“Day one of your corporate servitude,” Pocket said. “I can practically taste the despair from here.”

  “Well I can’t,” Seven snapped, “because you’re sitting in my only corporate-allotted mug.”

  Pocket settled down in the mug like he was enjoying himself, and Seven sighed, rummaging in her locker for the tube of ‘nutritionally complete’ gray paste that was supposed to be her breakfast. The sludge would have been nearly inedible for anyone, but for Seven, who was used to chefs and banquets, the stuff might as well have been an assault on her person. Still, she had to act the part, even if she was tempted to frequent Emmet’s house.

  They’d agreed to stay separate as much as possible early on in her employment, mostly to avoid any prying eyes from LMC’s higher-ups. It made sense, but as she sat in her dingy apartment, she couldn’t help but feel a little put out by it. Emmet might be a slave for LMC, but he’d certainly done well for himself with Moore’s money—and by extension, Seven’s.

  Still, she’d have plenty of time to upgrade her surroundings later, perhaps with a few good nights in the gambling quarter, if she could find some funds in the mines to play with. And it was important to experience every aspect of LMC’s horrible process—especially if she wanted to have plenty of evidence to use against Rook in the future.

  She shut her locker and sat on her tiny cot with the tube, looking at Pocket, who watched her expectantly. His flickering light was the only source besides a nearly burnt out bulb near her cot, and she’d stubbed her toe several times in her room already. It was the size of a closet—a small one. For children. Or maybe for a pet. But it was hers, and while the showers the night before had been a study in how to make a place as unwelcoming as possible, she was now cleaner, drier, and more well-rested than she’d been in weeks.

  Grimacing, Seven tried to force some of the slurry down. It fought its way back up her throat, and she paused for a moment, squinting her eyes shut, trying to control her stomach as it tried to heave the stuff back up.

  “Wellllll?” Pocket asked.

  “Oil,” Seven replied. “It tastes like oil.”

  Pocket bounced happily in her cup, flashing through a series of colors. “Like curry? Like a thick cream sauce?”

  “Like lubricant. Machine oil.”

  Pocket deflated a little. “Oh.”

  A muffled noise crackled through her thin walls—the company loudspeaker: “All new family members report to Orientation Theater 7 for mandatory fun and learning!”

  Sighing, Seven shoved the tube back into her locker and collected Pocket. At least she’d be in the mines soon. Then the real work would start. The d100 sat in her dice bag, now slung firmly around her middle, tucked beneath her shirt. It was useless—hardly worth keeping around—but it was something, and she’d make the best of it. And something petty in her couldn’t help but be excited about the prospect of ruining it as soon as she got the chance.

  She grabbed the rest of her pitiful gear and shuffled out with the rest of the new miners.

  The theater was hardly any better than the depot. Motivational posters were peeling off the walls with such phrases as, WORK HARDER, NOT SMARTER! and YOUR SACRIFICE BUILDS CHARACTER!

  The seats were sparsely filled by other miners who looked either unstable, or as desperate as Seven was. Several were missing fingers or teeth, and a few more were sporting fresh bandages.

  A blonde woman in a hot-pink suit clicked onto the stage, her heels easily six inches high.

  “Hello, you lucky survivors!” she chirped, her voice so high it made Seven wince. “I’m Cheryl, your wellness coordinator here at Lucky Mining Corp. We are so happy to have you all. And—oh!—I see some familiar faces!” She waved to several of the bandaged miners, her smile too-white, then turned back to the dice projector. “Today we’ll be viewing your orientation video and assigning you to sectors. A very exciting time for our new miners.”

  She turned and slotted a dice into the projector, and Seven slouched against the half-rotted theater seat, wanting to disappear. Maybe she’d avoided execution, but she could think of few fates as bad as this. Surely her father could have negotiated for imprisonment, but apparently what she’d done was too good for the dungeons.

  Even so, she’d chosen Lucky Mining Corp. And, while Rook was a churning undercurrent in her mind, there was another hum of excitement that she couldn’t shake. Those shards she’d held at Moore’s hadn’t faded quite as quickly as dice normally did at her touch. She couldn’t help but wonder if there was something to that—if perhaps some shards were better attuned to her energy, or if she could craft her own dice that might respond without draining itself dry. Besides that, LMC had to be absolutely drowning in dice. She’d spent most of her life touching every dice she could get her hands on, hoping for a miracle, but here, she wondered if she’d finally found it. There would be something here she could use.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  There had to be.

  The projector flickered to life, and several miners made from clay played across the screen, looking deformed. “Lucky Mining Corporation,” the video intoned, “where dreams come true!”

  Several obvious actors pretended to mine, the dice twinkling in piles of otherwise dull rock as safety statistics rolled across the bottom of the screen. Seven unconsciously did the math in her head, but none of it added up. The other miners didn’t seem to notice.

  “I started at Lucky Mining Corp as a young man,” one miner said in a stilted rhythm, obviously reading from a card, “and I am now wealthy beyond my most fabulous dreams. Everything I have I owe to Lucky Mining Corporation. They really treat you as family here.”

  “Jom Rook is the father I never had,” another said. “Every day I swing my pickaxe is a day I make my father proud.”

  “Daddy issues,” Pocket whispered.

  Seven stifled a laugh, then noticed something odd. She looked at the man in the video, then looked at a nearby miner, then back again, and her eyes widened.

  “It’s the same guy,” she hissed to Pocket.

  “He is lucky if he’s back,” Pocket said. “I didn’t lie about the odds.”

  “What do you know about the odds?”

  “A lot more than you, your royal pain-in-the-ass.”

  “Are you going for cute, or sarcastic?”

  “Whichever suits me from day-to-day.”

  “And stop calling me that.”

  Pocket opened his tiny mouth to reply, but the room lights bloomed back to life. The projector flickered off, and Cheryl produced a table and another stack of waivers. She began to read them off with enthusiasm, blushing and looking overcome with emotion as she went through a few of them.

  “Company not liable for loss of limb, sanity, of dimensional stability—yes, we just can’t stand seeing any of our family hurt! Employee waives the right to existence in case of temporal paradox—it’s for the best, really. Haunting of family members is considered standard occupational hazard—remember Joever, everyone?” Cheryl searched for confirmation, and while the miners mostly ignored her, she must have gotten it from someone, because she nodded, smiled, and went on. “Any and all dice and dice chips will be returned to corporate within three hours of arrival at the facility. Miners will be searched.”

  Seven sighed at that, annoyed. There had to be a way to smuggle something out of those mines. She was gambling on it. And her gambles always paid off. Usually. Eventually. Maybe.

  Cheryl waved each of them on stage, and the miners signed the paperwork one by one with tepid applause from all but Cheryl, who was the only light of enthusiasm in the entire room. When Seven arrived, she tried to read the new stack of paperwork before her. She really did. But slowly, steadily, her will to deal with any of it simply evaporated, and she hovered over the stack, pen in hand, and the words began to blur together. It was easy to see how even Emmet had been beaten down by the paperwork eventually.

  “Just sign it,” Pocket said. “You’re in too deep now.”

  Well, if that wasn’t the understatement of the century, Seven didn’t know what was. She scribbled her name and stamped it with her employee stamp for good measure, then made her way back to the crowd of miners, who looked just a little more enthusiastic than a bunch of funeral goers. Several looked outright terrified.

  “Time for your assignments!” Cheryl said with a squeal. She clicked over to another pile of papers on pink, shining high-heels, then began to read again. “Saint’s Fortune,” Cheryl called out, then listed several employee numbers. Not Seven’s. Several relieved-looking miners trickled away from the group, pickaxes in hand.

  “Highroll Hollow.”

  “Golden Echo.”

  “The Glimmerway.”

  Seven checked her employee number several times in case she’d forgotten it already, but no—Corporate Cheryl still hadn’t called her name. Eventually, the group whittled down to just a few miners, and one man sobbed audibly.

  Well, shit.

  “Bonewake Chasm.”

  The remaining men didn’t move, even as one checked his number several times in disbelief.

  “The Lady’s Spiral.”

  Another audible wince from the crowd, but the numbers were unfamiliar. Then:

  “The Seventh Fold. Employee number 1344134.” Cheryl hesitated, her smile dropping just a fraction, then added, “Seven.”

  Several miners made a cross over their chests, and she watched one miner whose face went so pale it was almost translucent. Another tried to run before one of the guards bashed him over the head with a trowel. Stunned but resolute, Seven made her way to the stage, but one of the miners caught her arm, his eyes panicked.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he demanded. “This’ll be your first and last day if you go down there. No one ever returns.”

  “I’ve got debts to pay,” Seven lied, trying to dislodge herself from the man. “Surely you do too.”

  He shook his head and let go. “We all do, girl, but you’d be better off running from the debtors or mining above the surface in chains than going down there. You won’t survive.”

  “Cheerful,” Pocket said from her shoulder. “A real team player.”

  “Team player my ass, you stupid slime. The girl’s as good as dead if she goes down there—and you know it.”

  Shaken, Seven ignored him and pushed her way towards Cheryl, who gave her a card to activate the lift that would take her down to the Seventh Fold. An odd name to be sure, but Seven almost considered it lucky. She’d heard enough about Lucky Mining Corp from Emmet that morning to be at least a little nervous—anyone with sense would have been—but surely employees were expensive to recruit and train. Expensive enough that they would have some safety protocols in place for someone new to the job.

  An hour later, the lift dropped her off in a darkened tunnel held up with several pickaxes taped together. Seven took a single step forward, and the lift rattled away, leaving her with nothing but the glimmer of the walls and Pocket’s faint glow. And the now-certain knowledge that even in the mines, safety protocols were the absolute last of Lucky Mining Corporation’s worries.

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