Seven passed the burly guard on the way into her shift, trying to hide her glee—and her nerves. She held her breath as she passed, but he let her go, and there were no klaxons of warning sounding as she entered the lift to go to her assigned sector. A part of her considered that it was too good to be true—surely LMC would have set up some sort of failsafe for dice smuggled into the city.
Then again, she’d seen the desolate location of the city on the way in. Nearly died of boredom in the flatlands between the last town and here, in fact. There was nothing for miles and miles. At least a day’s walk away. A miner’s absence would be noted much quicker than they’d be able to get a dice and get back into the city. And even if they managed as much by some miracle, they’d be subject to the scrutiny of the city guard.
She exited the lift and passed under another detector, wincing, but nothing happened. Everything’s keyed to dice shards, she thought, letting out a relieved sigh. I might actually get away with this.
The thought almost made her dizzy with joy. Of course, she was also just dizzy from the dice in her palm. Dizzy and strangely hot—like she was now running a fever that grew hotter with each passing hour. It might have been something to worry about if she weren’t so pleased about the palming actually working.
Just wait until I tell Juno about this, she thought, practically floating. Warning and laws be damned, she’d done something that was reserved for legends. So much for being a spare, she thought, smiling.
She straightened the leather strap she’d bought to help carry her pickaxe and picked her way down the lit tunnel, a few miners traipsing along after her. After days of filth and grime, it was a relief to be clean again; that shard from Emmet had bought her not just the meal last night, but a clean white shirt, sturdy denim pants, and slightly used leather boots. Those, at least, she’d gotten on a steep discount; there were hardly any other miners her size employed at LMC, besides maybe Luca.
She missed the fine clothes of her past life, of course, but she’d long gambled those away. Better to be practically clothed for the job at hand. And they fit her, at least.
She made a fist with her left hand, feeling the heavy weight of the dice settled into her palm, pulsing with a familiar warmth. The tunnels stretched ahead of her, and miners disappeared into side passages to enter their shifts. After so much chaos in her first few days, it was strangely mundane. If this was what it was usually like to work at LMC, then Seven could see how it might be easy to let your guard down. The shifts were light, the work easy. And today, hers would be even easier. Today she had a weapon that they didn’t even know existed.
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“You’re humming,” Pocket observed from her shirt pocket, his glow a sort of honeyed yellow in the dim tunnel.
“Am I?” She realized that Pocket was right—she was humming some half-forgotten tune from childhood. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt so optimistic.
She’d been assigned to an unnamed tunnel in Sector K. From what Emmet had told her, it was an overly-mined section of rock mostly used to keep miners busy and out of trouble. Most miners on the route collected just enough shards to avoid the worst penalties while stacking up greater debts that they couldn’t hope to pay. It was…kind, to say the least, that Rook had put her here. Maybe a little too kind. And, while she was ready for a break from the life-threatening nonsense of the last few days, Seven realized that the real danger of this tunnel lay in never escaping it at all.
But today, it was perfect for her purposes. As miners funneled away and she crept deeper into the mines, down a well-trodden slope thick with tunnel dust, she realized that she practically had the place to herself. The few miners she did pass paid her no mind, hacking away at walls that had been stripped bare months ago. Their shoulders sagged, and some of them smelled faintly of cheap liquor. Their listlessness bothered her, but there was little she could do for them right now—not without bailing herself out of this mess first.
Her unmarked little tunnel was at the very end of whatever ‘Sector K’ was supposed to be, and it was as desolate as advertised. The walls were picked clean of any visible ore, and scanning it, Seven wondered if Rook’s reassignment hadn’t been to keep her safe, but to break her. More debt and fewer opportunities to make any actual sort of progress. It seemed a Rook-like thing to do. Still, Rook wouldn’t matter at all if her dice had anything to say about it. She picked an isolated corner, far from the main line of the mines, and glanced over her shoulder to make sure she was really alone.
“Well, here goes nothing,” she whispered to Pocket, who was practically her only source of light in the tunnel. She gripped her hand into a fist, still feeling that faint warmth beneath her glove, and peeled it off, watching the colors pulse so faintly in the darkness that she could barely see them.
“What if someone sees?” Pocket asked, his squeaky little voice alarmed, but barely audible.
“They won’t,” she reassured him. “And if they do, they’re not going to suspect an unauthorized dice down here.” She kissed her fist for good luck, then flicked her palm towards the ground in an instinctive sort of motion. She’d never rolled a palmed dice before, but it felt…almost natural to do so. A release of tension, of energy. Yes, she’d moved her hand in such a way thousands of times before without actually rolling the dice, but this time felt different. There was intention in her actions, and the dice actually listened.
There was a tiny clicking sound in her head, followed by the musical chime she’d heard the day before in her dingy apartment. While the dice never appeared in her actual vision, she could see it in her mind’s eye, twirling and spinning, a kaleidoscope of light so bright that she almost had to shield her eyes, though it did nothing to light the dingy tunnel.
It stopped with a resounding, deep click, and a number fizzled into her vision.
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