The Game of Luck

by Catherine Cerveny

  I locked my office door seals before taking off my c-tex and setting it on the desk. A quick search through my desk turned up the add-on holo-chip that would connect my bracelet to One Gov’s AI queenmind. Removing one of the jeweled caps covering the input ports, I plugged in before I convinced myself this was a bad idea.

  Tapping the screen, I launched the face-chat. In my head, I envisioned my shim leaping through the various relay stations dropped out in space to reach Nairobi. I found that comforting—knowing that even though I was on Mars, I could still shim Earth in a few seconds. It made the achy feelings of homesickness for Earth a little less severe.

  The seconds turned into minutes, and I heard an old-time dial-up noise, a series of clicks, until a holo popped up over my screen display. There in the flesh—or as close as I could get—was my grandmother, Suzette Sevigny.

  For eighty-three, Grandmother looked remarkably fresh. Clearly the woman wasn’t skimping on her Renew treatments. If I looked that good at her age, I’d be thrilled. Her hair was thick and black, skin firm and supple aside from a few creases around her dark green eyes, and features refined and elegant in her angular, narrow face. To me, she always looked shrewd and cunning, as if she were hatching some maniacal plan. Or maybe I projected some misplaced anger.

  “Hello, Felicia,” Grandmother said, her voice crystal clear through our One Gov connection. No lagging or buffering whatsoever. “I was afraid you might not want to contact me.”

  Her tone sounded sincere and apologetic, with just the right dash of ashamed. I wanted to snap at her to cut the crap. Sweet and contrite weren’t her thing. Then I remembered the Nine of Swords and told myself to simmer the hell down.

  I forced myself to make small talk. “How is Desmond? Are you both still in Nairobi?” Grandmother had never married. Desmond was her latest partner, or had been when I’d left Earth. I had no idea who my grandfather was, which was rather surprising. The Shared Hope guidelines were strict as to who could reproduce, so you’d think we’d have better records. Also, as out-in-left-field as my family could be, there were some areas where we were rigid traditionalists. For example, marriage.

  “He’s fine and yes, we’re still in Nairobi. We moved in with your cousin Mariane and her husband. She just had a baby and they needed the help. Family sticks together, after all. And you’re doing well? Your husband…He’s…You always were attracted to the flashy and he certainly is that. But I’m glad you’re settled now. I saw your wedding on that woman’s show you seem fond of—Mannette Bleu, I think? I thought the ceremony would be larger, considering who you married.”

  Attracted to the flashy? Was that how she saw me? Biting back a scathing reply, I said, “It’s what Alexei and I wanted.”

  “Of course you did,” she backpedaled. “I never meant to imply otherwise. I just thought…Celeste tells me you’re happy, and that’s what matters. Even if he isn’t the man I would have picked and everyone still says it’s a shame that Dante left you like that, he’s a sight better than the other one you brought home. What was his name again? I forget now. An MPLE dung beetle, wasn’t he?”

  “It was Roy,” I said, fighting to keep from snapping at her. Gods, Dante? That was over six years ago, and she was still going on about him? I had to cut this off at the knees or I’d disconnect and flush the holo-chip for good measure. “Listen, speaking of Celeste—she said you needed my help, but didn’t say why.”

  The abrupt change in topic was rude even by my standards, but I didn’t care. I took a perverse pleasure watching her struggle to hold back her nasty reply. Suzette had been terrible to me my entire childhood. We would never be friends, and there was no point in pretending otherwise.

  Finally she came out with, “I can see how difficult this shim is for you. I respect that you reached out at all.”

  “I had Celeste pull a card on your behalf: the Nine of Swords. I couldn’t ignore a warning like that.”

  “Ah,” she said, and that was enough. We shared a moment of perfect understanding, where not even a single second need be wasted explaining. “I drew the same, but I wanted another opinion.”

  “So you decided on mine.”

  “You have my mother’s deck and you’re the best reader in the family,” she said, the words so simple and the tone so resigned I could only blink. What had stolen her fight? Where was the anger we’d both nursed for twenty years?

  “Grandmother, what’s going on? Why are we both drawing the same card?”

  She sagged then, as if she’d expended the last of her energy and could no longer maintain the façade that everything was all right. I saw the pain in her eyes and in the slump of her shoulders. A tear almost rolled down her cheek but she dashed it away with a tissue. Suzette may have been many things, but crocodile tears weren’t her style.

  Alarmed, I surged forward. “Grandmother, what’s wrong?”

  “What is the last time you spoke with Julien?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe four months ago?”

  “And you spoke to him in person? You saw his face?”

  “No. It was a shim originating from Venus.” It had been a breezy, easygoing face-chat shim telling me he’d heard about my marriage and wanted to congratulate me. The shim had been prerecorded and transmitted in a batch-wave from Venus, making it cheaper and easier to send when using a c-tex. It also meant you couldn’t talk live. He’d been distracted—it looked like he’d been in a bar with someone yelling at him in the background—and possibly drunk. It was a terrible way for a father to congratulate his daughter and I hadn’t bothered to shim him back. And yet I’d saved the message, having privately rewatched it more than once.

  “And there’s been no other contact?”

  My frown deepened. “Do you know something? Is he…dead?”

  “No. At least, I don’t think so. But no one’s heard from him in months. There’s a worry he’s gone missing.”

  “How is this behavior any different from normal? You know what he’s like. He’ll talk to you, but only on his terms. Maybe he’s trekking through the wilds of Ulfrun and hacking through the rain forest.” Most of the major features on Venus were named after mythological goddesses, including the rain forests in the West on the equator. “He’s done things like this before. Why expect something different?”

  “Because two more of us are missing as well. In the last six months, three family members have gone missing.”

  That got my attention on a whole other level. “Tell me everything.”

  So she did. In addition to no one having heard the slightest whisper from my father in months, two distant cousins had vanished in a similar manner—Luc Benoit and Orin Cormier. Like my father, both men had gone off on their own and hadn’t checked in with anyone in ages. Both were considered loners and eccentrics, belonging to generations far older than me, closer to what would have been Granny G’s age of 104 if she’d still been alive. While I hadn’t been close to either, I remembered them coming around the house to see Granny G, regaling me with the most fantastic stories of magic and adventure.

  A chill raced through me. I thought of the christening and the readings I’d done about Yasmine and Tait, also missing. I’d been dismissive then. A runaway daughter angry at her parents. A husband on a new job in a new town who hadn’t checked in with his wife yet. It had been so easy to logically explain the disappearances. Now the number had gone from two to five, and one of them was my father. It suddenly felt far more sinister.

  “You’ve thought of something,” she said, peering closely.

  “I don’t know. Just that two more are missing here. I thought it was nothing but…” I shrugged, out of reasonable explanations. “Have you contacted anyone to look into this?”

  She gave me a look that said she couldn’t believe someone she’d raised had asked such a stupid question.

  “Family takes care of family. This is your father we’re talking about. Don’t you care what’s happened to him?”

  “Of course I care, but
it’s hard to get invested in a person I barely remember. I haven’t seen the man in over four years,” I shot back.

  “If you were any kind of daughter, you’d be the first one out searching for him,” she said with a regal sniff.

  And there was the old bat I loved to hate. Gods, she was frustrating!

  “How can I when this is the first I’ve heard about it?” In a calmer voice, I tried, “Look, this sounds serious. We have five people unaccounted for. There could be more for all we know. It’s not like we’re connected on the CN-net and can check on each other instantaneously.”

  “Why do you make it sound like there’s more going on here than I anticipated?” she asked, studying me with those Sevigny green eyes.

  “I’m not making it sound like anything. I don’t know what’s happening and I don’t have any theories. But I do suggest we contact the local One Gov representative and start the missing person process.”

  She gave me a level look. “I thought that’s what I was doing.”

  The way she said it didn’t make it sound like a compliment. Wonderful. So this was the game we were playing now.

  “No, you’re calling your granddaughter and telling her about a problem. What makes you think I’m in a position to do anything?”

  “Because you’re One Gov.”

  Oh, fan-fucking-tastic. I wanted to bang my head on my desk. Azure’s words from the christening were fresh in my mind—I was a One Gov lackey, there to spy on everyone.

  “I’m not One Gov. I work for them and do my job, and that’s it. I’m not there to be the company’s spy and I definitely don’t run the damn thing.”

  “You know how that world works and the rest of us don’t. You’ve dealt with the tech and the MH…things, so you know what to do.”

  “They’re not things. They’re people,” I said through gritted teeth.

  She waved my words away with a dismissive hand. “That’s not the issue. My point is that right now, you’re what this family needs, whether we like it or not. The universe has put you in the place you need to be to help this family, and I’d be a fool to ignore that gift.”

  This wasn’t the ringing endorsement of my life I wanted to hear. Her dismissive attitude said I’d dirtied myself by taking a position with One Gov, but I was a tool, so she’d use me until I was no longer valuable.

  “I’m so glad I could be of service,” I said, annoyed.

  “Don’t take that tone with me. You know what affects one, affects us all. I’m afraid for the whole family. This is your father we’re talking about. We’ve already lost him once. This time, I’m afraid Julien is gone for good. The cards are scaring me and I’m having terrible dreams—dreams so awful, I’m afraid to sleep anymore. So I’m reaching out. We all need to look after this family, and I know you’re one of the few with the resources to do something.”

  Gods, this woman had burned me so many times over the years, she should be grateful I gave her the time of day. Yet as annoyed as she made me, I still heard the fear in her voice. When she spoke about her dreams and being too scared to sleep, I knew we had serious business on our hands. Alexei claimed my luck gene manifested itself through my Tarot cards. If that was true, then Grandmother’s manifested through her dreams. It was one of the things that set her apart and made her so remote—and hard to love, in my opinion. She dreamed imperfect glimpses of the future, the same as I did with my cards. But where I’d used my cards to help people, her dreams isolated her. She stored what she knew, hoarding the secrets and grudgingly doling them out. I gave secrets away, sometimes for free.

  “Fine,” I said with a weary sigh. “I’ll look into it. If they’re out there, I’ll find them.”

  “Good. I knew contacting you was the right decision. Despite our differences and how contrary you can be, I know you can handle this. Tell me as soon as you have something. I’m trusting you with our future, Felicia. Don’t disappoint me as you have with so much else.”

  And before I could say another word, Grandmother—that cool, calculating old bat—ended the shim and left me holding the bag.

  I popped the holo-chip out of my c-tex and sat back in my chair, thinking. I had an uneasy feeling in my gut, prodding me gently and rousing a secret fear I’d kept buried for the better part of a year and a half. There was a reason I’d never told my family about the luck gene. I knew they couldn’t handle the truth. I could barely hold it together and I counted myself as the most levelheaded in a family tree full of crazy.

  If I couldn’t handle it, what would the rest of them do? I had no doubt they’d try their damnedest to abuse and exploit it. And when that happened—because gods knew it would—more people would learn about the gene. After all, who could sit on such an explosive secret? Yet the more people who knew, the more dangerous our lives would become.

  Konstantin Belikov had once said if people thought they could get their hands on actual, tangible luck, they’d want to use that to their advantage. And if they knew my family was the source of that luck, our lives wouldn’t be worth living. We’d become a race of slaves to whoever was powerful enough to control us.

  And now that I was faced with five missing family members, I wondered if that had become a reality. Did someone else know about the luck gene? The thought was terrifying because if it was true, I could expect so much worse than missing family members.

  I could expect the Sevigny clan to be hunted and caged like animals.

  7

  I gave up any pretense of settling back into work, set my avatar to “do not disturb,” and dove into the CN-net, scouring for clues. When had my father last been seen? What had Luc and Orin been up to before they disappeared? Did Yasmine even have a boyfriend? Had Tait reported to work with his construction crew? Was there proof to suggest this was more than a terrible series of coincidences and I should suspect something insidious?

  Even though I knew I was essentially bashing my head against a brick wall—what did I know about digging into the CN-net?—I couldn’t stop myself from looking. Grandmother had come to me for help. I didn’t want to disappoint her, even if she’d disappointed me my whole life. I was One Gov. In Grandmother’s eyes, that meant I was supposed to make things happen. And if I couldn’t, gods save me from her wrath.

  After several unsuccessful hours spent fishing, I’d blown through my entire CN-net allowance for the sol. Even worse, I was now behind in my real work—work I couldn’t finish given how I’d shot my CN-net quota to shit. I’d need to complete the tasks offline and upload everything later.

  On top of that, I was exhausted, hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and my bladder was full to bursting—which happened when you spent too long on the CN-net. It was a key reason why One Gov had mandated fitness hours and calorie consumption intakes: Since One Gov gave everyone genetically superior bodies and longer life spans for free, they didn’t want people shitting all over their gift.

  In the end, I did what I should have done from the beginning—I pinged Alexei.

  I reached for the tiny sliver of CN-net awareness that resided in my head since getting my implants. Awareness wasn’t really the right word. It sounded far too mystical and magical for something that felt more like a pebble stuck in my shoe—irritating and annoying, but I could live with it.

  “I hate to bother you, but I need help with some research. It’s too much to go over with you on the CN-net. Can I see you this afternoon?”

  Less than a second later, as if he’d been waiting to hear from me, Alexei was there in my head. “You’re not bothering me. A flight-limo will pick you up in five minutes.”

  “I don’t want to inconvenience anyone. I can take an air-hack,” I sent back, referring to the automated public vehicles you could hail to zoom around Elysium City.

  “A flight-limo will be there in five minutes,” he repeated, ignoring everything I’d just said.

  I held back a sigh. I’d learned when to pick my battles with Alexei. Some I could win, others I couldn’t. Air-hacks versus fligh
t-limos was utterly unwinnable.

  “Okay, I’ll be waiting outside.”

  “No, inside. One Gov’s hooahs can watch you until your security detail arrives.”

  This time, the sigh slipped out. Wasn’t going to win that one either. “Fine. Inside. See you soon.”

  “Looking forward to it.”

  After I broke the connection, I gathered up my things to leave. It was already early afternoon so there was no point in coming back. A knock on the door made me pause, and a quick AI check showed Caleb outside my office. Weird, but I instructed the queenmind to let him in.

  “Hi,” I said, putting away a random deck of Tarot cards in a desk drawer. The Witches’ Healing deck, I noted; I had more decks of cards than I did pairs of shoes. “Sorry, I’m heading out to an appointment.” Well, it was…sort of. “Did you need something?”

  Caleb leaned on the doorframe. “Nothing that can’t wait. I wanted to say I got the Under-Secretary’s official notification about the Venus task force and to thank you for including me.”

  For a moment, I just stood there blinking stupidly at him. Venus? What was going on with Venus other than it was the last place in the tri-system I’d been able to locate my father? Then I remembered my conversation with Felipe and slapped a smile on my face.

  “I didn’t realize Felipe had announced it. Sorry, I’m a bit behind today. I’m glad you’ll be part of the team.”

  Caleb frowned down at me. “If you don’t mind me asking, is everything all right? You seem distracted.”

  “Just family issues.”

  “Not with the Under-Secretary I hope? You two have a great working relationship.”

  I smiled at that. “No, it’s my dad’s family back on Earth. I haven’t really talked to them since I arrived on Mars, and it’s been kind of a nice break, but now they’re back. They have a tendency to get in your face and turn even minor issues into big, messy disasters with more drama than anyone should have to handle.”