Melissa la Cruz - Frozen

“Pretty sure. Couldn’t have been easy, letting me win with all those cameras around. Not really sure how she managed it in the first place.”

“Maybe she was setting you up,” Farouk called from inside the small apartment. The kid was always butting in where he wasn’t invited.

“And maybe you talk too much,” Shakes grumbled. “She’s the reason you didn’t eat goop tonight, you know.”

Farouk put his feet up on the shabby couch. “So, she let you win a few credits, so what. So we got steak for dinner.”

“Yeah, we don’t owe her nothing,” Daran agreed, taking the binoculars for a look. But he didn’t seem to recognize her from the other night.

Farouk let out a large burp and Shakes grimaced. “She can pay, and god knows we need the work.” He’d outlined her proposal to the team earlier: She needed a military escort, protection through Garbage Country, passage out to the sea as far as New Crete. She would pay them half now and the rest once they arrived at their destination.

“She’s not marked, is she?” Zedric asked. “You know we don’t mess with ice trash.”

“What did they ever do to you, man?” Wes asked, annoyed.

Zedric shrugged. “They breathe. It’s unnatural what they can do . . . they have no place in this world, and you’ve heard what they say happens to them . . .” He shivered and looked away.

“Relax, her eyes are gray,” Shakes explained.

Zedric sneered. “Rets can be faked.”

“Not easily,” Shakes argued. “I’m telling you, she’s legit.”

“Why New Crete?” Wes wanted to know. “Nothing there but penguins and polar bears.”

“You know why,” Daran said. “Probably another delusional pilgrim looking for the Blue, but she just won’t admit it.”

Wes sighed. He knew Daran had guessed correctly. There was no reason to go halfway around the world except in search of paradise. There’s nothing out there, he wanted to tell her, and looking for something that didn’t exist was a waste of time and heat credits.

Maybe he could sell her on the tent cities in Garbage Country instead. Try to talk her out of risking the black waters.

He thought of the last girl who’d asked for his help to the Blue. Juliet had also wanted out, but he’d turned her down. He wondered what happened to her; rumor had it she died during the bombing at the Loss. Jules did like her cards. He didn’t want to think about what that meant, if she was truly gone. But what else was new. Everyone he loved was dead or lost. Mom. Dad. Eliza.

“We don’t need this job, man. Remember there are things out there in the Pile. We barely made it out last time, and the water’s even worse.” Daran flexed his muscles, and the scars on his hands turned pink at the effort, souvenirs from the region’s insurrections.

Wes agreed with him. He knew what was out there. And even if they made it through Garbage Country, the corsair ships would be circling the toxic oceans, ready for fresh meat, fresh cargo for the slave holds. It was getting harder and harder to evade them.

“What’s your gut say?” Wes asked Shakes again. He trusted Shakes with his life. They’d been through a lot together since they were rooks, especially that last deployment when they were sent down to what the government called a “routine police action” and what everyone else called the Second Civil War. Texas had been the last holdout to sign the new constitution and was punished for its insurrection. What was left of the state that wasn’t covered in ice was covered in blood, its militia utterly decimated during the final battle at Santonio.

“She said she has the credits. I believe her,” Shakes said.

They were in a standard-issue apartment, in one of the new developments off the Strip. Casino dorm. Much nicer than that hovel where they bunked. Wes looked west, where the shining lights of the casinos glowed in the gray sky. In a few minutes, as it did every night, Kaboom! would play on the main stage at the Acropolis, reenacting the huge blast that had torn a crater-size hole in the Loss the other week. “Excitainment” it was called.

Wes checked his watch and looked through the binoculars at the girl again. She’d pulled off her scarf, and he could see her face clearly now.

“How much did she say?”

“Told you—twenty thousand watts—half now, half when it’s done,” replied Shakes.

Twenty thousand watts. A king’s ransom for safe passage through the Pacific. How could a lowly blackjack dealer have enough credit in her account to offer them a payday so big they wouldn’t have to work the rest of the year?

Twenty thousand watts.

Wes inhaled sharply, remembering those glittering five-thousand-credit chips on the table.

There had been exactly four of them on the stack.

He hadn’t swiped them, but somehow they had disappeared. Carlos told him that table had come up short exactly that amount, so where was his cut? Wes had told the security chief he had no idea what he was talking about, if he had it, he’d give it, and of course, Carlos hadn’t believed him. Wes had been puzzled at first, but as the week wore on it became clear that Carlos was serious, that his old friend wouldn’t cover for him. The credits were gone and he expected Wes to cough them up, favor or no. Wes would have to find a way to pay him off soon, or get out of the city if he knew what was good for him.

Wes hadn’t been sure before, hadn’t believed she had the audacity to pull it off, but now it was obvious he had underestimated the pretty dealer.

Nat hadn’t returned those chips to the casino after all—she’d taken them. Somehow, she’d intuited that the blame wouldn’t fall on her. Why not let him take the heat for it; what did she care? He was nothing to her.

Wes was impressed. He’d thought he was running a game, but he had been outplayed.

Natasha Kestal. Blackjack dealer. Pilgrim. Thief.

WES WAS NOT ONE TO TAKE A JOB unprepared, and he’d had Farouk check out Nat, not that there was much to find. No school records, no military ones either; she hadn’t been recruited for officer training and she hadn’t volunteered. A civilian. With no record, no online profile. As far as they could tell, she’d only arrived in New Vegas a few weeks ago.

Those credits she was offering as payment were rightfully his, Wes thought, but now she was making him work for them. He had to hand it to her—that took style.

She’d let Shakes win a few big hands as an apology, and while it would be enough to feed them for a few more days, after that, they would be hungry again. Their Fo-Pro card was fake, and it would be deactivated soon, just like the others they’d forged. They weren’t eligible for real ones, not with their records. Since he’d rejected Bradley and forsaken the death races, they were living on fumes.

“What’s the holdup? We already agreed, we’ll take the bounty, that’s a meal ticket for sure. And when we turn her in, if she’s got the chips on her, we’ll take them, too, along with whatever’s left in her apartment,” Daran argued. The military paid a reward of five hundred credits for each potential fence-hopper, and the plan was to turn her in so they could collect, as well as rob her in the process. “Pilgrims talk a big game; we’ve been taken for a ride before by people who can’t pay.”

Wes had to admit Daran was right, that was what they had agreed. It was even Wes’s idea to turn her in, but that was before he had recognized her through the binoculars.

Down on the sidewalk, Nat crossed the street and disappeared from sight.

Wes studied the glittering landscape of New Vegas, the casinos, old, new, destroyed, and refurbished. Thank god for the Hoover Dam. The fossil fuels left were only available to the military or to those who stole from or bartered with the military, but hydroelectricity let Vegas pay its electric bill.