The Guillotine Game Over

Barry shut down the shake-out belt on Separation 3 at 11:30 in the morning. The motor wound down. The belt stopped shivering. Quiet, finally.

Then the drawer jammed.

Of course it did. Prepupae packed into the drawer like sardines. Wet ones, fat ones, ones that had crawled halfway up the drawer wall and died there in protest. Barry stood there with his gloves on and stared at the clog.

"Mikayla," he called. "Drawer's jammed again."

Mikayla's voice came from the office behind the window. She was twenty-nine and she sounded sixty.

"If you say the word guillotine, I swear..."

Barry had a miniature wooden guillotine that he kept at Jasper's platform. He'd built it himself. It was for the card game. Nobody at the facility appreciated it.

"I wasn't going to say it," he said. He said it.

The groan came through the glass. Actual groan, hands over face, the whole show.

"It's a game prop, Mikayla. It's dark humor. The game is called Guillotine. The prop is thematic."

"Barry. It's eleven forty. You've been talking about that thing for six weeks."

He looked at the drawer. The drawer looked back, full of dead fly pupae. His hands smelled like the facility and his shoulders hurt and it was Friday. Thirty-five years old, and his job was separating black soldier fly prepupae from their own substrate. There were worse jobs. He'd made a list once. It was a short list.

"I'm going to Dorado," he announced. "For a refill."

"For a what?"

"Refill. Jasper has that keg now. The carbonated water thing. I'm taking my lunch."

"It's not lunch, it's eleven forty."

"It's lunch now!" He pulled his gloves off. "Belt's off. Drawer's jammed. It'll keep."

Mikayla put her head down on her desk. He could see her do it through the window. He decided to take that as approval.

---

Dorado Lake was a flooded quarry twenty minutes down the gravel road. The water was that fake-looking blue you only get in quarries and postcards. The platform floated at the rim, a bright metal rectangle moored with cables to the bank. From the shore it looked like a toy. Up close it looked like a toy too, but a serious one, with railings and dive flags and a glass viewing window over the deep end where the pool bottom dropped twelve meters into a dark blue pit.

Lillian was on the deck checking her breath against the pool deck thermometer. Not the temperature. Her breath. She'd hold, watch the second hand, hold, exhale, check her time. She was thirty. She'd been doing this since she was old enough to have a leaderboard number, and for two years she'd had the top number in Argentina, static apnea, and then one dive in the Salta cave system went wrong and she quit competing and started teaching rich tourists and one local guy who worked at a fly plant.

She saw him coming up the aluminum steps with a canned iced tea in one hand and a thermos in the other.

Oh no, she thought. The fly guy.

He'd booked a private lesson. Three o'clock today. He'd shown up to book it in his work shirt with a larva on the shoulder and said, quote, I need to think about nothing for one afternoon. She'd liked that. Now he was walking toward her platform drinking a can.

"Hey," he said. "You're the instructor, right? Lillian?"

"Lesson's at three."

"I know. I'm early. Jasper around? He's got the keg."

"Jasper's inside. Who's your client?"

"I'm the client." He held up the can, sheepish. "This is lunch. The can's not part of the lesson."

"It better not be." She narrowed her eyes. "What's in the can?"

"Iced tea. But that's not what I'm here for. I'm here for the keg water."

Inside the wet room, Jasper was doing what Jasper always did, which was fussing with his rig. Forty-two years old, gray stubble, a volunteer who ran the platform cooler on weekends and had organized the first official Diet Kola Challenge in all of Jujuy province, an event attended by nine people and remembered fondly by four. His seventy-liter keg of carbonated water sat in the corner with its lines coiled like something medical.

"Barry!" Jasper said. "You're just in time. I fixed the regulator."

"Did you?"

"I plugged the new line into the main line and now it pours cold. Watch."

He hooked it up, worked the tap, and poured a tall plastic cup of carbonated plain water. It foamed up white and settled. He handed it over with the pride of a man who had personally invented hydration.

"Go on," he said. "Tell me that's not the best seltzer in El Hoyo."

Barry drank.

It was flat.

Not flat flat. It had bubbles. But the bubbles were wrong. Weak, scattered, tired bubbles. And underneath them the water had a plastic taste, like it had been sitting in the line since Tuesday, and a throat-hit of carbonation that rose up through his sinuses and died somewhere behind his eyes as a dead end. No bite. No snap. Just gas-liquid, going nowhere.

Barry stood there holding the cup.

"Well?" said Jasper.

"It's..."

"Say it."

"It's got a plastic taste."

Jasper's face fell. "The line. It's the line, not the keg. I just put in the new line and it..." He sniffed the cup, drank, winced. "Okay. Yes. That's the line. That's Tuesday's water traveling through Wednesday's line."

"So it's flat and it tastes like the inside of a garden hose," Barry said.

"Like a new garden hose."

"Jasper."

"I'll bleed the line! Give me twenty minutes, I'll bleed the whole line and it'll be..." He was already under the sink part of the rig, mumbling. "Twenty minutes. Sit down. Drink your iced tea. You brought one, drink it."

Barry drank the iced tea instead. It was fine. Iced tea doesn't have lines.

Lillian had followed them in and stood in the doorway of the wet room with her arms crossed. She was looking at the corner of the room, at the clear plastic box on the shelf.

"What is that," she said.

Barry followed her look. His guillotine. Six inches tall, oak and balsa, a real working blade on real oiled runners, built over four weekends because the card game came with a paper standee and he had standards.

"That," said Barry, "is a guillotine."

"I can see that. Why is it here?"

"It's the game prop for Guillotine. The card game. You collect nobles and then you chop them." He set the cup down. "I built it myself. The blade actually drops. Jasper keeps it in the box so nobody breaks it."

"It's a game prop," Jasper said from under the rig, muffled. "It's not mine. It's his. I just store it. For the game nights."

Lillian picked up the box. She turned it. The blade caught the light.

"You built this," she said.

"In my garage. It's not a big deal."

"It's very well made." She said it like she was annoyed about it. "You chop heads for fun."

"It's dark humor. It's French Revolution themed. Everybody dies, it's a card game." He took a swig of iced tea. "You want to play? Jasper and I play on slow weekends. Loser buys the winner's next refill."

"I don't lose," said Lillian.

Barry laughed. It came out before he could stop it, a real laugh, the first one all week. "Everybody says that."

"I don't." She set the box down on the table between them with a click. "Fine. Show me the game. But if I win, you owe me dinner, not a refill."

"What?"

"We'll figure it out." She pulled out a chair. "And Barry. Before your lesson. No gas-liquid. Nothing carbonated in you before a deep pool session. I mean it. You burp at eight meters, you'll know why."

"Eight meters?"

"Twelve. The pit goes twelve. You'll see." She started dealing cards. "Rules first. Then heads."

Jasper surfaced from under the rig with a wrench in his hand and a look of pure joy on his face, because nobody had played the guillotine game with him since March.

"Deal me in," he said.

"Rules first," Barry said. He flipped the lid off the box and lifted the guillotine out. "Everybody gets twelve noble cards. You play action cards to mess with people. When a noble goes to the front of the line, off comes the head."

"That's it?"

"That's it. It's a terrible game. It's great."

"How do you win?"

"Points. Some nobles are worth a lot, some are worth nothing. A lot of it is timing." He set the little machine on the table. "Normally the loser buys refills."

"You said if I win, you owe me dinner."

"I did say that."

"Then here's my offer." Lillian leaned back in her chair. "Five rounds. Every round, the loser takes a forfeit. Not money. Dignity stuff. Something the winner picks."

Jasper made a noise from the sink.

"What kind of forfeit?" Barry asked.

"I don't know. Small. Harmless. You sing something, you hold your breath for a minute, you let the winner write on your arm. That kind of thing." She shrugged. "Unless you're scared."

"I built the guillotine. I don't get scared by my own guillotine."

"So that's a yes?"

"It's a yes if you do one thing."

"Name it."

Barry picked up the blade piece. It slid off the runners and sat flat and heavy in his palm for something the size of a stamp. "You put the blade on the block yourself. Every time. Before every drop. That's the rule. If you're going to chop my nobles, you do it with your own hand."

Lillian looked at him for a beat. "Fine. My hand. Every drop." She stuck her hand out and they shook over the wet room table, and Jasper banged his wrench on the counter like it was a bell.

They played the first round and Lillian lost it.

"How," Jasper said. "How did you lose the first round."