud enough to carry.

Athena looked at his platform with the smile of who had wished for the question and was satisfied it had arrived when it did. "Escape."

She continued pleasantly. "You will be processed as incoming inmates with assigned cells, numbers, a daily routine, work details, meals, yard time. The guards maintain that routine. Any violations trigger response, and response escalates with severity. We recommend treating them seriously."

She let the implication sit for a moment. "Those who escape outside the prison walls and cross to the designated point in the water outside are safe. Those who are caught attempting escape are eliminated. Those who have not escaped when one week expires are eliminated when the timer does."

"How long is one week from out here?" Another contestant asked.

"One night," Athena said. "You will wake up in the morning."

Proxy thought how convenient that was.

Athena moved to the piece she had been saving. "Two things worth noting before you begin. The first, inside the prison grounds, no cyberware works. No weapons are permitted in the intake process. Every contestant enters as a baseline human, with the knowledge and training you arrived with, and nothing else."

A beat of silence spread through the room.

Proxy considered what that meant.

No cyberdeck. No network reads, no feed loops, no access, no manipulation.

He was going to spend one week of in-game time as an intelligent person with limited direct combat ability and no tools except himself, which was the most uncomfortable the island had managed to make him feel since the courtyard on day one.

"I’m very capable without my implants."

Nyx said, with the warm certainty of someone making a simple observation.

Proxy glanced at her. He remembered everything she had show since the first day.

"I believe you," he said.

"I’m not! Please help!" Jinx said.

She immediately looked like she wished she hadn’t said that out loud.

Proxy glanced at her again.

She pressed her lips together and looked at the table.

"The second thing."

Athena continued, with the warmth she saved for the details she found most entertaining. "The prison is aware you are attempting to escape. The guards operate on standard behavioral logic. The warden, however, has been briefed."

She paused, because the pause was doing work. "On all of you specifically. We have provided the necessary information for the warden to perform effectively."

Jinx looked at the stage for a moment, then at Proxy.

"So the guards are NPCs," she said, "and the warden is the actual problem."

"Looks like it. He’s either a corpo rat or some crazy maniac they found," he said.

Nyx was not looking at either of them.

She was looking at the middle distance beyond Athena’s stage with the calm focus she adopted when she was already working something out in her head.

Athena raised her chin toward the room with the wide expression she had worn for every terrible announcement she had made since the beginning.

"We wish you the best of luck escaping."

She said. "The word escaping is doing a great deal of work in that sentence, and we are aware of it, and we mean it anyway. Enjoy your week. The audience is very much looking forward to watching."

The light changed.

Jinx looked across the table at the two of them. She looked at the space around them, at the prison game that was now a fact waiting to happen.

Then she said, with the resigned pragmatism of someone who had run out of room to be surprised by anything,

"I escaped from school detention once. Does that count?"

"Sure. Try writing your name on the wall a hundred times." Proxy said.

"Meanie," Jinx said.

Nyx was already looking at the prison cell that didn’t exist yet, with the expression of someone who had already found her way through it.

Yet again, everything went black.