A faint, scornful sneer played across Balot’s lips as she said the words, and she jerked her head at Shell—and the cards—to indicate she was ready.
Shell’s face was peculiarly shy at this moment. What was he feeling? Embarrassed? Bashful?
At the very least he seemed to recognize that the words that Balot had just spoken were quotations, phrases that he had once said to her, even if he couldn’t remember actually having said them. He had made long-forgotten promises, and now he was being held to account.
Stuck for words, Shell focused his attention on the cards at hand, cutting them, preparing them.
That handful of movements told Balot everything she needed to know about just how much control Shell could still exert over the cards—and how much control he had lost.
She waited for Shell to finish placing the cards in the card shoe, toying with the four million-dollar chips in her hands, as if to say I hold your heart in my hands.
–I’m not the impatient sort, my dear. I like to take my time.
With these words, Balot placed a chip in the pot.
It wasn’t one of the golden chips. Rather, it was an ordinary hundred-thousand-dollar chip. Shell had evidently been expecting one of the million-dollar variety, and he gulped, then eventually exhaled deeply.
–Let me peel your layers off one by one, my little one.
Balot smiled as she spoke. By now, Shell wasn’t the only one to have realized that she was quoting verbatim words that Shell had said to her, once upon a time. The others around the table were listening with keen interest.
“You filthy gutter-born whore…” Shell muttered, touching the card shoe as if in some sort of warped act of purification.
The Doctor and Ashley scowled when they heard his words. Only Balot and Bell Wing remained unaffected, unflinching.
Shell flicked the cards out of the card shoe. Violently, recklessly, like a hotheaded teen rebel quick to snap out his jackknife and lunge at the opponent who had enraged him so.
Balot dodged the blade in a deft movement, then crushed all resistance with a single blow.
–There’s nothing to be embarrassed about, my little one.
Shell continued dealing, trying to appear unconcerned.
–You look a little frightened, but don’t worry, I like it that way. It makes you look even more alluring.
Balot continued to smile a seraphim’s smile at Shell, who by now was gritting his teeth so hard it seemed like he was about to break his own jaw.
She was smiling, but her eyes blazed with her true feelings of animosity.
Balot took those hate-filled eyes off Shell for a moment and refocused on her cards. She was deciding what she wanted of him, how she wanted him. She was going to release him from the waiting—the worst part, that moment before the customer told you just how he was going to enjoy you. Just as Balot had suffered in the past.
Her eyes snapped back up toward Shell, and she called out her move.
–Now, open your legs wide, little one, and show daddy what he wants to see…
Then, when Shell showed no sign of understanding, Balot rephrased her instructions.
–Stay.
A fat vein started visibly throbbing in Shell’s temple. He struggled to suppress his fury as he flipped over his hidden card. Slowly. Not in order to put his opponent off. No—Shell moved slowly because his foul, abject mood meant that he physically couldn’t move any faster.
The game had begun. Balot’s farewell game to the casino, her lap of honor. A game just for her.
≡
Ashley and Bell Wing were the first to realize what was going on.
The Doctor knew already, of course, as it was none other than the Doctor who had hatched the plan in the first place.
The only ones who remained oblivious to the end were the man from OctoberCorp and Shell.
Shell’s mind wasn’t even able to comprehend the possibility that something was going on—that he was being played—or, if it was, he soon suppressed those errant suspicions. The only thing that Shell knew was that he was winning, over and over, just as he did in life, and his victories were all he had to hold on to from amid his shame and disgrace.
For Shell was winning. From the very first hand up to the ten-game mark where they currently stood, the cards seemed to be going his way.
The Doctor’s plan was unfolding nicely. Your target is the golden yolks—don’t touch any white or shell. If you do end up getting some along the way, be sure to return them immediately once you’ve reached your objective. Balot understood what she had to do. The only question left now was the matter of timing. So that the plan would achieve its maximum effect.
It was around the twelve-game mark when it happened. The upcard was 9, Balot’s cards were 3 and 8.
The melee of figures at the bottom of her left arm showed her what she needed to do. Balot hit.
The card she received was a 6. Then she hit again, a 2. Total nineteen. At first glance it looked like her recklessness had paid off. In particular to the man from OctoberCorp, standing behind Shell and the chips, glaring over all he could see.
Balot glanced up at him before calling out her intention to stay.
Cleanwill John October, the man from OctoberCorp, wore a fearsome expression. Unrelenting and relentless. As if he wouldn’t permit Shell to lose a single hand, let alone the game. An impossible demand. Like ordering him to play Russian roulette with an automatic pistol.
Shell turned over his hidden card. An ace. Shell had won, by the narrowest of margins.
“Ha!” John yelped in satisfaction. Shell smiled even as he looked on at his cards with a grim expression.
Shell was hanging on by a thread, and he knew it. Balot was on the crest of a winning wave, on the ultimate winning streak, and yet she was somehow suppressing it. Leaving the door open to Shell. Cutting him some slack, giving him some rope—for what?
She was planning something. He could smell it. Even in his present state, Shell was still Shell, and he was usually the first to pick up on this sort of thing.
But it was already too late. The race had already begun: a drag race, where speed was everything and the first to cross the finish line took it all—and then mid-race Shell realized that the finish line was actually a chicken run straight to hell, and yet he couldn’t slam on the brakes or he would lose, and lose everything. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Balot’s hundred-thousand-dollar chips had run out. Before long she had also exhausted her supply of fifty-thousand-dollar chips too, and was on to the ten-thousand-dollar chips, burning through them steadily, one after another, like a chain smoker his cigarettes.
What did the others in the casino—the players, the dealers—make of such a scene?
Let me help you with that, they would have been thinking, most probably. They would have taken the chips in their hands and ran from the casino as quickly as their legs would carry them.
It was only common sense, after all—winning streaks didn’t last forever.
This girl and the lanky man beside her had lost it—they were suckers for pushing on past the point that their luck had run out, for not knowing when to quit while they were ahead.
Now their recklessness had driven the casino mad, forced the house to call in its big guns, and their chips were crumbling away like an asphalt road under a jackhammer. An unstoppable force—and one that nobody had any inclination to try and stop.