It wasn't until my break that I couldn't avoid it anymore.
“That Vinduthi at your table yesterday,” Chgriz mentioned in the break room. He'd been dealing here for fifteen years, saw everything, said little. “Strange one.”
My hand tightened on my water cup.
“The one with the green traceries?” Naya asked. She was new, still terrified of everything. “He barely watched his cards at Collapse. Kept looking at the probability displays instead.”
“Lost big at Sabine's table,” Marza added from his corner. The shift chief knew everyone's business. “Thirty thousand. But the pattern...” He shook his head. “Almost seemed deliberate.”
I'd noticed the pattern. Of course I'd noticed. I noticed everything. But I'd filed it away without analyzing it, the way I'd learned to file away anything that might make me feel something other than nothing.
Now, sitting in the break room with its flickering lights and broken coffee dispenser, the numbers surfaced in my mind, demanding attention.
Eight thousand. Five thousand. Twelve thousand. Eight thousand. Thirteen thousand. Twenty-one thousand.
Ter'gathi sequence, but modified. The modification was specific. Each number shifted by a value that corresponded to... I worked through the mathematics. Letter positions. Basic substitution cipher hidden in mathematical sequence.
I. See. You. Seeing. Me.
The warmth that flooded my chest was unwelcome and undeniable.
Five years I'd been dealing on this station. Years of being furniture. A function. A tool that moved cards and collected credits and reported suspicious behavior. Players looked through me, not at me. They saw the uniform, the smile, the hands that dealt their fate. Never the person.
But this Vinduthi, Varrick, his player registration had said, he'd seen me.
He'd recognized what I was doing and told me so. Not through words, not through obvious interest, but through mathematics.
The language I thought in when I wasn't being careful.
It was dangerous, this curiosity I'd been suppressing since yesterday. This warmth when I pictured those red eyes that seemed to find something in me worth understanding.
I should crush the feeling. Hope was expensive, and I couldn't afford it.
But as I returned to my table, my gaze kept drifting to the mezzanine entrance. Wondering if he'd come back. Wondering what game he was really playing.
And wondering, despite all my careful defenses, what it might mean that he'd seen me.
VARRICK
Calculated genius hadn’t gotten her attention. So today, I played tired.
I sat down at her table looking exhausted. Let my shoulders slump just enough to suggest defeat. Pushed fifty thousand in credits forward. Same buy-in as yesterday, but this time my hands moved slower, like the money mattered.
“Rough night,” I said to no one in particular. Not to her, that would be too direct. Just a comment to the air, the kind of thing exhausted travelers said.
She dealt my cards. Same efficiency. But I caught her glance at my face for a fraction of a second longer than necessary. Cataloging the deliberate slump in my expression.
I played conservatively for the first three hands. Small bets. Safe choices. The complete opposite of yesterday's deliberate losses. Building a pattern of someone trying not to lose. Someone protecting what little they had.
The sweating ambassador at the next seat noticed. “Finally, someone else playing careful. This table's been eating credits all week.”
I gave him a tired nod. “Can't afford to be reckless.”
A lie wrapped in body language that suggested truth. And Sabine would know it was a lie. She'd seen my buy-in, watched me lose thirty thousand yesterday without flinching. But the contradiction would intrigue her. Why would someone with credits pretend poverty?
She dealt the next hand, and there it was—a near-imperceptible shift in her pattern. My actions had captured her attention. I'd moved from furniture to puzzle.
Good.
