Linc’s eyes moved from the guy with the slicked-back hair, now an island in a sea of empty space, to Willy, who pushed a deck of cards toward him and said, “It’s your deal.”
Linc nodded and reached for the deck, and everyone started breathing again. The Chapster with the big ears and the one with the red hair rushed to right the chair Linc had kicked over and get it under him, as though Linc were some kind of aristocrat.
Or some kind of psychopath who had to be constantly appeased, Sadie thought. At least I seem to have found the village elders.
“Once you’ve got your bearings in the landscape, start charting your Subject’s mindscape,” Catrina had advised during orientation. “Each one is unique, but they are all built around three basic components: emotion, thought, and memory. Just as your computer takes the programs you see on your screen and translates them into zeros and ones for processing, the mind takes joy, ambivalence, your thoughts about what to have for dinner, and the quadratic equation you memorized in sixth grade and converts them into chemical impulses, each associated with a different sensory system. Your job is to create a key to translate them back.”
Poker is actually a good place to start, Sadie thought. She’d played poker once with Pete and his friends, a strip game that had ended up with her minus one sock and everyone else naked, so she knew how the game worked, but she wasn’t a pro. Was Subject 9?
Pete and his friends spent a lot of time staring one another in the eye and talking about one another’s “tells,” but Subject 9’s eyes stayed mainly on the tabletop and on the other player’s hands, as though he was uncomfortable looking up.
As Linc dealt the cards, several other guys took seats at the table. Willy said, “You’ve been a stranger here at the Castle too long, Little Ice.”
His tone struck Sadie as kind, but Subject 9 stayed tense. His eyes moved to Willy’s chips, arranged in four neat stacks, and the windy sound in his mind spiked. “It’s been tough at home,” was all Subect 9 said. “What have you been up to?” He took two chips off one of the tall stacks in front of him and tossed them into the middle of the table. Sadie noticed for the first time that his hands were crisscrossed with scars and cuts.
From fighting, she thought, and felt a twinge of nerves. The violence Curtis had suggested as a possibility seemed real in this setting, with these guys. The room felt like a tinderbox, a single wrong word enough to set it all off.
“I’ve been working at my uncle’s appliance store the past four months,” Willy told him.
“You? Selling fridges and washer-driers?” Subject 9 chuckled.
“Naw, mostly security. Making sure no one runs off with the washer-driers.”
The guy with slicked-back hair said, “Raise, fifteen dollars.”
Sadie had the impression that someone had momentarily dimmed the lights. Subject 9 said, “Call.”
Are you nuts? Matching that bet? Sadie wanted to ask. Even with her rudimentary knowledge of poker she knew that he had nothing, while the way the other guy was betting indicated he must have a good hand. Maybe dimming vision means dimming brains.
But Subject 9 got lucky. The guy with the slick hair had been bluffing, and Subject 9 won the pot.
“How does appliance protection pay?” Subject 9 asked as Willy dealt the next hand.
“Not bad,” Willy told him. “Got myself a car. And gas.”
A quick cloudburst of noise filled Subject 9’s head, and he looked up to meet Willy’s eyes. “No way.” Based on both the rise in sound and the elevation of his heart rate, Sadie thought he was genuinely impressed. It had never occurred to her that gas could be as much of a luxury as a car.
“And a girl,” Linc said drily.
Willy’s grin got even bigger. “Yep. She’ll be along soon. You can meet her.”
Subject 9 folded. His head got quieter as he watched the others finish the hand, but he seemed distracted, as though the game had lost interest for him. He kept checking his watch, which Sadie was surprised to see was an old Mickey Mouse one, the kind with hands that you probably had to wind. That hardly seems in character for a bad guy, she found herself thinking, before remembering that objectivity meant not prejudging.
He was so disengaged that he didn’t even pick up the cards he’d been dealt on his next hand, but his vision dimmed when Linc bet, so Subject 9 matched it—and won again when Linc flipped over his cards to show he’d been bluffing.
Dimmed vision means he knows someone is lying, Sadie decided, setting it down in her mental notebook. It had to be something instinctive, because his pulse and the sounds in his head showed no change.
When it was his turn to deal the cards, Subject 9 said, “Any of you know how I can get in touch with James’s girl? Was hoping to ask her a few questions.”
The question was followed by silence, not a normal silence but the kind that made the hair on the back of his neck prick up and the lights seem to dim again.
Who is James? Sadie wondered. And why was that question so loaded?
Everyone at the table got very busy with their cards for a while. Willy broke the quiet, saying, “Which one? You know James. Loved the women, and the women loved him.”
Another flicker along the edge of Subject 9’s vision. “I’m not sure. A brunette, I think.”
“Maybe it was Virginia,” the Chapster with the sniffles volunteered. “The cashier at that casino.”
The guy with big ears offered, “Or Ala, the girl at Sirios? With the angry father.”
Willy puffed up his cheeks and made a comical face. “She was a dangerous one. Right up James’s alley. Any of you remember—”
Linc tossed his cards on the table and looked directly at someone for the first time. “If you’re just going to sit here wikiwacking off about the past, you should find another game. I’m sick of talking about dead people.”
Whoever James was, he was dead.
The windy sounds in Subject 9’s head stopped as though someone had hit pause on the haunted-house soundtrack. “He was your best friend,” he said to Linc.
“Operative word was.” Linc’s phone buzzed, and he unlocked his eyes from Subject 9’s to glance at the screen, then frowned and stood. “I’m going to get some air,” he said, striding out of the room.
As soon as Linc was out of sight the clutch of guys who had been around the table began to disperse as though they’d only been there to attend him. Watching them slip away, the sounds in Subject 9’s head intensified, getting not louder but broader, as if new skeins had been added.
Are the sounds thoughts? Sadie asked herself. And they get louder because he is wondering what is going on? Sadie decided to set it down in her mental notebook provisionally and see if it held up.
Her Subject and Willy were alone at the card table now and nearly alone in the room. Sadie wondered how long the piles of pizza boxes and beer cans overflowing in the garbage cans had been accumulating; she imagined the Castle, as Willy had called it, didn’t have a cleaning crew that came in at two A.M. like the Union Club did.
Acting like a fond parent trying to distract from the outburst of an infant, Willy said, “What have you been doing since we last saw you around the Castle, Little Ice? How’s your love life?”
“Still with Cali. I’m a one-girl guy,” Subject 9 answered, rearranging his stacks of chips into five uneven skyscrapers. “Too much trouble otherwise.”
Oh, charming, Sadie thought.