She raised her eyebrows. Things were starting to get interesting. “What’ve you got in mind?” she asked.
“For one thing, I need to get my ship back.”
She stared at him. Did he just say what she thought he’d said? “What do you mean, get your ship
“Relax, relax—I have a ship—just not right now. But that can be rectified.” He shrugged.
She goggled at him and turned to Shakes. “Did you know he doesn’t have a ship? And you guys took this job anyway?”
To his credit, Shakes managed to look sheepish.
“I thought you didn’t gamble,” she accused Wes.
He shot her a Cheshire cat smile. “What can I say? Easy come, easy go.”
Shakes guffawed. “How? Once the Slob sees you, he’ll leave the table. He knows you’ll be after it. He’s not going to risk having to give it back after you won it from him in the first place.”
“I’m not going to win it,” Wes said, pointing at Nat. “She is.”
19
THE PLACE WASN’T A CASINO EXACTLY. It was just another crowded subterranean basement room with a few roulette tables, card tables, a craps table, and a bar. Nat found the noise and the smell of sweat and smoke overwhelming as she walked into the room, a little unsteady on her high heels. She was dressed as a tai tai, a rich Xian trophy wife, slumming in K-Town on her way to Macau.
With the help of a video blog and a few silver coins from Wes’s stash, she’d managed to find an appropriate costume. She was wearing a tight red cheongsam, her long dark hair was held back in a bun with two sparkling chopsticks, and the blue stone remained looped on a chain around her neck, masquerading as a decorative bauble. Farouk had outfitted the dress with a fake fusion battery, which blinked red at her collar. She’d protested she would freeze before she got inside the door, but Wes had been adamant. The tai tais did not wear bulky layers of any kind; they slithered around the city flashing their bare legs as a sign of wealth and ease.
“You look good,” Wes had allowed before she left the shelter. “You think you can do this?”
“Watch me,” she’d told him. Even if she was nervous, it was too late to back out now, and he knew it, too. Besides, of all the things she could do in the world, she could play poker.
The Slaine brothers, dressed in chauffeur uniforms, would act as her bodyguards. If anything happened, they would make sure to get her out of there alive. She didn’t know if she trusted Zedric and Daran with her life, but, once again, she didn’t have a choice. Without a ship, she might as well go home.
“VIP room?” she asked the bouncer guarding a door near the bar.
“Fingerprint,” he grunted, pointing to a reader. “And no muscle inside,” he said, shaking his head at her companions. He held up a flashlight to check her pupils.
Wes had warned her there was a chance she would have to run the play alone, but if she had entered the hall without any protection, no one would believe she was who she pretended to be.
Daran winked and whispered, “Don’t worry, I’ll be close by.”
She dismissed them with a wave of her manicured fingers and smiled at the bouncer as she put her designer sunglasses back on her nose. She pressed her hand against the print reader. Farouk had entered her photo and fake background into the system. She was Lila Casey-Liu, the sixteen-year-old wife of a molecular phone magnate.
Nat would have to do much more than convince a bouncer; she’d have to deceive the Slob, one of the most feared slavers in the Pacific. His real name was Slavomir Hubik, but everyone called him Slav, or the Slav, or SLB, his handle in textlish, which had turned into Slob. The Slob was far from one. He was a trim nineteen-year-old pirate from somewhere in New Thrace, the most notorious of the outlaw territories. He was one of the top men in a fearsome scavenger armada that trolled the black waters, supplying garment slaves to Xian factories, drugs to New Vegas, and pleasure girls and boys to anyone who would pay the bride price. There were even rumors that the slavers weren’t just trading animal meat either; to desperate buyers, they were willing to sell the human cargo that wouldn’t sell otherwise.
The Slob had a scar above his right eyebrow, dyed white-blond hair “drau style” in a military fade, and tonight wore a vintage velour tracksuit—a real synthetic, not the cheap animal furs that the other slavers preferred. His face was all sharp angles, handsome but with an edge. He didn’t look up when Nat joined the table.
“Deal me in,” Nat said, taking a seat next to the dealer, traditionally the luckiest draw in the table. “One hundred large,” she said, with a brilliant smile as she slipped him a doctored heat-credit card. Farouk assured her it would pass the scanner in the room, but once it was out of range it would read zero.
“Feeling lucky tonight?” she asked her fellow gamblers. The Slob wasn’t the only slaver at the table; she could tell by the tattoos on their faces. There was a girl, about her age, similarly bejeweled and bedecked, who nodded when she approached. “Love your shoes,” the girl cooed.
Nat played conservatively at first, allowed herself to win a few hands, but not so much that she attracted attention. Wes had cautioned her to reel him in slowly.
It was time. Nat won the next hand and the next, by the third, she had quintupled her money.
“Big win for a little lady,” the slaver said in his clipped accent.
“Eh,” Nat said dismissively.
“Too boring for you?”
“Let’s make it exciting,” she said with a gleam in her eye.
He shrugged. “Sure. What do you want?”
“I hear you have a fast boat,” she said.
The slaver seemed amused. “You can’t have
“Too scared you’ll lose, Slob?”
For a moment, Nat saw the rage in the slaver’s eyes. No one called him Slob to his face. But Nat knew she would get away with it. She had seen the way he looked at her legs. She giggled, letting him know she was flirting, playing her role.
The slaver gave her a thin smile. “Please, call me Avo.”
“Avo, then,” she said.
“If I put the bird in play, what will you give me?” he said, leaning over with a wolflike grin. “That gem around your neck?” he asked.
“This? A mere trifle,” she said, slipping the stone underneath her collar and wishing he hadn’t noticed it at all, irritated with herself that she had worn it. “This is the real treasure.” Nat placed a small velvet pouch on the table. She pulled the string and showed him what was inside: tiny crystals that sparkled in the light, bright as diamonds.
It was fleur de sel. Sea salt. Real salt, not the synthetic kind—which was at once too salty and not salty enough—but the real thing, from before the floods, when the world was still whole. The last in the world, harvested before the oceans were poisoned. It was one of the souvenirs she had taken from the treatment center, nicked from the commander’s kitchen, and she had been saving it for just the right moment. Wes didn’t ask her where she got it, only told her it wasn’t enough to buy a ship, but it might be enough to win one back if she was clever enough.
Avo Hubik eyed her. “Do you know how valuable that is?”
“Yes,” she said evenly.
“I doubt it; if you did, you would not wager it so easily,” he said, picking up his cards.
“In New Kong we bathe in it,” she said, and waved her cards like a fan. The rest of the table folded, watching the two circle each other—like a mating dance—one before a kill.
“Why do you want
