The notification arrives the next morning.
I'm at the public library, using the free Wi-Fi to check my email. There's one new message. The subject line reads:Prime Match Notification.
The bottom drops out of my world. I open it and the world gets very small.
Dear Mr. Holland,
Following your registration and biological screening, the Omega Match Bureau is pleased to inform you we have identified a Prime Match with a compatibility rating of 97.4%.
I read the number and reread the number and the number doesn't change. Ninety-seven-point four percent.Prime.It’s not the sixty-something percent background noise I'd calculated as the unlikely worst case. Not even the ninety percent threshold that would put me on the Bureau's radar. Ninety-seven point four, which is so far above the statistical average that my first coherent thought is that there's been a data error.
It has to be. The chances are too small for it to be real.
My second thought is less coherent. It's just noise. White noise, filling my head, drowning out the hum of the library's airconditioning and the tap of keyboards and the rustle of someone turning pages at the table beside me.
I scroll down.
Your matched Alpha is: Dominic Novikov.
I don't recognize the name. I close the email.
I sit very still in the library chair and breathe and wait for my hands to stop shaking.
The math is simple and the math is everything. The Bureau knows my name. They know my blood type, my scent profile, my designation. They have my registration address — the shelter on Vine Street. They will follow up. They will escalate.
I have, at most, a few days before the system starts looking for me.
I walk out of the library into a morning that's too bright and stand on the sidewalk and do the only calculation that matters.
I have two hundred and twelve dollars left. That’s enough for a bus ticket and enough to survive on the other end until I figure out the next thing.
I have a backpack with two changes of clothes, my toothbrush, the food I bought yesterday and a paperback novel I took from a free library box two days ago and haven't finished.
I walk to the bus station and do more calculations. I’ll need some money when I get to my destination but making that destination as far away as I can is more important.
The clerk doesn’t blink an eye as I ask him how far my money will get me. Fifteen minutes later, I’m sitting at the back of an old Greyhound, watching the city disappear behind me.
1. Theo
Eight years later
The trick to counting cards is not the counting. Anyone with a decent memory and a basic understanding of probability can keep a running tally. It's arithmetic. Elementary school stuff.
The trick is doing it while looking like you're not doing anything at all.
I push a stack of chips forward and take a sip of the club soda that's been sitting in front of me for the last forty minutes, slowly going flat.
The dealer, a woman in her fifties with quick hands and a permanent expression of mild boredom, slides cards across the green felt. Seven of hearts to the man on my left. King of spades to the woman in the red dress. Ten of clubs to me.
I update the tally in my head. The math is clean and good and it lives in a part of my brain that operates independently of everything else, the way breathing does, or blinking. I didn't learn it. It was just always there, this ability to hold numbers in parallel and track probabilities without conscious effort while the rest of me smiles and makes conversation.
I adjust my glasses — clear lenses, no prescription, part of tonight's costume — and study my cards with the appropriate amount of hesitation. Hesitation matters. A counter who plays too fast or too confidently is a counter who gets noticed, and getting noticed is the one thing I cannot afford.
Tonight, I'm Theo Garnett. Dirty blond hair, slightly different from my paler natural color courtesy of a cheap wash-in dye I picked up at a drugstore this morning. The glasses. A button-down shirt that's slightly too big for me, bought from a thrift store and chosen specifically because it makes me look like what I'm supposed to be: a moderately successful office worker blowing off steam on a Friday night. I’m forgettable: the kind of person a pit boss glances at once and never thinks about again.
I have rules. I always have rules.
Never win more than two thousand in a single session. Leave after ninety minutes, even if the count is running hot. Never play the same table twice in one visit. Never visit the same casino more than once every six months.
