"Do we need to—" he began, but Seven cut him off. Her fingers still prickled with fear, her heart hammering against her ribs, but she righted herself and shook her head. Heat flooded her face.
"False alarm," she said, forcing her voice steady as she crept back into the room—and avoided looking at the corner in the process.
"Maybe," Luca agreed, "but what would scare you enough to…" He trailed off, leaning around the corner to peer inside. "That's what scared you? Seven, it's a flamingo."
"Exactly," Seven said, shuddering. She traipsed over to Cheryl's desk—and more importantly, far away from the foul creature lurking in the corner of the office. Who would bother keeping something like that in their workspace? How would they focus on anything? How could they get any work done?
She tried to ignore the luck-forsaken thing, but her hands still shook as she worked, and she couldn't quite shake the memory of yellow eyes peering through her window at the palace.
"You have…a problem with flamingos." Luca's voice was incredulous. "I've never even seen a flamingo in person."
"Well, that one is real," she said, still not looking at it. "And dead. But whoever had it stuffed paid top chip to make sure it's as lifelike as possible."
"You had some at the palace?" Luca asked.
She wished he'd stop asking questions—at least until her nerves calmed and she found the keycard. But he hadn't turned her in yet, and he seemed nice enough for all his bravado earlier. Maybe it was okay to give him this. This one small piece of her that wasn't about failure or fraud or being expendable.
She nodded, flipping through a stack of folders, trying to keep her voice light. "My father kept a flock of them, though the Thirteen only know why—he never bothered visiting the things. Maybe it was for show, because he'd bring them out for visitors."
"And to rattle you, apparently."
"Never on purpose," she said. The words came out softer than she intended. More honest. "They mostly kept to themselves, but I had this one that would just stare at my window every night. Several times I caught it in the bushes peering into my window." She shuddered again, her skin crawling. "Why would a bird bother doing that? He was obviously up to no good."
Luca let out a nervous chuckle, watching her dig through the piles on Cheryl's desk. "Maybe he liked you."
"No one likes me."
The words fell into the space between them, heavier than she'd meant them to be. True in a way that made her chest ache. She kept her eyes on the papers, not wanting to see whatever expression crossed Luca's face. Pity, probably. Or worse—agreement.
The silence stretched too long, and Seven returned to the stacks of papers at breakneck pace, her movements jerky. It was possible no one would return until morning—certainly she'd seen Cheryl and the others keep very late nights at the local taverns—but she didn't want to find out the hard way that she was wrong.
Everything on Cheryl's desk was perfectly kept, which made it almost impossible to dig through without disturbing the lot. Maybe she wouldn't keep a card in the stacks of files, Seven thought, scanning the room with growing desperation. Maybe…
She trailed over to some of the tiny drawers in the back of the room and opened them tentatively, her fingers clumsy.
These were more promising. Stacks of obviously confiscated dice sat inside, twinkling innocently in the darkness of the office. Seven looked over her shoulder at Luca—still standing by the door, examining the flamingo with an expression she couldn't quite read—then stripped her glove and palmed a few.
They went dark immediately in her hand, of course. Business as usual.
But she couldn't help but feel that some of her headache had cleared. The pressure behind her eyes eased, the buzz in her skull quieting to something manageable.
Trying to ignore the pang of disappointment in her chest, she dumped the dice back in the drawer and tried a few more drawers, these bigger. There were files for what she was pretty sure was the site she'd stumbled on with Luca. Plastered with classified stickers, it was clear from the dates that the place hadn't been accessed in a long time, but so much of it was redacted that it had to be a copy of the original file.
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Still, that was proof. Whatever was going on down there, LMC was involved.
She shoved that folder aside and found a few more on 'errant dice', her pulse picking up. She frowned at those, itching to pull them out to read. Still, how much time did she have? She leafed through a few pages, trying to commit everything to memory so she could share it with Emmet when she returned.
LMC's main research, apparently, seemed to be on the strange shards that Morris had shown her just a few weeks ago. Samples of these were all over Cheryl's office, stored in tiny jars—obviously for distribution. She wasn't sure what they did, but judging by the preliminary research, LMC seemed to think that they could alter the very nature of dice themselves. They could change their skills, alter any other immutable characteristics…
Like whether they're suitable for game dice or not, she realized, her blood running cold. Her burned hand clenched involuntarily, phantom pain lancing up her arm.
She couldn't be sure, but it sounded like LMC—like Rook—was behind the game dice that had ended her life. They'd somehow tampered with it. Made it unsuitable for play while getting it past the gaming commission's stringent standards.
She shook her head, hand half stuck in the file, and swore faintly. "I knew it," she whispered, her voice breaking slightly on the words.
But would it matter? Would anyone believe her? Or would they find some other way to twist it, to make her the villain, to confirm what they already thought?
She dug through a few more files, searching desperately for something that would directly tie the doomed dice of two years ago to LMC. Something irrefutable. Something that even the rigged courts couldn't argue against. But the evidence was sketchy at best, and with each page she turned, she felt her hope slipping further away.
It's not enough, she thought. She couldn’t help but be annoyed, but she needed to find that keycard and get out of here. Certainly she wouldn’t be able to prove her innocence if she were behind bars.
Her fingers fell across something else as she dug—a letter, addressed to Cheryl from Rook himself:
Your employee retention numbers are somewhat concerning, Cheryl. I need more employees to call this operation a success. We'll need as many of them as we can get when everything's complete. Do what you can to keep them—and alive, not out in the fields behind Luckville.
Luck take her, there was far too much to go through in one night. Seven was halfway to settling down onto the rug to read every damn document in the room when Luca's voice rang out from nearby, panicked.
"Are you done yet?" he called from the door, his voice low and urgent. "I think I hear footsteps."
Swearing, Seven shut the file. She could return another time, but for now she needed that access card back. She tried a few more drawers, this time not caring how much noise she made, her movements frantic, and finally found a neat stack of cards in the final drawer of the row.
It took some digging, but she found her own keycard—splattered in blood and dirt, she realized with a wince—and pocketed it just as an alarm whooped to life nearby.
"Shit," she said, spinning to find Luca motioning frantically at the door. "Was that—" She checked the drawer, but it wasn't her that had triggered the alarm. No tripwire there, no dice—nothing but an ordinary drawer. She leapt over Cheryl's desk to join Luca at the door, her heart pounding so hard she thought it might crack her ribs.
"That's the main alarm," Luca said, his words too fast. "We couldn't have triggered it—LMC's corporate offices don't have one. But the dice vault does."
Well, that explained the strange hum of energy she'd been feeling since they'd arrived. "What's the big deal?" she asked, letting Pocket hop back into her shirt. With confirmation that she hadn’t tripped the alarm herself, some of the panic of earlier had ebbed. If anything, someone breaking into the dice vault might be the distraction they needed to leave the place. "We'll just use the keycard to get out."
"The big deal," Luca said, his jaw clenched, "is that every bit of LMC muscle in Luckville will be swarming the hallway, and two battered miners with all-access cards is not exactly what they'd consider welcome at headquarters."
"We'll just say it's our shift."
"My shift ended an hour ago."
Well, there went that. Seven scanned for something, her mind churning with possibilities. It was hard not to enjoy the risk of it all—to relish the game of chance she was playing with her life by breaking into LMC. Even with an all-access card.
Her eyes caught a vent overhead, and she smiled despite herself. Luca groaned.
"You're joking," he said as she stood on the edge of one of the fine couches and pushed the grate open.
"Afraid not," she replied, pulling herself up. It was certainly nice to have a little extra help from the dice in Cheryl's office—the lingering buzz in her veins made everything lighter, easier. "These go through, right?"
"Shouldn't you have asked me before you jumped into the vent?"
"Well I'm content waiting the night out here if I have to," she said, peering down at Luca. "Are you joining or not?"
Luca hesitated for a moment, but then he took her waiting hand.
"You know," he said with a grunt as Seven replaced the grate behind them, "this is kind of fun."
"Fun?" Seven asked, sneezing at the dust. The word felt foreign in her mouth. When was the last time something had been fun instead of desperate?
Luca nodded, crawling beside her in the cramped space. "The odds of this going right were one in four thousand, five hundred, and ninety-two. It feels good to beat them, you know?"
"I uh, sure.” And yet Seven paused in the vent, tasting something in the air. Something acrid and wrong. Her nose wrinkled. "Do you smell smoke?"
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