The Wookiee makes a noise she interprets, loosely, as embarrassed pleasure.
“If you are ever looking for a taste of home, and know me to be onworld, please feel free to call upon me. I would be delighted to help you.”
The Wookiee makes a noise somewhere between a warble and a growl. Derla sighs, half laughing at herself.
“Yes, I suppose I have fallen prey to the first danger of Canto Bight: I forgot that the house will always emerge victorious. I apologize for making another request of you so soon after the first, knowing that both or either could cause you trouble, but would it be possible for you to escort me to the facilities? We had time to begin our sampling before the lights went out, and I need to make use of them rather badly.” Derla looks at him hopefully. She’s pushing her luck, and she knows it, but she still needs to see what’s going on. It’s important. Important enough, in this moment, to take the risk.
The Wookiee hesitates long enough that she’s fairly sure her gamble has failed: Then he nods and growls, and grasps her upper arm in one surprisingly gentle hand, all but engulfing it. He holds her, not as he might hold a prisoner, but as he would hold someone he was instructed to escort. He looks like a bodyguard, and she is relieved and honored in the same measure.
“If you’re ever looking for more than wine—another employer, perhaps—please feel free to seek me out,” she murmurs.
He purrs acknowledgment, and they begin making their way across the floor.
The other security guards and bouncers are still moving table-to-table, and from the looks of the chaos in their wake, they have yet to learn subtlety. They question; they accuse. They leave people angrier than they were before—and since no one is remaining stationary, some of these people must have been questioned two and even three times. Tension within the club is growing. Derla can easily believe that it might erupt into violence before too much longer, and can’t see any easy way to make it better.
Ubialla will not stop, will not open the doors, until the wine is in her possession. If she’s willing to push things this far and risk this much damage to her reputation, she can’t be overstating the danger she faces if she fails to recover that bottle. Derla fights to keep the realization from showing on her face.
If she wins the negotiation, she will not leave here alive. If she withdraws, the sisters may declare it to be over, with no winner, and none of them will leave here alive. And if the wine is somehow gone forever…
It is too dismaying to consider, and so she considers, instead, what she believes to be the most likely situation. She continues walking, continues scanning the club, until she sees one of the sisters wandering, seemingly aimless, through the crowd. It’s all an act. There is purpose in every step, every move of her hands and turn of her head. The crowd seems calmer after the sister passes, as if whatever nonsense she speaks is somehow soothing to them. They turn, almost as one, to head for the nearest bar, and the sister, briefly without a crowd for cover, sees Derla.
Derla nods to her, minutely, and jerks her chin toward the restroom door. The sister nods, and turns her path in that direction.
The Wookiee, who has not been instructed to keep them apart, nonetheless looks faintly nonplussed when he reaches the restroom door, Derla in tow, at the same time as the sister. He looks to Derla and makes an inquisitive sound.
She closes her lower eyes and says, solemnly, “I promise you we are not doing anything that would hurt Miss Gheal in any way. I would like to resolve this as quickly and painlessly as possible. Wouldn’t you like the same?”
The Wookiee makes a sad sound and lets go of her arm. Derla touches his hand.
“Please consider my offer,” she says.
She slips through the door. The sister, whichever it may be, is close behind.
—
Like everything else about Ubialla’s club, the facilities are normally in exquisite condition, with organic attendants prepared to direct patrons to the stalls and private rooms designed to serve their needs. Once the door is closed, Derla reaches out and grasps the sister’s elbow. The other woman looks at her.
“I don’t know which you are, and I find I do not particularly care,” says Derla. “I know the wine wasn’t stolen.”
The sister blinks. “How?” she asks.
Derla has to fight not to laugh out loud. It had been a guess more than a certainty. It seems like she’s a better gambler than she ever thought. “You were too calm,” she says. “Had a treasure of such importance been stolen from me, I would have been the first to lose my composure. You and your sister both, you have remained so calm. We don’t know much about your world—”
“Hyperspace is a rainbow,” says the sister.
Derla does not quite suppress the urge to snort. “Your world,” she repeats. “I have tasted your wine. I know every flavor this galaxy has to offer. Yours is exotic, yes, and exciting, but it’s not from another dimension. It comes from a place that can be found. That will be found, one day. You’ll want friends when that happens, not only enemies. Ubialla is not going to be a friend. Any chance of that died when you contacted me instead of her. Right now all you can do is try to minimize the damage already done.”
“What do you suggest?” asks the sister.
“Appease her. Flatter her, favor her, grant her the wine in our negotiation, whatever is necessary to see that all of us walk out of here tonight alive. You carry a treasure. There’s no question of that. Should you ever wish to sell more than a single bottle, I would be honored to be your agent in the wider galaxy. Discretion comes very easily to me, and you would never need to tell me how to find your world. My only request is that we do no further business on Cantonica. I believe the city of Canto Bight will be a bad place for the three of us to be seen in tandem for quite some time to come.” Derla shakes her head decisively. “You have played an excellent game, and I applaud you for your audacity, but there is no victory here. There is only the hope of walking away more or less unscathed.”
The sister is silent for a moment, considering Derla’s words, before she says, with no small trace of amusement in her voice, “And your desire to be the sole agent of our wine has nothing to do with this warning.”
“It has everything to do with this warning,” says Derla. “Everything. If we all die here tonight because you’ve backed Ubialla into a corner from which she sees no escape, well. You certainly won’t be in any position to provide me with more wine, and I won’t be in any position to move it. If I believed in a deity, I would be suggesting you appeal to its mercies now, and hope that it could guide you to some favorable if unlikely outcome. I want your wine. You want, one presumes, to make a profit. Neither of us gets what we want if we don’t walk away.”
“I will tell my sister what you have said,” says the sister. “We will consider your words. We will come to an accord.”
“I suggest you consider quickly,” says Derla. “I don’t believe Ubialla’s patience is going to last for much longer, and it’s going to end badly for someone. I would rather it not be me.”
The sister nods and slips away, leaving Derla alone in the cavernous room. She still doesn’t know which sister she just spoke to.
She doesn’t know whether either sister is going to listen.
The water from the taps is cool and pleasant on her fingers. Real water, not sonic waves: one more luxury for one of the most luxurious places in the sector. Derla lets it run over her fingers for a moment, savoring the sensation of it, before she splashes some over her face, turns off the tap, and walks back to the door. The Wookiee is waiting just outside. He growl-grumbles relief at the sight of her.
“It is all right, my friend,” she says, touching his arm lightly. “I would not escape and leave you to face the wrath of Ubialla alone. Come now. Return me to my chair before she comes and finds us gone.”
He folds his hand over hers, like some strange parody of a queen’s attendants seeing her to her throne, and leads her back toward the booth where everything went
wrong.
CALLA WALKS CALMLY TOWARD THE closed nightclub doors. It’s strange to see the place shut down when every other business on the street is open and enjoying increased business—not only from the sudden lack of competition, but from the mystery of it all. What could possibly lead Ubialla to close down at mid-cycle, when there’s drinking to be done and the casinos and racetrack are churning out their endless stream of newly minted rich, each of them dying to drink to their success at the fabled Ubialla’s? Every minute those doors are closed costs her more than simply credits. She’s losing reputation, losing cachet, and while no one doubts her ability to win it back, it seems beyond strange for her to take the risk at all.
The walkways are well lit and reasonably safe, especially here, with merchants hawking their wares and criers for the various clubs waving discount slips and shouting promises to try to entice this sudden windfall of free custom their way. If she were to tread into the shadows, she would quickly find herself in substantially more danger, and so she will not do that.
She wears a long silver cloak over her resort uniform. She carries a bottle in one hand. She knows she should be afraid, but everything that has happened since she made—and lost—her unwise bet with the Grammus sisters has happened so fast that there hasn’t been time for fear. She’s been so busy reacting to everything that there simply hasn’t been an opportunity to stop and really think about what she’s been doing.
That’s good. As far as she’s concerned, this specific brand of thoughtlessness can last all the way to the moment when she gets either released or carted off to some alien dimension where she won’t know anyone and won’t have any way of escaping. Right now she has a job to do, and she needs to be as calm and clearheaded as possible if she’s hoping to achieve it.
There are no guards outside the door. That’s fine. If anything, that makes what comes next slightly easier. She steps up into the sheltered alcove that protects Ubialla’s guests from the ruffians on the street, and pauses to adjust her cloak and knock the dust from her shoes. She must look better than she is if she’s to play this part. She must look like she belongs here and not behind a resort counter.
It’s hard to suppress the small thrill that runs through her as she finally raises her hand to knock. Ubialla Gheal and people like her are the reason that the honest citizens of Canto Bight—the ones who came for a weekend and found themselves staying for a lifetime, whether intentionally or not—can never break even, much less get ahead. Their grift and graft is small-time, designed for survival, not for counting coup. They are small predators in a dangerous jungle, and Ubialla and her kind are so much higher up the food chain that even the thought of getting one over on her is deliciously intoxicating, sweeter than any wine.
Calla knocks. There is no answer, so she knocks again, and again, until it becomes almost a game, until she’s hammering out the tempo of a song she heard once, played by a strange little band in a strange little bar that she’s never been able to find again, no matter how hard she’s looked. Canto Bight is like that. It gives and it takes, and it never slows down enough to let you figure out whether the books balance after all. She’s fairly sure they don’t. For the books to balance, the city would have to occasionally lose.
Sometimes she feels like she’s standing in the belly of a great machine designed to grind people up and spit them out, over and over again, with loaded dice and marked cards and poisoned drinks and honeyed lies. She loves it here, she honestly does. She wants to be a creature born to this environment, capable of breathing this air without feeling it stinging the bottom of her lungs—a feeling born of failure to thrive, not any toxin or pollutant. There has never been a city as clean and as filthy at the same time as Canto Bight, where everything is planned, everything is controlled, and nothing is free.
She keeps knocking until the side of her hand goes numb, and then she keeps knocking after that, hit after hit after hit, and every strike is another wrong that Canto Bight has done to her, another hand that didn’t play her way, another customer who didn’t tip, another manager who thought she needed to learn humility, or at least learn to play the game of flesh and favors. Every time she knocks, she sees another reason the city set her up for this, another card played toward this eventual outcome. She never had a choice. She never had a chance.
She keeps knocking.
The door opens.
At first she’s so surprised that she raises her hand to knock again anyway, ready to slap flesh against open air and see what happens. Then she catches herself, lowering hand and head in the same instant, and says, “I apologize for disturbing you, but my mistresses instructed me to come meet them here, and I would have to do far more than apologize if I failed to meet their expectations. I know you’re closed for the night, but please, may I come in?”
The sound of shouting, shrill laughter, and loud protests drifts out from behind the weary, wary guard. He looks her up and down, expression barely shy of a scowl, and asks, “Who are your mistresses?”
“Rhomby and Parallela Grammus.”
The change in the guard is gratifying. He straightens, weariness replaced by shock, wariness replaced by something that looks very much like greed. “The sisters,” he says. “You belong to the sisters.”
Calla wants to bristle at the idea that she belongs to anyone apart from herself. She does no such thing, bowing shallowly instead as she replies, “They are my mistresses, and they have bid me to meet them here.”
“Why?”
Her instructions have prepared her for this possibility. She draws her cloak aside, revealing the bottle she clutches by the neck. The glass is dark, concealing the contents, but it is a wine bottle connected, if only tenuously, to the Grammus sisters; it is as good as any bribe, as valuable as any promissory note.
“I am to deliver this,” she says.
“Come with me,” says the guard, and grabs her by the wrist, hauling her into the club. The door slams as soon as she’s inside the dimly lit antechamber. More guards are present, holding back agitated patrons who have just been teased with freedom.
“Ubialla will want to see you immediately,” snaps the guard.
“Please,” says Calla, summoning every scrap of humility she’s learned from working at the resorts. There’s a surprising amount of it, coupled with a less surprising amount of scorn. They think they know her so well. They don’t know her at all. “My mistresses are expecting me. I’ll be in trouble if I don’t come. You have to let me go to them.”
“I don’t have to do anything but take you to Ubialla,” says the guard. “She’ll decide when you see your mistresses. If you see them.”
Calla allows herself to stumble, as if shocked by his blatant implication that she’ll never see the sisters again, as if pulled off balance by his hand. His response to the motion is, predictably, to yank her back onto her feet, keeping her from breaking free. That’s what she was hoping for. Using the momentum of the guard’s pull for cover, she lets her hand come open.
She lets the bottle fall.
It strikes the marble floor of the club and shatters into a million shards, too broken to ever be pieced back together. Dark-purple liquid splashes outward like a bruise, staining everything it touches. Patrons close enough to be in range step back, crying out in disgust and dismay.
Calla starts to cry, small, hitching sobs, and feels the sympathy of the crowd shift. Yes, she dropped the bottle, but only because that brute of a guard pulled on her. The guard who has, in tandem with his fellows, been keeping them locked in all night, refusing to let them leave as they deserve. He’s the one to blame here, not her.
The mutters swell to grumbles to open-voiced complaints. The guard, still struck silent and motionless by the destruction of the greatest treasure his employer has ever pursued, finds himself surrounded in an instant, hemmed in by a wall of angry bodies. He tries to take a step. They’re making motion—making flight—impossible.
He raises his hands to ward them off, releasing Call
a in the process. Her tears stop immediately. She ducks low, making herself a smaller target, and pushes through the crowd, finding the natural holes among their bodies as they move in and she moves out.
The smell of the spilled liquid fills the air, sweet and cloying and passably believable as an unfamiliar vintage of wine. It’s not wine, of course, was never fermented, never aged, never put through any process more elaborate than a single woman in a resort bathroom crushing flower petals into a funnel, but it can pass for the stuff in the right light, under the right circumstances.
There is a screech of fury behind her. Calla turns. Ubialla stands at the edge of the antechamber, staring at the spill with horror. Ubialla’s eyes flick upward, and widen as she sees Calla.
“You,” she says, voice trembling, and raises her hand to point. “What was…was this…?”
“My mistresses contacted me and asked me to bring it after the bottle they carried with them was stolen,” says Calla. She doesn’t have to work to make her voice shake. Part of her is still pleased by the chaos she’s helped to create, by the understanding that the strange women who plucked her from her safe resort job are well on their way to beating the house for once. They’re going to win. For Ubialla to be this angry, for the club to be this restless…
They’re going to win. But there’s a blaster in Ubialla’s hand, and Calla has been on Canto Bight too long to believe that any victory comes without a cost. Someone has to pay when the cards are marked and the dice are loaded, when the edges of the tiles are dusted with pheromone pollen. Someone has to pay. Always, it’s been people like her. Why should tonight be any different?
“You dropped the wine?” Ubialla’s voice is low and dangerous.
Calla takes a step back, prepared to run. A hand closes on her shoulder, stopping her where she is. She glances back, sure she’ll see the face of another one of Ubialla’s goons, some hulking bruiser with the strength to pull her head off her shoulders for her offenses against the house—
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