Nine years ago, I hadn’t even thought of being a detective. I was still young, but I thought I was old enough to be jaded, and there was no one I kept close enough to me to say otherwise. I was a runner for the Luna cartel, a job I could keep so long as I didn’t get shot and didn’t get too curious about the pressed pouches of thin leaves that I delivered across the city.

I sat cross-legged on the cold concrete floor, a stolen red jacket draped over my shoulders and a small stack of bottle caps piled in front of me. My hair was a little darker than it was now and a lot shorter, unevenly hacked off with a knife I’d been unwisely lent. The scar next to my nose hadn’t faded yet. I leaned forwards, fiddling with one of the golden buttons on the jacket so I wasn’t tempted to fiddle with the tattered cards face-down in front of me. I had a good hand. I knew I had a damn good hand—so, of course, I couldn’t let anyone else know that.

They were Dumal’s cards. He’d just grabbed anyone who didn’t look busy at the old warehouse with the broken windows. There was a lot of nothing to do in between jobs, and all of us had just enough cash to gamble in search of more. I didn’t know half the players save the names we’d muttered at one another in a show of civility before we began, but I recognized that look in their eyes.

Blaine and Evie had already folded. It was just me, Dumal, and the oddity that was Madeline Zamir. I couldn’t place what she was doing here, in her neat grey suit and long black secretary’s skirt. She wore perfectly round glasses with small keys inset along their frames, and behind them her eyes darted from side to side making circuits of the room. Crumpled envelopes and the edges of a lanyard stuck out of her pocket, and if I crossed my eyes the right way I could imagine that it was the seal of the mayor’s office. But what would she be doing here?

The mayor’s office didn’t run sting operations. They didn’t dare. And even if it did, she was going about it all wrong, making herself complicit while playing the game least likely to foment trust between us.

There were two aces on the floor, a six, and a two. Dumal flipped over the final card to reveal a king with the face of a leopard. Zamir snickered at that, and the smile worked its way across her face from left to right without ever reaching her eyes. “The king of the jungle,” she said. “The king of diamonds. But he’s spotted!”

I sighed. “Well spotted.”

She gave a high-pitched nervous laugh at that. It wasn’t funny, and she’d still laughed at it. Not genuinely—like she’d felt the need to, like she was worried about what would happen if she didn’t. Dumal left me no time to wonder at that, though. He rapped the floor with the edge of his bottle and cleared his throat. “Call or fold?”

“Call,” I said.

Zamir frowned. She picked up her cards, looked at them once, and put them back down. “All in,” she said, and began to move her meager stack, one cap at a time, into the center.

Her pile was joined by Dumal’s much larger one. He looked to me. I ground my teeth without looking at either of them—were they bluffing? But with what? I had an ace and a six facing the concrete right now; neither of them could beat a full house. “I’m not backing down now,” I said, pushing forward my own stack of bottle caps. “And I’d like my payment in all half-talents—makes it easier to spend.”

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Now that we’d all bet, now that we didn’t have a chance to recant—now Dumal smirked. “You know, you make a good point. I’ll want my money that way. Everyone show their cards.”

He flipped his. Ace and queen. Three of a kind.

I flipped mine. Ace and six. Full house, aces over sixes.

Zamir flipped hers. Two aces. Four of a kind.

There was a slow burgeoning silence. Four of a kind meant Zamir had won, had slipped our money out from under us. But if she had two aces and I had one and he had one, and there were already two on the ground… Dumal slammed the bottle down on the ground, where it cracked, and the cloyingly sweet smell of the honey-flavored mead he drank began to fill the air as he glared at us. “Six aces,” he growled. “Six aces lying next to each other. Anyone wanna own up?”

“You dealt,” Blaine called. “Maybe your deck’s just scuffed.”

Next to Dumal’s bottle landed a gleaming sharp knife as long as my arm. He laid a hand on its grip. “I don’t cut my cards. You know that. Everyone knows that. So which one of you lowlifes was it?” He leaned forwards, and it was as if the walls came with him, pressing in around us. And a small space with someone holding a bottle and a blade is no place to be.

I blinked. The walls hadn’t moved at all. Damn claustrophobic nightmares. Stunts like that were the reason I’d smuggled an ace into my hand. I mean—it was expected, really. You couldn’t bluff a nightmare, couldn’t pretend to someone who was only a figment of imagination themselves. So it was just a way to even the score, a little indulgence allowed of humans among nightmares. But the funny little thing was, it was only ever one ace. One card up my sleeve. And that meant I wasn’t the only one cheating here.

Dumal was a jackass, but he was an honest jackass. Blaine and Evie weren’t even playing this hand. Which left Zamir—who had paled further at every one of Dumal’s words and now looked as though she wanted to turn to ectoplasm and seep away. She was terrified.

The pieces clicked into place. Zamir was some sort of official, even had the seals of city hall to prove it. But she didn’t have the shadow of the law protecting her any more than we did. She was here, deep in Luna’s territory, because she was selling something. Information. Protection from the cops. High-profile buyers who wanted everything done through more legitimate channels. Money and safety, commodities always in short supply.

I needed to be part of that. And therefore, I needed Zamir not to get some fancy new slits in her throat.

I heaved a theatrical sigh. I picked up both aces, one to each hand, and flicked them up into the cuffs of my shirt. A neat little trick. “Alright, alright. Everyone makes such a ruckus about having an ace up my sleeve. But then I thought to myself, I’ve got two hands, I’ve got two sleeves, and, well…” I shrugged, letting the cards slide back out onto the floor. “I wasn’t going to use them both in the same round, honest, but the way you were smiling I was sure you had something good. Just my bastard luck that it was the other three aces.”

That earned me an open-mouthed stare from Zamir—but at least she wasn’t fool enough to say anything. Dumal sneered. “I was starting to expect better of you, Starling. Not sure why.”

“I mean, I’ll take-”

He mirrored my gesture, except it was his knife he flipped up into his hand and pressed against my throat. “But you ruined the game.”

“I-” Both of them coming out at once must have struck a nerve. He wasn’t usually this angry. “Come on, Dumal. I have to do what I have to-”

“How much do you think two aces are worth?”

I didn’t dare move my head. “Maybe…half my winnings…”

“Half?”

“Most of them…”

“Most?”

“All of them.” I really didn’t like feeling my own heartbeat in that blade. “And—and I’ll take the foundry job. I know the smoke bites and nobody wants it.”

“This foundry job and the next one.”

As the laymen say, I was in a bad position to negotiate more. “Deal,” I said quickly.

He grumbled, but he set the knife away. He tossed a few caps towards Zamir—less, I was sure, than what she’d had at the start of the game, not that I cared enough to quite literally stick my neck out any further for her. He pulled the remainder towards him and began to count, stopping only when he realized none of us had moved. “What are you looking at?” he snapped. “Game’s over.”