Seven froze, reaching for her pickaxe, for the little good it would do. Emmet had already told her plenty of stories about how dangerous the mines were, and that was if she’d snagged a cushy spot up near the surface. Down here, anything could be slinking around.

  Those gleaming eyes grew closer, and Pocket hummed against her shoulder faintly, his hue going a deep purple with fear. She expected some sort of creature, or maybe even a demon, come to collect on a possible soul-debt she’d made after a bad night of gambling.

  What she heard instead was the sound of expensive shoes clicking against the broken stone.

  “Well, well! Still alive!”

  The voice belonged to a familiar man in a suit. Seven held up her lantern as he stepped into the light and flinched as the light bounced off of thousands of tiny pins and gold stars. Rook held a clipboard in one hand and muttered faintly to himself as a team of suited men swarmed into the corridor behind him. One shoved Seven towards a clearing ahead, this one looking much more reinforced than the last one. She should have been relieved, but instead she spun on Rook.

  “How can you be that fast?” she demanded. “I sent out the SOS literally minutes ago. Were you waiting for me?”

  Rook waved her off, chewing on his pen. “Our rookies have a way of disappearing on the first day. Always pays to be prepared—for the good of our employees, you see.”

  Something told Seven that Rook wasn’t at all interested in her wellbeing. She settled for asking about the other oddity of his appearance. “Don’t you run the company?” she asked. “Why bother coming all the way down here for me?”

  “Because I’m your handler, of course!” He beamed at her, the smile still not meeting his eyes. “And at Lucky Mining Corporation, we’re family.” Seven caught a new tag glinting on his suit in the darkness. It read, Incident Assessment Specialist.

  “That’s unexpected,” Rook continued, consulting his clipboard with a frown. “And expensive. So unfortunate to have an accident like this on your first day. I would hope that my rookies would have the sense to listen a little more carefully to our orientation video.” He tilted his head, considering. “Perhaps we can note it on your performance evaluation. An opportunity, if you will.”

  The men in suits swarmed around him, measuring cracks and collecting dust from the wall. They counted fallen rocks, catalogued deep cracks in the wall, and measured the distance between shard veins. One disheveled young man knelt on his hands and knees, licking the dust from the ground. With each discovery, the men scribbled on their clipboards with the enthusiasm of tax auditors finding unreported income.

  “Excuse me?” Seven finally bit out. Her voice came out hoarse and weak, and she coughed, still trying to rid herself of the rock dust. “I almost died in that shaft. It was barely reinforced at all. How is that my fault?”

  Rook looked at her with glee, then jotted something down, murmuring under his breath. “Possible admittance of fault.” Then he waved dismissively at her. “Your near-death was an impressive attempt at insurance fraud, but since you made the mistake of actually living, let’s focus on what’s really important here—the damages.”

  Pocket peeked around her shoulder and trilled strangely, the sound somewhere between blowing a raspberry and laughter. “Oooh I can smell the bureaucratic evil from here.”

  One assessor called out from nearby. “Structural integrity compromise: 1,256 chips!”

  “Air quality compromise: 378 chips.”

  “Potential haunting risk assessment: 147 chips.”

  “Rock displacement: 989 chips!”

  Seven stared at them, baffled. “I didn’t cause any of this. You can’t even—that tunnel was held up with pickaxes taped together like—” She tried to gesture with her hands as words failed her. What was wrong with these people? She’d dealt with idiots plenty of times in her life—courtiers and others vying for political positions with her family were normal—but this was a new level. It was as if everyone else had lost their minds. Even Pocket seemed more reasonable than Rook and his cronies. And worst of all, she’d signed up for it willingly.

  “Cause or not, I’m afraid you’ll have to take responsibility for the damages,” Rook said. He produced a massive binder from seemingly nowhere and flipped to a highlighted section, pointing at it with a chubby finger. “Section 47-B of your employment contract: employee presence constitutes liability acceptance for any and all workplace incidents occurring within a fifty-foot radius of their person.”

  “When I signed that, I didn’t think that the entire tunnel would be compromised,” she snapped. “Who could predict that?”

  “Don’t go all-in if you can’t afford to pay the house,” Rook said, now smiling broadly. “But we have a section for that, too.” He flipped to a new set of pages and read the highlighted text. “Subsection C, paragraph 35: employee assumes full financial responsibility for any workplace incidents, acts of geology, supernatural manifestations, or probability-related catastrophes occurring within fifty feet of their person, regardless of causation, intent, or basic laws of physics.”

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Seven’s stomach dropped somewhere into the vicinity of her boots. She’d signed that contract. Actually signed it after barely reading past the first few pages. She’d figured she could just strike it rich as soon as she got into the mines, but now...

  “And,” Rook added, “we have the teensy little problem of your damaged authorization dice.” His eyes fell on the dud dice in her hands that she’d nearly forgotten she’d been holding. “Those are practically irreplaceable these days—liability and all that, you understand.”

  “No kidding,” Seven said, crossing her arms with a wince to hide the dice. “If you’d told me it was a luck dice, I wouldn’t have—”

  “Surprise dice,” Rook corrected. “This jurisdiction requires disclosure of all luck dice, but surprise dice fall under another legal category entirely. But come now, I won’t bore you with the details—I’m sure you’re so excited to get back to mining!”

  Seven opened and closed her mouth a few times in shock, but Pocket regained his squeaky voice first. “Told you it was famous last words.”

  “Not helping,” she hissed.

  Rook cleared his throat, looking over the clipboard as his men bustled past him, disappearing into the mines, several of them glowing faintly with the dice shards they’d shaken from the walls. “Including your missing luck amplifier, the extravagant damage to one of our finest mineshafts, and the ignorance of company policy while mining, the running total of your debt comes to...four thousand, three hundred and fifty-three chips.” He delivered the staggering number with the casual tone of someone ordering coffee.

  At first, Seven scoffed at the number. Her family was wealthy enough to barely blink at the amount.

  But she wasn’t wealthy anymore. Or part of her family.

  And slowly, as she did the math, Seven swore faintly.

  “That’s nearly a year of wages,” she spluttered. “How do you expect me to pay that off?”

  “We don’t!” Rook replied cheerfully. “Not before it comes due, anyway. But don’t worry—we have a payment plan especially for our newest miners. Twenty-four percent interest, compounded daily.”

  She didn’t need to do a bit of math for the weight of her debt to hit her like a second tunnel collapse. She’d be paying it off forever—assuming she even lived that long. And while her debt didn’t exactly matter if she found a way to bring Rook and his entire family down, the very idea of it was insulting.

  “I’m not taking your payment plan,” Seven snapped. She dug in her belt for the bag of dice shards she was sure was worth a fortune and thrust it into Rook’s face. “This should cover my debts.”

  Rook took the bag, his eyes gleaming, and peered inside. He might as well have been opening a bag of dung given the look on his face. He shook his head.

  “I’m afraid this simply won’t do,” he said, though he stuffed the bag away in his shirt. “By the time we take out your nutritional needs, your healthcare—obviously needed by the time you get back to the surface—your pet fees, your daily required taxes, well, it barely puts a dent in things. But I’ll be happy to reduce your interest rate to twenty-three percent, given your perilous morning.”

  He paused, then flipped through a few pages on his clipboard, frowning. “Your productivity ratings are also concerning,” he went on. “Day one: zero chips earned, multiple workplace incidents, probable violation of several safety protocols, and difficult to coach, to boot.” He looked up at her, all serious now. “Have you considered mining better?”

  Seven stared at him. She’d never hit anyone before. It wasn’t becoming of a lady, certainly, and it had always felt better to win at the table than end up beneath one. But now, watching Rook, Seven had to clench her fist to stop from swinging at the man. “How do you expect me to mine better when your tunnels are so poorly maintained they snap at the roll of a dice? And for that matter, how can I ‘mine better’ if my dice only gives me ‘good luck’ three percent of the time and blows the tunnel to smithereens the rest?”

  “Sounds like a you problem,” Rook replied cheerfully, and tapped her shoulder with his clipboard. It was all Seven could do not to snatch it from him and snap it in half. “Have you tried believing in yourself more? Positive thinking is very important in the mining industry, you know. We have a motivational pamphlet if you’d like!”

  “I’d rather be fed to whatever lives in these tunnels than read your pamphlet.”

  “That can be arranged!” Rook made a note on his clipboard. “Employee expressed interest in alternative feeding protocols. We’ll add it to your file. Maybe you’re a real go-getter after all! We’ll expect payment at the end of your shift. Given your current situation, I’d take advantage of our generous loan rates. Oh and do attend your mandatory safety re-orientation!”

  Rook shuffled away, humming faintly, and Pocket buzzed happily on her shoulder.

  “What are you so pleased about?” She snapped, happy to see Rook’s form fading in the darkness.

  “This company has a real commitment to creative evil. It’s downright inspirational.”

  Seven took a few steps forward, not sure where to go until the light caught on something lying on the ground—another keycard, this one labeled with her employee number. She stooped to pick it up, then lifted her lantern to read the fine text left behind.

  Your new assignment card will activate the lift to Penny Pincher’s Paradise until we reassign you to a more suitable location. Try not to cause any more expensive disasters for the remainder of your shift.

  -Jom Rook

  With shaking, annoyed hands, Seven crumpled the paper and lifted her lantern until it caught the glint of a lift in the distance.

  “So that’s how they got down here so quickly,” she muttered, and walked towards the lift. She stepped into the lift and slid her card through. The lift pop up flickered, then flashed red.

  AUTHORIZATION DENIED. EMPLOYEE FLAGGED FOR DEEP SECTOR EMERGENCY ASSIGNMENT.

  The lift shuddered and descended at breakneck pace, and towards what Seven figured was definitely not Penny Pincher’s Paradise.

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