The figure wore a heavy traveling coat that fell past the knees, collar turned up, and a wide flat hat angled down, and between the collar and the brim there was , Adam looked, and looked again, trying to see a face, yet he could see nothing.
He made himself walk toward it anyway.
As they approached, the figure turned its head , that was all, just the head, smooth and unhurried , and tracked them the last several paces. When they reached the table, it spoke. The voice came out light. Friendly, even. Pitched like a host's, warm at the front and impossible to find the back of.
"Two of you," the figure said. "And only one chair. How awkward."They still couldn’t see his face. "But then , only one of you came here to think. Didn't you."
"I'd like to try the door," Adam said.
"Everyone would like to try the door." The figure made a gesture at the empty chair , an open hand, palm up, the same hand from the poster. "Far fewer would like to have tried it."
Why is this weirdo being so dramatic, can’t he just get to the point already? Adam taught to himself.
The coat shifted; something about the way it moved suggested amusement, though Adam could not have said by what. "Sit, Adam."
Adam was halfway into the chair before the obvious thing landed on him, and when it did he kept his face very still.
He had not given the figure his name.
"How do you know my name?". Adam asked, surprised.
"I am a magician, knowing my guest’s names is the least I could do, your name is Adam, and your friend’s name is Zeren, I’m I right?"
Zeren and Adam looked at each other for a second, then looked back at the strange man.
"Yea, whatever, let’s get this done with. And just to be sure, if I solve your puzzle, I get in for free right?"
"The promise is to be fulfilled.", He responded.
"The rules are simple, the way the good ones always are," the figure said, settling into stillness across the table. "There is no time limit. There is no penalty for failing , you may stand and walk away whenever you like, and no one will think less of you, except possibly yourself. "
The hooded man spread his hands, and a deck appeared.
"A game, then. I draft ten cards from this deck and show you all ten. From those ten I choose four, and I arrange them in an order known only to me. We will call my arrangement the code." The cards riffled once, soft. "Your task is to find it."
Adam waited for more and, when it didn't come, said the obvious thing. "That's just luck. There's no way to play that well , I'd be just guessing."
"Exactly." The word came out pleased. "Which is why I haven't finished. You make tries. A try is an arrangement of four cards you propose to me, and for each one I give you a reading. Any card you place that exists in my code but sits in the wrong position, I call touched. Any card that exists in my code and sits in its correct position, I call dead." A pause, deliberately laid. "I will not tell you which are which. I'll tell you only how many of each. The rest is yours to untangle."
"So, the fewer tries I need, the better." Adam was already turning it over. "How many to win?"
"There's no fixed number. Played perfectly, this game falls in six to eight tries , six means flawless play and fortune, eight means flawless play and wretched luck. So I won't be counting your tries." The hood tilted. "I'll be watching how you spend them."
"Alright. Bet."
The man began to shuffle out his ten. Adam stopped him.
"Wait. Don't make the ten random, same game, but make the cards the ace through nine of hearts. Ace as zero, then one to nine. Let me track them as numbers instead of pictures."
A low sound from under the hood that might have been a laugh. "Good judgment. Done , with one condition. I swap the seven of hearts for the seven of spades."
He wants the odd one out, Adam thought. He looked at it for half a second and then decided, flatly, not to. It's a seven. I'll read it as a seven and nothing else.
"As you like. I want a pen and paper."
"Of course." The deck stilled. "I was going to insist. The game's near impossible in your head , I'd rather test your reasoning than your memory."
The man laid his four face-down between them, squared the edges, and folded his hands. Adam saw only the backs.
"They can't repeat?" Adam asked. "Not in your code, not in my tries."
"Just so."
"Then let's begin." Adam wrote a clean row of ten digits at the top of the page, 0 through 9, and under the seven put a small mark , spade , and then, on purpose, stopped looking at the mark.
He opened wide.
"Zero, one, two, three."
The hood: "No touched. One dead."
One of these four is exactly where it belongs. The other three aren't in the code at all. He didn't know yet which of the four was the dead one. He crossed nothing out; he only noted it.
"Four, five, six, seven."
"Two touched. No dead."
Two of these live in the code, both in the wrong spots. The other two are out. Adam set his pen down a moment and counted what he had. Two tries, eight distinct cards used, no overlap , and only three live cards surfaced across all eight. Which means one of the two I haven't touched at all , the eight or the nine , has to be in the code. He marked them both with a question.
The third try he chose to re-test on purpose.
"Seven, one, two, five."
"One touched. No dead."
Adam felt the gears bite. And then the colder read, the one the result handed him for free: in the first try, zero–one–two–three had produced a dead. If that dead card had been the one or the two, it would still register now since their positions weren’t changed , and here, we got a touched not a dead card. So the dead from try one wasn't the one or the two. It was the zero or the three, So the single touched card here is the seven or the five. He underlined both.
.
"Seven, six, two, three."
"One touched. No dead."
He sat with it. I reused the two on purpose , I know it's dead weight, it clears the slot for me to read the rest. One touched, no dead. He worked it out loud in his head. I put the three back in its first-try position. No dead this time. So the three isn't sitting in a correct slot , and combined with try one, the three is simply out. Which means the dead card from try one, the one sitting perfectly in place, was the zero. First position. Locked.
And the touched here was either the six or the seven. He looked at try three again , seven, one, two, five, one touched , and try two , four, five, six, seven, two touched , and something clicked that wasn't a guess.
The seven appears in two and three. The five appears in two and three. In try three only one of them is live. They can't both be in the code at once. He turned the pen over his knuckles, once. So the code's live pair is one of two packages. If the live card is the five, then its partner from try two is the six , five and six travel together. If the live card is the seven, then its partner is the four , seven and four travel together. A matched set, either way. Plus the zero, locked first. Plus one straggler , the eight or the nine , that I still haven't laid down even once.
Three cards he could almost name, and two open questions stacked into a single move.
"What's it going to be, Adam?" the voice asked, light. "Where are you?"
He's tracking it, Adam thought. Step for step. He knows exactly where I am. It should have rattled him. Instead he found the next try had built itself.
"Zero, five, eight, six."
A breath from under the hood , almost a smile, given sound. "One touched. One dead."
The dead is the zero. I already own that , first position, settled. Which meant the single touched among the rest was real new information. Five and six are here together. If they were the live pair, that's two touched, not one. They're not. So the pair is seven and four. And the touched card, the only one left standing in that try , the eight. The eight is live. The nine is out.
Four cards. Zero, seven, four, eight. He knew the whole hand. All that remained was the order.
"You've got them," the man said.
"I've got them." Adam didn't look up. Zero is first, fixed. From try two, the seven sat in fourth and was only touched, so seven isn't fourth , and from try three it sat in first and zero owns first, no help there; net, the seven lives in second or third. The eight, from this last try, sat third and was touched, so the eight isn't third , second, then, since first is taken and seven wants the back half. He stopped. No. Not certain. The four can sit anywhere but first. He ran the survivors and three orders stood up and refused to fall: zero-seven-four-eight. Zero-eight-seven-four. Zero-four-seven-eight.
Three arrangements. One answer. And no try left that could separate all three without spending another guess to do it.
That's what he meant. Adam almost laughed. Six to eight. I'm at the wall where deduction ends and luck starts. Pick right now and it's six. Pick wrong and the answer he gives makes the seventh a certainty. He could play it safe , burn try six purely to split the three, win clean on seven, no gamble. Flawless, and slow, and the man had told him plainly he wasn't counting tries.
He was counting nerve.
Adam looked at the three orders a last time, and chose the one his gut had been quietly holding the whole while.
"Zero, four, seven, eight."
The hood was silent just long enough for the silence to be nerve wrecking.
"Congratulations," the man said softly. "That's the code."
"YEEAAA LETS GOO I DID IT!!", Adam said excited, as Zeren was clapping while jumping in his place.
"Well played, Adam." The cards were already gone from the table; he hadn't seen them go. The open hand turned toward the red curtain. "The house is yours tonight. Go in , you've more than earned the seat."
Adam and Zeren passed through the curtain, into the murmur of a waiting crowd.
Behind them, at the emptied table, the hooded man did not move to follow. A girl came up at his shoulder, quiet, from where she'd been standing in the dark the whole time.
"Master. He solved it.", she stopped for second then continued. "He's the first. He must be a very promising person."
"He played it perfectly." The man watched the curtain settle where the boy had gone through. "Made his own rules before we began. Turned my cards into numbers so the game would fit his hand instead of mine." A pause. "And he didn't so much as blink at the seven of spades. I changed the suit right in front of him to bias his eye, and he simply... declined to be biased. Looked straight past the trick as if I'd never tried it."
"You sound impressed.", the girl said surprised "I don't think I've seen you like this before."
"Pack everything up, Wendy. We're done with the door tonight." The hood turned, unhurried, back toward the lights. "I won't take another guest, so no one's going to walk up now and fail and spoil the mood, I'm in too good a mood for that."
"What was his name?", Wendy asked.
"Adam, his name was Adam."