Melissa la Cruz - Frozen

The chips . . .

Four platinum ones.

Equal to twenty thousand heat credits. Enough to pay a runner, enough to hire a ship. Enough to get her out of here . . .

She looked up and caught her newfound hero’s eye and they stared at each other for a heartbeat.

When she looked down at the table again, the chips were gone.

The handsome boy blinked, confused.

“Here,” Nat said, slipping a few plastic chips into his hand. She thought of those warm gloves she’d been saving up for. “For your trouble.”

“Save it for that glass of water,” he said, giving her chips back and walking toward the exit.

WES MOVED QUICKLY THROUGH THE CASINO, annoyed with himself. The platinum chips were right there. Four of them, equal to twenty thousand watts, his for the taking. So why didn’t he have them?

It had gone down perfectly at first. He had hooked the dealer with his line, saw how she lit up when he smiled, and Daran had executed the play to the letter with that shady ace. Caused a commotion, and in the process allowed Wes ample time to take four of those platinum chips while the dealer’s attention was focused elsewhere.

Except Wes hadn’t taken them and he was going back to the rendezvous empty-handed. He frowned as he scissored his way through the slow-moving crowd on the way to Mark Antony’s. All he’d had to do was slip those fancy chips into his pocket and they would have eaten like kings tonight. But he had hesitated, and then they were gone, vanished in the blink of an eye.

The walkway was full of hustlers peddling their wares, handing out cards and flyers, their good-time gals casting sultry looks at anyone who came by.

“What’s wrong, handsome? I can make you feel better,” the nearest one promised. “Or you can do the same for me . . .”

Wes found his crew assembled at the base of the Bacchus statue at the Forum Shops-in-the-Sky. They looked up at him eagerly. Daran wasn’t there yet, but he would be okay. Carlos would take care of him.

“How’d it go, boss?” Shakes asked. The scruffy, goateed beanpole of a soldier was his right-hand man, and had been with Wes since their grunt days. They were like brothers. Shakes was solid, a rock, despite his name. He was a veteran like Wes, with a survivor’s stoic determination. Shakes had been more than displeased the other night to hear that Wes had been back at the tracks. I didn’t save your butt in Santonio just so you could throw your life away as a death jockey. He looked at Wes hopefully, but Wes shook his head.

“What happened?” Farouk whined. He was the youngest of the crew, all nose and elbows, a scrawny, twitchy kid with a bottomless appetite.

Wes was about to explain when Daran and Zedric came running up the walkway. The brothers were dressed identically, in the same tan windbreaker, the same dark slacks, the same shaggy dark hair and piercing black eyes. If Daran had been recognized by security, Zedric would have stepped in to play the part of the thief.

Unlike Shakes, the rest of the team were new hires. Daran and Zedric Slaine and Farouk Jones. Farouk was thirteen going on thirty, a blabbermouth—he never stopped talking even when he didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about—he was an expert on every topic with no experience to back it up. Dar and Zed were only a year apart, but Daran treated his younger brother like a kid. They’d been booted from the army before they could be eligible for full post-service benefits, which was routine military policy these days. Cut ’em loose before they get too expensive. Typical soldiers, they were brash, potty-mouthed, and hotheaded, but they were also dead shots who were handy in a firefight.

“How much?” Daran asked. “How’d we do?”

“Came up snake eyes, sorry,” Wes told him.

Daran cursed long and creatively. He sneered at Wes. “You holding out on us?”

“I swear to god—I got nothing,” Wes said, returning his gun.

Daran yanked it back furiously. “What d’you mean you don’t have it? I had that golden. It was all there! All you had to do was reach out and take those chips!”

Wes looked around, people were beginning to notice, and while the sky patrols were giving them a wide berth, they would be moving in soon if the boys continued to make too much noise. “Keep your voices down. They were on to me. I couldn’t blow Carlos’s cover.”

“No way! They knew nothing! I’m not buying it!” Daran protested. “And Carlos is expecting his two thousand hot.”

“Let me take care of Carlos.”

“So there’s nothing to eat?” Farouk asked again. “Nothing?”

“Not unless you like glop,” Zedric intoned darkly, glaring at Wes. “I’m not going back to that food line—it’s humiliating.”

Shakes nodded. He didn’t accuse, he didn’t complain. He clapped Wes on the shoulder. “You can do this in your sleep. We’ve run that play a hundred times. What happened?”

Wes sighed. “I told you, I felt the eyes on us. I spooked.”

He didn’t want to tell them the truth, didn’t even want to admit it to himself.

What had happened?

The blackjack dealer was beautiful, with long dark hair and luminous, fair skin. She had none of that bronzed hardness that was so popular now among the New Veg snow bunnies, with their dark-orange tans and bleached hair, a desperate attempt to look as if one could afford to travel to the enclosed cities where an artificial sun provided heat and light.

But it wasn’t that she was pretty. It was that she was on to him.

Right at the moment, right when his hand was hovering over the platinum chips to take them away, she had caught his eye and stopped him with a look that said, Don’t even think about it.

She hadn’t been fooled by his theatrical heroics or distracted by his flirtatious banter. Not for a second. She knew what they were doing. What he was doing. That he was a fraud, and no hero.

Wes had backed off, startled. The moment was lost, and when he looked down the chips had disappeared. She must have put them back on the casino stack. It was cute how she tried to tip him, too, as if a few heat credits could make up for his loss.

“Come on,” Daran said to his brother. “Let’s go see if we can do better with the play at the Apple,” he said. “I’ll play the hero this time, get it done right, ” he said to Wes.

“Can I come?” Farouk asked.

“Sure—you can be lookout,” Daran said. “Shakes—you in? We might need you for muscle; they don’t know us as well at the Apple.”

Shakes looked at Wes and sighed. “Nah, I’ll catch up with you guys later.”

“Suit yourself,” Daran said.

“You’re going to lose them if you can’t feed them,” Shakes said when the boys had left. “Then what? Without a crew we can’t run any type of play.”

Wes nodded. They would have to leave the city, or join up again, something. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Then he wouldn’t have the luxury of turning down his assignments.

“Something will come up,” Wes said. “Want to try our luck at the lines?” It was humbling, but they had to eat.

“Yeah—why not,” Shakes grumped. They walked through the casino, past the food courts, a myriad of treats available but not to the likes of them. Noodle shops, crepe stands, chic cafés serving coffees and tea sandwiches, five-star gourmet restaurants where reservations had to be booked months in advance. There were floor-to-ceiling tanks, brimming with exotic fish domestically farmed in saltwater pools—pick one and they’d slice it into sashimi while you waited.

Another restaurant boasted delicacies beyond imagination. Quail, pheasant, wild boar, everything organic, grass-fed, free-range. ( Where did they range? Wes wondered. He’d heard that the heated enclosures were vast, but how vast could they be?) The tropical fruit display was the hardest to ignore. The colors alone made him stop and stare. He knew the bright reds and yellows were genetically modified for maximum saturation, but it was still a gorgeous sight. The fruit was stored under heavy glass, like diamonds of old, but the shops always left out a few trays to tease passersby with their flowery scent. They passed a chocolate shop selling handmade artisanal candy that cost more than the two of them put together (hired guns had nothing on small-batch truffles).