Joy put one finger on the rack of black chips and pushed it back across the felt.
“Thanks,” she said. “But I don’t think I do markers.”
The words came out before the thought had really sunk in. But as she said it and looked at the chips, a feeling gripped her stomach, as if she were being asked to eat something she knew she hated.
“Everybody does markers,” said the emerald-eyed man.
She made the mistake of looking up at him. The emerald eyes were right there, warm and amused and entirely on her, and she felt her lips part with a short intake of breath. For about a second and a half, taking the chips seemed like a wonderful idea, easy in the way she could eat a whole package of cookies if she let her guard down. Her hand had actually started reaching toward the rack.
She heard Nate clear his throat and looked over. He was subtly shaking his head, with an absolutely stricken look on his face. More importantly, Joy realized that once again she no longer wanted the chips. The spell, it seemed, had been broken.
“It’s the same money,” he told her, and she looked back at him, this time focusing on a spot just above his shoulder. “It spends the same. The only difference is that mine doesn’t come with a…” He had followed her eyes to the wall by the stairs. For the first time since he’d walked in, the wonderful voice missed a step. “You can’t be serious.”
Joy hadn’t been sure until that moment, but when she heard the dismay in his voice, she suddenly knew she was very serious.
“Hey, Auntie Lau, could you bring over the…” She paused, not sure what to call it. “Special menu?”
Nate realized what she meant first, and made a noise of extreme discomfort.
The emerald-eyed man was just behind him, and he didn’t say anything, but Joy could feel his stare suddenly grow cold.
Auntie Lau, on the other hand, didn’t seem overly concerned, and laid a document in front of Joy. The moment it hit the table, silence spread out from it like a ripple. First everybody at her table went quiet, staring at the document in alarm. Then it reached the surrounding tables, and the patter of Chinese and the clicking of tiles stopped. Everybody was staring at Joy.
She tried to play it cool, and looked at the document.
“Uh…” she said after a moment, looking at Auntie Lau apologetically. “I can’t read Chinese.”
Auntie Lau translated. Most of what she said wasn’t encouraging. A gallbladder was three hundred dollars. An appendix was forty.
“Nobody wants those,” Auntie Lau added.
Half a liver was thirty thousand, but Joy was pretty sure she was going to need hers to get through college.
Then there was the kidney. Twenty thousand dollars. It was the only thing on the list with four zeroes that she also had a spare of.
“Dude. Joy…” said Nate. “This is insane, even for you!”
“I’ve got two!”
Nate made a choking sound that was halfway to a sob.
“Look, man, I’m sorry! I know I screwed this up for you. Let me just pay you back what you lost. Just walk away and forget about this.”
It was the most emotion she had ever heard from Nate.
He took his glasses off and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. When he put the glasses back on, something had gone out of his face. It was the flat thing, the one he wore all day like a screensaver. She’d lived with him for two years and had seen him without it maybe three times.
“I taught you the wrong game,” he said. “I had a week. I’ve got four thousand hands, and I never once looked at what it was called. You lost everything you had tonight because of me, and now you’re going to…” He stopped, and started again, quieter. “Please don’t lose a kidney because I didn’t read a menu screen. Please. Just come get a burger.”
Joy looked at him.
It would have been easy to make a joke. She had about four of them ready. She didn’t use any of them, because Nate didn’t say please. Nate plugged your phone in for you and then acted like it had been that way when he found it.
“Hey,” she said. “What did you tell me, the first night? Four sets and a pair.”
“That’s still…”
“Watch what everybody throws. Never throw somebody the tile they need. Count what’s left. Know what you’re building before you build it.” She ticked them off on her fingers, the way he did. “Is any of that different down here?”
Nate opened his mouth. He shut it again.
“The only thing that changed is what a win’s worth. And that guy gave me the price list for free, because he can’t help himself.” She grinned at him. “You may have taught me wrong. But you taught me well.”
“That doesn’t…” He looked at the list, and then at her, and she watched him lose the argument with himself. “That doesn’t even mean anything.”
“And Nate? I spent the whole week playing toasters.” She nodded across the table at Mrs. Cheung and Uncle Wing, who were watching her, perfectly still, as if trying to decide whether she was about to explode. “Those are people.”
He didn’t say anything for a while. Then he looked at her over his glasses, fiercely.
“Kick their asses.”
Mr. Lo received them at his table under the oranges. He had a fresh cup of tea, and he did not seem at all surprised.
“Miss Lockheed. I had hoped we would speak again.” He folded his long hands. “You wish to ask the house for credit.”
“One kidney, please.”
“Left or right?”
Joy hadn’t thought about it. “Is there a difference?”
“I am told there is none. The young generally prefer to keep the right. I have never learned why.”
Joy grimaced.
“This… happens often?”
“Enough that I have a specialist on staff for when it does.”
“Left, then,” said Joy.
“Left.” From somewhere under the blanket he produced a sheet of paper the color of weak tea, a brush, and a little dish of red ink, and for a moment he wrote in quick small strokes. “The terms are these. The house advances you twenty thousand dollars against one kidney, the left. You will play one round. Four hands. At the end of the round you will come back to this table and give me twenty thousand dollars, and I will give you this paper, and we will have no further business.” He looked up. “Or you will be unable to do so, and the house will collect. One kidney. I wish to be very clear on that point. Not two.”
“Perfectly reasonable,” said Joy, swallowing hard. The excitement building up in her was having a knock-down, drag-out fight with her self-preservation instinct.
“I am always fair.” There was the light again, back behind his eyes, there and gone.
“And house credit plays at the house limit,” said Auntie Lau. “Ten thousand.”
Joy did the multiplication. An hour ago at table nine, the limit had been four hundred.
A man in green scrubs, presumably the specialist, had come to stand a polite distance behind Mr. Lo’s chair. He was holding a small red cooler, the kind you’d bring to a soccer game. He gave Joy a little nod, one professional to another.
“Lo. This is absurd.”
The emerald-eyed man had come over the bridge behind them. The charm was back in place, with an edge under it.
“She’s a junior in college. I’ve made her a perfectly generous offer, with no interest and no term, and you’re going to let her…”
“The young lady asked for the house’s terms,” said Mr. Lo. He didn’t raise his voice or turn his head. “She has heard yours. In my house, a guest chooses for herself. You know this.”
There was a very short silence, and in it Joy learned two things. The first was that these two had known each other for a long time. The second was that the emerald-eyed man was not the scariest person in the room, and he didn’t like it.
And Joy knew that if she had to choose between an ancient Chinese sorcerer and the man looming behind her, she was team sorcerer all the way.
“Of course,” he said smoothly. “Then I’ll make it simple. My offer stays open. At any point in the round, you say the word. I cover the twenty thousand and the kidney’s off the table. You’d owe me instead of him, that’s all.”
“How kind,” she said vaguely, not turning around.
“I would much rather be owed money than watch you get wheeled out of here. Be sensible.”
“Okay, Dad.”
She heard a strangled noise come from him. That had been the little voice in the back of her head, the one that had told her exactly what to say if she’d wanted to enrage Vic at the first poker game at Ray’s, and which had been getting louder and louder ever since. She grinned, suddenly having more of a measure of the emerald-eyed man. Mr. Lo saw it, and he smiled too.
She pressed her thumb into the red ink and then onto the paper, under a column of characters she couldn’t read and one line of English she could: ONE (1) KIDNEY, LEFT. LOCKHEED, J. Mr. Lo blew on it, folded it once, and tucked it away under his blanket.
“Play well,” he said.
Back at table nine, Mrs. Cheung had unzipped the fanny pack and taken out a brick of cash roughly the size of a paperback. Uncle Wing had a roll of bills with a rubber band around it. Neither of them seemed to think a ten-thousand-dollar limit was anything to comment on.
Dana was still in the fourth chair. She had been sitting there the entire time, with her little stack of chips, and Joy realized with something close to guilt that she’d forgotten all about her.
“I think I’ll play this one myself,” said the emerald-eyed man.
He was standing behind Dana’s chair. He didn’t say anything else, and he didn’t have to. Dana looked straight ahead with the same wide-eyed look she’d have had if somebody had put a gun to the back of her head and pulled the hammer back. Then she swept her chips off the table and into her coat pocket, got up, and went to stand behind the chair instead. She didn’t look at Joy while she did any of it.
Joy watched her go with a frown.
He sat. He set the black rack down on the felt in front of him, and then he kept setting racks down beside it until Uncle Wing stopped chewing.
This was going to be a problem. He was directly across from her now, four feet away, lit by a paper lantern like something in a jewelry ad, and there was nowhere on that side of the table to look that wasn’t him. Joy settled on his hands. They were nice hands, but she could manage hands.
She hadn’t quite figured out what his deal was, except that the moment she looked at him she started feeling things she was pretty sure she shouldn’t be feeling. Yin had magic, and unless Joy was discovering something about herself tonight, so did this guy. She didn’t think that was especially fair. She hadn’t gotten any magic out of her own transformation, unless you counted her hair, or possibly her hundred-meter time. As nice as those were, neither one was a whole lot of help right now.
But she did have something. She knew how she was going to beat this smug bastard. At least, she hoped she did.
“Ah, so it looks like I’m getting your chips after all!” she said, still looking down at his hands.
She could feel it work. She could feel him tense up from all the way across the table. It was time to see if her theory was correct.
She put on the sweetest, most doe-eyed smile she could muster, leaned forward with an elbow on the table, twirled a wavy lock of hair around one finger, and looked him directly in the eyes.
“And now I get to get them the fun way.”
He stared back at her, and his eyes were different this time. The charm and the warmth were gone, and now Joy could see plainly what was under them. Right now it was barely suppressed rage, but more importantly, it was insecurity. It wasn’t the insecurity of an important, powerful man who was simply used to being respected. It was the insecurity of a man who had spent his whole life not being taken seriously by women who looked like Joy.
So that’s who you were before you got your tarot, Joy thought, not breaking eye contact, and gave her hair another twirl.
The charm and the attraction were gone, at least for the moment.
“I think you’re going to regret not taking my offer,” he said at last. “I think it’s time you got taught your place. You’re going to be begging me to save you from Mr. Lo by the time we’re done.”
Joy paused for a second, a shocked look crossing her face. Then she raised a finger and pointed at him, her mouth opening and her eyebrows going up, as if she’d just gotten a joke she’d heard earlier.
She started laughing. At first it was small, then she had to put her hand over her mouth and squeeze her eyes shut as she convulsed with it. The rest of the table looked at her like she’d lost her mind.
Joy looked up with tears in her eyes and turned to Mrs. Cheung, still pointing at the emerald-eyed man.
“Oh man, did you hear that? Mr. Armani Suit over there is going to teach me a lesson!”
Mrs. Cheung looked at Joy with surprised bafflement. Then, slowly, she started laughing too.
Joy turned to Uncle Wing, shaking her head.
“Can you believe him?” She lowered her voice in the best imitation of him she could manage. “I think it’s time you got taught your place.”
Uncle Wing gave the emerald-eyed man a sideways glance and started chuckling nervously too. The whole table was laughing at him now.
For just a moment, Joy looked at him again, not laughing, but with a smile that said she was about to have the time of her life, and she was going to make sure he hated every moment of it.
Auntie Lau put a rack in front of Joy with twenty thousand dollars in it, which was more money than she had ever touched and represented half her body’s filtration organs. Behind her, Nate gave a long, despairing groan, which earned him a sharp reprimand from Auntie Lau. Behind the emerald-eyed man, Dana was staring at Joy in absolute disbelief.
“So, big shot,” she said, to his hands once again, not wanting to push her luck with his eyes more than was wise. “Since you know all this stuff. What are the big ones?”
“The big ones?” he said in a wavering voice, completely off balance.
“The hands that pay the limit. You said you were going to teach me my place, so go ahead, teach.”
“You are asking your opponent,” he said, sounding like he was fighting a valiant battle to keep his temper in check, “how to play? How to win?”
“Hey, you don’t have to. I’m sure everybody here will think you’re a real big man for beating the clueless newbie.”
She waited. Behind him, Dana closed her eyes.
It took him about four seconds.
“There are six worth knowing,” he said, and the shortness went right out of his voice. “Big Three Dragons, a triplet of each dragon. Big Four Winds, the same thing with winds. All Honors. Nine Gates, which is one suit in a very particular pattern, and which you will never see in your life. The pure flush you’ve met. And Thirteen Orphans. Every other hand is built out of sets. This one is built out of the thirteen tiles nobody wants: the one and the nine of each suit, the four winds, and the three dragons. One of each, plus a second copy of any one of them for your pair. Hold twelve of them and you have the worst hand at the table. Hold all thirteen and you have the best one in the game. It’s the only hand that doesn’t have a single set in it. Statistically it’s…”
The hands stopped moving. He had heard himself.
“Was there anything else?” he said.
“Nope! That was great,” she said, giving him another sweet smile.
It was the best thing about him, really. Thirty seconds of listening to him explain something and Joy’s pulse was right back to normal. He worked like a fire extinguisher.
She turned around in her chair.
Nate was sitting very straight on his stool. His lips were moving. She couldn’t hear him and didn’t need to. He was repeating what he’d said earlier, with less ferocity now and more desperation.
Kick his ass.
“No talking,” said Auntie Lau, although he hadn’t, and dumped the tiles.
Joy didn’t try to win the first hand. She tried not to lose it, which was a different job, and one Nate had drilled into her three nights running. She threw nothing anybody could possibly want. She watched.
It was amazing what you could see once you knew what a hand was for. Mrs. Cheung played with her jade bangle, around and around, right up until she was one tile away, and then her hands went still on the fanny pack. Uncle Wing’s toothpick switched sides when he liked what he drew.
The emerald-eyed man she couldn’t watch at all. She could feel that his charm was back, and with it her heart beating faster and an excited warmth in her stomach that had nothing to do with the game. It was a real handicap, since being able to look at people and read them had been her whole edge. She watched his hands. They told her nothing. They set each tile down square to the edge of the table, in the same amount of time, every time. It was like playing against Nate’s laptop. He was a toaster. He was an extremely good-looking toaster. She groaned. She really wanted to stop thinking that.
What he had instead of a tell was a table that was in love with him. Mrs. Cheung, who an hour ago wouldn’t have thrown a useful tile to her own grandmother, threw him the same wind twice and giggled about it. Uncle Wing fed him a dragon and then looked confused about why he’d done it.
And he was watching her. She could feel it on her face like a heat lamp. It took her a couple of turns to work out why it felt so familiar. It was what she did to other people. He was reading her, the same way she’d read Vic and Dana and everybody else at Ray’s, looking for the thing her face did when she wasn’t minding it.
She caught herself at it on the sixth turn. She had pulled a tile that fit, and she felt her lower lip start to push up, the same way it had on the fence at Drake Stadium. Across the table, the hands paused, very slightly, the way a pen pauses.
Oh! thought Joy.
Three turns later he drew his own winning tile off the wall and laid his hand down in a perfectly straight line. There wasn’t any defending against that. It cost them five thousand dollars each.
Fifteen thousand. She was now worth less than her kidney.
“Say the word,” he said, stacking. “If you want to keep yourself in one piece, I’m the only one left who can save you.”
Joy pointedly ignored him.
The second hand was junk. It wasn’t even interesting junk. It was a little of everything and not enough of anything, the kind of hand you would fold in any country.
So she smiled at it.
She let her lower lip press up all the way, the whole thing, the one Marco had caught, and she kept it there while she drew and while she threw. She leaned forward. She bounced a little.
It was like watching three doors close. Mrs. Cheung looked at her face and stopped throwing anything that hadn’t already been thrown. Uncle Wing took apart whatever he had been building. And across the table the hands picked up a tile they’d been about to throw, considered it, and put it back.
Nobody would give her a single thing, which was fine, since there was nothing she could have done with it. The wall ran out with all four hands still standing.
“Draw,” said Auntie Lau. “Nobody pays.”
Joy tipped her tiles over so the table could see, the way she had earlier in the night, when she hadn’t known any better.
Mrs. Cheung studied them. She studied Joy. She said one short sentence, and Uncle Wing said “Ha.”
“She says you smile at garbage,” said Auntie Lau.
“Smiles don’t cost anything!”
Behind the emerald-eyed man, where he couldn’t see it, one corner of Dana’s mouth moved.
“Interesting,” the emerald-eyed man said softly. Joy could hear the strain in it, but under the strain was the small satisfied sound of somebody who had just found a tell.
Joy knew exactly how good that felt. She also knew that once you had one, you stopped checking it.
The third hand was real.
By the fourth turn she had two triplets and a pair of green dragons, and she didn’t smile at any of it. She thought about Microeconomics. She thought about the count in the sideline routine, five, six, seven, eight, and how she was always on six when everybody else was on seven. She put on the face she’d practiced in the mirror for Ray’s, and she left it there.
The heat lamp stayed on her for a long time. Then the hands took two tiles out of the middle of his row and tucked them away at the far end, where they were never going to see daylight.
She got to one tile away and stayed there. Nobody threw it. On the eleventh turn the bangle stopped, and on the twelfth Mrs. Cheung drew her own winner, kindly, and it was five thousand dollars each again.
Joy tipped her hand over anyway. Two triplets, the dragons, and a hole where the three of dots should have been.
The emerald-eyed man turned over the two tiles at the end of his row. They were both the three of dots.
“You don’t smile when it’s real,” he said. “You should work on that.”
“Oh no!” Joy said, staring at the ceiling in mock despair. “He’s figured me out!”
Ten thousand dollars, and one hand left.
The arithmetic was not complicated.
She owed Mr. Lo twenty thousand dollars in about ten minutes. She had ten. To make up the difference she had to win a big hand, right now, off a table that was busy feeding all its best tiles to the man across from her.
Or she had to beg the man she’d just put a great deal of effort into mocking to save her. She could just about imagine the price she was going to have to pay if she took that route.
He seemed to be reading her now too. He took a single black chip off his stack, set it on the felt halfway between them, and left it there.
That was the smart play. Twenty thousand on a marker, no interest, between “friends,” and she’d go up ninety-four stairs with both kidneys. Anybody who cared about her would have told her to take it. One of them was sitting right behind her, thinking it so hard it was practically a cough.
Then she stood up her tiles for the last hand, and the hum came up under her sternum, stronger than it had ever been. The stakes had never been higher. This wasn’t a casual poker hand, or hours of tedium in a mobile game flushed down the drain on pulls she didn’t want. If this didn’t go her way, she was going to be waking up in a bathtub full of ice.
She looked at the tiles and almost laughed out loud. She’d been dealt four of the prettiest hands of her life tonight without a peep from the hum, and now it showed up. For this.
It was the worst hand she had ever seen.
There wasn’t a run in it. There wasn’t a pair in it. It was ones and nines and loose winds, a green dragon and a white one, eleven tiles that had never met each other and were never going to.
But then she remembered something.
In Nate’s game, a hand like this came with a little button that let you throw the whole thing back and deal again. It also came with an achievement, if you didn’t. She’d seen it on his laptop, a little gold icon at the bottom of a long list. Thirteen Orphans. The one and the nine of all three suits, the four winds, the three dragons: thirteen tiles that didn’t go with anything, one of each. Collect twelve of them and you had nothing at all. Collect all thirteen, with a spare of any one, and it was the biggest hand in the game. It paid the limit. There was nothing in between.
She counted. She was holding eleven, and she hadn’t drawn yet.
It looked like a hand full of nothing. But if she played her cards right, or her tiles at any rate, and if luck was on her side, what she was holding was four cards to a royal flush. If it wasn’t, she had a date with Mr. Lo’s surgeon.
This was her last chance to back out. She could still swallow her pride and take the emerald-eyed man’s offer. That was the safe play.
The fun play was thirteen kinds of garbage.
And the nice thing, Joy thought, as her lower lip pushed up all on its own, was that this time she wasn’t going to have to act. In her mind she took a leap, much like the one she’d taken racing Cole, except that this time it was over an abyss she knew she’d plunge into if she made a single misplay.
She threw her middle tiles, one after another, into her tidy little row. By the third turn Mrs. Cheung had noticed the row.
“Sap saam yiu?”
“She’s asking if you’re making Thirteen Orphans,” said Auntie Lau.
“I don’t know!” said Joy, absolutely glowing. She was sailing over the abyss now, and she had never felt more alive in her entire life, not even last week, when a giant tree had been trying to pound her into jelly.
Uncle Wing said “Ha.” Mrs. Cheung looked at the smile, snorted, and went back to her bangle.
“Four hundredths of one percent,” the emerald-eyed man remarked, to nobody in particular.
Joy drew the nine of dots on the fifth turn. That was twelve. On the seventh she drew a second north wind, and that was her pair, and she was one tile away.
What she needed was a red dragon. There were four of them in the set. Uncle Wing had thrown one on his very first turn, before anybody was paying attention, and Mrs. Cheung had thrown another. That left two, somewhere.
On the eighth turn she drew the five of characters.
It was no use to her at all. It was also, she was nearly certain, exactly what Mrs. Cheung wanted. Mrs. Cheung hadn’t thrown a single character all hand. Joy had watched every tile go into that heap, because a week of battling AI cat girls and some horrible little munchkin creatures in Nate’s game had taught her that much. The bots had never had faces. The discards were all you got.
If she threw it and she was wrong, that was the limit, and she’d be paying for the whole table with money she didn’t have. Then it would be a man with a cooler.
If she kept it, she had to throw an orphan, and the hand was dead.
She looked at Mrs. Cheung’s hands. The bangle was still going around.
Not yet, then.
She threw the five. Nothing happened. On Mrs. Cheung’s next draw, the bangle stopped.
Then the emerald-eyed man drew, and his hands did something they hadn’t done all night. They stopped.
The hum grew so intense Joy was nearly vibrating with it.
He had it. He had the red dragon. And from the way he’d arranged everything else, square and finished, he was one tile away himself, and the dragon was the only thing in his row that didn’t belong. To keep his own hand alive he would have to throw it. To hold on to it he’d have to break up something that would have ended her.
The warmth that came along with the thrill of chance washed over her. She let it. She was grinning ear to ear now, at his hands, at a tile she couldn’t even see, at the whole ridiculous night. She was potentially seconds away from being organ harvested, and she had never had this much fun.
“She smiles at garbage,” he said, mostly to himself. Then, without turning his head: “Dana. You’ve sat across a table from her. Does she bluff?”
“He’s talking,” said Nate.
“No talking,” Auntie Lau told Nate.
Dana didn’t answer right away. Joy looked up, past the hands, past the shoulder she wasn’t looking at, and found her.
Everybody else at this table had learned that smile tonight. Dana had learned it a couple of weeks ago in Culver City, across a pot Joy had no business being in, and it had cost her two pair. She knew exactly what it meant. Joy could see her knowing.
So this was the two ways. The thing the hum had been leaning toward all along hadn’t been a tile.
Joy didn’t do anything. That was the whole trick. She kept looking at Dana, and kept smiling, and let her read every word of it.
“All the time,” said Dana.
“Thank you.”
He picked the dragon out of his row. He held it up for a moment between two fingers, so that Joy could see exactly what it was, which was the nicest thing anybody had done for her all night.
“Say the word, Joy.”
He set it down on the felt, square to the edge.
She felt her feet touch solid ground on the other side of the abyss. The hum went quiet all at once, the way it always did. All that was left was a kind of numbness, all the fear, excitement and uncertainty suddenly gone.
She’d won.
“Okay,” said Joy. “Sik.”
She laid them down one at a time. One of dots. Nine of dots. One of bamboo. Nine of bamboo. By the time she got to the winds, Mrs. Cheung was standing on the rung of her chair, and when the last dragon went down she made a noise Joy wouldn’t have thought a person that size could make. People were getting up from the other tables. An old man took a picture of the tiles with a flip phone. Uncle Wing took the toothpick out of his mouth, which Joy speculated was something few people ever witnessed.
Mrs. Cheung said something long and fast, with one hand pressed to her visor.
“She says she has played for fifty-one years,” said Auntie Lau, “and made it twice.” She cleared her throat. “Thirteen Orphans. Limit. And whoever throws the tile…”
Nobody finished it for her this time.
It came to thirty thousand dollars. Auntie Lau took it out of the black chips, and it took nearly all of them. On top of the ten thousand Joy already had, that made forty, half of which belonged to Mr. Lo.
Joy stared at the chips, still numb, not really able to process what had just happened.
The emerald-eyed man hadn’t moved. He was still staring at the tiles.
“That… that was the stupidest play I’ve ever seen!” he sputtered. “You’ve got a kidney on the line, and you go for the one-in-a-million play?”
“One in twenty-five hundred,” Nate corrected absently. He seemed to be in about the same mental state as Joy.
Joy didn’t answer. She just stood up, staring at the chips. The seven thousand she’d won at Ray’s had been more money than she’d ever had at one time. Her half of this was more money than she’d ever had, period. It was more than she had ever dreamed of having. It was nearly a sixth of what she needed to pay this year’s debt, all in one night.
She didn’t even realize she was laughing until after it had started.
It came at first as a nervous giggle, barely audible above the uproar going on around her.
But then it all started to hit at once. The thrill of what she’d just done, the risk she’d just taken.
The laughter came long and strong. She tilted her head back, closed her eyes, and laughed at the ceiling like a megalomaniac watching the superspy he’d captured get lowered into his piranha tank.
She could feel the dismay and the anger coming off the emerald-eyed man, and then, from further away, something else. It was a sense of approval, from somebody Joy couldn’t place, and it washed through her like liquid sugar.
It was too much.
The laughter turned to tears. They weren’t sad ones. She was so happy that there was nowhere left to put it, and it came out of her the way it came out of people at weddings, only louder and messier. She was still laughing while she did it. Daniel had rarely cried, and never for something good. But then again, she’d never gone all out like this as Daniel, and had never achieved a victory worth crying about.
She turned away from the table with a hand over her eyes and ran right into a chest that smelled like cheap aftershave and solder fumes. She was beyond caring at this point, and sobbed tears of joy into Nate’s shirt.
Nate stood there stunned, not knowing what to do and looked to the side at Auntie Lau. She shot him a glare and sharp nod towards Joy. Nate frowned, then looked down at Joy and awkwardly placed an arm around her shoulders.
Mr. Lo counted it with one fingernail.
Joy had looked for the emerald-eyed man once she’d pulled herself together. His chair was empty. The black racks were gone, and so was Dana, and nobody at table nine seemed to have seen either of them leave.
It took him some time, and he did not hurry. When he had twenty thousand dollars in front of him he stopped, and slid the other twenty back across the table to her. Then he brought out the tea-colored paper from under his blanket and held it out, and Joy took it.
The man in green scrubs looked a little let down.
“Maybe next time!” Joy told him.
He gave her a friendly nod and went away with his cooler.
“You have played well, Miss Lockheed,” said Mr. Lo.
Joy gave a sniffle and smiled.
“Thanks! Gotta say, I really missed out not getting into mahjong sooner.”
“In all my years, perhaps a dozen people have sat down at my tables on the house’s credit and then walked back across that bridge to pay me. A dozen.” He set down his teacup. “I remember every one of them.”
He stood up.
It took him no time at all. The blanket slid to the floor, and he kept standing, up and up, until the wheelchair looked like a toy behind him and Joy and Nate were craning their necks to try to keep eye contact. There were robes now. There hadn’t been robes before. The light had come back behind his eyes and this time it stayed, and it was behind his teeth too. All over the room, the lanterns dimmed. The tiles stopped. Along the far wall, three men in very large hats took one step forward together and grounded their spears.
Back at table nine, Mrs. Cheung went on counting what was left of her paperback.
Nate had hold of Joy’s sleeve.
“MISS LOCKHEED,” said Mr. Lo, and his voice came from every corner of the room at once. “YOU HAVE COME INTO MY HOUSE. YOU HAVE WAGERED YOUR OWN FLESH AT MY TABLES, AND YOU HAVE WON.”
He raised one hand. The fingernails went on for a very long way.
“AND NOW I WILL SHOW YOU WHAT HAPPENS TO THOSE WHO THINK TO BEST ME.”
Joy and Nate both grimaced and braced themselves.
“Oh my god that duck was good,” Joy said as she and Nate walked to his car.
“I know!” Nate said.
“I’ve only ever had duck once before, and Dad didn’t get all the shotgun pellets out of it and I had to go to the dentist.”
“Yeah I’d say this was better then.”
It was ten to three in the morning, and the parking lot of the Eight Immortals Chinese Restaurant was exactly as dark and as empty as they’d left it. Joy had a white plastic bag in each hand, each one knotted at the top and heavy enough to swing. Nate was carrying a third. His was entirely chow fun. Mr. Lo had made it himself, at a wok the size of a satellite dish, and had then stood over Nate with his hands folded until Nate finished the first plate and accepted a second.
There had been eleven courses. Joy had lost count somewhere around the fish. Nate hadn’t.
She was glad she’d worn the oversized hoodie, since she was pretty sure her stomach had a distinct bulge in it. It wasn’t the only one. In the hoodie’s front pocket was twenty thousand dollars, neatly organized into two bank stacks of hundred-dollar bills. Nate had pointed out, somewhere around the soup, that that was exactly one kidney. This had made Joy laugh so hard she was afraid she was going to start crying again.
She still felt the thrill of the evening prickling in her fingertips like electricity. Even though it was closer to morning than evening, she knew she wasn’t sleeping tonight.
“I’m buying In-N-Out,” Joy announced.
“Nooooo…” Nate groaned.
“Not now. Sometime. I owe you a burger.”
“Please stop talking about food,” he begged.
Joy looked back at the dark windows, and the jolly man on the sign with his bowl of noodles, and the big silver fish hanging in its tank, watching them go.
“That place is amazing,” she said. “We should come back!”