Silence stretched between us. Not uncomfortable, but weighted with everything unsaid. Finally, she glanced at the chronometer.
“My shift starts in two hours.”
“We should be professional,” I said, echoing our lies from yesterday.
“We should.” She met my eyes, and we both knew the truth. “We will not.”
“No.”
She stood, still wrapped in the sheet, and gathered her uniform. “I need to shower. You should… you should probably go.”
I dressed in yesterday's clothes, aware of her watching me. When I reached the door, she called my name.
“Varrick?” I turned back. She stood in the doorway to her small bathroom, vulnerability and determination warring in her expression. “I am glad you stayed.”
The words followed me back to my suite, warming something in my chest I had not known was cold.
I told myself I was just checking the casino's patterns. Observing. Gathering intelligence. But my feet carried me to the mezzanine bar with its perfect view of her table.
She dealt with her usual efficiency. Professional. Controlled. Like last night had not happened.
Then a Mondian, drunk on cheap ambition and cheaper liquor, leaned too far over the table. He was losing badly and decided Sabine was the cause.
“You deal from the bottom, human,” he slurred, grabbing for the deck. “I saw it.”
“Sir, the cards are randomized?—”
He was not listening. His attention fixed on Sabine, on her refusal to be intimidated. “Maybe you need a lesson in respect.”
Before he could do more, I was at the table. I did not break his wrist. That felt too simple. Too repetitive.
“Let me play this hand for you,” I said to the Mondian, my voice quiet but carrying. I placed a hundred thousand credit chip on the table. “Dealer's choice. I will bet against you. If you win, you take it all. If I win, you walk away from this table and never return.”
He saw the chip, the easy money. Greed won out over anger. “Fine.”
Sabine's eyes met mine. I gave her the slightest nod. She understood.
She dealt the hand. The Mondian's cards were good. A near perfect sequence. He grinned, already spending the credits in his head. My hand was trash. Utter trash.
“The algorithms on this station,” I said conversationally as I studied my worthless cards, “are based on a predictive model I designed seven years ago. They are currently in a state of cascading failure. But they still have… habits.”
I placed my bets. Not based on my cards. Based on the algorithm's flaws. I knew how it would fail. I knew the sequence of its decay.
“I predict,” I said, “that the system will misread your hand as a fold, pay out my inferior hand at a sixty to one error rate, and then attempt to correct by freezing your account.”
The Mondian laughed.
Then the table display flickered. His winning hand registered as a fold. My losing hand registered as a win. And sixty thousand credits slid into my stack. A moment later, his account icon turned red. Frozen.
He stared at the display, then at me. The color drained from his face. He had not just been beaten. He had been dismantled. His understanding of reality had been taken apart piece by piece in front of everyone.
He stumbled away from the table without a word.
The remaining players found excuses to leave soon after. Within ten minutes, I sat alone at her table.
“That was not professional,” she said, but there was a hint of a smile on her lips.
“No.”
