One of the challenges of accurately quantifying intelligence stems from the fact that it's not a single capacity, but rather an aggregate of various mental functions. While IQ tests reliably isolate and measure selected intellectual abilities, they can't necessarily provide a realistic analysis of overall competence; the whole isn't always the sum of its parts. An oversimplified metaphor might characterize the mind as a team, and even a roster stacked full of all-stars can fail to assemble a winning one. Studies demonstrate that individuals with an above-average working memory have a greater propensity to choke under pressure than their more ordinary counterparts, for example, and today has vividly evidenced the burden that one player's weaknesses can impose upon his teammates.

Some aberration of environmental and genetic factors granted Spencer quite a lineup of logical capabilities, and their performance has always managed to squeeze him through a crisis. Like anyone experiencing disproportionate stress, however, he's susceptible to a reduction in cognitive flexibility that leads to an overreliance on habitual behaviour. When the stakes are high, people tend to fall back on their most-practiced mental processes—essentially, they prefer to pass the ball to their strongest players. On Spencer's part, his own MVP has always been an aptitude for inductive reasoning.

Using pattern recognition, inductive inference detects the relevant details disguised within broader data; it filters the signal from out of all the noise. Spencer's early childhood predisposition towards it had developed into a lifelong fascination—he loves making connections. The ceaseless reading, excessive doctorates, and career he'd selected had all fundamentally gratified an instinctual curiosity sometimes bordering on obsessional. His pursuit of knowledge was grounded in a desire to help people—it was, he's sure, he remembers—but he's always sought the revelatory instant when disparate elements finally converge.

Even earlier today, despite everything, there had been an undeniable dose of satisfaction lacing his solution to Cat's game. On the grounds that his priorities are likely as suspect as most aspects of his character, Spencer lacks confidence that it was primarily derived from the survival of her hostages. Winning a high-stakes game, achieving a eureka moment, the abuse of opiates; it requires no real genius to uncover an ugly behavioural pattern at play. The answer is obvious: each of them triggers a powerful rush of dopamine into the nucleus accumbens of the basal forebrain, and an addict will always chase after more.

So give him an astronomical array of input to consider, and Spencer will compulsively identify constellations. This has lent itself to a talent at solving all kinds of puzzles. Everything lines up for him—or it just falls into place. Emily had once shared a sentimental little story (absent of any discernible morals, it couldn't be defined as a fable) about an impossibly broken star, and he'd needed only seconds to correctly configure the wooden facets of her diagonal burr puzzle. An appreciable parallel: Spencer doesn't have any morals either, and the wreckage of his personal meteoric descent has likewise proven too confounding for even Emily to repair. Argument from analogy is a form of induction, and it would suggest that his recognition of the Prisoners' Dilemma was the deft assembly of an accurate conclusion this time too.

Anomalies, conversely, are data points that deviate so significantly from an observable pattern that they could, if genuine, disprove an entire hypothesis. For Spencer, it's a distressingly anomalous experience to be second-guessing whether he's managed to fit any of these pieces in the right place.

From a mathematical standpoint, puzzles aren't games. Simply handing someone a complicated problem isn't the same as playing with them; a rat placed in a maze is left on its own. Game theory describes interdependent decisions. Any strategic behaviour is contingent on the opposition's available moves, and so it takes two to play. Puzzles, on the other hand, are—well.

They're solitary activities.

Spencer has already endured too many months of them. The accruing experiences have led to a noteworthy decline in his psychological state. So a real puzzle here: is he playing a game right now?

Undermined by the potential holes in its foundation, reality has begun to sway. His hands are wracked by uncontrollable tremors, and everything seems on the brink of collapse. It's an incongruous reminder of Jenga with Henry, all bated breath and cautious analysis, an insistent background chorus chanting no no no as he reaches out to prod at the precarious supports.

Spencer opts to sit on the bunk in case he topples.

Despite his careful smokescreens, he knows the others have had their concerns regarding his mental health. He's obstructed countless investigative inquiries from expert profilers, though it's hardest to defuse the anxieties that Penelope intermittently blurts at him in breathless rapid-fire. The lack of prying from Alex has been an ongoing relief, even if he recognizes the design behind her more practical approach. Chronic boredom and acute stress are both reliably associated with negative outcomes—cognitive impairment, substance abuse, an overall proneness to psychopathology— and he'd welcomed the complex puzzles she'd initially barraged him with in an attempt to distract from the monotony and pressure.

He should have known better. Penitentiary mailroom staff are constantly on alert for illicit gang communications, to the point that they'll call up the FBI's Cryptanalysis Unit if a randomly-screened letter proves indecipherable. Having occasionally enjoyed consulting for that very department, it ought to have been unsurprising when, instead of receiving his cryptic crosswords, he'd ended up under investigation, placed on an intensive monitoring list and—oh, motherfucker.

The overlooked piece snaps into place; it hadn't happened that way at all. That was just Dalton's convenient excuse to have his correspondence scanned so it could be forwarded to Cat.

Spencer's acuity at problem-solving is the self-evident casualty of that clever maneuver, though Alex had pivoted her efforts towards alternate means of intellectual enrichment. When all he can have from her are words, he's fortunate a linguist can offer an abundance; books, monthly journal subscriptions, and envelopes packed so densely with lecture materials that T-Rex had suggested layering them underneath his shirt to intercept Herzog's inevitable shank. Her personal letters always contain interesting etymology she's selected for him, and he's gnawed over every syllable with the persistence of a dog seeking kibble from a Kong toy. Starved as he is by a paucity of strategies to definitively resolve his mounting dilemmas, those useless words seem like the only things still rattling inside Spencer's vacant skull.

Courtesy of Professor Blake: game is a word of disputed origin. One possibility is the proto-Germanic ga-mann, which translates roughly into a concept of "people together"—and, contrasted against his empty cell, substantiates the premise that games can't be played alone. The second contender is the Proto-Indo-European verb ghem: to leap.

I push the line and you do the long jump, Cat had said; not long afterwards, he'd sprung right out of his chair to throttle her. And now, in just the last fucking hour, Spencer has demonstrated multiple instances of what by all means appears to be a Jumping to Conclusions bias. Cognitive biases are systematic patterns of deviation from rational thought, and the Jumping to Conclusions bias is particularly correlated with the experience of a word he knows a lot about, etymology included.

Delusion.

From the Latin preposition de, indicating a point of departure or deviation, and the verb lūdere. Its literal translation?

To play falsely.

The cell is the decompressing airlock of a spacecraft, and he has no helmet. Capillaries burst, blood boils and lungs rupture when exposed to a vacuum; within a mere fifteen seconds, hypoxic loss of consciousness becomes imminent. Systems failing, the darkness obscuring his peripherals is verging on a total eclipse.

Unfortunately, Spencer is no stranger to the management of personal emergencies. He takes convulsing breaths through cupped hands, as slowly as he can, holding and counting. His heart rate has skyrocketed, explosive and erratic in his chest, but he commands himself to focus on something external instead. It's a struggle for his eyes to cooperate, aching as they are from the orbital bruises blooming outwards from his swollen nose. He squints at the nearest wall through a myopic blur, straining like he might decipher hidden evidence of his sanity encoded within all the gang tags and dicks scratched into the peeling paint.

The trouble with looking at stars and finding constellations? They don't actually exist. Were he ever to have another opportunity to view a night sky unpolluted by floodlights, he could easily point out Orion or Ursa Major—and both hunter and game would remain absent overhead, because they're the erroneous perception of nebulous stimuli. From the Greek apophaínō: "to appear," apophenia describes the inclination to see patterns in unrelated information. Mistaken patternicity and a subsequent misestimation of odds is so commonplace during games of chance that it's referred to as the gambler's fallacy; lotto and slot players tend to read numbers or machines as being "hot" or "cold" despite the outcome's guaranteed randomness. Pareidolia is another benign form of the phenomenon that everyone experiences—the fluffy figures that emerge from cumuliforms, or the soap scum faces he sees on the shower room tiles—but apophenia was originally used as a term describing a symptom that begins at the early onset of schizophrenia. The subject experiences an unprovoked perception of connection and synchronicity; self-reflexive overinterpretations are assigned unfounded meaning.

He knows, and in a manner not merely familiar but familial. He'd sat and listened to lectures as a boy, entranced by the intricate webs spun from fact and conjecture, captivated by every esoteric analogy and unexpected insight woven into the words. It was all so brilliant, so astonishing in the way that everything could be linked together—and it was frequently delivered to an auditorium of invisible students in their living room. Apophenia was why the television was smashed to bits to silence the secret messages broadcast during commercial breaks, and it was the reason so many dark vans on the road contained government agents on their tail. It was how the experimental poisons he'd forced on her had ended up flushed down a toilet, so Spencer can see why, in a way, it's already the explanation for how he ended up here.

The most common delusions are persecutory in nature, and they're…six? No—maybe eight times more prevalent amongst the male prison population, appearing in seventy percent of first-episode psychosis cases and increasing after exposure to traumatic events. Typical beliefs include the fear that someone is out to cause the individual or their loved ones harm, that they're being stalked or spied on, or that their actions are being controlled and manipulated. They're generally accompanied by catastrophic worrying; an implausible disaster looms over every horizon.

And that—

Isn't crazy at all, he knows, slamming the door shut against his suspicions. Delusions are false beliefs, held even when the evidence fails to support them. None of that is outlandish after today. His inferences have more than enough to validate them. He's got—

He reverses, pushing through the game tree's riotous overgrowth, tracing the tangle of branches back down to where roots grasp at foundation. What exactly has he got?

This:

Cat mentioned the Prisoners' Dilemma this morning.

He can't speak to her.

He'll either confess or exercise his right to remain silent tomorrow.

That's it.

That's all of it. The false confession she's extended doesn't even belong in the Dilemma; it's a jigsaw piece with all the wrong interjambs, and he's shoehorned it into a gap that needed filling. The lowest burden of legal proof is a preponderance of evidence, yet this is too insubstantial to support any certainty. He'd looked at it and decided it would bear the weight of his hanging corpse.

That's insane. He's insane.

Cat had mentioned Mario Kart in the interrogation room, but Spencer doesn't think he's driving a racecar. The Prisoners' Dilemma likewise came up only once in their conversation, as another passing comment.

Oh, she had stalled significantly afterwards—

And she'd been making a joke. In all likelihood, that moment of silence was the pause of a comedian anticipating the reaction from her audience. Spencer's sides ache from repressing whatever noise is attempting to force its way out of him, though he has no expectation it will be laughter.

It's obvious the authorities weren't going to let him talk to Cat again. Even if inmates held in separate facilities were ever allowed to maintain communication, she's been tormenting him for years, and he just tried to kill her with his hands. In the same vein, it's the reason he's currently alone in this place—purportedly, the federal government has a duty of care towards its prisoners. There's no conspiracy here, nor any mystery in why Emily conceded to his placement in segregation. Failure to isolate a violent offender immediately after committing an assault would be negligent, and locking a former federal agent in intake with unvetted felons who might recognize him is equally reckless. By the book, it was either here or hogtied on the padded floor of a psych observation cell—where he probably belongs, because he already knows all of this.

And yes, the BOP's Special Investigative Service will try to talk to him tomorrow. They need to initiate a murder investigation. Spencer's conducted enough of them that he should have a rudimentary understanding of the process.

He knows the signs and symptoms well enough to have faked them, but the extent of their genuine presence has somehow escaped his own notice. It's impossible to reach a reliable conclusion with such a deficit of evidence, yet he's connected so many dots he could produce a fucking star chart. He's becoming totally detached from reality. It had taken only three data points for him to fabricate an outrageously complex narrative.

Just three. And yet—

When he looks at them—

Don't they all line up?

In his doctoral thesis solving Connect Four, Victor Allen uses a specific term for when that happens. Three in a row: he calls it a threat. On the basis that they've become the singular focus of his continued existence, Spencer is exceptional at recognizing them.

In Connect Four they're childishly simple, but chess provides a more relevant definition: any move that could jeopardize an opponent's position should they fail to adequately defend themselves. A truth pertinent to more than just board games is implicit—there's no obligation to clearly communicate them. Gideon had told him to always look three moves ahead, but the best players aren't constantly scrying the future; brain scans of experts confirm that it largely comes down to pattern recognition. Observation and experience are necessary to identify and repel potential threats, and he's no longer naive to hers.

Years of preoccupation with the forms that danger takes have etched them onto Spencer's neurons. It had been a painful learning process, but by now it requires no calculation to track the trajectories and collision courses of everyone around him, scanning for scrap metal and sharp shards of plastic like NASA satellites track orbital debris. It's all become ingrained behaviour: the risky positions and the safer ones, the body language and eye contact, verbiage and vocal tones, right down to the way he sits on the toilet with a leg threaded outside of his pants—so if anyone jumps him there again, he won't be hobbled by a tangle of clothing tethering his ankles together while they kick the literal shit out of him. He doesn't consciously select where to stand to maintain a constant vantage of entrances and exits (which is why she'd put his back to the door this morning), and he doesn't need to count to keep a running score of the number and affiliations of men in whatever room he's in. There have been times when he's spontaneously reacted to a threat long before his mind has had a chance to catch up to the details.

Every once in a while, he can't offer a cogent explanation for how he even saw it coming.

This…is not a compelling argument, he knows. Belief in one's extraordinary knowledge or abilities comes too close to delusional grandiosity. But how often had the BAU seen near-victims survive simply by trusting their instincts about a situation? Morgan used to say that Spencer over-analyzed things. Had told him don't think, just feel it. He'd found that guidance rather irritating at the time—

And it had been on the subject of baseball. Real home run, asshole.

But then, some of the most useful advice he's been offered in Florence is stencilled in a suggestive hue of red right across the walls of the yard. NO WARNING SHOTS FIRED bluntly asserts the consequences of escape attempts and armed altercations—but really, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy writ large. When everyone else treats it like scripture, each inmate has good reason to be just as trigger-happy as the tower guards. Any situation that has Spencer staring down the barrel of a potential threat could rapidly escalate into life-or-death; he doesn't double-check if he's misinterpreting. In the rare instance someone bothers to rifle off a rhetorical question like:

Does it look like I'm fucking around?

Or, am I playing, ese?

And most relevantly:

"Do you think this is a game?" he wonders faintly.

The answer is—

Well, the answer is—

Okay, so the answer is more complicated than its face value. Play is generally an abstraction of conflict, and that can make it challenging to identify. A dog's friendly nip simulates its bite; Morgan's affectionate jabs had gently mimicked every fist Spencer encounters in authentic confrontations. In predatory animals, one of play's primary evolutionary functions is to rehearse the skills necessary for genuine acts of violence. Apart from the results, the only difference between initiating a bout of roughhousing or a fight lies in the nuance of behavioural cues surrounding them, and those boundaries can bleed. He can't quantify the number of times in his youth that some oblivious teacher had offered reassurance that his older classmates were just playing, as though it might make his bruises fade faster. Admittedly, it's always taken Spencer great effort to overcome his interpretive shortfalls with social signals—

But returning to the question, his answer is yes.

Threats are a fundamental tactic addressed by game theory. In a scenario between rival decision-makers, they offer a persuasive strategy to alter an adversary's decisions—if you do (or don't) do this, I will (or won't) do that. From playing Chicken to a felon trying to expropriate the nuggets from his tray, arms races right up to mutually assured destruction: by definition, they're all just games.

On that basis, Spencer has enough of a dilemma to wrestle with; additional doubts are superfluous. He's fully capable of intuiting the cues that Cat has offered him. He knows a threat when he sees one, and they aren't a feature of puzzles. They show up in games, and the two of them have established a pattern of playing them together, so he—

A captive of blind animal impulse, his back is pressed against a wall before he consciously perceives the stimulus that galvanizes him into motion. He endures the punishing moment of mindless panic it requires to pinpoint the rattling, hissing source of his alarm: the overhead vent has shuddered to life. It exhales stale air down on him with a steadiness his sputtering lungs refuse to imitate.

The juxtaposition of his hair-trigger sympathetic nervous system and the brief confidence it's annihilated does not fail to register; it's a synchronicity tailored to highlight every flaw in his thesis. Elevated threat sensitivity and a hostile attribution bias are forms of optimization to a violent environment, but a defense specialized to one habitat may prove utterly dysfunctional in another. Case point: the same traits that kept Roy Woodridge alive as a Ranger in Somalia had led to the delusion that murdered five and ended with a sniper's bullet in New Orleans, 2007. Observed in a vacuum—like in the sucking black hole of this cell—the benefits of Spencer's exaggerated startle response are dubious at best. Examined on its own, his behaviour is a distressing indicator of an injured mind that lacks the capacity to differentiate between real and illusory danger.

Flattened from the repeated assaults by his hyperactive amygdala, Spencer collapses across the bunk onto his back. Above him, the short span of ceiling is honeycombed with cracks and spattered in suspicious stains. Feelings of powerlessness correlate with illusory pattern perception, yet he sees no pareidolic shapes or faces overhead; all that he can identify is a government contractor's improper water-to-cement ratio and a potential biohazard. While he stares hard and long enough that his eyes water and drift unfocused, an autostereogram stubbornly fails to emerge either.

More commonly referred to as Magic Eye puzzles, autostereograms create an optical illusion (Latin, illūdere, "to play upon") which can only appear when the observer blurs their vision. The puzzles themselves are just unintelligible noise formed by a mosaic of repeating images, but small deviations in the pattern cycles create binocular disparities that the brain interprets as depth when the eyes have over-converged. A picture pops out with near-tangible dimensionality, yet it can never be viewed with proper perception. The illusion vanishes the very instant that correct focus is applied.

If Spencer sees one up there, he'll know he's seeing everything else the wrong way. But what should he think when, turning his gaze back on all the presumptions he's made, they slip further from view the more he tries to examine them?

Here's what he can see: his train of thought has become worryingly indirect. Derailment is a symptom common to psychotic disorders, characterized by a loosening of mental associations. It can result in total incoherence, but when the severity is only moderate—like at the onset of illness—it manifests as increasing tangentiality. Instead of orderly, straightforward cognition, ideas veer in unexpected directions. For that reason, derailment is also referred to as knight's move thinking. In comparison to the linear paths of every other piece on the board, the knight's movements are uniquely erratic.

Randall Gardner had held the delusion that Spencer was a knight once, and he's starting to feel like he's holding the key to this mystery too. He'd used to wonder—if it was happening, would he know? Could he see it? Impaired insight is a cardinal feature of psychotic disorders, but deterioration can be gradual at the outset. It's sometimes possible to recognize the decline before it steepens. First-episode psychosis generally includes disruptions in perception, emotional disturbances, and social isolation—all admittedly accounted for, but somewhat fucking difficult to self-diagnose within the context of this room and the remarkable day he's been having.

During his time in ad seg, he'd recognized when the nosedive picked up speed. He was terrified that he'd never pull back out of it, but he'd also understood that his mind wasn't the ultimate source of his problems. The environment itself was inherently pathological—the best treatment was to leave. But the symptoms hadn't arisen within a timeframe of hours, and it had been different from this. Oh, it had been bad: visual hallucinations of indistinct movement had crept along the margins of his vision, and his migraines were preceded by auras that framed the room in flickering kaleidoscopic geometries. In the final month, his perceptual constancy had fractured; viewed at certain angles, he'd failed to recognize the few objects in his possession. Stupor would overtake him until his mind had the inertia of settling concrete, or his focus would constrict unrelentingly inwards on some inescapable physical irritant or intrusive memory. Emotions combusted, thoughts spiralled, impulses overwhelmed—

But it hadn't been like this.

This isn't—he isn't—

He's not.

Spencer has always been prone to both cognitive and verbal tangents, and not all studies correlate knight's move thinking with mental illness. Sometimes it's indicative of creative problem-solving. Lateral thinking: the difficult task of stepping outside the box. A knight may appear errant to someone unfamiliar with the game, but the piece is so valuable precisely because of its ability to jump.

Cat hadn't given him a lot to work with this morning either. It had taken prodigious leaps—cognitive fucking hopscotch—to clear all the gaps standing between him and the winning answer. And he'd got it right, hadn't he?

Everything keeps tilting, and it's become impossible to orient himself in the violent whiplash of uncertainties. Caught in a hopeless ricochet between conviction and reasonable doubt, his frazzled synapses are flashing their competing warnings like lights on a pinball machine. It's nearly as challenging to breathe through the nauseating disequilibrium as it is to think beyond it, but he retains the distant awareness that he's rendered the toilet temporarily incapable of flushing should he vomit into it.

Ludology is the study of play as a social science, and one of its forefathers—Caillois or Huizinga, he can't remember—divided it into four distinct types. There are games of competition, chance, and mimicry, but he named the final, most abstract category after the ancient Greek for "whirlpool." Ilinx refers to the deliberate pursuit of vertigo. As a toddler, Henry had sometimes urged Spencer to lift and spin him in dizzying circles, inspired by a motive that instigates college drinking contests and carries free soloists up precarious cliffs without ropes or harnesses to arrest a fall. Because recovering from unexpected positions benefits both predators and prey in their future encounters, one of the inferred evolutionary benefits of play is the kinesthetic experience of being thrown off-balance. Games can be intentionally designed to induce ecstatic panic or the temporary obliteration of perceptual stability—and while he's far from euphoric, hasn't everything else he's experienced today been achieved with Cat's careful deliberation?

All of this brainless scrambling could be the intended result of her gaslighting. Maybe gamesmanship is the more appropriate term: the use of psychological techniques to undermine the opposition's performance, usually by damaging self-confidence, creating distraction, and through the incitement of hesitation or anger. It functions outside the scope of the rules, or bends rather than breaks them, so gamesmanship is considered a metagame and consequently skirts the definition of cheating.

She'd spent so much time today lingering over his damaged mental status, goaded him endlessly over his—

Frustrated by their ceaseless tremors, Spencer balls his hands into fists.

…over his genetic predisposition. She'd pushed and prodded with the sadistic understanding that self-control has become one of his slipperiest ideals, and that losing his mind has always counted among his greatest fears. And now that she's planted the idea, he can't shake the possibility that her insights were entirely on-target.

It seems like everything else she saw in him was.

He rolls onto his side, vainly attempting an escape from his skin-crawling discomfort at the air streaming downwards from the vent. The warmth gusting against his face is too much like sitting nose-to-nose with her, inhaling incendiary bursts of laughter—or like the soft strokes of a hand along his jaw; DNA smeared all over her messy crime scene. It's a reminder of the way she'd burrowed her face against his jugular notch and the commitment she'd voiced there moments before he'd committed her attempted murder. Another aspect of ilinx is the toxic allure of destructive behaviour, and she'd said that they were going to have more fun together.

In game theory, very little delineates a promise from a threat. Regardless of whether it's an announcement that a competitor's actions will lead to punishment or reward, the same criterion is applied to determine the statement's validity. The terms must be overtly understood by the recipient, and sequential rationality demands that the proposition serves the best interests of the player extending it. Her confession to Herzog's murder initiated all of this, yet it does neither of those things—

And really, a field of mathematics can offer precisely fuck-all help with the problems he's dealing with.

Oh, there's no disputing that game theory can reliably model a player's optimal moves, but using it to predict human behaviour is engaging in a ludic fallacy—an inherently chaotic world can't be framed by such rigid, simplistic constructs. Game theory begins with the premise that its participants are perfectly rational agents, but Spencer couldn't have made that claim about himself even as an SSA. During his time in the field, he'd borne witness to an appalling parade of delusion, compulsion, and senseless brutality; since his transfer to a less-reputable federal bureau, he's seen a lot more. He isn't surrounded by reasonable decision-makers pursuing their best interests. Directly handed an optimal move, most of his peers would utterly fail to recognize it. Spencer is not much different, and Cat Adams is a diagnosable psychopath. The assumption that either of them could be acting rationally is another illustration of his own impaired judgement.

Why is this coming as such a surprise? Perhaps he'd believed that the bullet had been permanently dodged at thirty, but he's lectured on the diathesis-stress model in the past. The trajectory of a disorder is defined by biological vulnerability and the cumulative effect of stress over time. The family predisposition is spoken for, and he can think of so many cases where a final stressor became the tipping point in a long chronology of psychosocial pressure: childhood instability, traumatic life events, loss.

He has those three in a row, so it's really no wonder Cat's made him feel so threatened.

A sane, linear thinker wouldn't have spun himself in all these unnecessary circles, and would have instead confronted his concerns by immediately running through one of the many diagnostic exams that had formed his nightly prayers for approximately two decades. Spencer has always tested well, so as he ticks his way through the items on the Self Screen Prodrome evaluation, it's hard to say whether he's upset over his impressive grade or because he's fallen short of a perfect score. The newest symptoms give meaning to older ones—the hostility and mood swings, memory issues, drug use, social withdrawal, even the damaged sense of self are all right there on the checklist. It wasn't self-deception to have ascribed them to other causes (to have refused to even think about it, to deny, deny, deny) and he strongly suspects comorbidities, but he can no longer maintain the cognitive dissonance required to dispute the wider connections.

Psychotic disorders are often prefaced by years of prodrome, and it appears he should be categorized within the ultra-high risk phase. Catching it earlier is critical to reducing the likelihood of a transition into psychosis, and he'll add it to the growing list of important details he's failed to notice.

The thing is—

Psychosis is a loss of contact with reality. If Spencer can acknowledge the possibility that some of what he's experiencing isn't real, then he's not there yet.

And the thing about delusions—they shouldn't be diagnosed when beliefs are based on incomplete information. Even if Spencer reached his conclusion thanks to the unusual ideation symptomatic of prodrome, it's really just a misapprehension until it's been confronted with incontrovertible evidence and refuses to yield.

He hasn't seen any evidence.

In Information theory—a discipline founded by Claude Shannon, the man who first calculated the lower bounds of the game tree complexity of chess, and that's probably derailment—entropy is a measurement of uncertainty. A flipped coin has lower entropy than the toss of a die, and Spencer is vacillating somewhere near the heat death of the universe. Of course he's disconnected from reality— the lock on the door is keeping it that way. Thinking his way through this is about as likely as strolling out into the hallway; even if it weren't broken, this shovel was never going to dig him out of the hole he's in. If these are truly the throes of a delusion, he's reinforcing them with the current fantasy that he retains the competence necessary to weigh information and make reasoned judgements. No proof exists that will ever dissuade his beliefs.

The trouble with inductive reasoning is that it can never be certain. It's the nature of profiling; an argument based on perceived patterns can be cogent, plausible, and highly probable, and it can still be proven incorrect. He may remain genuinely capable of changing his mind when presented with additional data, but there's no way he can know unless someone pops the lid off this box. Until that happens, he's trapped in a situation analogous to Schrödinger's—

"Oh, fuck off," he groans. At her, maybe, but probably just at himself.

Spencer would like to be very high. He'd like to pull the plug on the last laboured gasps of his cognitive processing and just drift away, but he knows his night won't go so peacefully. On cases where the facts were insufficient, his mind would still scratch around the unknowns, contorting itself to squeeze down narrow rabbit holes in a search for unlikely answers. There's no off-switch to his brain just because a solution isn't forthcoming. His hyperfocus used to be an asset, but she's made it into something maddening; thought perseveration is an involuntary inability to move away from ruminating thoughts even when they've been fully explored.

And maybe he doesn't know how this night's going to go at all. Maybe he's midway through an elaborate process of pretzeling himself into a demented state of self-assurance, and when he sits down with the SIS tomorrow, he will get everything wrong.

He's sure (is he?) that all this dithering is being induced through Cat's deliberate design, but—shocker— it's also symptomatic. The paradoxical groundwork for delusional formation lies in an intolerance and misestimation of uncertainty inherent to prodrome. In the high risk phase, the feeling of aberrant salience—wherein everything is relevantly connected—results in predictive errors, and the inability to make correct assumptions about the world leads to a clinical form of perplexity. Even simple events and interactions become unsolvable puzzles. In one study he'd read about early-stage illness, participants played a betting game where the rules would be randomly reversed. Moves which had previously won a player points would lose them, and vice versa. The control group would quickly adapt to the shift in rules to recognize and profit from periods of stability, but pre-psychotic participants struggled to optimize their approach. They were so impaired by doubt that they would be incapable of gambling on a play that could, in all probability, win them the game.

Spencer sits back up.

JJ had looked at him and seen a man teetering on the edge of reality, and she'd looked at Cat Adams and seen a bluff offered in the hopes that he'd decide to shoot himself directly in the kneecap. It would be an audacious gamble to present him with an opportunity to just walk out the door and expect that he wouldn't take it—

But the gambler's conceit is a common decision-making fallacy. A truly rational agent will walk away with their winnings when the stakes become too high, but it's human nature for players to believe they possess the judgement and self-control to stop when the timing is right. People caught in win streaks feel little incentive to end them, and the dysfunctional orbitofrontal cortex observed among compulsive gamblers is the same broken reward circuitry that drives the impulsive risk-taking behaviour of psychopaths.

It strikes him that it doesn't particularly matter if he's playing by himself right now. Solitaire is technically a puzzle, but there's a "game"-specific term used for the win scenario. The entire objective of playing is to get out. In the slim chance that he was right about the Prisoners' Dilemma, his best option would be to try the same thing anyway.

The sensation flaring in his chest would be easy to mislabel, but Spencer doesn't waste his time with hope anymore. It's a passive, limp-wristed emotion, temporarily brilliant and too easily subdued. It does nothing but wait and wither. He recognizes this demanding, voracious feeling for what it is: want.

He wants a lot.

The big things: finally seeing Hank's smile spread across his face in-real time, taking Michael trick-or-treating, and learning if Henry will laugh or roll his eyes at magic tricks. The media is irrelevant, but he's going to spend weekend sci fi marathons with Penelope right next to him on the couch as she slowly annexes all his personal space, and instead of desperately self-monitoring every word he'll have easy conversations with Emily again. Luke might still look at him like he's worth listening to, and Morgan's shoulder will jostle reassuringly against his own. And there are little things too: sitting underneath a tree, and drinking real coffee, using a knife and fork. Going to bookstores and crossing a street and his bare feet on the floor of a private shower. He's been keeping a very extensive list. None of it is so far away, maybe, if he would just reach out and take it.

It's wrong, obviously. He'll feel guilty. But he already feels guilty, and he'd rather feel that way somewhere else. He'd rather feel a lot of other things too.

He'd really rather win. He'd really like to beat her, even if he'd prefer to do it with his bare hands.

And all of that—

Is a problem. The gambler's conceit doesn't only apply to winners. For losing players, it takes the form of the sunken cost fallacy. They promise themselves they'll quit engaging in risky behaviour, but only once they've clawed their way back to baseline. Instead of cutting their losses, they want to recoup them all before they'll consider stopping.

They never win it back. It's why he avoids playing poker in Florence. He sees the debts amassed by gamblers who keep betting with the hopes that they'll break even, and he sees what happens to them when the other players decide that the games are over.

Depending who they've been dealing with, it doesn't stay inside, either. It stretches its arm right over the walls and reaches out to their families. It's never particularly gentle when it does.

This is a trap. Even if it's not a trap—

No, it's definitely a trap.

In Schrödinger's thought experiment, he puts the cat in the box with a vial of poison. Argument from analogy: it's here in the room with him. When Spencer was fumbling with chess analogies, he'd overlooked the most germane gambit available. It's certainly the most obvious. It's called the Poisoned Pawn Variation.

The pawn has no defender. It's open for the taking. Crossing the board to capture it doesn't risk anything—there are no immediate threats facing the attacking piece or any other material—yet despite the lack of apparent ramifications, it permanently changes the nature of the game. A player who seizes their opportunity discovers themselves in a position of incredible sharpness. Especially so close to the opening, most chess matches offer competitors a range of moves across a broad spectrum from brilliance to blunder; if that's a fistfight, someone in a sharp position discovers that their opponent is holding a knife. After swallowing the poison, almost every available move is a losing one. Their adversary continues to have an abundance of options, but the poisoned player has perched themselves on the edge of a razor, discovering new disasters anywhere they look. For as long as the game lasts, they spend their turns desperately searching to find a single move that won't end in defeat. It requires flawless insight and surgical precision to continue playing afterwards, even for just a little while.

The prevailing advice is broadly applicable: don't take poison. Spencer's track marks and his track record both demonstrate an inability to listen. Mexico, the plea deal, a dozen hospitalizations in Millburn, heroin trafficking. And after all of that, he'd looked at Herzog from across the yard and seen a piece unprotected, ready to wipe from the board.

This time he's staring at the door, and—

There's a funny thing about playing Solitaire. Mathematicians haven't been able to calculate what percentage of hands are actually winnable, but they've solved a modified version of it. Even if a player with x-ray vision could look through the cards and see all their positions on the table—if they knew every variable with the perfect certainty that Spencer can never have—most of the time, they would still lose.

The harsh glow of fluorescents always lights these narrow spaces too brightly for shadows to exist, and the cell is compressing into unsettling two-dimensionality the longer he looks at it. One of the perceptual impairments common to schizophrenics is poor distance constancy, and it causes them to perceive a world of shallow depths. Right now, Spencer could be looking at a flat plane bordered and intersected by simple lines, and it would be so easy to misconstrue it as something else; the places where gameplay occurs are isolated and enclosed for specific purposes too. The magic circle is one of Huizinga's—or maybe Caillois'—most valuable contributions to ludology, describing the margins that formal play is always framed and demarcated by. Boundaries are ubiquitous, and they're unique to each game: yard lines, rinks and their penalty boxes, course maps, ticking clocks, the perimeters of the court—and since lawyers win and lose competitions of skill and chance, Caillois had said that courtrooms created magic circles too. From a bird's eye view and with the x-ray vision of a theoretical solitaire player, this correctional complex with all its men in their little boxes would appear as a board that unmerciful giants play upon.

The physical and temporal outlines of the magic circle are somewhat secondary to its psychological ramifications. What really interests ludologists are the transformative features contained within it. Normal reality suspends upon stepping inside its borders, and participants enter into a sort of voluntary dissociative state. The customs and rules of real life are set aside for new and arbitrary ones, senses of identity and purpose may change entirely, and actions become imbued with unconventional meanings or subject to different consequences than they have on the outside. The DA doesn't press assault charges when boxers beat the shit out of each other inside the ring; Spencer's a maniac if he throws a punch over someone cutting in line at Starbucks, but he'll lose respect if he lets it slide while queuing for the phones in Florence. Within the circle, it might become permissible or even necessary to act with unrepentant selfishness, lie convincingly to one's friends, or to move with uncharacteristic ruthlessness. To remain in the game, participants must accept the new rules, even if they require the use of worse means to achieve their new ends. It would be faster to cut across the track than to run around its perimeter, after all. Decisions made inside of the magic circle can be rational in the context of the game itself, but the logic is being applied to function within a system that's been intentionally separated from reality—and the system can be so consuming that the world beyond it seems to vanish entirely.

He averts his gaze from the door and all the temptation it offers. Liminal experiences (Latin, līmen, "doorstep") mark permanent transitions and metamorphoses, and ambiguity and disorientation naturally occur within their midst—consider a graduation, for example, or the exhausting list of sub-threshold symptoms that might anticipate an incurable illness. Games are not quite the same, being classified instead as liminoid. Liminoidity results in a similar separation from established reality, but the experience is contrived to remain a temporary one. When it ends, everything reverts to the way it was—the crowd united behind their team disperses at the final buzzer, vacationers return to work, and the high of a hallucinogen wears off. The magic circle exists as a limited space for a limited time, and when it breaks, it will have made no meaningful impact on its participants. Life returns to normal.

It's a pleasant delusion, but not one he can continue entertaining. When Henry changes out of his soccer uniform, he ceases to be a midfielder. Taking off the orange jumpsuit doesn't change anything about Spencer at all. If he's seeing circles, it's because he's become stuck in the concentric ones that half the Nevada car have tattooed across their elbows. The spiderwebs are an open acknowledgement of the reality he's been so determined to escape: once you're in, you won't find a way out.

Even excluding his history in law enforcement, Spencer had walked into Florence as a human catalogue of risk factors. White socially-isolated first-time offenders with above-average levels of education and histories of childhood victimization or neglect face the highest incidences of violence while incarcerated. Physical weakness, below-average weight, low assertiveness, and lack of aggression all correlate with assaults within the carceral setting. A high or soft voice, slim stature, youthful demeanor, and even certain manners of gesturing are all perceived as exploitably feminine attributes that contribute to the likelihood of a different type of abuse.

He changed everything he could to avoid becoming a victim, and he did even more to stop being one. He succeeded. Now Spencer bears an entirely different array of risks.

They say the best defense is a good offense, which might explain why victim-offender overlap is such a widely-documented phenomenon among the incarcerated; nearly anybody who starts as one will eventually become the other. Regardless of a participant's role during an act of in-prison violence, there's a strong correlation between the event and the perpetration of future criminal acts. Recipients of repeated assaults are three times more likely to recidivate upon release, and they're more likely to face discipline for infractions committed during their incarceration. Rearrest rates rise alongside disciplinary proceedings, and spending any duration of a sentence in solitary confinement also increases the risk. Mental illness alone doesn't necessarily correspond with recidivist outcomes, but it does when a psychotic disorder or drug abuse is involved—and intravenous heroin users rank at the top of the list.

Violent federal offenders have among the worst rehabilitative outcomes on the planet. After release, the majority will be back in handcuffs in under two years. The crimes they commit during their brief window of freedom are also likely to be more serious than ones perpetrated by non-violent felons.

The data is limited, but there appears to be no meaningful statistical difference among the wrongfully convicted. Their experiences result in long-lasting psychological damage, and there's growing support for the assertion that prison conditions are inherently criminogenic. Long-term exposure to criminality can create habituation to it, particularly in the context of institutions with high security levels. Freedom fails to repair an absolved prisoner's relationships, finances, job opportunities, or faith in humanity. The studies only extend to exonerees, of course. It beggars belief to imagine that the outcomes improve for those who are never acquitted.

There is, to be more positive, an ameliorating effect to high levels of personal support from friends and family upon release. He's pretty sure it's somewhere under five percent. Aiding and abetting in a murder coverup conspiracy probably isn't the type of support the academics were discussing, and he can't speculate if it improves or worsens his prospects. It seems like JJ and Emily have been suffering in the absence of a teammate skilled in statistical analysis who could help inform their decisions. While the math is honestly a little beyond his capacity at the moment, he bets he'll teach them that putting money on the longshot is no different than backing a losing horse.

Worse still, all those numbers only speak to who he was yesterday. They don't apply anymore, because they fail to account for Cat Adams. He can't summon a formula to calculate his odds now that she's revealed her hand.

He's going to see her everywhere.

In all of Spencer's future misfortunes—in every undeserved second chance he squanders and for each relationship he'll ruin when he does, within little unexpected coincidences, among life's inconveniences and his total inability to tolerate them: he'll see her fingerprints. God forbid anything happens to a member of the BAU or their families, because Spencer will be sure she's behind it. He'll see patterns and read signs and portents wherever he looks. She'll be every set of eyes that observe him, every stranger on the street, everyone he encounters, everywhere at every moment. There won't be any easy conversations with Emily after everything he's done—and the next time he looks into her dark eyes, he might see someone else smiling back at him.

Some basic behavioural analysis offers a pretty clear indication of how well he'll handle it.

How is this worth the risks they're taking? What is the value in putting everyone through all of that? They already have their hands too full with murderers at work to waste their spare time with another one. If he'd witnessed a dangerous madman trying to get close to his godsons four years ago, he'd have done everything in his power to keep him far away. If he'd been handed his own casefile—the victim of an involuntary drugging who subsequently poisons drug users—it wouldn't be a particularly complex criminal pathology to unravel, and he'd have ensured that person never had an opportunity to do it again.

Spencer would ask what the hell he's thinking, but it's not even surprising anymore. He'd aspire to be a better person than this, but it's a lot more realistic to wish he was ever-so-slightly worse. Maybe if she'd given him just one more nudge, this wouldn't feel so impossible. He's so close he could almost cross the days off on a single fucking wall calendar—

And it's as close as he's getting.

If he steps outside of this circle, nothing changes. If nothing changes, he's not playing a game. Illusionists sometimes fool their audiences into believing they have free will through a tactic called equivocation. Pick a card, any card—but the magician has staged the trick so that any choice ends in an identical result. What had looked to Spencer like the Prisoners' Dilemma was really just a Morton's fork: a selection between a pair of terrible options that both eventually lead to the same destination.

Even still, he'd desperately prefer to take the scenic route. Regrettably, a gun pressed against someone's head is still just barely enough to make him do the right thing. More regrettably, he's the one who'd be holding it.

His resentment—at himself, at Cat, at fucking JJ for not just holding his stupid hand and gently explaining that they were charging him with murder so that he didn't have to be the one making the fucking decision instead—is scalding him, and it's never going to stop. As of this moment, it's already next week and it's a decade from today; maybe the layout of the room changes a little, but the future is just the long present moment. He wants a Haloperidol prescription strong enough to render him a drooling zombie after he explains all the thoughts he's been having in this room to a psychiatrist—actually, no, he wants to discover that heroin still gets smuggled underneath the door of whatever hole they're about to bury him in.

And actually, no. What he really wants is to find out where they're putting her.

It's a thought that will only lead him to worse places—but he's going to have a lot more of them the longer he stays here, so why bother?

Several thousand years ago, back when nothing he ever did worked out either, he'd attempted to give Peter Harper an answer to that question. He'd looked at a man with awful urges and told him that his issues would probably never be solved, and then suggested that he just keep trying anyway.

Peter had declined quite emphatically. Spencer sees his point.

The thready ghost of Cat's pulse is almost tangible under his thumbs, and he's not sure what exactly he should be trying to do anymore. Self-improvement is unreachable from here—and to his blistering frustration, he knows that she is too. He can try as hard as he wants; his problems are just as insoluble as Peter's were.

He shouldn't have said the horrible things he'd promised Cat if he actually intended to do them. They were offered honestly, but it's more delusional ideation on his part if he thinks that the BOP are ever going to let him have an opportunity to follow through on his threats. It takes an average of around twenty years to drag death row inmates across the finish line, so she's got perhaps fifteen left to go; he can spend every last one of Cat's remaining days working on finding his way to her, and it won't make any difference. It's become much harder to Ted Bundy a way out of a courthouse ceiling than it was in the seventies, and the literal and figurative stonewalling he's facing will be utterly immobilizing. They know his IQ and that profilers are rather adept at picking people apart, so even the restricted human contact of admax will likely be minimized to deny him the access necessary to manipulate anyone. If a guard happens to be injudicious enough to come closer than they should, he doubts that their proximity could lead anywhere useful anyway. He lacks both the criminal network and physical assets that Cat must have successfully leveraged against her accomplices. The BOP will be monitoring and censoring his mail—and while he's an exceptional penpal, no letter he can ever write will be cordial enough to coax Dr. Kimura into lending him an envelope of anthrax. Frankly, it would be a stunning achievement if he managed to mail Cat an invitation to play correspondence chess.

A stalemate is a draw. It doesn't end a game by putting anyone in check, but because there aren't any moves available to the player taking their turn. Nothing threatens their current position, but they can't leave the square they're already in. There's simply nowhere to go. If a piece intentionally offers itself for capture to force a stalemate, it's called a desperado—a reckless, violent criminal— or it's referred to as crazy.

Maybe that's a self-reflexive overinterpretation, but it seems accurate either way.

It feels like emerging from surgery without painkillers, but he's begrudgingly aware that this is a best-case scenario. Some gnawing part of him will never believe it, but JJ had been adamant that Cat won't be able to do anything again. If she has no moves and he has no moves, everybody else comes out of this a winner.

It's just excruciating to know that even the most worthless thing he wants is going to elude him too.

Elude: Latin, ex + lūdere, "finish play."

Game over. All done. He's going to bed, and then tomorrow he'll tell the truth, and then maybe a couple months or years from now—because there's no impending deadline anymore, and he'd like his friends to get some distance from him and the tremendously shitty day they've just had—he's going to take Peter's advice and bring this to a permanent conclusion.

Alex, his mind drifts—or veers, or jumps—had written him about that word too, and he can picture her tidy cursive on paper:

It would be tempting to conclude that "conclude," "exclude," and "seclude" all derive from lūdere as well. Their actual source is the Latin verb claudere: "to close, to lock, to imprison." The root of lūdere and perhaps the very concept of play, if we're being philosophical, is actually in direct opposition. Lūdere's source is the Proto-Indo-European verb leyd: "to let go, to release."

The most common type of lock contains a set of pins (four, usually) that are unique in length, and each pin has a break in it. The pins block the lock's plug from being able to turn, but when those breaks all line up in a row—when the right key slides in and aligns them perfectly with the plug's shear line—it becomes free to rotate, and that's how it unbolts. Sometimes an answer feels the same way. There's a gentle glide, a perfect convergence, an easy click, and Spencer presses both hands right into the bridge of his broken nose in an attempt to obliterate the hijacked chemical processes unravelling inside of his malfunctioning brain.

It's a familiar sensation that he's always seeking, but throwing shit at the wall is no way to reach an epiphany; it's the behaviour of his crazier podmates in ad seg. He knows that his faulty circuitry has latched onto Alex's unconnected words and is forming associations where none exist. It's all meaningless static and nonsense patterns, and his vulnerability towards overconvergence has manifested in the lurid autostereogram that's leaping out at him in surround sound and technicolor. An apophany is the delusory inversion of an epiphany, and it turns out that the feelings of perfect clarity they provide are utterly indistinguishable.

He presses harder, cartilage grinding, until blood trails sluggishly down his lip to spatter on the floor—and even through the dazzling pain, he feels it. He'd needed to flip and skew and force the Prisoners' Dilemma to fit in place, but nothing sticks or catches or grates at him now. He feels like a door has swung wide on its hinges, and he thinks closing it may require significant blunt force trauma.

There's nothing at all complicated about what he's seeing. If he looks behind him, he recognizes a meandering trail of thoughts convoluted and distorted by fallacies, bias, and paranoia, and he understands why they weren't making any sense. It reminds him of the time he'd handed Morgan a Rubik's cube one step from completion and watched a man of incredible intelligence twist himself further and further away from the answer that had been right there.

What he sees: Cat confessed to Herzog's murder because she wants him to get away with it. She's trying to let him go.

On its surface, that's insane. Out-of-character for his unsub. Doesn't match the profile at all. Cat Adams has a well-established pattern that doesn't deviate, and it starts with disgrace and ends in destruction. She never lets things go; it's how he caught her in the first place.

But from her perspective: can you really let go of something that's bound to come back? She'd wanted him to want to play again. When he said that he did, she'd promised they would. She never lies to him. He's done with the pretense that JJ is right; Cat always plans ahead, so of course she'll have arranged a way to take action once her movements became restricted by today's grand reveal. She likes when he feels trapped because he makes interesting decisions, but what decisions can he possibly make when he's trapped too securely to ever move? It's boring. She's not above shooting fish in a barrel, but there are better games to play. Cat loves winning, and the most fulfilling wins require an element of competition. Instead of tightening the boundaries, why not push the lines a little further out and see how far he'll go?

Fairness isn't always about keeping things even. Levelling a playing field sometimes requires imbalanced adjustments. Whenever Spencer and Henry would kick a ball around the yard with JJ, she'd always space her goalposts much wider than theirs. The edges of a magic circle are agreed upon by its inhabitants, and they can be altered to improve the quality of engagement for both parties. Even animals do it; physically stronger apes and canines restrain themselves to extend their play with mismatched partners, and felines self-handicap in order to prolong the entertainment provided by captive rodents. Handicapping makes its appearance in all kinds of games and sports, and it provides correction either by disadvantaging the dominant player or by allocating an edge to an inexperienced one. In chess, the weaker opponent might be assigned extra time, additional moves, or be granted improved material odds by removing some of the other player's pieces from the board.

Not being here would provide Spencer significant material advantages, and she'd enjoy continuing to show off how little these walls do to slow her down.

If he steps outside the magic circle and nothing changes, he's not playing a game—or, the game has never stopped, and its perimeters stretch far wider than he imagined.

No, he realizes. It's much worse than that. He isn't in the circle yet; right here is the only place he's safely insulated from it. He's gotten himself so turned around that outside and inside are all mixed up. Taking off the jumpsuit doesn't change anything about him—but for the duration of play, identities shift, and games can be so engrossing that they might almost feel real. He could put on a cardigan again for a little while. To achieve a game's goal, it might become necessary to lie convincingly to one's friends; she's given him plenty of practice, and they're already making it easy by being so determined to see the best in him. He'd just have to convincingly appear like the person they want him to be, and then he'd have space to make whatever moves he chooses. All circles eventually break at the end, and then everything returns to the way it was. He'd come right back here.

But first, he'd get to play pretend out there, and it would feel like being home.

And he'd win, of course.

Sometimes in ad seg, an inmate would hurt themselves, refuse to uncover their window, or assault a CO with bodily fluids. Before the whole goon squad thundered in for a cell extraction, an officer would toss an aerosol grenade of pepper spray through their cuffport. The ventilation throughout the pod was interconnected, so it fogged all of the cells alongside their intended target. Spencer would sit there just like this, tears streaming down his face while he choked, and there would be nothing he could do to make it stop.

And he can't make it stop. He doesn't want to be thinking these thoughts. He doesn't want to be inventing them, because they can't be his—but if they're not his then they're hers, and that would make them real. They're horrible excuses to do horrible things, and he wouldn't. He won't. He's already decided he's not going to try.

But he can't stop, because if she can still move by proxy from inside a solitary cell, he knows that she won't stop either. He can choose to stay, but that doesn't end a game of poker—it's a synonym for calling the other player's bet, and anything she's holding is better than he is right now. Staying in with a bad hand in the unlikely hope that the leading player is bluffing is referred to as a hero call, so it's not something Spencer can continue considering. Declining her get-out-of-jail-free card doesn't mean it's over, but it leaves him unarmed and useless.

That's a position he'd be an idiot to volunteer for. If there's one thing Spencer has learned, it's to take any advantage he can get. He shouldn't cooperate with Cat Adams. He shouldn't. What she's offering here is an act of collusion—

Latin, co + lūdere, "play together"—

"Jesus," comes a voice from the hall. "What the fuck, inmate?"

Spencer hides the battle to regain his breath inside the neck of his shirt, wiping tears and blood from his face as he tries to recover from the intrusion.

"What did you do to your mattress?" the voice demands.

"Write me up," he chokes into his shirt.

"Oh, I'm going to. That could be a Two-Hundred or a Three-Hundred," she says, as though his biggest concerns are over disciplinary infraction levels. "You want to explain it to me?"

"Write me up," he says again.

"You were looking for something."

It isn't a question.

He looks at the face peering at him through the slim aperture of the window. It's the same CO from earlier, incredibly unthreatening in appearance—short, too young, overweight. Someone it would be easy for him to overpower if a door wasn't standing between them.

Cat had been easy to overpower, and she remains the most dangerous person he's ever encountered.

"It isn't in there," the CO says, with an air of exasperation. "Someone tell you it would be?"

He'd been looking for microphones.

"Christ," she mutters. "You're lucky you're well-connected."

He's connecting something, yes. His ribcage is too tight of an enclosure for his stuttering heart, because he'd been looking for microphones

"I'm still writing you up for that," she continues, voice accompanied by the jangle of keys.

He stands up. She doesn't have a reason to be unlocking that door, and it's against BOP regulation to be alone while doing so—which means that she's following orders given to her by someone else.

If Cat's planning on having him moved somewhere, he won't be going easily.

"C'mon," she urges as he tenses at the screech and echoing slam of the opening cuffport, "give me your trash."

He stares, unable to compute the simple words. She's rolling her eyes at him, and it takes a long moment to grasp that she wants him to bring her the garbage from his meal earlier.

Clinical perplexity, maybe. He's struggling to understand what the hell is going on, but she knew he was looking for something and he'd been looking for microphones and she wants his garbage? None of this is making sense, and his instincts are screaming that he's in the midst of something very dangerous.

He retrieves the crumpled paper bag from the corner he'd abandoned it in and lurches towards her, but she doesn't back away to give him room to place it on the ledge created by the open port. She's supposed to; he could grab her by the belt and slam her face right into the door before she had time to react—keep doing it until he got some answers from her. He's only a step away and he could do that, because she's still standing right there scoffing at him within arm's length, and just as he starts to extend his hand she reaches through the port. It's so unexpected that he fumbles the bag she pulls right out of his startled grasp. Garbage tumbles onto the floor of the cell, and he gapes at her as she slams the port closed.

"What's she doing?" he pleads. "Where's it hidden?"

The CO gives him a pointed look that says he's very stupid, and his mind careens down a thousand horrifying paths as she finally backs away from the door.

"Please don't cause me more trouble tonight," she says, and then she's nothing but footsteps.

"What the fuck? What did you hear?" he shouts, slamming his hands against the door, but she isn't coming back.

Well-connected. She was talking about JJ and Emily, and her wording implied an awareness they had done him a favour. She'd heard them. There's a microphone. There's a microphone, this is the fucking Prisoners' Dilemma, and—

He kicks the water bottle that had fallen out of the bag, and then crushes it underfoot when it ricochets back to him. Then he stares at the lump of tinfoil on the floor of the cell, because there hadn't been any tinfoil inside that paper bag.

The little wad of aluminum isn't something he recognizes. He picks it up, rotating it in case he's starting to have trouble with his perceptual constancy again, but he's never seen it before from any angle. It wasn't in here earlier—

Which means she'd dropped it in through the cuffport.

His fingers are painfully clumsy, and he struggles to unravel it. He doesn't want it to tear in case there's something written inside. His nails eventually catch an edge and—

Everything stops in an instant. His disoriented panic fades like body heat, and he slackens into a boneless vacancy that generally precedes rigor mortis by around four hours. There's really only two things that have ever immobilized Spencer's mind for any extended period of time: rooms just like this one, and the contents of his hand.

He stares for a very long time.

Eventually, his free hand rises to paw abortively at his chest. He just got his four months token—laminated paper, because the metal and plastic coins are considered contraband—but it's still tucked into his shirt pocket back in Florence alongside his glasses and his watch. The marshal hadn't allowed him to bring anything with him when they left.

Laying in Spencer's palm are four little red-brown pills, and he can't manage to form a single discrete thought. His heart isn't racing, his hands have stopped trembling, his breath fails to hitch in his chest. He just stares.

They're sixty milligram extended-release Oxycontin tablets; he knows this because an intelligent FBI agent can't expect to juggle intravenous drug use and fieldwork for very long.

It's a lot of oxy.

It's too much oxy.

They're pills intended for the tolerance of a long-term user managing severe chronic pain, but Spencer's recent personal progress has reset him back to baseline. Taken orally, just one of these would fuck him up well enough that he'd be courting respiratory depression.

The entire handful would probably kill him three times.

He stumbles backwards from the door on unsteady legs, folding when his calves collide against the edge of the bunk. A dramatic impulse momentarily animates him—but he doesn't cast away the contents of his hand. They would skitter across the floor, and he and the pills would still remain trapped together within the same fifty-four square feet. The door has been constructed to avoid a gap that kites might pass underneath, and the tablets won't fit through the tight mesh drain grate in the sink. The cuffport has been locked shut, and the toilet won't flush for another half hour.

That's why he doesn't bother trying anything. That's why he just continues to stare.

He supposes he could crush them into powder, and then—

He could—

He locks his hand into a fist to hide them from view, but Spencer's psychological deterioration has yet to extend to his sense of object permanence. He knows they're there.

It's still enough distance for his mind to resume limping forward.

How did she—

She can't possibly know about the toilet or why he'd try to use it as a timer. Despite concerning evidence, he's pretty sure Cat isn't actually able to read his thoughts. There aren't any microphones or cameras in here; even if there are, she couldn't have access to them right now. That would be a paranoid, irrational conclusion.

Heedless of logic, every hair on the back of his neck prickles from the eyes of an unseen observer. She's thinking about him—but is she wondering what he'll do, or is she already certain?

The pills weigh next to nothing, but they're exerting an inescapable gravitational pull on his attention. There are a lot of other things he should be thinking about, but it's hard when he's attempting to hold down the safety on a live grenade. All he can really focus on is within his grasp, and Spencer can't decide whether it feels more like an impossibility or the inevitable.

His encounter with the CO makes more sense, at least. She hadn't understood what she'd been doing any more than he had, and was just a middleman transporting pills to a trembling addict who'd torn his cell apart looking for the drugs he'd been promised. It's unsurprising; with West Virginia sitting at the epicenter of the opioid crisis, it's either an easy way to boost an income or a problem that ended in blackmail. Cat lives here, so she may have anticipated where he'd likely be placed overnight, but maybe she just pulled the right strings with the right connections to make sure her delivery found its way to wherever he'd be housed. She would have had to set it in motion before this morning—which means that it was coming to him regardless of the outcome of her hostage game.

If he were sitting here with three dead Simmons on his conscience, there's really no question what he'd do.

Funny, how he's a little too quick sometimes; how he reaches things early and gets ahead of the game. He'd just been considering hanging himself, but Schrödinger's thought experiment puts the cat in the box with poison.

In the past four years, Spencer has felt trapped in more unique ways than he could have ever fathomed existing. He's sure he's never been more confined than in this precise moment. Caged and cornered by his actions and all of their consequences, locked inside his misfiring brain, and confronted by all the things he wants and shouldn't take, he's sure he's reached the absolute limit.

Which is why it's paradoxical that he's struggling to remember the last time he's had this many options. Perhaps the strangest aspect of a magic circle: its boundaries are devised to provide its occupants with freedom of choice. The structure it provides creates a temporary order that gives players agency to act. Play needs limits to confine it in the same way that jumping requires the existence of gravity. Outside of these walls, Spencer would have never been like this; she's put him in the only place he can make any move he wants.

There are exits here. If he wants, he can take one of these pills, and hopefully he'll spend the remainder of his pathetic life too busy chasing after more of them to even notice the disasters she'll be causing. He can take all four of them and won't be worrying about anything. He can take the Fifth tomorrow and probably get away with murder, and then he can run away from every connection he's ever made and pray that it's far enough to keep her attention away from them.

She's never forced him to do anything, and, at its heart, play isn't something that can be compelled or coerced. It can be suggested, tempted, even provoked, but it's one of those partnered acts that can really only be undertaken with consent. Game theory claims that it arises whenever two parties are in competition, but from the perspective of sociology, play emerges only if and when its participants choose to willingly engage in it.

Whenever they've sat down together, she's always asked if he wants to. It would have cost a few lives, but this morning she'd made it clear that the door was unlocked for him if he wanted out.

So what does he want?

Spencer unfurls his fingers. The warmth and sweat of his palm has smeared the dye coating the pills, and red-brown stains are blotted all across the fading scar she'd put there in Matamoros.

In all honesty, it's a stupid fucking question.

He's taking the poison. Obviously he's taking the fucking poison—when has he ever once stopped himself? He is so full of shit. Sometimes he tries for a while, but it's a tired refrain; a pattern worn out from repeated play:

Just one more time.

Just one last time, and then he'll be done.

Well, maybe he won't even be lying this time. Incredibly, he's still managed to find himself with a final dilemma on his hands.

The way he sees it, there are two perspectives on the nature of games. Ludology asserts that uncertainty is a fundamental feature of play. A game's meaning arises from making meaningful choices, so an engagement is pointless if it's predetermined. The heart of all competition is the outside chance for the unlikeliest of outcomes; the underdog might fight all the way to the top, the Hail Mary pass may hit its mark, the loser could still make an extraordinary comeback. Unpredictability, randomness, risk, complexity: these are the proposed hallmarks of any genuine game.

From that viewpoint, the Poisoned Pawn is an ideal representative. Despite appearances, there's no zugzwang on the board if a player selects to capture it. Nothing is fated, and it isn't necessarily fatal. Theoreticians have tried, but there are too many lines to follow; even though play has reached its sharpest, there's no decisive solution for the variation's endgame. Spencer knows how disastrous it is to ignorantly accept the bait, but players have swallowed it knowingly and come out the other side. Despite the danger, grandmasters and world champions have advanced out onto the knife's edge and successfully navigated it, turn by turn, decision after critical decision, and they've emerged alive. It's a willfully terrible choice—all the worst impulses of ilinx, to court that degree of disaster intentionally—but the main allure of a tightrope is the narrow possibility that it can be traversed.

Or to look at his problem another way: self-control issues are sometimes framed as an intertemporal game of the Prisoners' Dilemma where a player competes against their future self. Refusing a destructive desire is clearly the most beneficial and cooperative option if a player has higher priorities, but there's a temptation payoff in the present to sell out tomorrow and reap the inferior reward. The worst outcome of the game is a betrayal in the future; the longer the prisoner spends denying an impulse, the greater the loss they risk when their efforts are squandered by a single misstep somewhere down the line. From personal experience, an immediate surrender to an unacceptable urge is much less disappointing than relapsing after a decade of sobriety.

Spencer can try. He can run right after what he wants the most—he just can't ever fuck it up. Every step is perilous, and the tightrope is infinite. Losing is easy when he can fall off anywhere, but the only way to win is to remain constantly upright. The serial killer trying to drag him down is hardly the worst opponent he'll be facing when he's so capable of ruining things on his own. It's a wild gamble against absurd odds, but he can make another indefensibly selfish decision—just one last time, promise—and then he can commit himself to playing a harrowing game where he has to always make the right choice despite being unsure what it is or what comes next, without any room for error, forever.

Yes. Good luck with that; he's feeling pretty off-balance already. Spencer never even wobbled his way across the backyard fence as a boy, and he's handed back so many NA chips he looks like a high roller cashing out his winnings.

He rolls the tablets in his hand, watching the invisible lines that draw them together and the shapes that form between them. It's almost certainly pure happenstance that there are four of them—he knows—but there's no denying the synchronicity. It rings like a siren across his palm, and he feels no uncertainty about it at all. Of the two perspectives he could take on games, the first is so messy and doubtful; the second is attractively straightforward. He's well-aware that he's handling lethal poison, yet finds it surprisingly simple to digest.

Years ago, he and Cat played a game together. They finished their second one this morning, and right now, she's got him playing Truth or Dare.

That's three in a row, and it's a familiar pattern he wishes he could unsee—because with some games, it's possible to know the ending before they even begin.

Spencer always wins at Connect Four.

He just has to make the opening move the next time they play.