The Game of Luck

by Catherine Cerveny

  “Normally, this would be done as an emersion share so you could have a sense of the whole life, including sensory emotions that pair with the audio and visuals,” the Librarian explained in his wispy yet refined voice. “However, because of Julien Sevigny’s limited technological capabilities, the production quality is restricted to what the Eye network could capture. Inferior work of this sort wouldn’t be shared with the public, but given that you are his biological daughter, Ms. Sevigny, and with Mr. Dekker’s former connections to the Eye project, an exception has been made.”

  I shot Caleb a look and he shrugged. I wondered again about what kind of strings he had access to. The Librarian hooked the book to the cabling and showed me how to gesture through the feed.

  “Bring this back to the desk when you’re finished,” the Librarian said, then ducked out of the room.

  “This is your father’s history since he arrived on Venus,” Caleb said. “Try not to be disappointed if it isn’t the experience you hoped. Like the Librarian said, with your father’s tech limitations, just be happy the Eye network captured anything at all.”

  “What can I say? I come from a family of technophobes.”

  “Then how did you end up plugged in?” he asked.

  It was an innocent enough question, but not an answer I felt comfortable sharing with someone I hardly knew. I certainly wasn’t going to give him the scoop on my black-market implants.

  “Long story,” I said instead, then decided to hurry him on his way before he asked more awkward questions. “Thanks for arranging all this. I appreciate it.”

  “No problem. I’ll let you to it then. I’ve got a meeting in about five minutes and need to get back into One Gov’s private loop. See you at the next staff meeting,” he said, and left.

  I wasn’t sure what I expected from the vid footage. When I looked at the compilation stamp, it said there were two standard years of available feed to watch. Two years? Had it been condensed and this was the highlight reel, or had my father been on Venus two years before he’d disappeared? I didn’t have time to watch that much footage. I’d have to skim through and hope something obvious popped up.

  I started the feed. The footage was grainy and washed out, the resolution poor and shot from a distance in places. First image was my father getting out of the space elevator and onto the landing platform on Ishtar Terra. My breath caught. There was the man I barely remembered from my childhood and had seen only a handful of times since, striding out with all the confidence in the world. He was handsome, with the Sevigny coloring and a look to him that didn’t quite fit One Gov’s cookie-cutter baseline genetics mold. He had a blonde with him—apparently my father had a thing for blondes—and she clung like she’d been grafted onto his arm. They kissed on the landing platform, as if deciding this would be their first official kiss on Venus, before getting into the transport shuttle that would take them to Venus Immigration. There was sound as well, but it was garbled. It seemed the Eye hadn’t deemed Julien Sevigny or his blonde worth capturing in vivid detail.

  I’ll admit I was fascinated. This was my father and I now had a firsthand account of his life from a perspective I’d never expected. I wished I had more time to watch the vid. Instead, I jumped through moments, skimming over his life the way a stone might skip over the surface of a lake.

  I saw him with the blonde. Saw their home and how they fought over simple, everyday things that seemed so silly. It made me wonder how much he really loved her and why he was even with her. Did he ever think of Monique? Was their love affair as great as my family had told me or had I reimagined its perfection in my head?

  Eventually, I reached the date from four months ago when he’d sent me the shim. I slowed the feed to almost normal speed. He and the blonde—Gretchen—had been fighting again. She hated their home, their life, there was never enough money, he couldn’t hold a job, she hated Venus because it was so hot and dirty—the list was endless. My father endured it, not saying much and mostly ignoring her. It seemed to be his go-to move when Gretchen got like that. In shrieking tones, she demanded to know why he hadn’t reached out to me for money because apparently I’d married so well, I was drowning in gold notes. I could help them get off this miserable planet. His answer shocked me: He would never try to claw his way back into my life when he’d already ruined it. He believed leaving me with Suzette and Granny G was the best thing he could do for me and had no intention of barging back into my world and burdening me with his issues or taking advantage of me. After that, he’d left Gretchen, went to a local bar, and got drunk, and his shim to me had followed.

  Wow. I paused the feed at that point. I was breathless, amazed, and wishing I’d made an effort to shim him back. Instead, I’d been so annoyed at his inability to be any sort of decent father. To him, he’d done me a service. He’d spent his life holding me at arm’s length, protecting me from himself and his demons because he thought that was best for me. Now it was too late; all that time was gone. I felt a stab of regret and remorse for what could have been. Or maybe things had worked out as they were meant to. Maybe being close to a tempestuous, unstable man like Julien Sevigny would have been a mistake. I had no idea, and suspected not even the Tarot could tell me exactly what I wanted to know.

  I brooded a few minutes before deciding this was an emotional detour I couldn’t afford to investigate. I didn’t have much feed left to view so I made the executive decision to skip to the end. The system AI scanned ahead to the last sol and resumed play from there.

  I was confronted with the image of my father’s leg being amputated. I screamed a little and jumped from my chair. Oh gods, what the fuck? The blood. Was that a hacksaw? A white room with bright white floodlights overhead. Several figures dressed in white, as if ready for surgery and reminding me of the Renew prep rooms. What was going on? What had Julien stumbled into?

  When I calmed down, I instructed the feed to go back twenty-four hours. Nothing but blackness. Another twenty-four. Nothing. I kept going back until I had feed again. It was my father, sweating, running, barely able to catch his breath. He was on a dirt road and looked terrified, continuously glancing behind him. I reversed the feed again. He was in a bar, drinking, looking calm and relaxed. He was with a different blonde, definitely not Gretchen. They were flirting, having a good time. I watched in real time and then experienced the utter horror of watching my father and the new blonde leave the bar, go to a room in a seedy part of whatever town they were in, and have sex. All I could do was thank the gods I didn’t have to deal with the emersion share as I sped up the feed.

  After, he went home, then to work maybe—it was hard to catch the exact details at the speed I was cruising. Then blackness, running down the dirt road again, followed by blackness. Shit. I played the feed forward and back several times, at different speeds, but the black skips wouldn’t go away.

  Next came the white room again. My father was strapped to a table, being prepped for a medical procedure. Then white robed figures I couldn’t identify. He was awake but seemed paralyzed in his own body. He could only watch as the figures approached. Then the leg amputation and other things I couldn’t watch. Probes. Scrapings. I had no idea how the Eye was getting all this, recording as if there in the room with them. I couldn’t imagine why someone hadn’t turned off the feed so it wouldn’t capture this. Maybe they couldn’t disable the Eye, or maybe they hadn’t cared.

  It was brutal and horrifying to see, but I sat through it with grim determination. I watched my father be examined and dissected, skipping through the frames until I got to the end. The last bloody image was of my father hollowed out and his organs harvested. His eyes were open and lifeless. He’d been awake the whole time. Quiet—I don’t think he felt what was happening or he would have been screaming—yet aware all the same. Helpless. How in the world would this help anyone isolate the luck gene, if that was indeed what they’d been doing? What had been the point? I thought of my other family members—Luc, Orin, Yasmine, and Tait—and knew i
n my gut they had all endured this. Knew that if Lotus and I had been caught, we would have been subjected to this too. Gods, what sort of monsters were hunting us? What would I tell Suzette?

  Once I’d calmed, I disconnected the book and exited the room. Finding the Librarian AI, I returned the book and thanked him for his help.

  “That is quite all right. I’m more than happy to be of service,” the Librarian said. “Hopefully you found your time here valuable. The Venus Athenaeum is always open to the public at any time. Please come back to visit in the future.”

  Not bloody likely. I was never going to set foot in the Venus Athenaeum again.

  Three hours of standard time had passed, meaning I’d run through most of my daily CN-net allotment. I hauled ass down the street and toward the nexus-node jump pad, with only one goal in mind—get out of this realm and never come back.

  Opening my eyes, I was back in the office beside Alexei’s, in my reclining chair. In Soyuz Park. Back on Mars. I slumped forward over my desk and took deep, shuddering breaths in an effort to fight off a panic that had no interest in going anywhere. I wouldn’t be able to unsee the images I’d witnessed from that white room for as long as I lived. I knew now my father had been hunted, captured, experimented on, and harvested. He was gone, stripped away from my life as if he’d never been. The sense of loss I felt for him stunned me. Or rather, not so much for him, but for the loss of a dream instead—one I’d harbored my entire life. There would be no happy family for me. No loving parents who adored their child and made a complete unit, insulated from the world. I’d never had it with my parents, and I couldn’t recreate it for myself. I thought I had made my peace with it; Alexei and I would be together, and I had no plans to change that. But I hadn’t realized I secretly held out hope until all that hope was gone.

  A movement in front of the window. I shrieked, fear spiking in me as fresh as a summer daisy before the figure resolved himself. Alexei stood looking outside toward the Baikonur launch pad with his hands behind his back. He’d turned when I shrieked, almost moved toward me, then stopped. The hesitation said he didn’t trust either himself or me. There was something in his face too—a look that scared me.

  “You’re back,” he said. “I didn’t want to interrupt. Are you all right?”

  I wanted to tell him my new revelations, but that look had me rethinking everything. It was cold, and hard, and very dangerous. Something had happened, and he had decided on a plan I wouldn’t like.

  “What’s going on?” My gut was on edge now, prodding, alerting me. “Has something happened?”

  He left the window to sit on the edge of the desk next to my chair. He brushed my cheek with his thumb. “You first. Why are you upset?”

  “I finally got access to the Eye project on Venus and found out what happened to my father.” I sounded robotic, reciting something that was of no interest to me. Maybe that was the only way I could get through the details. “I saw him hunted like an animal, then dissected, dismembered, organs harvested, and then die. I should have stopped watching when I realized what I was seeing, but I was trying to find clues. All I know is no one should ever see what I just witnessed, especially not when it’s your parent.”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t spare you that pain.”

  “No. What I saw was horrible, but necessary. It reminded me what we’re up against and how we can’t let our guard down. No one is going to take another person away from me. Not if I can stop them.”

  “I’ll put the Ursa 3 launch on hold until we discover who’s behind this. Determining who’s after the luck gene takes priority now.”

  I gasped. “You can’t! It’s cost billions of gold notes to get the project this far. You have investors and accountants and so much wrapped up in this. Every delay just makes it that much more expensive.”

  “It’s only money. Ursa 3 can be rescheduled. This is different. This is personal.”

  I swallowed and nodded, understanding. “Tell me why you look like you’re going to unleash holy hell on everyone.”

  His thumb continued to stroke my cheek. I served as the touchstone that kept him grounded, and right then, he seemed to need grounding.

  “Because war is finally coming, and I plan on us being ready.”

  War? Oh, this couldn’t be good. Dread settled into the pit of my stomach, content to make a home there. It made me wonder if I needed to start praying and lighting incense sticks to all the known gods in the pantheon.

  “Tell me.”

  “It’s Felipe,” he said, simply. “There’s been an accident.”

  19

  I had no idea why, but Adjunct Rax Garwood now seemed to be the gatekeeper for everything in my life. When I tried to ping Felipe, all his incomings were forwarded to Rax, and I was disconnected. I tried to ping Rax and got the equivalent of an “out of office” and was disconnected. I tried to contact Tanith. Back to Rax. What the hell? My grandfather, and I couldn’t get any damn information! Worse, as Felipe’s Attaché, I got all the spillover pings. When people couldn’t reach him, they tried me and begged information. I had to say I didn’t have anything new to tell them, then switched my avatar to private mode.

  I dithered, paced, and left Garwood numerous scathing messages to ping me back, but nothing. I reached out to other members of my Venus team, Caleb included. Nothing. Even Brody was unreachable. I knew he planned to lay low, but I’d assumed I could still contact him. The total lack of communication was scary, making me feel like I was on my own deserted island.

  The only information I received came through CN-net news feeds. Felipe’s accident was a nano-air bombing the hooahs hadn’t prevented. Felipe took the same route to work, which was scrubbed clean every sol by One Gov security. However, there’d been a detour because of a protest, so his flight-limo took an alternate route. The nano-air bomb had been set to hover along the new unswept route, and boom, instant terrorist success. His injuries were so extensive, he’d been placed directly in a Renew tank to begin treatments immediately. Standard Renew treatments could last from a week to two weeks, depending on the work being done. Felipe’s projected treatment time was twice that, or longer.

  “I’m going to find that little shit and kick his ass all over Elysium City,” I muttered to Alexei, thinking how Rax had blown me off. I’d given up all semblance of working. Anxiety and worry had me pacing laps around Alexei’s office, to the point where I was actually getting on my own nerves. Finally I announced, “I’m going to take Feodor for a walk.” At this, Feodor jumped up out of his dog bed and pranced over to me, having heard the magic word—walk. “I can’t run another card spread. All I’m getting is bad news I can’t interpret because I can’t focus. I’ve pulled more than enough stress and deception cards out of the decks I brought with me. I don’t need to see another Five of Swords or the Moon to know someone is lying.”

  Alexei took this the way he took all of my rants when it came to the Tarot—he sat back and asked questions. “Did they suggest what we need to do?”

  I liked how he said “we.” “Of course they did: Seven of Wands—calm down and face the challenge. But how can we when there’s a new King of Swords on the scene and I don’t know who that is…Unless Belikov is still alive.” I whirled on Alexei. “He isn’t still alive, is he?”

  “No, not alive” was all he said to that. “Do you know where to start looking for the new King?”

  I went back to pacing. Feodor trotted with me. “One Gov, obviously. Secretary Arkell makes the most sense, but I’m just not feeling it. I’ve run spreads on all the Adjuncts I’ve met and there isn’t anyone else who fits the bill. Rax is nowhere near slick enough to be King, although gods know he wishes he could be.”

  “Then look for someone who isn’t obvious. Someone behind the scenes. Someone with access to One Gov’s systems, who could manipulate them without detection. They would need to know about your mother’s research as well. Given what happened to your father—the violence and the cruelty—I would say we�
��re dealing with someone who’s holding a grudge.”

  “With Felipe out of the way, there’s no one protecting either of us,” I said, forcing my brain to logically work through all the scattered pieces and clues and fit the puzzle together. “Someone wants my luck gene and the Consortium gone. Felipe was the only one with enough power to stop One Gov from rolling over us.”

  Alexei nodded, as if he’d worked this out years ago and was just letting me reach this conclusion myself. “War is coming,” he said again.

  I swore. Feodor, poor little dog who thought he’d be getting a walk, sat mournfully on his furry butt and watched. A thought occurred to me midway through my pacing circuit of the room. “You need to snipe the Eye project and find my father’s file. It was tough for me to watch, and there may be clues in the feed I missed.”

  “The Eye is a highly secure program. It will take strength over stealth to crack it open.”

  I bit my lip. “Is it dangerous?”

  “The queenmind will know I was involved, but if you think we need the file, then I’ll get it.” It was said with such confidence, I knew I had no reason to doubt him.

  I looked over to Feodor who’d sat so patiently while we plotted, then bent down to rub his head. There wasn’t anything more I could do now. For the moment, I had to leave this in Alexei’s hands and wait for Rax to ping me back.

  “Such a good puppy,” I crooned. “Do you still want walkies?”

  Now that he had my attention, Feodor was full of puppy exuberance all over again. I picked up the leash from where I’d thrown it on a table and snapped it to his collar. If it was possible for a dog to become more excited, Feodor did, running around after his tail in a tight circle and making happy little yips.

  “I’d ask you to come with me, but I know you’re busy. I’m going to shim Lotus and Celeste. I want to check in and make sure everyone is okay.”