had looked when he’d made the choice. His relationship with Angelique was long over. He’d wondered: If she hadn’t existed, wasn’t still a gaming force to be reckoned with, wouldn’t he have left the field long ago?
And now… the carousel had swung around again. Even worse-or better, depending on how you looked at it-it was the Big Game. The biggest game ever. The first lunar game. No matter what happened, no matter who won, everyone involved was headed for the record books.
But… why him? “Does he still blame me?”
Angelique leaned across the table, her fingers folded. “What do you think? He’s never forgiven you for ratting on him.”
His heartbeat accelerated. “I didn’t!” Even to Wayne, the protestation of innocence felt a bit too automatic.
Angelique smiled. It was a nasty smile.
“Riiight,” she said. “And he never forgave me for sleeping with you. I suppose that never happened, either?”
The discomfort vanished, replaced by another, equally powerful sensation. “Touch makes better memories than sight. How about a little reminder?”
“Hah,” she replied, but her smile was warm. So. She remembered their previous relationship with a certain fondness, just as he had. “Business. Only. ”
“Then I take it my evenings are my own?”
Her lips remained pursed into the same smile, but a tiny furrow had appeared between her eyebrows. Still a bit of possessiveness there? “I need your attention on work.”
This time, he grinned right back to her. “Stress relief is part of the package, dear heart.”
They both knew exactly what he was talking about. Gaming was a highly intense experience… emotionally, intellectually and physically. And the evenings were often filled with intense stress relief. Gaming relationships were as intense as those in Olympic villages. Yum.
“I’ll trust your professionalism,” she said.
“Why me?” he asked. “This isn’t just a game to you, and you’re playing OTG.”
That was another gaming term. “Playing Off the Grid” meant using tactics and strategies designed to upset or unbalance the other players, rather than to concentrate on the game itself.
Just like poker: Play the player, not the cards.
“I need the truth,” he said, “or I can’t even think about this.”
She drummed her fingers against the table. She’d known this moment would come, and probably wondered exactly how he would react when it did.
“Six years ago,” she said. “It was the Tesseract game. Xavier was the Game Master, but I’d thought that enough time had gone by that maybe bygones were bygones.”
“And they weren’t.”
She shook her head. “No. They weren’t. He humiliated me publicly, made me look like an idiot. He’s good enough to do that, to entertain himself privately and still function professionally.”
“What was your estimation of his skill?”
“Aren’t you listening?” Irritation was creeping into her voice. “I was at the top of my game, and he tore me to pieces.”
He thought about that for a minute. “So you don’t want me for my gaming experience.”
A short shake of the head.
“But for the fact that he hates me.”
A brief nod. She wanted Wayne Gibson because Xavier hated him, not in spite of it. Because he’d taken the woman that both of them loved. Dear God-she wanted to rattle Xavier’s cage. He’d respond by trying to destroy them both. The other gamers would take advantage of his distraction, and leap ahead. His professional pride would force him to spread his attention thin. They could predict some of his responses, and in those predictions might lie a momentary, fractional advantage…
She was playing a desperate, chancy game. But it just might pay off.
“This is either a brilliant move,” she said, reading his thoughts, “or the biggest mistake of my life. If you’re not an asset, you’ll be a lightning rod. So tell me: Want to find out which it is?”
After all these years, a path back into triple-A gaming? A chance to undo some of the mistakes that he had made? And dear God-a chance to go head-to-head with Xavier, with Angelique at his side? In front of the biggest audience in history?
“Asset,” he muttered. “Definitely asset.”
She nodded. They were back on the same page again. “And speaking of asses, mine is off limits. This is strictly business. Can you handle that?”
“I’m tougher than I look,” he said.
“You’d better be. Do we have a deal?”
“I’ll need more information. Wheres and whens. I’ve got a job. Not much in terms of ties, but…” His mind was wheeling. His bosses would bend over backward to give him this opportunity. For their resident Game Master to participate in a major IFGS event would give the Escalade a credibility it sorely needed, and could translate into a major draw. And given that, whether he won or lost, he’d be able to renegotiate his contract.
So he was in and he knew it, and she knew it. Damn her, Angelique had known that even before she’d ever sat down with him.
“How much time do I have to think about it?” he asked.
She seemed a little startled. Surely, she had expected him to jump at the chance and he could understand why.
She gave him until noon the next day to decide.
Midnight was hours gone, but Vegas never sleeps. Walking the streets, you passed from one casino zone into another. Seen from a distance of miles, the desert city was a complex of spires and theme attractions designed to convince Dad to leave his wedding ring on the dresser, and Mama into emptying the college fund. But on street level, only one casino existed at a time. Walk from one zone to another and each business manipulated the visual fields so that their casino, their restaurant, seemed to be the only one. Each establishment was a self-contained world, complete with food, rest, money and sex. Everything that a tourist needed to survive.
One world, multiplying endlessly into many worlds. It was so easy to get lost. Which he had, willingly.
Wayne had come here ten years ago, a minor gaming star, and become fixed in the firmament. He was just another of the has-beens who signed long-term contracts to sing or dance or tell smutty jokes or make tigers disappear on the casino stages.
How had it happened? How had he been caught in a life that brought him so little satisfaction, playing a game that he had once mastered, that had then proceeded to master him?
The truth was simple: He couldn’t do it. He just couldn’t engage with the game deeply enough anymore. It was like a line from one of his favorite old movies.
I’ve been to the puppet show. I’ve seen the strings.
Gamers had to believe. Gamers marched arm-in-arm with the faithful.
Didn’t they?
He had passed from the Azteca casino, with its hourly human sacrifices, to the edge of the Da Vinci, with its ornate bridges and flight stunts. Real people in those winged machines, even if the engine designs would have baffled the legendary inventor. He’d heard some of them had actually trained on Luna. No holograms here, except the visual field that transformed the entire world into fifteenth-century Milan.
“Listen to me carefully, for I tell you this from the bottom of my heart,” he said. “Get a life.” Half a dozen passersby didn’t even glance at the apparent madman. He must be talking on a phone. Wayne stepped onto a bench as an ersatz soapbox and continued William Shatner’s classic “Get a life!” speech for the City of Illusions.
He was going to the Moon. He was going with Angelique. He didn’t even have to win to come out ahead. How could any man resist?
There had to be a way to deal with Xavier.
Did Wayne still have the mental agility to play it by ear? Xavier was a monomaniac. Tunnel vision. There
