The dice itself had no informational pop up. Seven shook her bracelet, hoping to find the information there, but the air over her wrist stayed blank. She scowled at the little dice. She’d never had one that materialized out of midair, but usually dice would broadcast what they did into the air. Of course, there were probably exceptions. Even masters of dicecraft were still discovering dice that eluded their understanding of the art.

  Of course, if she really wanted to know what it did, there was always palming. Juno had brushed her off as crazy for thinking about it, but what else was she supposed to do with a dice that finally responded to her touch? If she kept it in the world for too long, it might shatter or be stolen. At least in her palm, she could keep it safe—for however many uses it had left. But even she felt a little squeamish at the idea of binding with a total unknown. And there was the rest of palming that she’d read about to give her pause.

  Pocket crawled down her arm to sniff at it tentatively.

  “Smells different,” he said. Seven couldn’t help but let out a little laugh.

  “You can smell them?”

  “Only on Tuesdays.”

  She nudged him aside and rolled the tiny thing around her palm in disbelief. Her first dice since coming to LMC. Her first dice since losing everything. Luck above, had she known that this sat in her pocket, she might not have been tempted to visit Emmet at all. She would have come straight back, shower be damned.

  She smiled at it, letting herself daydream a little. It was hard not to after all this time. And yet, the little thing was misshapen and did smell faintly like buttered popcorn, but it was hers. And maybe it was her ticket out of this mess. A reward from the universe for not turning her back on her people.

  “Are you gonna roll it?” Pocket asked, his big eyes watching from behind her cup.

  “Of course I’m going to roll it.”

  There was a pause, and then he added, “In here?”

  “I—” Seven hesitated. The very idea was ludicrous, of course. Insane. Only a slime would think of something so—she stopped the thought in its tracks. Where else would she go to roll it? The commons? Even at this time of night, there would be other miners there. She’d be robbed or put on a performance improvement plan before the dice even left her hands. And Emmet was likely in bed by now.

  The mines, maybe? Seven shuddered. She’d had enough of the place to last her a lifetime—and she’d be back in it tomorrow for her next shift anyway. But here?

  Seven glanced at the walls—one butting against her shoulder and another not five feet away. Her neighbor snored faintly on the other side, his snoring vibrating the wall against her shoulder. Outside her doorway, miners laughed or yelled, and the sound of machinery wasn’t far away—an obvious LMC processing facility, though she hadn’t explored far enough to know where it was, exactly. Too close for comfort, really.

  To roll it here was insane—a gamble so ridiculous even she didn’t want to take it. But she needed to know. Had to know. If it was something good, it could change everything—not just her rotten luck, but the luck of every other miner at LMC, if she had her way. And maybe it could buy everyone a ticket out of this place.

  “I have to,” she finally replied. “What if it’s good?”

  “What if it’s defective?” Pocket suggested, peering at it suspiciously. His color had gone a faint and sickly green. “It could explode and take half the compound with it. Though that would solve your debt problem, at least.”

  Seven snorted in spite of herself. “Your optimism is certainly inspiring.”

  But Pocket had a point. Even if it was defective, failure hardly changed her situation. She’d signed away forty-seven years of her life to a company that charged interest for breathing, nearly suffocated beneath the mountain on her first day, was assaulted by another miner, and watched a would-be escapee immolated. Now she was sitting in a room smaller than most prison cells with debt that would follow her to the grave. What was one more risk? And if jumping from a two-story wall left her with nothing but a sore ankle, surely she’d have some immunity from whatever the dice did.

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  Besides, the gambler in her—the part that had gotten her into this mess in the first place—was practically humming with curiosity. When was the last time she’d placed a bet on something truly unknown? Her bets had been calculated risks, taken after a lot of mental math on the possibilities. But this dice was impossible to really judge. And, though it pained her to admit it, her pulse quickened with just a bit of excitement tinged with dread.

  “It would be smarter to hide it,” she said, though even as the words left her mouth, she knew she wouldn’t. “Keep it safe. Figure out what it is first.”

  “When was the last time you did anything smart?”

  “Every Tuesday.”

  Pocket made a little humming sound of satisfaction at the joke, but Seven leaned forward, squeezing the dice between still bloodied fingers.

  “What if it’s dangerous?” Pocket asked, his voice small.

  “What if it’s good?”

  “What if it spawns chimeras?”

  “What if it spawns pancakes?”

  “What if it—pancakes?” Pocket went an excited sort of gold, watching her intently. Seven rolled around the dice lazily in her palm. It was practically begging to be rolled. And, well, she’d had enough of playing it safe.

  She thought of Emmet’s debt, of Luca, of the mounds stretching to the horizon. About the miner in the tunnel today who’d tried to rob her—and worse. About Rook the Rounder’s gleeful cruelty and the mountain of debt that was steadily growing around her ears, crushing her more completely with each passing day. And, about her rival’s laughter from across the table all those years ago.

  If this dice could change her situation, she’d take that bet.

  What did she have left to lose?

  “Luck take me,” she whispered, and before she could second-guess herself again, she gripped the dice against her scars, kissed it for good luck, and let it slip from her fingers.

  It hit the dusty floor with a delicate sound like crystal at a fine dinner party, rolling across the uneven planks with a few skips, glowing faintly against the dim interior of her room. For a second, Seven nearly choked as she saw it go near a hole in one of the floorboards, but it narrowly missed oblivion, cycling through a glowing series of colors.

  Just when she thought it would stop, the dice spun into a spiral. It rolled. And rolled.

  And kept rolling.

  She frowned, watching it. She’d never seen a dice behave like this before. But this one gathered speed, zipping around her room like a tiny comet, growing brighter with each revolution. The light was so bright, in fact, that Seven was horrified to see the actual dirt in her room, and made a mental note to do something about it.

  “Uh,” Pocket said, watching from behind her mug. His glow shifted to an alarmed sort of purple-red. “Is it supposed to do that?”

  The air in the room began to hum. Some of that hum reached her ears, but much of it was something Seven felt more than heard. A sort of energy. Power. Magic of a kind she’d never seen before.

  And then, without warning, the dice stopped. It dropped out of the air, and Seven caught it in her palm. She held her breath and peered at the result.

  A one.

  Seven laughed, and nearly sunk onto the bed in relief and bitter disappointment both. But then something flashed in her vision—thousands of tiny shards like the ones she’d spent hours mining during her shift. Ore, glowing like starlight in her vision, as far as the eye could see. Overwhelmed, she sat down. Hard.

  “What is it?” Pocket demanded. “Pancakes? Chimeras?”

  “Shards,” she whispered. “Thousands of them. The entire mine, if I had to guess.”

  “You can…see them?”

  She nodded, her mouth gone dry.

  Pocket let out a sort of disappointed sigh. “Well, it’s definitely not pancakes.”

  “It’s better than pancakes,” she insisted, scooping the dice into her hand. The glow had faded a bit, which was alarming, but it hadn’t shattered. It hadn’t gone dull as every other dice she touched did. “Pocket,” she said again. “Do you know what this means?”

  “That we’re about to be very rich or very dead?” he suggested.

  She shook her head, her mind racing. If this dice—this spelunker dice—could find ore pockets, then mapping the tunnels for Emmet would be easier than ever. Mines followed geological logic, and besides that, she’d be able to find LMC’s best veins with it. Their quotas, their debt, their control—all of it was meaningless if they couldn’t control the quotas through scarcity.

  She held the little dice in her hand with the shards, all glowing faintly. “It means,” she finally answered, “that we can change the game entirely.”

  She smiled at the little dice, still pulsing faintly. In the space of a few minutes, it had gone from curious anomaly to the most powerful weapon she’d ever held.

  “The house always wins,” she mused, turning it between scarred fingers. “But that’s only true when the house controls the game.”

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