Fourth hand, I shifted tactics entirely. Started calculating probabilities aloud, but not showing off. Muttering them like someone trying to convince themselves.
“Six percent chance on the draw. No, wait. Seven-point-three if the deck maintains standard distribution.” I rubbed my temple, a gesture of someone struggling with mental math. “Unless she's tracking the count, then it drops to four-point-eight.”
I said “she” specifically. Acknowledging her skill without directly addressing her. The Nexian merchant beside me laughed. “You think the dealers track? They just deal, friend.”
I placed my bet based on the wrong calculation. Lost exactly what someone following the seven-point-three probability would lose. But Sabine knew I'd identified the real odds—four-point-eight. She'd been tracking, and I'd just told her I knew it.
Her next shuffle was marginally slower. Processing.
By the sixth hand, I abandoned both previous approaches and went completely silent. Just played. But I played in a specific pattern—every decision took exactly three seconds. Every bet was a prime number. Every gesture precisely mirrored hers from the previous hand. If she touched her collar, I touched mine on the next deal. If she blinked twice before dealing, I blinked twice before betting.
Showing her I was studying her as intently as she studied everyone else.
The ambassador went bust and stumbled away. The Nexian merchants left for easier tables. New players filled their seats. A Poraki couple who reeked of fresh-caught fish, a Mondian woman drowning expensive sorrows in worse bets. Sabine managed them all, but a portion of her focus remained locked on my pattern.
Halfway through the session, I did something that would have been suicide at any other table. I folded a winning hand.
Not obviously. I let my micro-expressions suggest I thought I was losing. A subtle tension at the corners of my eyes, a minor hesitation before pushing the cards back. But the cards were face-up just long enough for her to see. I had the nuts. Perfect hand. And I folded it.
The Poraki couple didn't notice. The sorrowful human was too drunk to care. But Sabine's pupils dilated. Just for an instant. Because folding a winning hand meant one of two things: either I couldn't actually read the cards, or I was playing a completely different game.
She knew which one.
The message was different from yesterday's mathematical sequence. Yesterday, I'd said “I see you.” Today, I was saying “I understand you.”
When I finally gathered my chips—down only ten thousand this time—I stood slowly. That same performed exhaustion from the beginning, but now she'd seen through it. Knew it was costume, not truth.
“Same time tomorrow?” the Poraki woman asked, apparently having decided I was her good luck charm despite my losses.
“Probably,” I said. But I let my eyes flick to Sabine for just a moment when I said it. Not long enough to be obvious. Just enough for her to catch if she was watching.
She was.
I left without another word, without a backward glance. But I could feel her attention on me as I walked away. It wasn’t attraction. Not yet. Just curiosity, sharpened to a point.
SABINE
The observation lounge hung suspended between levels nine and ten, a glass bubble jutting out from the station's superstructure. Most staff never came here. Too exposed, too visible to the cameras. But after five years, I knew the blind spots. The corner where two support beams created a shadow. The place where reflection off the polarized glass obscured anyone watching from below.
I stood in that corner now, watching the main floor's patterns unfold. Not the players. They were predictable. The systems. The algorithmic displays that governed every game, every probability, every payout. They stuttered worse tonight.
The Gravity Well tables kept resetting their base probabilities. The Cascade algorithms couldn't maintain proper distribution for more than seventeen hands. The behavioral prediction matrix above the high-stakes pit showed impossible readings—players with zero percent chance of folding who folded immediately, others with guaranteed tell patterns that suddenly shifted.
I counted the failures automatically. Seventeen major glitches in the past hour. Twenty-three minor ones. A pattern within the chaos that suggested?—
“It's running a recursive loop it can't escape.”
I didn't flinch. Didn't turn. My body had heard him approach—Vinduthi moved differently than humans, their weight distributed through a different center of gravity. But I hadn't expected him to speak first.
Varrick stood three meters away, studying the same displays. Not looking at me. Just watching the mathematical catastrophe below.
“Recursive implies it's trying to return to a base state,” I said, keeping my voice neutral. “This is degradation. Entropy.”
“No.” He stepped closer to the glass, his reflection ghostlike against the casino lights. He traced a finger along the glass, outlining one of the failing probability matrices below. “Watch the seventh table from the left. The error pattern repeats every forty-three minutes. Not exactly—there's variance—but the core structure remains. It's trying to self-correct but lacks the proper parameters.”
I watched. Counted. He was right. The seventh table's probability matrix did repeat, a subtle pattern I'd missed because I'd been watching for breakdown, not recovery attempts.
“You're seeing it too broadly,” I said before I could stop myself. “The pattern's not forty-three minutes. It's forty-three minutes minus the accumulated processing delay from each iteration. It's speeding up.”
