Chapter 30: Choice Wrapped in a Game
(16 DAYS UNTIL RAGNAK'S DECISION)
The wind through the Convento do Carmo’s skeletal arches had grown teeth. It was a dry, scouring wind, carrying the scent of distant pine and the mineral chill of the Tagus. It found the six of them seated in a rough circle on the cold, uneven flagstones of what was once the transept, their backs to the remnants of pillars. Above, the sky was a hard, porcelain blue, offering no solace.
For two weeks, they had lived in a state of suspended animation within a meticulously restored wing of the convent. They trained—grueling, nonsensical drills that blended parkour with logic puzzles, strength tests with ethical quandaries. They ate together in a refectory where the silence was thicker than the soup. They observed each other with the acute, paranoid attention of birds on a wire. The knowledge of the impending cut—two chosen, four erased—hung in every room, a scentless gas.
Now, Ragnak had brought them back to the ruins. He sat slightly apart, a monochrome figure against the ochre stone, a sheaf of plain white paper on his lap. He did not speak for a long minute, letting the discomfort settle, letting them feel the absurdity of their situation: adults, professionals, reduced to waiting for instructions in a roofless church.
“Social cohesion is a measurable metric,” he stated, his voice cutting the wind. “It relies on predictable bonds, hierarchies, and unspoken agreements. Today, you will make the unspoken, spoken.”
He rose and walked the circle, placing a single sheet of paper and a black pen before each of them. The paper fluttered, needing to be anchored by a hand or a stone.
“You know the parameters of the selection. Two will proceed. The rest will return to their previous lives, absent this interval.” He returned to his seat, his gaze moving over them with detached interest. “A common parlour game. You will choose three others from this group. You will assign to them: kiss. Marry. Kill.”
Ruben let out a sharp, barking laugh. “Are you serious? We’re not teenagers at a sleepover.”
“The terminology is reductive,” Ragnak acknowledged, unblinking. “The function is diagnostic. ‘Kiss’ indicates tolerable alliance, temporary utility, or superficial attraction. ‘Marry’ signifies a perceived stable, long-term operational partnership. ‘Kill’ denotes the individual you assess as the greatest threat to your own progression, or the weakest component in a hypothetical unit. You have five minutes. Use only the first names you know. There are no right answers. Only true ones.”
The wind seemed to quiet, absorbing the cruelty of the exercise. It was a trap disguised as a game, forcing them to weaponize intimacy and confess their private calculations.
Bruno stared at his paper as if it were a subpoena. His jaw was tight. “This is repulsive.”
“It is data,” Ragnak replied.
João had already picked up his pen, his face a mask of analytical focus. He tapped the pen against his lip, his eyes already scanning the circle, assigning variables.
Beatriz picked up her paper, smoothed it against her thigh. Her expression was the one she used when reviewing a complex patient triage list—calm, impersonal, ready to make impossible decisions. Camila held hers lightly, her fingers trembling just perceptibly. She looked at the others, not as variables, but as people—Ruben’s defiant posture, Julieta’s withdrawn stillness, Bruno’s simmering anger. Her heart ached for them all.
Julieta simply looked at the blank whiteness, her mind translating the instruction into its raw subtext. Who do you use? Who do you trust? Who do you eliminate? The exile understood choices like these. They were never really choices.
“Time begins now,” Ragnak said.
The scratching of pens began, a small, frantic sound against the vast silence of the ruins.
João wrote quickly, decisively. His choices were tactical, clean. He did not hesitate.
Beatriz wrote with a slow, deliberate cursive, pausing only once to glance up at Camila, her gaze softening for a fraction of a second before returning to the page, her lips thinning as she completed her third assignment.
Ruben scoffed, scribbled with aggressive strokes, then crumpled the paper. He glanced at Ragnak, saw no mercy, smoothed it out and wrote again, his levity gone, replaced by a grim concentration.
Bruno sat motionless for three full minutes, the pen motionless in his grip. His principles revolted. To reduce these people—a woman who healed, a man who planned, another who grieved a home—to such crude categories felt like a violation of his own code. But the silent clock ticked. Finally, with a grimace of self-loathing, he bent and wrote, his script angry and swift.
Camila closed her eyes. She took a deep breath, trying to listen to something beyond the cold logic of the game. She thought of hands building a shelter, of a voice calming a panic, of steady logic in a crisis. Her pen moved, slowly, each word a small weight.
Julieta wrote last. She held the pen loosely, watching the others as she did so. Her choices weren’t about threat or utility, not entirely. They were about resonance, about which silences she could bear, and which would slowly poison a shared space. She wrote three names, her expression unreadable.
“Time.”
All movement ceased. Six sheets of paper, six condensed psychological portraits, lay in six laps.
Ragnak stood and walked the circle again, his hand extended. One by one, they surrendered their truths.
Bruno handed his over with a look of utter contempt, not for Ragnak, but for himself. Ruben tossed his with a forced smirk. “Hope you enjoy the read, boss.” Beatriz offered hers with a neutral, professional passivity. Camila gave hers up like a secret she wished she hadn’t told. João presented his with the confidence of a student turning in a flawless exam. Julieta let the paper go without a word, her fingers lingering for a moment as if to reclaim the echo of the words.
Ragnak gathered the sheets into a neat stack, aligning the edges with a tap against his palm. He did not look at them. The data was captured.
The group sat in a new kind of silence. The game was over, but its architecture now surrounded them. They could not look at each other directly. Every glance was a question: Did you choose me to kiss? To marry? To kill? The easy camaraderie of shared victimhood was gone, replaced by a lattice of secret judgments and betrayals.
Ruben cracked the silence. “So, who’s taking who out for dinner and a movie, then?”
No one laughed.
Beatriz stood, brushing grit from her trousers. “I believe our training schedule resumes in twenty minutes in the courtyard.” Her voice was steady, but it was a command, a lifeline back to structure.
They dispersed without another word, rising from the stones and walking alone toward the intact part of the convent, paths diverging. The circle was broken.
Ragnak remained. He looked down at the stack of papers in his hand, then up at the open sky where a single kite circled on a thermal.
A simple game on the surface.
But in Lisbon, in the shadow of a ruin that had already witnessed the end of faith, it had become psychological truth. The bonds were measured. The fractures, mapped. The choices, now inscribed, pulsed in the air between them, invisible and binding as vows.
=====
The Altis Avenida Hotel room smelled of old wood polish and the metallic tang of Lisbon’s underground river, the faint dampness that crept into every grand building near the Praça dos Restauradores. Ragnak stood by the window, the city’s amber glow painting his grey tunic in temporary warmth. The six sheets of paper lay spread across the desk like autopsy reports, their edges fluttering slightly from the draft beneath the door.
Bruno’s page was the first he lifted. The journalist’s handwriting was cramped and angular, as if each letter had been carved under duress. *Kiss: Ruben. Marry: Beatriz. Kill: João.* Ethical restraint, yes—but threaded through with the pragmatism of a man who’d spent years burying truths to protect lives. He’d chosen the administrator for stability, the daredevil for temporary alliance, and the strategist as a threat. Logical. Predictable.
Ruben’s page was a mess of ink and abrasion, words slashed onto the paper like graffiti. *Kiss: Camila. Marry: Julieta. Kill: Bruno.* Fearless honesty—or maybe just defiance. He’d marked the journalist for elimination without hesitation, not out of calculation, but something closer to disgust. The translator for marriage, though. A surprise. Ragnak turned the page slightly, as if expecting hidden context.
João’s answers were printed in neat, emotionless blocks. *Kiss: Beatriz. Marry: Julieta. Kill: Ruben.* Calculated logic, down to the millimeter. He’d paired stability with utility, identified the loose element, excised it. Textbook. But there was a single faint line where the pen had paused too long on *marry*—just a hair’s breadth of hesitation before committing to Julieta’s name.
Beatriz’s cursive was precise, unhurried. *Kiss: João. Marry: Bruno. Kill: Ruben.* Compassionate authority—but edged with the same decisiveness she used to clear ICU beds during a crisis. She’d spared the journalist, the one who carried silence like a wound. The planner for temporary alliance, the stuntman as the necessary sacrifice. Interesting.
Camila’s paper had smudges near the edges, fingerprints pressed too hard into the paper. *Kiss: Bruno. Marry: Beatriz. Kill: João.* Gentle and conflicted—the therapist’s instinct to preserve the wounded, to bind herself to the steady hand. But she’d marked the planner for elimination. Not out of malice. Because she’d recognized the cold architecture of his mind before the others had.
Julieta’s page was the last. Her script was fluid, almost musical, letters slightly uneven as if written while listening to something else entirely. *Kiss: Ruben. Marry: Camila. Kill: João.* The nostalgia in it was palpable—not for a place, but for the idea of belonging. She’d paired the healer with permanence, the reckless one with fleeting alliance. And the planner—again—marked for removal.
Ragnak set the pages down. The patterns were clear. João had been *killed* three times. Ruben, twice. Bruno, once. Beatriz and Julieta—never.
Outside, a tram rattled past, its bell ringing through the square. He turned the desk lamp off, leaving the room in the glow of the city’s sleepless lights.
They didn’t know it yet.
But Lisbon had already chosen.
=====
Chapter 30 (Continued)
The Altis Avenida’s elevator doors slid open with a hushed sigh, releasing Ragnak into the dimly lit hallway. His phone buzzed—not a call, not a message, but a pulse from the observation system. Six simultaneous replies, each a single word, each a scalpel peeling back another layer of their constructed selves.
Bruno: *Principled.*
Ruben: *Fearless.*
João: *Strategic.*
Beatriz: *Composed.*
Camila: *Empathetic.*
Julieta: *Resilient.*
Six words. Six self-diagnoses. Six attempts to distill lifetimes into digestible data points.
Ragnak’s thumb hovered over the screen. He had expected deflection, irony, obfuscation—anything but this quiet, brutal honesty. They weren’t performing for him anymore. They were carving their own epitaphs.