Zoe blinked and looked at the outstretched hand.

She shook it. His slender fingers dry in hers, a sure grip, strong but not oppressive. But she never moved her hand to take it, and this puzzled her.

She slapped it away before it ever touched her. The contact felt bizarrely mundane compared to the conflict haunting her recent memory. The Gambler only smiled.

She ran away from the desk.

As the gambler leaned over her shoulder with a pitcher to pour her a glass of water. Apologizing about the dust while bourbon flowed from the crystal decanter.

The office was her office in LA before Ben defiled it. The office where she spoke to a kind university administrator about which internship she should use. Familiar dust in the air taking her back all these years.

She had never seen this office before.

Blood trickled down her nose. She swooned. Something came to her attention like a tugging on her shirt.

Pain.

Unimaginable levels of —

She sat in the chair opposite the Gambler. He leaned his chin on his fist and gazed at her. Her nose no longer bled. The blood was gone.

Her nose never bled.

The Gambler smiled like a doctor at the bedside.

“How many probable futures do you usually occupy at once?”

Zoe didn’t respond. She still felt it in her skin. The pressure of a handshake combined with the stinging slap of her knuckles against his wrist. Her hand trembled as those sensations squirmed.

Her eyes widened. Her other hand held a glass of bourbon with two ice cubes. The cubes crinkled when she glanced at them as though they were just then placed in the glass.

“I know you understand me,” he said. “Please, take a sip. Refresh yourself. We have more than enough time.”

Zoe blinked. Looked around the room. The walls showed various photos of this same man shaking hands with people she didn’t know. His grin grew progressively more golden in each photo.

She tried to speak, but her parched throat choked her words. She drank. Stared at the empty glass. Mind drained. Empty. Light flashed through her soul… but no hunger.

“This is my Wild Turkey?”

“It’s your favorite.”

She nodded.

“There is none finer,” he shook a pack of Marlboro Gold. “Would you like a cigarette?”

Zoe blinked.

“I don’t smoke.”

“Sometimes you do, and when you do, which of course you never do, you smoke these, correct?”

Zoe took a cigarette from the packet. It lit itself and the curl of smoke rose that smelled like her mother. She puffed at the cigarette. The Gambler walked up from behind and refilled her glass directly from his crystal decanter. She tasted blood at the back of her throat. The Gambler sat before her. She sipped the bourbon. No blood. The room was dusty, messy, but not dirty. Comforting. Warm. Familiar.

“This is an office from my university.”

He poured himself a bourbon but left the glass on the desk.

“This must be quite perplexing to you. Such a mystery, yes?”

“You said you’re the Gambler.”

He nodded.

“I meant it too.”

“What… Why am I here?”

The pictures watched her, smiling, and the man behind the desk flashed the same gold teeth.

“You have become an outlier, Zoe Chambers. You are here so I can determine what to do with you.”

Deep cold settled into Zoe under the Gambler’s gaze, as though she were a cube of ice about to crack.

###

A slight breeze whistled across the red desert of the Bloody Eye. It picked up dust in dancing twisters, cleared out grooves in ancient canyons, and blew across nine hundred empty bottles like a discordant orchestra of glass flutes.

Rue squeezed his eyes shut as the melody passed and took another sip of his beer. It was empty. He rolled it downhill where it clattered and bounced and joined the pile.

“You know… you know what I don’t get?” he asked Esme.

She shook her head stiffly and finished her beer. Her bottle rolled down to clink against the others. Rue handed her a fresh brew.

“What?” she slurred.

“Why…” Rue gestured up at the remade Earth and the stars beyond. “Why are we here?”

“This planet?” she shrugged. “You want to die in a sad unnecessary battle.”

“No. I meant here in this universe.”

“Oh, then just to die.”

“That’s bleak.”

Esme nodded, stiffly, and drank. The beer sank into the shadows of her body. Though they were deep, they were not bottomless.

“Yeah,” she said.

Rue nodded and drank. He swallowed and gave the bottle an appreciative glance. His handwritten label marked it as a batch bottled almost a year ago.

“This ale is pretty good.”

Esme nodded.

“Do you think…” Rue sniffed the bottle. “Does beer get better as it ages? I know it does, I mean, like wine, right? But how do I know if it’s getting better or spoiling?” He gazed up at Earth. “I have a wild idea.”

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

“Hmmm?”

“Would it be wrong to pull up a brewer and ask them?”

Esme finished her beer and extended an empty hand for another.

“Define ‘wrong’?”

Rue laughed.

“Yeah… yeah…”

He handed Esme another beer and set down his own. As she cracked the bottle and let the foam hiss, he reached through space and time to the world beneath him.

And snatched up a brewer being chased by a pack of system-mutated hyenas.

The fat, middle-aged man stumbled onto the red ground. Eyes wide. His scream died off as he looked around. He brandished a machete taped to a broom handle.

“Sarah?” he looked around. “Sarah? Donna?”

The brewer saw Rue and Esme and fell to the ground. They were the same size as him, but their presence dominated his vision like a falling moon. He panted as he tried to speak.

“Am I dead?”

“No,” Esme sipped her drink. “We have a question.”

He got onto his knees and clasped his hands.

“You are gods? You are the system?” He paused, mumbling, eyes darting about. “You saved me? Please, save my family. They are being chased by monsters. Please, you must help them!”

Rue wiped his face as the brewer continued pleading.

“This was a bad idea,” Rue said.

Esme nodded.

“Lorrilla will be upset.”

“Why didn’t you talk me out of it?”

“You’re the boss.”

The brewer threw himself forward in the dust and groveled.

“Save them, I beg of you! Take my soul. Make me your slave. Just save my wife and --”

Rue sent him back to Earth with a wave of his hand. Esme tossed her beer backward over her shoulder.

“That was cold.”

The wind swept away the tracks his knees left in the red dust.

“This isn’t fun anymore,” Rue said.

He pressed his finger against his temple. With a flicker of Willpower braided through his Vitality, he pulled his finger away from his forehead and drew the alcohol out of his body. The clear liquid floated in a large trembling ball above his fingertip.

With a flick of his hand, he sprayed it across the tracks left by the brewer and revealed hard crystal under the dust.

“I feel better,” he said. “You want me to do you?”

Esme struggled to her feet.

“I drink to get drunk.”

“You shouldn’t say things like that to me,” Rue grinned. “I’m your boss.”

“I’m on vacation.”

They shared a laugh on the edge of the canyon, while the polyps prepared themselves down below. Rue gazed at the pulsing flesh and the network of psychic roots connecting them to the system.

“Almost time for Phase 6,” Rue said. “Couple of hours and they’ll be ready.”

“They look ready to me.”

“I want to wait.”

“Want to drink?”

Rue shook his head, and Esme shrugged.

“Leave some for me then.”

Rue tossed her his malachite robe with its pockets full of beer and leaped away. He shot beyond orbit, into space’s empty embrace, and gazed out at the abyss beyond the solar system. Facing such emptiness, he tried to empty his mind.

But he failed.

###

The gambler pushed a plate across the table. A three-layered slice of cake sat on the plate. Chocolate, vanilla, strawberry. Thick white frosting sparkled with edible glitter.

“What is the cake for?” she asked.

“For you to fill your belly with something good.”

“Am I in trouble?”

He tapped his chin.

“No… This isn’t trouble. This isn’t a principal’s office,” it was her office, with the thrum of LA traffic beyond the closed blinds. “I want to ask you a few questions, and then I want to offer you a few choices. How does that sound?”

Zoe peered at him.

“You seem reasonable.”

He laughed.

“Why would I be anything else?”

“The Smith…” She shuddered as her brain locked away those memories. “He was different.”

“Yes, my brother is enthusiastic about his role, but can you blame him? He works in the heart of stars forging new matter. He lives in the wombs of animals. In their cells. In the clouds that spew lightning. Without him, the Crimson Armada couldn’t touch the world, and for that, I will forgive his more zealous behavior.”

Zoe didn’t know what to say to that. She nodded. Feeling a sense of dislocation as she waited for him to get to the point. She knew it was something bad. She’d been trying her best to flail her way through the apocalypse and now another cosmic being judged her and condemned her to more suffering.

It wasn’t fair. Lives like hers, like Princh’s, like Crik’s, Cassy’s, Moth’s… None of them meant anything. If only all gods would die…

I know what you’re thinking by the way. Yes, it’s me. No, I won’t punish you, I’m just letting you know I can do this.

She gritted her teeth. It did nothing.

“Please get out of my head.”

“That’s not strictly possible,” he leaned back in his chair. “And technically, you’re in my head. What do you think it means to be incorporated into the system?”

Zoe’s eyes widened. She stood. Trembling. The office was too small. She faced the Gambler.

“Is this real?”

He leaned back and rapped his knuckles against the drywall.

“It’s real to me, and I am as real as your thoughts, so that depends upon how real your thoughts are,” he stood. “You are the keeper of the flame that is Zoe Chambers. How real is she? Would you like to know what she would be like if her mother never left?”

She stepped forward, flushing as her hands tightened into fists.

“Wait --”

He snapped his fingers.

“Of course, once I make a change, it never needed to be made, so snapping my fingers is purely for theatrical effect,” he studied his fingers. “Of course, some philosophers argue that I only create the memories. But how could you know which is true while you sit in this room with me?”

He snapped his fingers a few more times. Zoe tried to copy him as she leaned back in her chair.

“I never learned how to snap my fingers,” she said. “But my stepdad would always do it while watching…” She stared at her hand and fought down the urge to vomit. “What did you do?”

He snapped his fingers.

Zoe glared at him. She never had a stepdad. She wasn’t sitting. This is where she should be, standing again at the far wall of the office. This is how she would react, not that… other version of her.

She gripped a vase and thought about tossing it.

Don’t, that’s the actual vase from this office. I don’t want to ask my brother to replace it.

Leave… my… me… alone.

“You Earthlings have a very constrained sense of time,” he rolled his eyes. “That’s wonderful data, but not what we’re here for right now. No, we’re here for the survey.” A binder sat on the desk. He opened it, licked his finger, and turned a page. “I designed this survey to further improve the relationship between the Crimson Armada system and its users. The Smith, the Witch, and the Gambler, that’s me,” he winked. “Have approved its use. Answer each question honestly. You may find that some of your answers provide insight into yourself. There are no wrong answers. There are no right answers. At the end of this, I’ll give you a gift. Are you ready?”

Zoe sat down.

“Do I have a choice?”

He rolled a pen between his fingers.

“Treat this like a job interview. Do you have a choice? Of course, you do. There’s a door over there,” he pointed. “But I am being sincere when I say that I didn’t pluck you from an incursion to punish you. So, if you wish to forgo my reward and leave my office forever, please leave.”

He closed the folder, straightened it, and stared at Zoe. His eyes were pale blue. Watery. Old.

He couldn’t be as human as his eyes appeared. She hated it. Hated the whole situation. It felt wrong.

But she sat down.

“I will take the interview.”

“Wonderful!” he opened the folder. “I’m not human, of course, but I would like to say that neither are you, not really, not anymore. So please, it doesn’t pay to be so precious about such things. Now, question one.”