Silence rang out in the room. Then Emmet’s groaning. Then Seven’s swearing, leaving her mouth at such a rate that she couldn’t quite figure out what she was saying at all.

  She stared at her hands, then at the human-shaped dent in the floor, then at Emmet, trying to pull himself up to a sitting position at her feet. That finally snapped her out of it. She went down on her knees, helping him extricate himself from the rubble of his floor, looking like he was reconsidering his entire understanding of physics.

  “Shit,” Seven whispered. “Shit shit shit. Emmet, I’m—“

  “What the hell was that?” Emmet demanded, looking like he’d been thrown off the palace balcony. “I thought you said you didn’t know self-defense.”

  “I don’t.”

  “You just put me through my floor, Seven.”

  Seven grimaced, tugging on his arm to help him up. “A lucky shot?” she offered, smiling nervously.

  “I weigh two hundred pounds!”

  “I said I’m sorry—or I meant to, anyway.”

  Pocket bounced excitedly on the couch. “Do it again! Do it again!”

  “We are not doing it again,” Emmet and Seven said together.

  Emmet got to his feet slowly, helped in some part by Seven, and checked himself for injuries. Truth be told, she still looked worse than he did—minus the sheet-white color of his face. Mostly, he seemed to be fine. Bruised, startled, but nothing broken at least. He finally turned to study Seven, the awkwardness of earlier replaced with a sort of shrewd calculation.

  “This has happened before, hasn’t it?”

  So much for watching your tells, she thought, annoyed. She’d been so startled by the success of her throw that it had been impossible to hide the churning emotions on her face. She hesitated, then sighed, leaning against the couch. Well, Emmet already knew one of her biggest secrets. He might as well know the rest. She nodded.

  “My first night alone, I went to a gambling hall.”

  “Checks out.”

  Seven shot him a look, but went on, folding her arms together. “I cleaned them out, bought an inn room, and went to sleep. I swear I locked the doors, but somehow these two men got in. They…attacked me, and without any dice or anything, I—I just did what I could. I figured if I could just distract them for long enough I could get away, but when I kicked the first man, he flew through the wall.”

  “The wall,” Emmet repeated. “A full grown man. And you didn’t think that was worth mentioning before we practiced together?”

  “I thought it was a fluke!” She rubbed her arms, feeling chilled in spite of the warmth of Emmet’s living room. “If I’d thought it was something I could work with I would have kicked the guy tonight into the wall instead of setting off another SOS warning.”

  “You didn’t think to test it?”

  “I didn’t have time.”

  “Wait…” Emmet squinted at her. “Was I the test?” She couldn’t help but wince. “I was! Luck take me, you thought you’d try it on me!”

  “I was being gentle!”

  “Define gentle.”

  “I was at maybe thirty percent.”

  “Thirty percent just redecorated my living room,” Emmet snapped, now pacing. He seemed to be turning something over in his mind. “Okay, so this is either very good or very bad.”

  “How can it be bad?” she demanded. “If I can do this consistently, then I can mine faster, I can defend myself from anyone who tries to rob me after a shift, and I don’t have to worry anymore.”

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  “It’s bad,” Emmet said, pausing to watch her, “because it will draw attention. Maybe too much attention.”

  “No one has to know.”

  “No,” he agreed, “but they’ll see you making quotas—exceeding them, even. And if you have to defend yourself too often, word will get around.” He sighed, waggling a finger in the air. “But if you can control it, keep it hidden except when you need it…Seven, we can make some real progress.”

  He paced over to the kitchen counter, and Seven followed him, curious. “Progress doing what?”

  “What we both came here to do—taking LMC down.” He flipped open a notebook, nudging away Pocket, who’d leapt off of Seven’s shoulder to roll towards the pantry. “I didn’t want to send you after any of this—particularly not on your first day—but if I don’t have to worry about you coming back as a corpse, you can investigate the tunnels I can’t get access to.”

  “Why not?” she asked. “Surely you have a way to defend yourself.”

  He patted his dice bag absently, nodding. “I do. But there are more tunnels than I can investigate, and with you along, we’ll double our search radius.” He pointed at a marked spot in his ledgers—a list of tunnel names marked in red. “I’ve been trying to map out these tunnels, but it’s a maze down there. I do, however, have a few of interest—some that LMC tends to keep the rest of us away from. If we can get into the deep sectors, though, we should be able to find our way back to those no-access tunnels. But you’ll need access to some of the better tunnels first.”

  “Tunnels with loot and without a structural integrity problem?”

  “Exactly. You’ll need to prove yourself to LMC first, which should be easy given what you showed me tonight. Clear your debt, make quota, maybe even exceed it. Get promoted to a better sector.”

  Seven swore she felt a sort of itch at the back of her mind—the thrill of a new game, a new set of stakes. And, with this power coursing through her veins, she couldn’t help but feel optimistic for the first time in some time. Sure, she had no dice. But she had something better—a way to fight back.

  “What am I looking for?” she asked.

  “A pattern,” Emmet explained. “There’s a pattern in their shipments leaving the main campus. Certain tunnels yield shards that never make it to market. They’re logging them, collecting them, but they’re not selling them.” He tapped his ledger again, where he’d scribbled several notes about the tunnels. “And the miners who work those sectors never transfer out. They never quit. They’re never injured. They don’t seem to exist outside the mines at all.”

  “Weird.”

  “Extremely. I’m not even sure I’m supposed to know those tunnels exist—but I found them on Rook’s desk one day when I was running papers for Cheryl. Lucky for me, I’ve got a photographic memory.”

  “So if we can find a way through to those tunnels,” she said slowly, “we might be able to find evidence solid enough that LMC can’t bury it.” She leaned her head on her hand, thinking. “Realistically the best thing to do is map the tunnels. I’ve got a good sense of direction. If I can get assigned to a lot of different sectors, maybe we can find where they aren’t assigning people.”

  Emmet nodded, his eyes excited. “And if we can find that, we’ve found what LMC doesn’t want us to look for.”

  Seven nodded slowly. It was a long game. A dangerous one. But she was already knee-deep in shit. Already all in on this insane venture. Better to see it through. And, while she was loath to admit it, knowing she had a way to defend herself gave her some confidence at least. It was almost like having a dice.

  Almost.

  “Alright,” she said. “I’m in.”

  She went to shake Emmet’s hand, then froze, staring at her palm. It was glowing. More than that, the fresh, raw blisters of just a few minutes ago were already healing up, fading away to reveal fresh skin. Emmet took her hand, staring at it in awe.

  “You have to have a dice,” he said. “You’re obviously lying. It’s a healing one, right? And a strength dice? Maybe two dice? Surely they wouldn’t let someone in the royal family go without one.”

  Seven shook her head, marveling at her palm. She swore there was a faint outline there in gold—of a d20, one edge glowing brighter than the rest. “No dice,” she said, her voice feeling small. “I swear, Emmet. I’d kill for one.”

  “I don’t think you’ll need to,” he said quietly, watching her hands knit themselves back together. “Not with whatever this is.”

  She flexed her fingers, watching in fascination and some growing horror as the wounds knit themselves together. Within seconds, they looked days old instead of hours, and the pain was completely gone.

  Then, with dawning horror, Seven remembered that thrill of energy she felt each time she’d touched a dice. The way laying hands on them could light her up with a sort of energy that rivaled even the best coffeehouses in Veilhome. The way she was drawn to them, desperate for them, not just for the chance that one might accept her, but for the feeling of clarity, of energy, of peace after draining one dry. It was like a strange sort of addiction. She’d never really needed much sleep, nor had she ever struggled on a horse, or in fencing practice. She’d just assumed she was naturally athletic, but she’d never felt the need to push her athleticism farther. She’d never needed to survive with it. Now, though…

  “What if I’m not just killing the dice?” she whispered. “What if I’m absorbing something from them instead?”

  “Energy,” Emmet agreed. “Power, maybe.”

  They stared at each other, the implication settling over the room with a heavy silence. Pocket, who’d been digging in the pantry nearby, finally spoke up. “So, on a scale of ‘mild concern’ to ‘existential nightmare’, where are we landing?”

  “Maybe a little bit of both,” she said.

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