The Round Table met every Thursday at Zay's apartment, where the Wi-Fi was strong and the judgment was nonexistent.
The name was Mars's fault. Junior year, Hialeah Middle School, the five of them crammed around a cafeteria table with a first-edition Player's Handbook and a bag of off-brand Doritos, and Mars — who even at thirteen spoke exclusively in mythology and manifesto — had declared that they were knights. "Not the armor kind," he'd clarified, gesturing with a tortilla chip. "The vibes kind. The loyalty kind. We're a round table. Nobody at the head. Nobody at the foot. Equal." Priya had called it corny. Zay had shrugged and said it was fine. Kofi had said "I'm DMing, so technically I'm at the head," and everyone had thrown chips at him. The name stuck. A decade later, it was still the only kingdom any of them had ever belonged to.
Zay's apartment was a ground-floor two-bedroom in Allapattah that smelled permanently of jerk seasoning and Tiger Balm. Isaiah "Zay" Whitmore was six foot four, two hundred and sixty pounds, played left guard for the FIU Panthers, and was currently sitting cross-legged on a floor cushion reading Volume 14 of One Piece while waiting for the session to start. He read manga between reps at the gym. He read manga during film study. He read manga the way other people breathed — constantly, unconsciously, as if the act of following illustrated stories about pirates and heroes was a biological function his body required to maintain equilibrium.
"You're late," Zay said without looking up.
"I'm always late," Teo said.
"And yet it always surprises me."
"That's a you problem."
Zay turned a page. A smile — slow, enormous, the kind of smile that rearranged a face built for violence into something that looked like a sunrise. "Sit down. Priya's in the kitchen threatening to optimize the snack spread."
Priya Nair was, in fact, in the kitchen. She stood at Zay's counter performing triage on a chaos of chips, dips, and energy drinks with the focused intensity of an engineer solving a load-bearing problem — which, in a sense, she was. Priya was a mechanical engineering student at FIU, 5'2", wire-framed glasses, a braid that reached her waist, and a mind that processed the world as a series of systems to be analyzed, optimized, and, when necessary, dismantled.
"The salsa is next to the hummus," she announced to no one in particular. "This is a violation of snack topology. Salsa and hummus occupy competing dip categories. They need a buffer zone. I'm using the pretzels."
"Nobody asked," Zay said.
"Nobody needed to. The problem was self-evident."
Teo sat at the gaming table — a folding card table Zay had reinforced with plywood after the Great Collapse of sophomore year, when Mars had slammed his fist during a critical roll and the entire surface had buckled, sending miniatures and Mountain Dew cascading onto the carpet in what Priya had later described as "a structural failure with caloric consequences."
His phone buzzed. The group chat:
Mars:running late. 20 min. don't start without me or i swear on every conspiracy ever conspiracied
Marco "Mars" Delgado. The final knight. Freelance graphic designer by trade, paranormal investigator by conviction, the kind of person who said "do your own research" and genuinely meant it — not as a deflection but as an invitation, because Mars had done the research, all of it, every forum and archive and declassified document, and he wanted company in the rabbit hole. He believed in aliens, Illuminati, ancient astronauts, government black sites, interdimensional entities, and the healing properties of specific crystals, and the terrifying thing about Mars was that he was wrong about approximately 80% of it — which meant he was right about 20%, and nobody could ever figure out which 20%.
Kofi appeared on the laptop screen. Video call from Atlanta. He was in his bedroom — Teo recognized the Georgia Tech pennant on the wall, the dual monitors behind him, the controlled environment of a computer science major who liked his variables defined and his dependencies managed.
"Evening, Table," Kofi said.
"Evening, King," Zay replied. The formal greeting. A ritual older than some of their friendships.
"We waiting for Mars?"
"When are we not?"
Kofi smiled. It was the wrong shape. Teo noticed immediately — the way you notice a chord played with one finger slightly off the fret. The note was close enough to pass for most listeners, but Teo had perfect pitch for people the way he had perfect pitch for music, and Kofi's smile was a half-step flat.
Mars arrived in eighteen minutes, not twenty — a personal record. He burst through Zay's door carrying a canvas messenger bag covered in enamel pins (UFO, Eye of Providence, a cartoon Mothman giving a thumbs-up) and a six-pack of Mexican Coke because Mars believed that cane sugar was "vibrational fuel" and corn syrup was "a government sedative." He dropped into his chair, distributed the bottles, and said: "The energy in here is immense tonight. What happened?"
"Nothing happened," Priya said. "Sit down."
"Something happened. I can feel it. It's like — you know that feeling before a thunderstorm? That electrical thing? It's like that but inside." His eyes swept the table and landed on Teo. Stayed there. "It's coming from you."
Teo's stomach dropped. "What?"
"Your energy, bro. It's loud. Like someone turned up a dial. Have you been doing something different? Meditating? Fasting? Did you touch a meteorite?"
"Mars," Priya said, in the voice she reserved for redirecting him from the ledge. "Can we play the game."
"I'm just saying —"
"You're always just saying. Roll initiative."
They played. For two hours, the world contracted to a card table in Allapattah — five friends navigating a dungeon that Kofi had designed with the architectural precision of a software engineer, every encounter balanced, every trap logical, every NPC voiced with a commitment that would have been embarrassing if it weren't so obviously an act of love. This was the gift of The Round Table: suspension. Inside the game, Teo was not a failing father or a broke musician or a man whose hands glowed in the dark. He was a half-elf bard named Canto with a +7 to Performance and a lute that could charm any creature within thirty feet. The irony was not lost on him.
But Kofi was off. His DMing — normally fluid, improvisational, responsive — was mechanical tonight. He described rooms without texture. He forgot an NPC's accent mid-sentence. During a combat encounter, he miscalculated damage twice, and Kofi never miscalculated.
During a bathroom break, Teo texted Zay: What's wrong with Ko?
Zay, sitting four feet away, texted back: Don't know. Been like this for two weeks. Something with his mom.
When the session resumed, Kofi called for a pause. The screen shifted — his face filling the frame, the Georgia Tech pennant behind him like a flag at half-mast.
"I need to tell you guys something."
The table went quiet. Round Table quiet — not absence of sound but a collective leaning-in, five bodies orienting toward a single point the way iron filings orient toward a magnet.
"My mom's been getting death threats."
The words landed like stones in still water. Priya set down her dice. Zay closed the manga. Mars, for once, did not speak.
"Real ones," Kofi continued. "Not Twitter trolls. Letters. Physical mail. Someone broke into our mailbox — not to steal, to deliver. There was a dead bird on the front porch last week. Not a cat kill. It was —" He paused. Swallowed. "The feathers were spread out. Arranged. Like someone was sending a message."
"What kind of message?" Priya asked, her voice calibrated to the exact frequency of calm that she used when she needed to think clearly and needed everyone around her to think clearly too.
"I don't know. Mom says the FBI is involved, but she also says —" Another pause. Longer. The pause of a man deciding how much to reveal, how much weight the bridge could bear. "She thinks it's federal. Not the FBI investigating the threats. She thinks federal agencies are the threat. She's been looking into something. Some program that doesn't officially exist. She won't give me details. She just says the deeper she digs, the worse it gets."
Mars leaned forward. His usual manic energy had been replaced by something Teo had rarely seen: genuine stillness. "Ko. Listen to me. I know you all think I'm crazy —"
"We don't think you're crazy," Zay said.
"You do, and it's fine, I've made my peace. But listen. Atlanta has weird energy. Not city energy. Government energy. Black site energy. There are programs — MKULTRA wasn't the last one, it was the template. If your mom is pulling threads on something that doesn't officially exist, she's pulling threads on something that was designed not to exist. And the people who design those things don't send warning letters. They send —" He stopped. Looked at the dead bird implication hanging in the air. "Just tell her to be careful. Please."
"She's the most careful person I know," Kofi said. "That's what scares me."
The table absorbed this. Five friends recalibrating. The dungeon on the game mat suddenly seemed very small, and the real world outside Zay's apartment very large, and the distance between a card table in Allapattah and a front porch in Atlanta very short.
"What do you need?" Priya asked. The most practical sentence in the English language, delivered by the most practical person Teo had ever met.
"I need Teo," Kofi said. "At the fundraiser. To play. And to —" His composure cracked, just slightly, just enough to show the architecture beneath. "I just need my people close."
Zay, without hesitation: "Go, Teo. We got things here."
"The kids —"
"We got it." Zay's voice was bedrock. The voice of a man who could bench press four hundred pounds and had once carried Mars out of a bar on his back like a duffel bag and who understood, with the simple clarity of a good man, that friendship was not a feeling but a logistics operation. "Sofia's got backup. Priya and I can check in on the girls. Go."
Teo looked around the table. Priya was nodding. Mars was already googling something on his phone — probably "Atlanta black site programs" or "dead bird occult symbolism" — and his expression suggested he was finding exactly what he expected. Zay had reopened his manga but wasn't reading it, just holding it, the way you hold a familiar object when the unfamiliar is pressing close.
"Okay," Teo said. "I'll go."
The session resumed. They played another hour. Mars's bard NPC delivered a suspiciously specific monologue about hidden forces manipulating kingdoms from the shadows, and Priya kicked him under the table, and Kofi laughed — a real laugh this time, half-step corrected, almost in tune — and for sixty more minutes, the world was small and good and safe.
After. Packing up. Miniatures in the box, dice in the bag, the ritual dismantling of a world they'd return to next Thursday because some kingdoms only existed on card tables and that didn't make them less real.
Mars pulled Teo aside. The apartment door was open. The Allapattah night was warm and smelled like jasmine and exhaust.
"Teo." Dead serious. No pins, no manifestos, no rabbit holes. Just his name, spoken by a man who looked, for the first time in their friendship, genuinely unsettled. "I know you think I'm always on about something. And I am. But this is different."
"Mars —"
"Something's been off about you for weeks. Your energy is — I don't know how to describe it. It's loud. Like a signal. Like you're broadcasting on a frequency that used to be quiet and now it's —" He made a gesture with his hands, fingers spreading outward, an explosion in slow motion. "I don't know what's happening to you. Maybe you don't either. But whatever it is, it's real. I can feel it from across the room. And if I can feel it —" He paused. Let the implication breathe. "Other things can too."
The night air shifted. Not temperature. Not wind. Something subtler — a thickening, a density, as if the atmosphere around Teo had increased by a single degree of pressure that only Mars's particular brand of calibrated paranoia could detect.
"Just be careful in Atlanta," Mars said. "Please."
Teo looked at his friend. At the enamel pins and the messenger bag and the eyes that saw too much and the mind that connected too many dots and the heart that, underneath all the noise, was simply afraid for the people it loved.
"I will," Teo said.
He meant it. He drove home with the windows down and Mars's words riding shotgun and the second heartbeat in his chest keeping a tempo that sounded, if he listened closely enough, like a countdown.
[End of Episode 8][Next Episode: "Kingdom Hall"]