It wasn’t until Scratch hit the end of the docks that she realised she’d spent ten minutes walking the wrong way. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, given the fact that the water was right there, and yet Scratch had somehow turned right instead of left and found herself on the beach.

For a planet that was almost entirely water, there was very little in the way of beaches, and what was there was taken up by more casinos.There was exactly one beach open to the public, the rest dominated by waterfront casinos, each with their own version of a “private beach, no trespassers” sign. The beaches of course, were not actually private, but the billionaires that owned the casinos bribed the Lightport Council enough to get away with really anything they wanted.

The Bird of Paradise Casino was probably the fanciest of all of these casinos. The lowest buy-in on the cheapest table was a cool thousand stilbits, and if you couldn’t pay up, you were kicked out onto your ass. Not that most of the punters ever dealt with any net worths less than fifty million or so. Unlike some of the nastier ones, the worst of which was just called “The Casino,” there was no stench of vomit, or sweat, or any other bodily fluids, and no-one had ever died at a slot machine here.

There was a non-zero number of people that had been assassinated, and a non-zero number of people that had been killed by security, and even a non-zero number of people that had mysteriously fallen down an elevator shaft after having a little too much to drink.

The joke of it was, all twenty or so casinos on the Lightport shoreline were owned by the same parent company, and if you got in a service elevator down to a sub-basement, they were all connected underneath, ran on the same systems, used the same services. Of course, they couldn’t use the same employees, because the jig would absolutely be up if a gambler went into the Bird of Paradise one night, and saw the same blackjack dealer that he had seen at the Little Drummer Boy last Thursday. Certainly much shadier than the Lightport Grand Casino, but Scratch didn’t dare go back there after she was already on security’s radar.

She wasn’t the sort of gambler that got superstitious about that sort of thing. Suspicious, yes, but not superstitious. It was, generally speaking, a bad idea to get caught cheating in a casino run by people who had already caught you cheating once before. Put a damper on the relationship. And these were the sorts of casinos that were more likely to take fingers than to just kick her out. Scratch very much liked her fingers, and wanted to keep them. They were useful for a great variety of things.

All the information that Scratch knew about the casinos here she got from Fania in exchange for buying a bunch of tickets to some University Gala. A University that was half a galaxy away, for a gala that was six months away. Scratch wasn’t sure exactly why Fania couldn’t have just gotten the tickets themselves, and had been terribly vague and mysterious when Scratch asked her about it. Still, the number of tickets that Scratch had bought had only netted her the basic information, and not the really juicy stuff. She both couldn’t afford and didn’t entirely need the juicy information, since she wasn’t planning on robbing the place. She just needed to know enough not to end up in a cell.

Okay, and maybe to steal one or two tiny things. You could take the scoundrel out of the thief, but you couldn’t take the thief out of the scoundrel. Or whatever. Importantly, though, in about six months time, she was guaranteed a nice dinner and good banter at a fancy event. That was always nice.

Since she had been denied a nice breakfast by twelve crates of pineapples, Scratch splurged on lunch. Well, splurged by her own definition of the word, but probably not by the Birds of Paradise. She could have spent her entire savings on a meal and still not gotten the nicest thing on the menu, but the pasta was freshly made, and delicious, and she had the foresight to tuck a serviette into her shirt to avoid the inevitable tomato-based sauce splashback. Somehow, a bit of it still made its way onto her collar, and if she was lucky, everyone would think it was just blood.

She decided to save the wander through the casino art gallery for after she’d won big, just in case there was even the slightest chance that she could buy something. Sure, it was something a little less than a snowball’s chance in hell, but stranger things had happened.

It was barely four in the afternoon before Scratch had lost the five thousand stilbits that Mrs. Vandersnoot had paid her for the previous evening’s work. Okay, that wasn’t the whole story. She had doubled it in the first hour, and then put half aside to continue gambling with the remainder, and then had a bad streak of roulette that had her digging into the totally safe, “definitely not going to bet this” fund that she had just put aside.

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So, it could have gone better. She was down to her regular savings, now. Savings that weren’t exactly meagre, but probably would have lasted a lot longer in The Casino, versus in the Bird of Paradise, but that would have ruined the whole point of the thing. The gambling was only half of it, and Scratch could totally stop any time she wanted.

The other half was of course, the ambience.The glittering chandeliers, and the rich, plush carpets, and the literal trillionaires in million-stilbit suits. Scratch saw one with diamond-encrusted cufflinks and matching tie bar, and she was pretty sure she recognised those diamonds as coming from Farski IV. Something in the muddy brown colour. Very distinctive. So rare that the bodyguards standing on either side of him were paying more attention to the cufflinks than to anything else. Scratch might have been an idiot, but she was not idiot enough to attempt stealing heavily guarded diamonds without 1) a crew of other idiots to help her out, and 2) a plan.

Both necessities were not exactly in her wheelhouse right now. Charlotte, she suspected, would have been thrilled at the request to help with a dangerous diamond heist. Scratch also suspected that Charlotte wouldn’t even be that bad of a thief. She certainly fit in with the rich and sleazy far more than Scratch did.

Aziz and Damaris would be a harder sell. They were both too much sticklers for the rules to get involved with something like this, and, more to the point, they both thought that Scratch was a boring, law-abiding chef that had definitely been to culinary school, and she wasn’t about to try to prove them wrong.

The only other accomplice that Scratch could think of in the vicinity was Lucero, and even then, it was only because they had been interesting. She wasn’t even sure if they were–

Scratch stopped dead in her tracks. The bartender in question was standing about ten metres from her, wearing a figure-hugging red dress. The figure was reasonably androgynous, but undeniably sexy as fuck. Lucero was hanging off the arm of a man at the craps table, and smile faltering only slightly when they saw Scratch. Their hair was a deep russet colour tonight, and Scratch suspected a wig rather than a trip to the cosmetologist. It was certainly possible to get a look that good in any salon in Lightport, but Scratch was starting to get the impression that there was something slightly more dynamic going on.

A faltered smile was not the worst reaction she’d had to her presence. She’d had groans, and eye rolls, and on at least one occasion, people turning around and walking in the other direction. She was a little surprised, then, when Lucero excused themself from the table, and strode over, not even bothering to hide what they were doing.

‘I’m sure as shit hoping you’re not here to snatch that Bonasecci out from under me,’ they murmured, brushing their lips against Scratch’s ear. She raised an eyebrow. That was not how she had expected this conversation to go. She should have expected that this other person was a thief, though, and she was kind of kicking herself for not putting it together earlier. They had stuck around last night far longer than was necessary, and had apparently been ogling the jewellery rather than the people.

‘There’s a Bonasecci here?’ she asked, feigning innocence. Okay, so maybe she had heard that there was a Bonasecci here. But, dressed in her tailored off-the-rack suit, and her slightly more expensive than normal heeled boots, and the very dwindling stilbit chip in her pocket, she had mostly just come here to feel fancy. Bonasecci was well out of her league. Anyone that had auctions for their paintings was far more than Scratch was capable of stealing on purpose, and Alfredo Bonasecci had a whole goddamned exhibit happening here.

‘Don’t shit me, Scratch, you know I know about Galastar.’ Scratch felt her heart drop in her chest. Well, shit.

She was apparently doing a worse job at being covert than she had thought. If Lucero (if that even was their real name) knew who she was, then anyone could. Whether they were following her, or this was the world’s most convenient coincidence was anyone’s guess.

Scratch turned, so that their conversation was hidden from both the guards that were patrolling the floor, and the surveillance cameras that covered the entire casino. She had to tilt her head downwards, and she sure as shit hoped it just made her look demure and apologetic towards Lucero, rather than suspicious as fuck.

‘Look, I promise you. I’m just here on my day off, having a good time. I’m not here to steal a priceless artwork.’

There was a very long pause, and then the tension in the air seemed to deflate. ‘Okay, good,’ Lucero said. Another pause. ‘You wanna?’

Scratch stared at them. They raised a perfectly manicured eyebrow.

‘Come on,’ they said, almost breathlessly. ‘It’ll be fun.’

It was objectively a bad idea. Lightport was the only city on a planet that she was contracted to spend the next three months on.

Of course, it would have been comically easy to skip out on the contract. Not too difficult to change a name that never belonged to you in the first place. The thing was, she didn’t want to. The whole point of being here was that she wanted to spend the next three months being the highly regarded yacht chef that said things like “excellent choice sir” when a rich idiot asked for peanut butter on his three-hundred stilbit dry-aged steak (forgetting he was allergic to peanuts), and make dishes that could have fed a family of four for six months on Praxis Station.

Doing something stupid like trying to steal a Bonasecci from someone that owned every casino in town was a fucking awful idea.

But god, Lucero was right. It did sound fun.

‘Sure,’ she said.