The cafe on the corner had been closing when they walked in, and then the owner looked up from the till, looked at the five of them, looked at the tablet propped against the coffee machine that was still playing the final on a loop, and turned the sign back around himself.
"On the house," he said.
"Absolutely not," Elsa said, and put a card down on the counter before anyone else could reach for a pocket. "Five of everything. Whatever’s warm. And don’t tell me the price, I’ve had a very emotional evening."
So they ended up in the back booth at half past midnight with a table full of things nobody had ordered specifically, and the money came out of Dane’s phone in a screenshot he kept turning around for people who had already seen it.
"Two thousand dollars each," he said. "Two thousand. That’s rent. That’s my rent, that’s two months of my rent, that’s—"
"You’ve said the rent thing four times, give it a rest already." Sana said.
Dean frowned a bit. "Sorry, it’s just, it’s my first time actually winning something, you know?"
"I know. I feel the same way."
Elsa had her mask pushed up on her forehead where it had been since the pods, and her hair was still flat on one side from it, and she was refusing to fix it.
She leaned across the table with her chin propped on both hands.
"Say it again," she said to Karl.
"Say what."
"The thing. The thing you said on the mic. All four hundred people heard it and I want to hear it in a cafe."
"I don’t remember saying anything."
"He doesn’t remember." She turned to Sana. "He stood in a corridor with four people trying to end his life and said come at me, all of you, and now he doesn’t remember. Pftt, hahah!"
"He does remember," Sana said, not looking up from her cup. "He just wants you to keep asking."
Karl put his drink down. Dane made a noise into his food that he tried and failed to convert into a cough.
"Sana," Elsa said slowly, "Wow, what happened girl, you made a full blown joke in front of people."
"Wha- I make jokes."
"Not out loud, this is kind of a first."
Sana shrugged, and behind the cup something moved at the corner of her mouth that she clearly had no intention of admitting to.
Karl let it go on around him.
Dane had started drawing the turtle pit on a napkin with a fork.
Elsa was arguing with him about it and losing on purpose. Sana had eaten two things she’d said she didn’t want, and her ponytail had come loose an hour ago.
Karl looked at his phone under the table instead.
The organizer’s transfer had landed while they were walking here. Under it, the number he checked more often than he checked the weather.
19,640 dollars.
’Things could be worse.’
Something in his chest was moving anyway, fast and stupid and hard to sit still under.
His mother had picked up nights at the depot for six years so he wouldn’t know. He wanted, very suddenly and very badly, to hear her voice.
"I need to make a call," he said, sliding out of the booth.
"Who could you possibly need to call by this time?" Elsa asked, her eyes squinted a bit.
"Someone, I’ll be back."
Elsa’s face did something quick and unguarded, and then she waved him off with a chip.
...
The street outside was cold and mostly empty, the shutters down on everything, one streetlight buzzing over a bus stop nobody was going to use tonight.
Karl got two digits into the number before he realized he wasn’t alone.
She was sitting on the back of the bench with her boots on the seat, hood up, a black scarf pulled to just under her eyes. He would not have recognized her from ten meters.
He recognized her from three because those eyes had been filed away in his head since an alley.
"You didn’t come," Karl said.
"I came." Dori didn’t move. "I sat in the upper block with a hat on. Nobody talked to me. It was great."
"You said you weren’t coming."
"I said a lot of things."
He stood there with the phone still in his hand.
"You’re good," she said. "I want that on record, since I’m not going to say it in front of the rest and give them the satisfaction. I’ve watched a lot of junglers play; none of them do the thing you do where you’re already standing where the fight decides to happen. It’s not normal."
"Thanks."
"It wasn’t a compliment, idiot; don’t get all blushy. "A pause. "Fine. It was a compliment."
Karl sat down on the seat of the bench, a body’s width away from her boots.
"Why did you sign up?" he asked. "You knew who I was before I knew who you were. You could have said no to Elsa easily. But even more, why is a member of a gang in a gaming tournament with me?"
"Secret."
"That’s not the answer i was hoping for."
"It’s my answer. Take it or leave it, I’m not selling another one tonight."
He let it sit. Somewhere down the block a delivery scooter went past and the sound took a long time to leave.
"You’ve got money now," Dori said.
"Some."
"Enough to be interesting." She turned her head, finally, and the streetlight caught the edge of her eyes over the scarf.
"So listen. You’re going to walk in there Monday with a bag and you’re going to feel like a man closing a door. You won’t be. That’s the part nobody tells you. Paying them doesn’t end it. It just moves you from the pile marked owes us to the pile marked can get money."
"They’d have no reason to—"
"They don’t need a reason, they need a name that works." Her voice stayed low and flat the whole way through, which was somehow worse. "Your dad’s paper is nearly clean. Then it’s you. A kid who found ten grand in four days and wouldn’t say how. You think the boss forgot that?"
Karl looked at the shuttered shop across the road.
"There you go again trying to help me. I don’t get it," he said.
"I’m informing you. Do what you want with it."
"You’ve done that twice now."
"Have i? Bold of you to keep count like that, don’t tell me you’re already in love with me."
He turned to look at her properly, and the question came out before he had decided anything about it.
"Are you going to be an enemy?"
Dori went still on the back of the bench.
"That’s a weird thing to ask, don’t you think?"
"I know." He rubbed the back of his neck.
"I’d rather ask it than find out. I don’t want you to be one. You’re good, Dori. Not just at the game. You held the river against a girl who scared you, and you said she was interesting instead of saying you hated her, and you came back for me in that corridor when you had nothing left, and if it turned out one day you were standing on the other side of something, I think I’d be pretty unhappy about it."
The silence that followed was long enough that he started assembling an apology.
Then she made a small sound behind the scarf, sharp and undignified, and turned her whole head away.
"You can’t just—" She stopped. Started again. "Who says that. Out loud. To a person."
"Was it wrong?"
"Shut up."
She came off the back of the bench, landed light, and on her way past she brought her hand round and smacked him across the back of the head hard enough that he saw the streetlight twice.
"Ow—"
"Stupid," Dori said, already walking. "Go call your mother."
He turned to say something and the pavement past the bus stop was empty.
...
Karl sat there for a while with his hand on the back of his head.
’Is that a normal thing for people to do.’
[Query is outside this unit’s function.]
’You’re enjoying this.’
[Charlotte notes that the Administrator has now been struck by three different women in two months and has not once seen it coming.]
’That’s not the same as an answer.’
[Charlotte notes that it wasn’t meant to be.]
He laughed, quietly, at nothing, on a bench outside a closed cafe.
’You were good tonight,’ he said. ’Both of you. I mean it.’
[Charlotte says she knows.] A beat.
[Charlotte says she would like it noted that she also said it first, this morning, before the semifinal, and was told she would be sitting out.]
’You were watching the whole time.’
[She was.]
’And?’
The pause stretched out longer than the brackets usually allowed.
[She says you looked wrong in someone else’s hands.]
[She says she will get over it.]
[She says do not ask her to say more than that tonight.]
Karl closed his eyes.
’Raziel.’
Nothing came for a second. Then something arrived that was not a panel at all, a voice landing somewhere under his ribs, low and clear and entirely certain of itself.
[You want to know if I am satisfied.]
’Something like that.’
[I am. I do feel that you as my master, is a privilege.]
’I see. Thank you.’
"Yes." Something in the voice shifted, and it was not warmth, exactly.
It was closer to a man setting down something heavy.
[I told myself I would decide about you after one match. I have decided. I am yours to draw, Administrator. Ask, and I will answer. You will not have to reach for me again.]
[Bond interaction: 30 percent.]
[Recalculating.]
[Bond interaction: 52 percent.]
Karl opened his eyes and looked at the number hanging pale in the dark over an empty street.
...
The hotel was four streets over and had Elsa’s family name on a small brass plate by the door, which she pretended not to notice and everybody noticed.
"Right," she announced in the lobby, fanning the keycards out in one hand like a hand of cards she’d already won with. "I’ve sorted rooms. Don’t argue, it’s done, I paid, arguing is rude."
"You didn’t ask anyone," Dane said.
"Correct." She started dealing. "Dane. Sana. And—"
She held the last two cards for a second longer than the others.
Karl looked down at the one she’d put in his hand.
It had the same number on it as the one still in hers.