by Tara Sim
And it didn’t hurt that Amaya was with him. At first he hadn’t liked the thought of her sticking by his side tonight, but while he played he couldn’t help but want to impress her, to show her that he could be useful, if just not in the way she’d initially wanted.
But what if they could pay for Soria’s medicine, as well as find a lead? A night of slipping back into old habits might be worth it.
Cayo spotted a familiar card game called Threefold, one he had played often in the Grand Mariner back home. “All right,” he said to Amaya, “I’m going to play a couple of rounds, and you’re going to watch. Then you’re going to play.”
She nearly choked on her drink. “Me?”
“Have you ever gambled before?”
“Only once, when…” She flushed. “When I went to the Vice Sector looking for you.”
Which must have been when she’d met Romara. “Then I’m sure you’ll be a quick study.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You just want to win against me, don’t you?”
“It sounds alluring.” He flashed her a dimpled smile. “I already know your tells.”
“And you are predictable. I’m going to win.”
“We’ll see about that.”
Cayo sat and played a couple of rounds, falling back into the routine of the game, the rhythm of the cards. He kept an eye on the other players, noting how a woman scratched her nose, how a young man’s tongue darted out between his lips, how another always sniffed right before showing a bad hand.
They were actors in a play, and Cayo knew all their lines.
After he won his second round, the other players grumbled, most of them leaving their seats in search of a more favorable game. Amaya sank into the seat on his left.
“Got the idea?” he murmured.
Her dark eyes flashed in challenge. “Don’t you worry about me.”
He grinned and subtly pointed at the woman two seats down. “She seems like the sort to know a man with muttonchops. Watch this.”
Cayo leaned an elbow on the table, smiling in the woman’s direction. What she wore wasn’t particularly fashionable, but she had a keen gaze and had been the hardest to read. Which meant she was a regular.
“Can’t believe I got lucky,” Cayo said. His voice sounded foreign to him, too carefree to be natural. “Other week I was here, I got walloped by a man with muttonchops. Muttonchops, of all things!”
The woman raised a plucked eyebrow at him. “Am I supposed to say sorry?”
“Have you gone against him? His winning streak was maddening.”
“Can’t say that I have.”
“Pretty sure she’s telling the truth,” Amaya whispered as the cards were handed out. “Nice try, though.”
Cayo examined his hand. Not bad—but not the best. His gaze slid over to Amaya, studying her reaction to her own hand.
He’d claimed to know her tells, which wasn’t a lie. He’d had plenty of time to observe her in the past several weeks. When she scrunched up her nose, she was dissatisfied. When she chewed the inside of her cheek, she was thinking about something that worried her. When her fingers twitched, she was angry.
But she showed none of her usual tells tonight. Instead, she looked calmly at her cards and set them face down on the table. Noticing Cayo’s stare, she winked.
He scoffed and returned to his own cards. Her left eyebrow had twitched slightly, but he didn’t know what that meant yet. He targeted the woman on the end instead, swapping a card with her. The game went on, slowly, carefully, the players tense as cards exchanged hands, three times per player.
When everyone revealed their hands, Cayo immediately looked at Amaya’s. She had been close, very close, but he ended up victorious again. The winnings were pushed toward him, and he scooped the coins into his pouch before any of the other players could start a fight.
Amaya didn’t seem angry, though. At least, her fingers weren’t twitching. When Cayo faced her, she surprised him with a wide grin that nearly knocked him to the ground. The rest of the casino was an unsightly blur compared to that smile.
“Again,” she said.
They tried their luck at other tables, other games. There had been a bevy of Rain Empire games in the Vice Sector, enough for Cayo to have familiarized himself with a handful. They sat at a table of Twice Scorned, rolling sets of differently shaped dice, and stood around a roulette wheel calling out colors and numbers.
Amaya remained steadfast in her goal to beat him. A couple of times she did, at first shocked and then distinctly pleased with herself.
“Maybe I have to start worrying about you coming back here,” Cayo joked as Amaya added her winnings to their fattened pouch.
“It’s not the game I’m addicted to,” she said. “It’s the look on your face when I win.”
Cayo tried his charm again and again, attempting to weed out anyone who might have crossed paths with Trevan Nicodeme, but so far no one had risen to the bait. Still, he kept his ears open and ended up overhearing quite a bit of gossip that served no purpose, as well as speculation about the supposed Ghost Ship in the harbor.
He had seen it while working at the fish market. It had been anchored far enough away that he couldn’t make out any details of the ship, just its outline. People liked to point and mutter about it—“It’s abandoned?”; “I heard it was filled with a poisonous gas”; “No, it’s probably haunted”—but the navy wasn’t able to do anything about it until they got clearance from higher-ups to dispose of it. In the meantime, one of their ships was always lingering nearby, watchful for suspicious activity.
Cayo and Amaya had long since finished their first drink. Going against the faint, worried voice in his head that sounded like Soria, Cayo took them to one of the other bars, where they ordered something called Divine Chance. In order to make the drink, the bartender handed them a pair of dice they had to roll in order to determine what combination they’d get. Cayo got a five and a three, producing a floral mix of lavender and cardamom syrup, and Amaya got a two and a six, resulting in cherry and muddled mint.
“This is surprisingly good,” Amaya said after a tentative taste. She pointed at his. “But that’s the last one for you tonight.”
“Whatever you say, my lady.”
Despite Amaya’s wariness, he noticed her relaxing as they returned to the card games, her mouth soft and her eyes bright. Cayo thought back to her in Basque’s manor, the elegant and untouchable Countess Yamaa. Here she was mischievous and addictive, and Cayo found himself leaning over to make fun of the other players just to hear her brief, husky laugh.
“Do you think that hat was alive once?” he whispered, pointing out the plume of feathers on one woman’s head.
“I think it’s still alive,” Amaya whispered back, her breath smelling of cherries.
A drunk man was swaying in his seat and muttering insults to the dealer, his face blotchy and his nose bearing the broken veins of an alcoholic. Amaya gave him a dirty look, one of her hands straying to a hidden knife.
“Just leave him alone,” Cayo murmured as the woman beside him took her turn. “He’ll probably doze off soon anyway.”
But the more they played, the more belligerent the man got. He turned his ire toward the other players, critiquing their dice throws and questioning their choices in fashion.
“You wear that to toss the whale bone ’round?” he slurred at Amaya, sneering at her high-collared jacket that had admittedly seen better days. “Hair fallin’ all ’round your face like some vagabond.”
Amaya’s eyes narrowed, but Cayo leaned forward to block her from the man’s view. He disarmed the man with a wide smile, emboldened by the alcohol buzzing pleasantly through him.
“I’ll make a wager with you,” Cayo said. “All your winnings against all my winnings.”
Amaya poked him in the back. “What are you doing?”
“Hah?” The man peered at him with bloodshot eyes while the dealer nervously looked between them. “You’re just a little boy. Don�
�t steal from little boys.”
“Indulge me.” Cayo rattled the dice in his hand. The sound they made was as comforting as rain on a window.
“I win, she’s gotta put her hair up or some’n’,” the man muttered, pointing at Amaya. “Little bit of makeup, y’know…”
“We’ll see what we can do. But if I win, you have to answer one question.”
“What sorta bet is that? Fine, fine.”
Amaya sat back with her arms crossed, brow furrowed. Cayo flashed her a reassuring smile before going one-on-one with the drunk man, each of them taking turns rolling the dice and racking up points. Cayo’s heart sped up giddily, remembering what it felt like to be in the heat of the moment, competing with someone across the table as his friends cheered on the sidelines.
Cayo observed the man’s form, how exactly he held and released the dice. How his bloodshot eyes flitted around the casino as if paranoid. When the man’s next turn came, Cayo timed a fake sneeze at the exact moment the man released his dice. The man jumped at the noise, and the dice barely rolled, showing the lowest score he’d earned the entire game.
Then it was Cayo’s last roll. He held one of the die between his thumb and palm, tossing the rest as usual. But the third he let go of at the very last second, making sure it wouldn’t roll and that it could land on a six.
“Well, then,” Cayo said, leaning his elbows on the table. “Looks like your pretty mountain of coins is mine, and the lady gets to wear her hair however she damn well likes. And you have to answer one question.”
The man’s face reddened even more. “You— What did you—?”
“Trevan Nicodeme,” Cayo interrupted. “Where does he like to gamble?”
The man gaped in an almost comical way, and Cayo knew his guess had been correct. Someone this shifty looking surely frequented the sorts of places a money launderer would go. Or at the least, someone this concerned with appearance would undoubtedly have noticed a man with muttonchops.
“Trevan?” The man blinked several times. “I—I don’t know! The Crown and Barrel, I think?” He scowled suddenly. “Why d’you want to know? You set this up, didn’t you?”
The man stood, yelling and swearing at Cayo until the casino guards came to escort him away. Cayo laughed as the dealer shoved the man’s coins toward him. His blood was effervescent, his body crying, More, more.
He had done it. He had gotten a lead.
When they left the table, his victorious grin faded when he realized Amaya was no longer smiling.
“You cheated,” she said.
Cayo drained the rest of his drink and set the empty glass on the nearest table. “I did what I had to in order to get us information. It worked, didn’t it? Besides, I taught that bastard a lesson.”
“That bastard,” she said, pointing in the direction the guards had taken him, “is who you’ll become if you keep this up.”
The joy sparking through him fizzled out. “You were the one who thought this would be a good idea. Why are you complaining?”
Amaya drew herself up. “I don’t have the right to be worried? One wrong move and we could have the authorities breathing down our necks.”
She paused, took a deep breath. “It’s not just the cheating, it’s… it’s the reminder of the life you used to have, when you’d do things like this without a second thought. We’re not in the Vice Sector, Cayo. You don’t work for the Slum King.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Cayo mumbled. “I’m doing this for Soria, not myself. You don’t get to shame me for that.”
“I’m not trying to shame you. Just no more cheating, all right?”
He glared at her, but she only gazed calmly back. He scoffed and turned back to the bar.
“Fine,” he said. “But I’m getting another drink.”
“We have what we need. We can go.”
But Cayo didn’t want to call it a night. Amaya kept a close eye on him as he won a few more games, lost a couple others. Since Amaya refused to let him have a third drink, he found a group of people in the corner smoking jaaga, and they let him have a couple hits. The world was bright and pleasant, and Amaya’s worry had become unexplainably funny.
“Don’t move,” she warned him before walking away.
He should have felt panicked, but he didn’t. He just leaned against the wall and watched the crowd, and when Amaya returned with a glass of water, he grinned.
“I didn’t move,” he said as he took small sips. “I trusted you’d come back.”
“That’s nice.” Amaya crossed her arms. “Trusting people must be nice.”
“Mm, I don’t though,” he murmured. “Not really. But you—you’ve lied and you’ve done bad things, but you’re still good. Me, I’m—I’m not good.” He pressed a clammy hand to his forehead, closing his eyes. “I’ve never been good. That’s why you hate me.”
Her eyes were pinched. “Cayo…”
Before she could say anything else, someone approached them carrying a stack of flyers. They handed one to Amaya.
“What does it say?” Cayo asked.
“I don’t know, I have a hard time reading Soléne.”
He took it from her and skimmed it. He pushed himself off the wall, the water in his glass sloshing.
“What is it?”
Cayo shook the flyer. “An event here at the casino in a couple of days. High-stakes games only. Anyone can compete, but they already have a list of prominent people who’ll be there, probably to draw a decent crowd.” He lowered his voice. “One of them is Robin Deirdre.”
Her eyes widened. “We have to compete.”
“We?”
“I mean you have to compete. We can’t pass this up, Cayo. We can be right next to the Benefactor!”
He should have felt excited. Instead, he felt his stomach drop. “Do you really want me to do this? It would mean putting down the money I won for Soria.”
She considered it a moment longer, visibly torn. “It’s a risky idea,” she said at last. “But it’s the best chance we have of finding out more about her. Besides, I saw you play tonight. You were unstoppable.”
Cayo couldn’t help the flare of satisfaction at the praise.
“It’s your decision, though,” she said.
He stared at the water in his hand. Everything in him cried to say yes, burying that tiny voice that sounded like Soria. Eventually he nodded.
“I’ll do it.”
Amaya folded up the flyer and tucked it into her pocket. “All right. But we’re doing this on one condition: no alcohol, and no drugs. And no cheating.”
“Those are three conditions.”
“Cayo.”
He put a hand over his heart. “I swear.”
“Good.” She steered him toward the exit. “Now let’s get you to bed before you fall on your face.”
The beast curled its claws over her shoulders, steering her ever onward.
“Do not look behind you,” it whispered in Lady Trianh’s ear.
The back of her neck was damp with sweat, the urge to look over her shoulder a burden that sat heavy in her heart. But the beast’s fangs were a mere inch from her skin, begging to puncture and tear at the first sign of betrayal.
—THE BEAST BELOW, A HORROR NOVEL FROM REHAN
That’s why you hate me.
Those words had been haunting Amaya since Cayo had said them the night before. His voice had been slurred yet full of an emotion she couldn’t ignore.
Despair.
Amaya had tossed and turned since they’d snuck back into the apartment, anxious and more than a little disturbed. When dawn broke, Liesl got up and went back to her decoding. Amaya went to check on Cayo and found his bed empty.
“Went to work,” Avi said as he sipped his tea. “Looked fair wrecked, though.”
Amaya had to admit she was impressed at Cayo’s determination. With nothing else to do, she went to visit Soria and found the girl partially sitting up against her pillows. She seemed to be dozing but opened he
r eyes when Amaya came in.
“Amaya,” the girl said sleepily. “How are you?”
“Fine, I suppose.” Amaya sat heavily in the chair beside her bed. “I’m more concerned about you, though.”
Soria smiled. “You know, I’m getting rather tired of other peoples’ concern.”
Amaya flushed. “Sorry.”
“No, no, don’t be sorry. I’d just prefer discussing something else.”
Amaya nodded, looking around the room as if for inspiration. “I should bring flowers next time. It’s so sparse in here.”
“That would be lovely.”
“Which are your favorites?”
They chatted about small, inconsequential things for the next half hour, and Amaya found that she’d desperately needed the distraction. Still, she couldn’t quite shake her memories of last night. After a lull in the conversation, she ended up blurting, “Your brother’s a fool.”
Soria was startled into laughter that quickly became a cough. Amaya handed her a cup of water.
“What did he do now?” she wheezed.
Amaya explained what they’d done last night. Soria’s amusement faded as Amaya explained the change that had come over him.
“At first it was fine, and we were actually having fun.” Amaya said the words like she was testing them out for the first time. “But he spiraled a little.”
Soria looked down at her hands a moment, a divot forming on her brow.
“Amaya,” the girl said at last, “I expected more from you.”
Amaya leaned back. A flash of prickling heat filled in her chest, which she quickly identified as shame.
“I’ve seen him that way before,” Soria went on. “When he would come home still drunk or drugged. Sometimes he’d be sweet and happy, and other times he’d be angry and volatile. I hated it.” She turned her head away, staring out the window at the bright morning light. “But it was the only way he thought he could deal with his pain. Once in a while he would curl up at the foot of my bed to sleep, because he didn’t want to be alone. He fears it, I think. And he doesn’t know how to handle that fear.”
Amaya closed her eyes tight. That’s why you hate me.