“Will we get hit this year?” Buff asks. It’s a question that gets asked dozens of times at Yo’s each year.
I shrug. “You can only control what you can control,” I say.
“Like how much you gamble and lose?” Buff says, smirking.
“Shut the chill—” I start to say, but then stop when I hear a whoop.
We scramble to our feet, spin around, gaze up the snowy mountainside. Plumes of snow burst from the ground like low-flying clouds. Blurs of black snowsuits flash down the incline, cutting side to side, carving up the slope. A line of sliders, chasing each other playfully, head right toward us.
“Look out!” Buff shouts, but I’m not sure if he’s talking to me or the sliders bearing down on us. I don’t have time to clarify as I jump to one side, narrowly avoiding getting chopped down like a poorly placed snowman.
When I look up there’s snow in the scruff of my thin beard and flecks of ice on my eyelashes. “What the chill?” I say, pushing to my feet, warmth flooding through my limbs. I’m not warm, but something inside me wants me to be.
Three sliders are stopped just past us, having turned their slides at sharp angles to brake suddenly. It’s almost like they were aiming right for us. We can’t see their faces, because they’re wearing thick masks to keep the snow and cold away, but their eyes are alight with adrenaline and blinking away coldness-induced moisture.
“You Daisy and Barf?” one of them says, his alert eyes flicking between us.
“What?” I say, taking a step forward. “I oughta beat you senseless for a move like that.”
The guy laughs. “The king calls the shots here. You touch me and you’ll be off the job quicker than you got on it. And trust me, you don’t want that.”
“What?” I say. “You mean, you’re the ones meeting us?”
“Get wit’ it, kid,” another of the guys says. “You must be Daisy, the big gambler who lost enough silver to land you wit’ us.”
“It’s Dazz,” I say, taking another step forward. “Call me that one more time and you can slide the rest of the way down the mountain with a broken arm.”
“And I’m Buff,” Buff says, stepping beside me, his fists knotted. He’s all riled up, too, which almost makes me grin. Nothing like a good scrap to start our first day on the job.
“Calm the freeze down,” the first guy says, shaking his head. “Heart of the Mountain, you’d think we actually hit you guys.”
“Near enough,” Buff says, not giving an inch.
“Look, we’re on the same side. Consider it a bit of friendly first day initiation. Now do you want to get to work or swing those antsy fists of yers?”
The honest answer is that I want to swing my fists, but this new job is supposed to be part of a fresh start, so I flex my hands, trying to coax the fight out of them. But I’m also not about to back off without some form of retribution. Weakness like that can haunt a guy. I pick up one of my snowballs and launch it hard enough to do some serious damage. Crunch! Although it was headed right for the main speaker’s head, the ball slams into the open hand of one of the other guys, the biggest of the lot. Good reflexes. He grunts, squeezes the ball into mush in his fist, lets it crumble to the ground.
The main guy laughs. “Nice arm,” he says. “That’s why we keep this guy around. We call him Hightower, on account of…well, I think it’s obvious.”
Obvious as a wolf in a sled dog team, I think, staring at the big, brown eyes of the gargantuan who’s at eye level despite being a good foot further down the hill than me.
“I’m Abe,” the guy continues. “This fella is Brock.” He motions to the other one who spoke to us. His eyes glare back, sort of cross-eyed. “And this little guy is…” Abe looks around, scanning at waist level, like he’s trying to find a missing child. There’s no one else around. “Where the freeze is Nebo?”
Brock gazes up the mountain. “’E was right ’ere a minute ago…Musta gotten lost at the hairpin.” Something about his tone tells me he knows exactly what happened to the one they call Nebo.
Hightower grunts and points, so we all follow his gesture until we spot another slider coming down slowly, barely spraying any snow at all. We track his progress all the way to us, although it takes so long I swear another inch of fresh snow has fallen by the time he gets down. His every movement is uncertain, awkward, unbalanced, and when he tries to stop, his slider gets all tangled up with his feet and he goes down face first.
The others are laughing—even Buff is sniggering—and normally I’d probably join in, but something about the guy seems so helpless, so pathetic, that I don’t feel like getting pleasure at his expense. After all, I’ve been pretty pathetic lately myself.
“Shut it,” I say, punching Buff and shooting icicles at the others. I help the guy, who really is quite small, to his feet, using the back of my hand to brush some of the snow off. Right away he pulls at his mask, which is caked with snow, until it pops off his head.
He’s bald…and short…and jittery.
It’s the man who came out of the Chance Hole last night.
“You!” I say, loud enough that the small man takes a step back, concern flashing across his red face.
“Do I know you?” he asks, saying it in such a way that it sounds like he thinks he probably should.
“We saw you leaving the Hole last night,” I say.
He screws up his face. “Last night. Not a good night,” he says.
“Ah, I wouldn’t say that, Neebs,” Abe says. “Your new losses pretty much guarantee you’ll be working with us for the rest of time.” Abe chuckles, takes a few steps over to smack Nebo on the back. Nebo cringes and puts a hand to his mouth as if the weak blow knocked a few of his teeth loose. “You’re late. Where you been?”
“Uh, sir, I’m sorry, but uh, Brock here, he, well, he…”
“Spit it out!” Abe says, glancing at Brock. “What did Brock do?”
Behind Abe’s back I see Brock use his thumb to make a slashing motion across his throat. “I, uh, well, Brock didn’t do anything actually. I just, well, sort of fell going around a bend, sir. I’m sorry, it won’t happen again,” Nebo finishes lamely, ducking his head like he expects to be hit.
Clearly there’s more to the story, and if I had to guess, it was probably Brock who caused the fall in the first place.
I chew on my lip, which is suddenly feeling numb. “So this is his first day, too?” I ask, wondering why he didn’t meet them at the same place as us.
“Ha ha ha!” Brock laughs boisterously. “First day—that’s funny. Despite Neeb’s awful display of sliding, ’e’s actually been runnin’ with us for comin’ on a year now.”
“Then why…” I start to ask, but then figure out exactly what happened. Why would Nebo be playing high stakes boulders-’n-avalanches if he’s already got a job and debts to pay? Simple. Because he wanted out. One lucky night and he could pay his way back to whatever normal job he might’ve had before he first lost big at the Chance Hole. But why would he want out of a job working for the king?
“Why what?” Abe says, staring at me strangely, as if he can see the tail end of the question hanging off the tip of my tongue.
“Nothing,” I say.
“Good,” he says, ripping off his mask. His face is pale white with a nose so flat it looks like someone uses it for a punching bag on daily basis. His ears stick out and sort of up, like maybe he can hear as well as an animal, like a rabbit. He’s older than us, but only by a few years. “First, some instruction.”
Beside me, Buff mumbles, “I thought school was long over.”
Abe ignores him. “Brock. Wanna start with the rules?”
Brock nods and pull off his mask, revealing a face that only a mother could love, and even that would be stretch. It’s so bruised and scarred that it looks like he mighta had a pet dog and offered his cheeks as a chew toy. Either that or this guy’s been in a lot of fights, and not just of the fists and brawn variety. A long, six-inch scar runs from the edge of his right eye to his lips, like a curved scythe. It reeks of knife wound.