Mardock Scramble

by Ubukata, Tow

  She sensed his eyes opening wide behind his sunglasses.

  His eyes were filled with a deep, deep anger—and at the root of this was an overwhelming fear that Shell couldn’t even understand, much less come to terms with.

  Balot felt the dregs of an old memory dredged up from the murky past: the memory of Shell lecturing her ever so calmly about the definition of love. The words popped into her head, then disappeared again as soon as they came—but not before she had said them out loud.

  –You’re going to be the prettiest little ornament there is. Everyone’s going to admire you, and respect me. Because I have all the money and love that anyone could ever want.

  Silently, Balot thrust the red marker into the pile of cards.

  –Just do as I say, and everything will be all right.

  A faint, scornful sneer played across Balot’s lips as she said the words, and she jerked her head at Shell—and the cards—to indicate she was ready.

  Shell’s face was peculiarly shy at this moment. What was he feeling? Embarrassed? Bashful?

  At the very least he seemed to recognize that the words that Balot had just spoken were quotations, phrases that he had once said to her, even if he couldn’t remember actually having said them. He had made long-forgotten promises, and now he was being held to account.

  Stuck for words, Shell focused his attention on the cards at hand, cutting them, preparing them.

  That handful of movements told Balot everything she needed to know about just how much control Shell could still exert over the cards—and how much control he had lost.

  She waited for Shell to finish placing the cards in the card shoe, toying with the four million-dollar chips in her hands, as if to say I hold your heart in my hands.

  –I’m not the impatient sort, my dear. I like to take my time.

  With these words, Balot placed a chip in the pot.

  It wasn’t one of the golden chips. Rather, it was an ordinary hundred-thousand-dollar chip. Shell had evidently been expecting one of the million-dollar variety, and he gulped, then eventually exhaled deeply.

  –Let me peel your layers off one by one, my little one.

  Balot smiled as she spoke. By now, Shell wasn’t the only one to have realized that she was quoting verbatim words that Shell had said to her, once upon a time. The others around the table were listening with keen interest.

  “You filthy gutter-born whore…” Shell muttered, touching the card shoe as if in some sort of warped act of purification.

  The Doctor and Ashley scowled when they heard his words. Only Balot and Bell Wing remained unaffected, unflinching.

  Shell flicked the cards out of the card shoe. Violently, recklessly, like a hotheaded teen rebel quick to snap out his jackknife and lunge at the opponent who had enraged him so.

  Balot dodged the blade in a deft movement, then crushed all resistance with a single blow.

  –There’s nothing to be embarrassed about, my little one.

  Shell continued dealing, trying to appear unconcerned.

  –You look a little frightened, but don’t worry, I like it that way. It makes you look even more alluring.

  Balot continued to smile a seraphim’s smile at Shell, who by now was gritting his teeth so hard it seemed like he was about to break his own jaw.

  She was smiling, but her eyes blazed with her true feelings of animosity.

  Balot took those hate-filled eyes off Shell for a moment and refocused on her cards. She was deciding what she wanted of him, how she wanted him. She was going to release him from the waiting—the worst part, that moment before the customer told you just how he was going to enjoy you. Just as Balot had suffered in the past.

  Her eyes snapped back up toward Shell, and she called out her move.

  –Now, open your legs wide, little one, and show daddy what he wants to see…

  Then, when Shell showed no sign of understanding, Balot rephrased her instructions.

  –Stay.

  A fat vein started visibly throbbing in Shell’s temple. He struggled to suppress his fury as he flipped over his hidden card. Slowly. Not in order to put his opponent off. No—Shell moved slowly because his foul, abject mood meant that he physically couldn’t move any faster.

  The game had begun. Balot’s farewell game to the casino, her lap of honor. A game just for her.

  ≡

  Ashley and Bell Wing were the first to realize what was going on.

  The Doctor knew already, of course, as it was none other than the Doctor who had hatched the plan in the first place.

  The only ones who remained oblivious to the end were the man from OctoberCorp and Shell.

  Shell’s mind wasn’t even able to comprehend the possibility that something was going on—that he was being played—or, if it was, he soon suppressed those errant suspicions. The only thing that Shell knew was that he was winning, over and over, just as he did in life, and his victories were all he had to hold on to from amid his shame and disgrace.

  For Shell was winning. From the very first hand up to the ten-game mark where they currently stood, the cards seemed to be going his way.

  The Doctor’s plan was unfolding nicely. Your target is the golden yolks—don’t touch any white or shell. If you do end up getting some along the way, be sure to return them immediately once you’ve reached your objective. Balot understood what she had to do. The only question left now was the matter of timing. So that the plan would achieve its maximum effect.

  It was around the twelve-game mark when it happened. The upcard was 9, Balot’s cards were 3 and 8.

  The melee of figures at the bottom of her left arm showed her what she needed to do. Balot hit.

  The card she received was a 6. Then she hit again, a 2. Total nineteen. At first glance it looked like her recklessness had paid off. In particular to the man from OctoberCorp, standing behind Shell and the chips, glaring over all he could see.

  Balot glanced up at him before calling out her intention to stay.

  Cleanwill John October, the man from OctoberCorp, wore a fearsome expression. Unrelenting and relentless. As if he wouldn’t permit Shell to lose a single hand, let alone the game. An impossible demand. Like ordering him to play Russian roulette with an automatic pistol.

  Shell turned over his hidden card. An ace. Shell had won, by the narrowest of margins.

  “Ha!” John yelped in satisfaction. Shell smiled even as he looked on at his cards with a grim expression.

  Shell was hanging on by a thread, and he knew it. Balot was on the crest of a winning wave, on the ultimate winning streak, and yet she was somehow suppressing it. Leaving the door open to Shell. Cutting him some slack, giving him some rope—for what?

  She was planning something. He could smell it. Even in his present state, Shell was still Shell, and he was usually the first to pick up on this sort of thing.

  But it was already too late. The race had already begun: a drag race, where speed was everything and the first to cross the finish line took it all—and then mid-race Shell realized that the finish line was actually a chicken run straight to hell, and yet he couldn’t slam on the brakes or he would lose, and lose everything. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

  Balot’s hundred-thousand-dollar chips had run out. Before long she had also exhausted her supply of fifty-thousand-dollar chips too, and was on to the ten-thousand-dollar chips, burning through them steadily, one after another, like a chain smoker his cigarettes.

  What did the others in the casino—the players, the dealers—make of such a scene?

  Let me help you with that, they would have been thinking, most probably. They would have taken the chips in their hands and ran from the casino as quickly as their legs would carry them.

  It was only common sense, after all—winning streaks didn’t last forever.

  This girl and the lanky man beside her had lost it—they were suckers for pushing on past the point that their luck had run out, for not knowing when to quit while they were ahe
ad.

  Now their recklessness had driven the casino mad, forced the house to call in its big guns, and their chips were crumbling away like an asphalt road under a jackhammer. An unstoppable force—and one that nobody had any inclination to try and stop.

  The whole floor seemed to feel this way.

  And this was what Balot and the Doctor needed in order to bring the final act to an end on the requisite bang. How would the regulars who haunted this place react toward those who had just wandered onto their turf and won a fortune, and not even a small one at that? Some would be prepared to kill the interlopers to steal their newly acquired riches. Others might try and team up with them, use them to win big for themselves. It wouldn’t just be the other customers who felt this way but many of the dealers too, no doubt. Either way, they were a veritable hornets’ nest, ready to sink their opportunistic stingers into those who won big—another hurdle for Balot and the Doctor to contend with.

  The best way to subdue the angry hornets was to smoke them out and put them to sleep. To do this, Balot needed to lose big, and conspicuously. If she was seen to stumble, to trip and drop her fat purse in the gutter, to watch its gold contents irretrievably washed away by the effluvia—well, then she’d be of no more interest to the swarm that was only after one thing. Indeed, once they’d seen she’d lost, and lost everything, they’d see her as jinxed and avoid her like the plague.

  Even so, Balot still had to win in her own way.

  She had to bring verisimilitude to their little act. More importantly, she had a bad debt she needed to pay off.

  The upcard was 5. Balot had a queen and 2.

  –Stay.

  Waiting for the dealer to bust.

  Shell’s face showed his despair even before he turned his card over. No doubt he already knew the distribution of the cards, helped by information fed in from his earphone and the watchlike device on his wrist.

  All that was left for him to do was entrust everything to luck and flip his hidden card. His face hoped, prayed, begged, for total victory—no more the basic self-control expected in even a rookie dealer.

  The card was a king. He then went on to draw another card—queen. Total twenty-five. Bust.

  John’s face erupted in nuclear fury as he watched Shell silently paying out to Balot. His face turned black.

  Balot waited for her next move, gauging her timing perfectly.

  She snapped one of the golden chips into place on the table. The sound was like a judge’s gavel when judgment was passed down. Shell and John sprang to attention.

  The air was icy with tension. Balot said and did nothing, waiting silently for her next card.

  It felt good to be able to stare down an opponent without having to say anything—particularly an opponent to whom Balot had nothing to say.

  Shell’s blood was as thick as molten wax as he forced his hand over to the card shoe to deal. As he dealt, his fingers withdrew one of the cards and dealt the one just below it, out of turn, so that he received a card that was meant for Balot. A blatant switch.

  Ashley and Bell Wing saw right through the clumsy maneuver, as did Balot.

  The upcard was an ace. Balot’s cards were a king and jack.

  –Stay , Balot called immediately.

  Shell flipped over his hidden card with his leaden hand.

  The card was a 4. Total fifteen. He went on to draw a 7. The ace in his hand was now worth only one, bringing his hand to twelve.

  Then he drew a 9. He had reached his total of twenty-one. Shell had won.

  02

  –Never doubt. It’s the road to ruin.

  Shell looked up at Balot, confused.

  –The recipient of love shouldn’t have any doubts. No need to trouble yourself with questions.

  Behind Shell, John chuckled to himself.

  Shell collected the golden chip with hands that couldn’t quite stop quavering, then took in the cards for the discard pile.

  Shell understood all too well what had just happened. The way the cards had been dealt was ace, king, 4, jack, 7, 9.

  In other words, before his switch the cards had been arranged king, ace, 4, jack, 7, 9.

  Had Shell not made his move, Balot would have had blackjack, and not just any old blackjack. The ace and jack of spades: a payout of 11 to 1. Her million-dollar stake at that level of payout would have been an atomic bomb, blowing the casino to pieces.

  Then it hit Shell; he had worked it all out. Where exactly Balot had inserted the red marker: right below the ace that had just been dealt. She had known exactly how and where he was going to cut and based her own play around that.

  Shell was completely under her thumb. She’d even planned exactly how he was going to win, forcing his hand, quite literally. He felt a deep malaise welling up inside himself. He was on the verge of screaming as his pride and confidence were ripped to shreds.

  John, on the other hand, was delighted to see the golden chip return to its box, welcoming it home like it had been his own kidnapped daughter released from incarceration. Hardly surprising, considering the chip represented his own dirty money.

  It wasn’t even so much the money itself that was at stake for John and Shell but the very fact of its existence. If, as a result of the transfer of large amounts of cash—a large payout, for example—they came under scrutiny from the authorities and their money-laundering scheme was discovered, it would be far more than the actual cash that John and Shell both stood to lose.

  Balot’s aim now was to find the right timing to lay down the final three golden chips.

  She threw around more of the ten-thousand-dollar chips for the next few rounds, waiting for her next chance. Then, just as she was getting ready to place the next million-dollar chip, an old memory came to mind.

  Something she had once seen on television. Aborigines—native peoples under the protection of the Commonwealth. A funeral, a wake, but a festive occasion. The aborigines had great respect for Mother Nature and celebrated a person’s return to her bosom via the ceremonial slaughtering of a cow.

  The reason she’d ended up watching such a program was simple: she had misheard the announcer and thought it was going to be a program about abortion.

  Abortion, abortionist, abortive—Balot was only half paying attention to the television when she thought she heard something along those lines. She was surprised, therefore, to find out that the program was about a completely different topic.

  She kept on watching, though, if for no other purpose than to try and dispel the images that her mind had conjured up. That was how she’d learned about aborigines. Where was she when she saw that program? Yes, that was it—the place she’d been at before her last brothel—the Date Club, in the waiting room.

  There were a number of girls working there. The clients would phone in, having seen the details on a flyer or poster, and the man in the office—reception, really—would then send out the girl that most closely matched the client’s request. In between assignments the girls waited around in interminable stretches of tense boredom. The girls would do what they could to alleviate this with magazines, television, books, or by attending to their manicures. It helped blot out other, more unpleasant, thoughts.

  Occasionally, though, these other thoughts would still seep through. Much in the same way that Balot ended up watching the program on aborigines—to try and take her mind off a more unpleasant thought.

  The aborigines in the program didn’t just revere death—they also feared it. The reporter explained that this was all tied to their deep respect for the jungle. Balot understood immediately. She could relate to the animals being offered up to nature—she knew what it meant to be a sacrificial lamb. And she knew that this was a scene that played out everywhere.

  It the city, people feared one another. Society was divided into those with power and those without, and if it was social interaction that helped to dissolve that fear of each other, it was also social interaction that served up scapegoats—sacrificial victims, a necessary and
inevitable function to keep society running. Balot was always hearing such stories from her customers and the other girls.

  Stories of sadistic men who could only get their kicks by torturing people, or religious nutjobs who had to follow a precise set of bizarre rules in the correct sequence in order to get off, or men who selected the right girls—or boys—to fulfill their fantasies to the letter, choosing their costumes and the scenery, ordering them around like a theater director would his actors. These men may not have physically been taking machetes to the throats of their livestock, but they were doing the equivalent to the hearts and minds of thirteen-year-old girls.

  The Date Club that Balot worked at was one of the better brothels—one of the safer ones, anyway. The club paid taxes, or at least the man at reception said it did. We’re virtually a public service.

  In other words, they’d covered their backs against charges of violating the protection of minors law.

  Those places that operated under the radar, avoiding such “unnecessary expenses” as taxes—it stood to reason that these were the most dangerous of all.

  The pimps weren’t always strangers, either. One of the girls, before she worked at the Date Club, used to be pimped out by her father on a regular basis. She’d already been with nearly a hundred johns by the time she was sixteen—most of her “clients” being his friends, drinking buddies, or customers at the watering holes her father frequented. Then one day her father found himself in deep trouble with one of her clients and mysteriously disappeared from the world. The girl carried on living, surviving, through the profession that her father had taught her so well. As if that was her way of showing her filial love and devotion.

  At the club the girls swapped gruesome stories of how girls who plied their wares from street corners had a tendency to meet a bad end. One girl recounted to Balot a particular tale as if she were talking about a horror novel. How one of her friends ended up wasting away in the hospital, her bones shattered, her body jelly. Girls beaten to death by their violent men had looked a prettier sight.

  Apparently the dead girl used to refer to herself occasionally as a bomb. A ticking time bomb. Her friend only understood why when she saw the diagnostic charts at the hospital. The dying girl had AIDS and had been slowly dying from it for many years, working the streets all the while. Then the dying girl told her how she had ended up infected with such a disease. She had been raped one day on her way home from school.