The smells of the mess hall made Seven dizzy—both with hunger and genuine disgust. She lurked in the doorway for a moment, passed by burly miners, and watched the food dished out on metal trays across the room. For a woman who’d only had nutritional paste and little else before coming to LMC at all, the food seemed like the finest cuisine—a luxury she could hardly believe existed.

  And yet, for a woman who had been royalty, the slop they were dishing out at the counter nearly turned her stomach. In spite of that, she would have readily gobbled a tray down, if she could have afforded it. Emmet’s house was always an option, of course, but she didn’t like the way his good looks sent her stomach churning in other ways—and besides that, she wanted to return with results, not problems. She might have come from royalty, but she certainly wasn’t going to act like it.

  “Is staring at the food supposed to be motivational?” Pocket asked.

  “Something like that,” Seven replied, her heart not quite in it.

  “They have pancakes,” Pocket whispered, his mouth gone comically wide. Seven had to admit that even the shapeless pancakes looked decent—even if everything else was exactly the same color and shape.

  “No pancakes today,” she said, and Pocket practically deflated on her shoulder. “Business first. Then we’ll see what we can do.”

  Pocket moaned on her shoulder, but she ignored him when she found the source of her visit—Luca. He sat alone at the edge of a table, scribbling something on a paper between bites. Well, that was strange. Seven hadn’t figured that most of the miners could read, let alone write. Given the stack of picture books in the corner of the room, she wasn’t sure she was far off the mark.

  Seven crossed the room, practically floating with glee. The dice stuffed in her pocket wasn’t just a lucky break—it was everything. And for the first time in weeks, she found herself actually hoping that things might change.

  She plopped herself down beside Luca and waited for him to notice her. It took longer than expected. He was deep into his paper, his pencil moving quickly, a bite of syrup-laden pancakes inches from his mouth, clearly forgotten. He wasn’t scrawling letters, as she’d figured, but…numbers, she realized. Probabilities and the like, if she remembered her own correctly.

  “Do you like math?” she asked, snatching Pocket before he could take a bite of Luca’s pancakes. He flinched, then looked at her, and finally at Pocket, wailing from where she’d stuffed him inside her shirt. Then, he seemed to shake himself from his stupor.

  “I do,” he said. “But it doesn’t do any good here—they made sure to design their contracts in their favor, and our rolls are just up to chance anyway.”

  “Some chance,” Seven agreed, glancing at his paper. “But knowing the probability of success or failure is half the battle.”

  “I guess,” he agreed, looking glum. He squinted at her suspiciously, and Seven was a little chagrined to notice the flowering bruise still on his face. “Why are you here?”

  “Because I have a question for you.”

  “A question?” he asked, squinting at her. “Not interested.” He returned to his paper, though now he only halfheartedly scrawled on it, obviously distracted by her presence. “Rook talks too much about you for my comfort.”

  “About me?”

  “Yeah, and not always positive things.”

  Well that wasn’t good. Seven would have to get to the bottom of that. Was he watching her? Did he recognize who she was? Regardless, it made her uneasy. The last thing she needed was for Rook the Rounder to notice her—especially with what she planned.

  She leaned forward, so close to Luca that he tried to lean back from her, and nudged his thigh. “Give me your hand,” she whispered, trying not to move her lips. Fortunately, no other miners seemed to be watching. Luca, unfortunately, was less than cooperative.

  “Why?”

  “Just give it to me.”

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  Reluctantly, he put his hand in hers, and she dropped a few shards there. They’d been from Emmet, meant to buy her breakfast and a new set of clothes, but she could always get more shards—especially with this new dice. “Drop your pencil,” she instructed. Luca hesitated, then seemed to understand what she meant. He dropped his pencil, then made a big show of picking it up, only Seven caught him peeking at his palm in the process. When he came up from beneath the table, he was beet-red and panicked.

  “You can’t be serious,” he spat.

  “But I am,” she replied, smiling. “Consider it a thank you for answering my question.”

  “I’ll get in trouble,” he argued, though already she could see the doubt spreading across his face. Three pristine utility shards were worth plenty of money, even if they might not make the best dice.

  “You’re already above ground,” she argued. “You presumably went to the earnings counter after your shift. They’d have no reason to search you.”

  He seemed to turn this over in his head, his hand tight around the shards. Finally, he sighed, then took her hand and placed a shard there. He was at least somewhat subtle with the action—an impressive skill, given that she had no idea what kind of past could have shoved a mathematician into slavery at LMC. Perhaps Luca was well-born, or he’d worked gambling tables before. Regardless, she tried to shove the shard back at him, but he shook his head.

  “I’ll only take these two if you take that one,” he said. “They’re too valuable for me to have all of them. And you…” He trailed off, studying her thin frame, and Seven felt her cheeks go hot. “You look like you need the help.”

  “Boy, does she,” Pocket chimed in. “Hey, are you going to finish those—”

  Seven shoved him back into her shirt, suddenly irritated, though Luca stared at Pocket, obviously curious. When Pocket’s voice was muffled, his eyes fell on her again, studying her. He was obviously older than he looked, his eyes measured and wary somehow.

  “What do you really want?” he asked. Seven shrugged at him, trying to act casual.

  “I told you. I wanted to ask you a question.”

  “Sure, but there’s something else. You want something. Everyone wants something.”

  “Well, that much is true,” she admitted. When he didn’t speak up again, she stared at the numbers on his paper rather than meet his eyes. “You’ve worked here for a while, right?”

  “Right,” he replied. “Is it that obvious?”

  “It’s the dead look in your eye,” Pocket said, his voice muffled. There was a faint purple glow coming from beneath her shirt, and Seven sighed.

  “Anyway,” she said, and held her right hand up on the table, removing her glove. “Palms. Do they scan them?” She didn’t miss the way Luca’s eyes cut to her gloved hand. But being left-handed had its perks. Most simply assumed she was right-handed. Luca glanced at her hand again, then met her eyes, doubt warring in his.

  “Of course not,” he replied. “They scan you when you enter the company town, but if they let you inside in the first place, they know your status already. They wouldn’t bother doing it all the time. Once you’re inside, where would you get a dice? You can’t mine for one—they make sure to track mined shards so people don’t suddenly materialize a dice one day. And having the wages to buy one in a shop would be practically impossible. Even the miners doing well only have enough to eat at the mess hall or buy company-sponsored dice. None of the good ones around the city. Even if you got your hands on a dice, they’d know about it long before you put it into your palm.”

  Seven fiddled with her glove, her mind turning through the possibilities. What Luca said made sense. Her dice was an anomaly—a thing that shouldn’t have existed in the first place. Why would LMC bother scanning for something that, in their minds, shouldn’t have existed at all? It was possible she could make it into the mines without putting the dice in her palm at all, but the idea made her gut churn with dread.

  What if they searched her? What if she did too well in the mines and they decided to try to find out why? And besides that, the dice had maybe a few good uses left on it. It wouldn’t last forever, and if palming worked the way she’d read about it, she’d be able to stretch out its uses a little longer, at least. No, it was better to put it in her palm, even with the other risks involved. Better to keep it where LMC couldn’t touch it.

  “Whatever you’re planning, they’ll find out,” Luca said. “You can’t fool LMC. No one’s ever done it before.”

  “No one’s ever done it yet,” Seven said, grinning. “You’ll see.”

  “I’ll see you in one of those mounds,” Luca said grimly, shoving another bite of pancake into his mouth. Pocket whined faintly from her shirt. “You should have just left me out there.”

  “You don’t mean that,” she said, smiling. She stood and patted his shoulder and thought she saw the hint of a tiny smile.

  “No,” he agreed. “I don’t. But whatever you’ve got planned, leave me out of it. I’ve already got mandatory corporate training tonight.”

  Seven paused, frowning. “For what?”

  Luca’s smile grew as he jotted down a few more lines of numbers. “For telling Cheryl that her math was wrong.”

  “That’s it?”

  Luca blinked, the smile falling from his face, then met her eyes, pencil still in hand. “Seven, at LMC, perception is reality. If you break that perception—prove it wrong with something logical and true—then they have to get rid of you before it spreads to everyone else.”

  Seven glanced at his complex proofs on the page, then at the coloring books in the corner, and laughed. “I don’t think you have to worry about your math spreading to the other miners—they already find literacy a threat.”

  “Stranger things have happened,” he said.

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