“Do you even know what that does?” Emmet asked. For a second, his words hung in the silence of the apartment. Seven supposed she should be alarmed by the genuine fear she heard in his tone, or at least a bit concerned, but she couldn’t help but feel like she’d won. It was risky to palm dice, perhaps. Risky to break down that wall today. Risky to work for LMC at all. But she was taking the house with it, so it was working, wasn’t it?

  She shrugged. “Does it matter?”

  “Of course it matters,” he spluttered. “It’s…no normal person does it.”

  “Maybe I’m not normal. Maybe I—“

  “Have a death wish?”

  “Possibly,” Pocket agreed, his muffled voice emerging from the bag. Emmet’s eyes went far too serious, far too quickly. It was the same look Moore wore before lecturing her about whatever project she was working on, whatever heist she’d been planning. The same look her parents had when overwhelmed with her antics. The same her siblings wore when they were trying to reign in everything that made her her.

  But there was something different in his eyes that she didn’t see in her family’s. A genuine sort of concern there, the same as Moore. As Juno. As Lan, on his better days. So, instead of cracking a joke or ignoring him, she watched him steadily, simply listening.

  Emmet sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to frame it like that, it’s just…well…there’s a reason palming fell out of favor. It’s dangerous. Most people couldn’t handle palming one at all without burning their bodies from the inside, out.”

  Seven felt the blood drain from her face at that. Well, she thought. That explains the fever. Still, she felt fine. Better than fine, really. The mild nausea from earlier was gone, and while she wished she’d drained more shards before leaving the mines, her aches were mostly gone with the exception of her arm. And, well, it was hard to ruin her mood right now.

  “I guess I’m not most people then,” she said smugly. Emmet eyed her doubtfully, his gaze lingering on her bruised arm.

  “I wouldn’t say you’re out of the woods yet.”

  “Dangerous or not,” Seven said, “it saved my life today. We wouldn’t have gotten out without it.” She paused, waiting for the inevitable question about what, exactly, her dice did, but it never came. It was rude to ask about another person’s set of dice, but she hadn’t expected Emmet to actually respect that sort of traditional all the way out here. Yet another reason to respect the damningly handsome man. She shook her head, then added, “There’s something down there. Something that scared LMC off. Something huge.”

  “There’s always something down there,” Emmet said, unfurling her map. “They’ve sent me into plenty of the bad sectors before, and there’s always something prowling around. But I’ve got a set of dice. You’ve got…” He studied her again, frowning. “Well, you’ve got something, but whatever it is, you can’t control it. Did that whole…” He trailed off, then gestured to her vaguely. “…thing you’ve got going on even work for you to be this beaten up?”

  “I told you it mostly worked,” she said, leaning back. “I think there’s some sort of limit to it, but I’m not sure what the limit is. Even if I don’t drain more dice, eventually my energy comes back, and it seems to heal me faster regardless. I was drained by the time Bert snuck up on us, but I should have been far worse off after that tunnel collapse. And the bag of shards I had with me was completely drained.”

  Emmet raised an eyebrow. “Without touching them?” She nodded. “So you pulled from them instinctively somehow. And without touching them with your bare hands.”

  Seven nodded again, suddenly stunned at the implication. She’d always thought it safe to be around dice. That if she just kept her hands behind gloves, she could prevent the worse. Even now, she assumed that palming her miracle dice could keep it afloat just a little bit longer, but who was to say she wasn’t draining it dry with every breath she took? With every injury she knitted together?

  Paranoid, she checked on the thing in her mind’s eye, but it seemed to slumber, nothing about its energy affected by the events of the night—besides the single use she’d rolled it for. She let out a shaky breath and pressed her hands against the cool countertop, thinking.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  “Yeah, but…whatever ore they’re mining in these deeper tunnels reacted strangely to me. It was like…like it spoke to me somehow. And I couldn’t drain it.” She shook her head. “Regardless, we’re going to need a lot more firepower if we want to go back down there.” She eyed the dice bag at his chest. “Maybe some of yours, honestly.”

  “Mine’s nothing special.”

  “I’m sure it’s sufficient.”

  Emmet let out a huff of a laugh. “Sufficient? That’s the word you chose?”

  “Did you want me to go with ‘girthy’ or ‘big enough for me’ or—“

  Pocket gasped, then emerged from the bag, glowing a flashing gold. “I read this part in one of those romance novels! This is the part where you two—“

  Seven shoved him back into the bag again with a muffled squeal, her face suddenly far too hot. She’d meant the sarcasm, of course, but—

  “Where did a slime get a romance novel?” Emmet asked, looking genuinely curious as she shoved Pocket further into the bag.

  “Not in my apartment if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “LIBRIEREIRIES!” Pocket squealed, his voice nearly unintelligible. “LIBRIEEIRRIES!”

  “Do you want pancakes later?” she snapped. “Or not?” That seemed to shut him up. He went silent in the bag, and Seven’s own stomach rumbled. That was another problem to take care of. One she’d deal with after convincing Emmet to let her stay—permanently.

  Emmet sighed, pushing from his chair to lean over the counter and examine her loot. His broad chest was far too close, and Seven took one of the access cards to busy her hands, and more importantly, keep her distracted.

  “Do you know what these are?” he asked, holding up a card.

  “Access cards.”

  “Better than that,” he said, smiling. The grin made her dizzy, though she wasn’t sure why, exactly. “They’re all access cards. They’ll get you into any tunnel, any office. I’m sure they’re tracked, but for one use, you could get just about anywhere.”

  “Anywhere,” she repeated, a smile spreading across her face again. Luck above, the damage she could do with one of these. She turned it in her hand, marveling at it. Just a day with her spelunker dice. A day and a big gamble with the tunnel collapse. It had all paid off, and in spades.

  “Don’t get too excited,” he said. Seven felt the smile fall from her face.

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s got to be bad down there if LMC abandoned all of this.” He picked up a bracelet, holding it like a dead animal. “The bracelets alone would fetch an entire house worth of chips if you could sell them somehow. The dice inside them are priceless—but you can’t get at them without blowing yourself to pieces, so only the specialty buyers would be interested.”

  Seven took a bracelet from the stack, studying it. “They’re powered by dice?”

  “Of course,” he replied. “How else do you think they generate that kind of explosion.” He sighed, then returned a bracelet to the pile. “Anyway, we’re further than we were yesterday. With the info you brought back we can start mapping the tunnels in earnest and find a better path down there that doesn’t involve caving in the entire upper sector.”

  “I think we can go bigger,” she said, tapping a bracelet against the counter in thought. “We’ll mark the paths, yes, but we could use them to form a network. We could involve the other miners, even. Create a sort of network of spies to work against LMC. We’ll meet everyone’s quota, cover shifts for people by using the tunnels to our advantage. We can—“

  “Seven.” The exhaustion with which he said her name finally made her look up. “You’re getting way ahead of yourself. We need to make a plan.”

  “That is a plan.”

  “Together,” he said firmly. “And one that doesn’t involve you prowling the tunnels alone. You were just as likely to come back dead as with all this loot.”

  “Close call, but same odds,” she muttered.

  “Are we in a partnership, or not?”

  “We are,” she insisted, “but we need to use this, Emmet—not sit on it.”

  “We will,” he replied, putting a hand on her shoulder. His eyes weren’t exactly stern, so much as filled with a sort of genuine concern. “But I wasn’t joking when I said you looked horrible. Give it a night. Stay here. We’ll figure out our next move in the morning.”

  Seven wanted to argue. Was desperate to keep going, to push forward. But, well, even she had her limits, and it wouldn’t hurt to sleep on the information she’d found. And she’d been looking for a graceful way to ask Emmet for his spare room. Perhaps this was the only chance she was going to get.

  Reluctantly, she nodded and began to shove everything back in her bag. Emmet looked almost relieved as she did it.

  A knock cut through the quiet.

  Also, if you'd like to read ahead, or sign up for free for news and updates, you can find my .

  NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s and publisher’s exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.