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  I hadn’t been lying to her about peeking at the internal mechanisms. They were tricksy, cheating things. Unfortunately I couldn’t adjust the payout ratio, since no amount of finagling had let me expose the brains of it.

  It didn’t grab hard enough to pick up most of the objects when it should have. On the off chance that it did manage to hoist something high, the machinery within was so old that it practically shook itself to pieces on the ascent, unavoidably dropping the treasure back to the bottom of the platform.

  I’d seen her accomplish the miraculous feat of getting an object grabbed, hoisted, and maneuvered above the prize chute a grand total of three times since I’d known her. Every occasion had ended in failure as the object struck the plastic around the hole and bounced back into the prize pit.

  Illgott had once confided in me that he’d never seen anyone win. He was okay with that, since the prizes were original to the machine and his key didn’t unlock the big glass cube where they were stored.

  “Give it up, Patch,” I told her, trying to push a little gentleness into my voice. It sounded odd to me, but maybe that meant that I was doing it right. “I get that you’re full of optimism, but this is taking it a bit far. Save some of your coin.”

  “You’re just saying that because you want me to give you the copper I owe you.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  Her shoulders slumped as she turned around to face me. “But quitting means giving up.”

  “It’s not so bad, once you get some practice in.”

  She shook her head in defiance and the eye not covered by the patch shone fiercely in the light. “But I’m supposed to win! I dreamt it last night.”

  Not this again… “I know you think you did, but next time your making up dreams, pick one that isn’t a complete waste of time and money. You aren’t a Hero, and there can’t possibly be anything in there that’s worth the effort you’re putting into it.”

  “Says you.” She reached into her pocket and held up a single copper coin. “This is my last one anyway, and it’s yours. I’m sorry again that I ruined your game.”

  I sighed and surprised myself by extending an olive branch. “I’d rather you waste it on you than I waste it on me. Go on, Patch. One last try at the claw game and we’ll head off, okay?”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really. Do you want me to help you triangulate?”

  That earned me a gigawatt smile. “Yes please! Only if you want to, though…”

  I climbed off my stool and shoved it over against the side of the claw game. Once I’d clambered back up into position, I could survey the prizes and help her aim for the object of desire.

  The machine was crammed full of stuff. The best of the lot was a cute plush Fibble, a battered Kindle Paperwhite, a Swiss Army knife that might just hold held an enchantment, and a first-generation Oculus Rift. “What are you going for, anyway?”

  “See that golden capsule, near the bottom?” she asked, pointing at the most difficult place possible for the claw to get to.

  “Sort of.” I stood up on my tiptoes and stared down at it. The capsule was about as big around as an apple, although most of it was obscured by the tangle of items on top of it. “Are you sure that’s the one you want?”

  “Very.”

  There were a million reasons that this wasn’t going to happen. Patch would have to sell her soul to one of the denizens of the lower planes for the claw to even touch the capsule, let alone grab it. The stuff in the way needed to be won or shoved aside, but I didn’t bother to point that out.

  Logic didn’t going to matter to her once she set her heart on something. Besides, now that I’d given my blessing to a final attempt, even I wasn’t cruel enough to rain on her parade.

  Patch licked her lips and flipped her eyepatch up on to her forehead. I’d seen her do it before. Occasionally she even wore it over the other eye, presumably having forgotten which side she’d been covering previously. “RNGesus,” she whispered, “take the wheel.”

  I sighed. Was she was making this hard for me on purpose? “Ready?” I asked, surprised to discover that my heart was beating a little quicker.

  She put the final coin in and the machine hummed to life. “Yep. I’ll line it up from left to right and then you tell me how far back I need to go. We’ve got thirty seconds, by the way.”

  I nodded. “I know the deal, and your plan’s a good one.”

  She carefully guided the swinging claw along the X-axis, and once she was happy with the placement she looked at me. “Now tell me how deep to go.”

  The pure, unadulterated trust I saw in her gaze made me feel closer to her than ever. “That’s what she said.”

  “Raze!” Patch howled, laughing despite herself. “Be serious!”

  “Okay, okay. Come on back,” I said, dragging my attention to the prize pool and the clumsy claw creaking and groaning above it. Maybe a hundred years ago it would’ve been able to function smoothly, but not anymore. The entire game shimmied as the vibrating, wheezing, jerking internals fought to obey her commands.

  Even though I knew that this was going nowhere, my competitive streak wouldn’t let me give it anything less than my all. If anything, I felt my excitement picking up steam. “A little more,” I coached. “Still more. Wait!”

  “Yeah?”

  “Now toward you a bit. Stop!” I grabbed the side of the machine and looked at the claw’s placement from as many angles as I could.

  “Six seconds…”

  “Almost there, Patch. Come towards me again, but just a smidge.”

  She did her best, but the machine wasn’t helping. Her light touch turned into something far more heavy-handed, and before I could shout a correction she’d yanked the joystick toward her in an attempt to compensate and whacked her hand down on the drop button.

  I could hardly stand to watch as the claw plummeted in stops and starts, spinning on its monofilament wire and finally plunging down amongst the accumulated novelties. I couldn’t tell if she’d gotten anything or not, but judging by her sudden whoop of excitement and the fact that she was pumping her fists into the air so violently that she fell off her stool, I figured she’d lucked out.

  This is where the damn thing slips out of its grasp or gets halfway up and then drops back down. Don’t get your hopes up, whatever you do.

  Patch was desperately staring up at the claw, both eyes so bright and clear and shiny that I could see the golden capsule clearly reflected in them.

  I climbed down from my stool as carefully as I could and moved away from the machine, grabbing her and dragging her backwards too. The last thing her heart needed was for one of us to bump it and knock the prize loose just short of making it over the chute.

  I don’t know why I was being so cautious, since it was going to drop early anyway.

  It always did.

  And then it didn’t, falling straight and true with a satisfying kachunk. I turned to congratulate Patch and caught her clutching the d20 around her neck with both hands with what I could only call reverence.

  Fair enough. If there was ever a time to give the big imaginary guy upstairs a little bit of credit, this was certainly it. I threw my arms around her, happier than I could remember being. “You did it!”

  She was giggling in my ear. “We did it, you mean.”

  I was still stunned by her success, but that didn’t mean I wanted to steal her thunder. “No way. This was all you,” I breathed. “Now reach in there and get your prize before the machine blows up or gets swallowed up by the ground or something.”

  Patch crawled over on all fours and reached into the retrieval nook with a trembling hand. The flimsy plastic door that stopped prizes from bouncing out on to the floor had so seldom been pressed aside that she had to shove hard to get it to open. Once it did, I crossed my fingers and didn’t take another breath until she was holding the capsule to her ample chest.

  She was gazing down at it with admiration, but now that I saw it outside of the m
achine, the container looked cheap and gaudy. It wasn’t anywhere near as highly polished as it had appeared a second ago, showing the signs of countless years of shuffling and scraping amongst the other trinkets.

  Annnnnd, the old Raze is back. I didn’t recognize you there for a minute or two, buddy…

  “Are you going to open it up?” I asked, trying not to hear the glee in my own head as my cloak of cynicism descended over me once again. It had felt good when I’d had hope, but now that I’d given it up again at least I didn’t feel so off balance.

  The world didn’t hand you anything, and even the things you fought for were rarely worth the fight. To think otherwise was dangerous.

  “Maybe later.” She was still giddy, squeezing her eyes shut and listening to the jangle of whatever was inside the capsule. She shook it harder, a movement that gave mesmerizing motion to the flesh jammed into her crop top.

  “Really? After all that?”

  She shrugged, adding an enticing up and down to the jiggle of her boobs. “I sort of want to savor the moment for as long as I can, you know what I mean?”

  “Totally,” I said, though I didn’t care about the capsule anymore. It was bound to be a letdown, and right now I was entranced by something far more carnal.

  “You’re staring at my knockers again, aren’t you?” Her eyes were still closed, but sometimes girls know.

  “Absolutely.”

  Her gaze snapped open, though there wasn’t as much anger in it as I thought there’d be. “Go on, then. You earned it.”

  I did as I was told, leering with as much lechery as I could manage.

  “Finished?” she asked eventually.

  “For now.”

  “Good.” Patch slid the capsule into one of the pouches on her toolbelt. “You know what?”

  “What?”

  Her voice was soft, and I had to lean in to hear it. “You’re part of the best day of my life, Raze. Thanks to you, my dream came true!”

  “Don’t blame that crap on me,” I said, unable to stop myself from squashing the moment flat, “and you didn’t have a dream, since you’re not a Hero.”

  “You’ll see.”

  Patch liked to pretend that nothing bothered her when in fact, it went deeper than that. She liked to pretend that she wasn’t pretending that nothing bothered her, which was an even harder thing for me to comprehend.

  Of course, the alternative was completely unfathomable, since she couldn’t truly believe that things would work out for the Dreg shopkeeps and vendors and armorers and smelters and questgivers and all the rest, could she?

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “I…” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I don’t think you are. At least not yet.”

  I flinched. The comradery we’d shared was gone, smashed to bits by my attitude.

  She ignored me, pulling out the cheap golden capsule again and staring at it, which is when I decided to retreat to the bar. It wasn’t until I was sitting in front of Illgott that I realized that the ever-present Ogre would have seen and heard everything.

  He was still wiping down the woodwork, but his gaze pinned me to my seat. Illgott had a Knack for pitching his deep voice in such a way that only the intended recipient could hear it, and I practically leapt out of the green mottling of my skin when it rumbled up around me. “She found it, eh?”

  I reached into the bowl of beer nuts, but he’d already emptied them out. “Patch won that stupid thing fair and square, for all the good it’ll do her.”

  “That part remains to be seen.” His watery eyes were huge to begin with, and as pink as a pig’s ass. They got even wider when Patch came over with the capsule proudly thrust out ahead of her.

  “Look what I got out of the claw game, Illgott!”

  “Congratulations, little one.” He picked up the sound system’s remote and aimed it at the receiver. “I’ve been waiting for this day. Here’s a little something I’ve been planning,” he told her, trying to get the device to respond.

  “Cool!”

  The batteries were bad, and he often needed to stretch to find the sweet spot that’d make the music obey the remote. When he did, his massive height lifted him almost out of earshot. I took the opportunity to whisper to Patch, “He’s drunk. If we don’t go now, he’ll bend our ear for what’s left of the night.”

  “Not drunk,” he slurred.

  “See what I mean?”

  “Just one song, Raze,” Illgott said, laughing so hard at the dour expression on my face that his belly wobbled like a water balloon. “Stick around. You need to hear it more than she does.”

  It was Skynyrd. It was always Skynyrd. This time the opening chords of ‘Swamp Music’ spilled out of the speakers. Instead of bobbing his head along, Illgott started growling at the remote and frantically stabbing buttons. “This isn’t right. Hang on a second…”

  “I think we’re going to go, actually,” I told him. “I still have to finish the closing-up chores you forgot to do. After that I promised Patch I’d walk her home. I was supposed to do it last night, and it’s even later now than it was then…”

  “She’s waited for you this long, you idiot. She’ll wait another couple of minutes.”

  “If he’s lucky,” Patch said, and the way her voice was even higher pitched than usual made me look over at her. Was she blushing?

  Illgott snorted. “See?” he asked me. “That girl’s got it bad for you. You’d have to be blind not to see it.”

  “Maybe we should go,” she said, spinning on her heel and heading for the door as her braids flew out behind her. “Before this gets even more awkward…”

  That’s probably a good call… “Thanks for this little chat, Illgott. I’ll listen to more Skynyrd tomorrow, if you want. Not that I have a choice, of course..” I reached over and grabbed the remote from him and muted the flag bearers of southern rock. “I’m bone tired, and my shift starts here in less than four hours. I’d like a chance to regret the day’s events a bit before I have to relive them for real.”

  He looked crestfallen, his gaze swapping from me to the stereo and then back again. “But…”

  “Another time,” I told him. “Maybe tomorrow we can even drag the karaoke stuff out of the storeroom again, but I’m done for tonight. I’ll do the chores as fast as I can, and then that’s it.”

  “Okay,” he said, the wind clearly out of his sails. He only brightened when he glanced at the doorway, after which he reached over and spun me around on my stool. Patch was still there, waiting for me. “Off you go, then.”

  Patch looked at me with what I could only call bashfulness. “Still wanna walk back to ‘Neath with me?”

  “Yep. Just give me a couple of minutes to sweep up the blood-soaked sawdust and roll the dumpsters to the landfill pit, and we can be off.”

  “No, no, no,” Illgott said, coming out from around the bar and unlocking the front door. “I’ll do all that. Walk her home and keep her safe. The Vigilance Committee’s decided to get very serious about the curfew, and that started almost six hours ago.”

  I rolled my eyes at him. “If we get nabbed, I’ll just talk my way out of it. Same as always.”

  He shook his head. “If your mischief outweighs your usefulness to their questlines, the next time they haul you in there’ll be more at stake than the fine they charge me to free you. At the very least, you’ll buy your freedom back with the loss of a limb.”

  I shuddered. I needed all my arms and legs, and Illgott wasn’t one to spread idle gossip. If he was warning me to walk a straight line for a while, I’d probably do well to listen.

  Patch was over by the door, humming to herself. I didn’t want her out there on her own, particularly if the VC was flexing their muscle.

  When I headed in her direction she flashed me a smile and reached into her pocket, pulling out a squished cinnamon bun. “I forgot all about this. I thought you’d be hungry so I brought an extra one for you. It’s a bit squashed, now.”

  My m
outh was watering from the smell alone, and I barely managed to mumble a heartfelt thanks before devouring the whole thing in two messy bites. I wanted to enjoy it, but wants and needs are two different things.

  She frowned. “Wow. When was the last time you ate?”

  “Earlier.” I didn’t want her pity, so I kept it vague.

  “Unless you’ve got a time machine, no duh.”

  Patch turned around and reached for the door, but I grabbed her arm and stopped her. “Illgott says it’s dangerous. Let me go first.”

  Patch shook her head and winked at me, holding up the plastic capsule yet again. “Are you kidding? The claw game’s given us a sign that nothing bad’s going to happen to us. This is the start of a +1 day if ever there was one!”

  I chuckled and opened the door, checking the streets and then dragging her behind me. We hurried away, but as we sprinted down the block Illgott cranked up the sound system and blasted David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’.

  “I love this song,” Patch said, grooving along with the lyrics. “We can be heroes,” she sang, “forever and ever. What d’you say?”

  I was more worried about watching for patrols than singing a duet with Patch. “Honestly? I say that Illgott’s losing what remains of his marbles.”

  Chapter 4

  It should have been pitch black out here, but the Vigilance Committee had ruined that too.

  Up and down the street, ensorcelled light spilled from perfect rows of immaculately wrought lampposts. The VC had taxed the lifeblood out of the merchants in order to hire big hitter wage Mages, and once the coin changed hands the contracted magic users had sung songs sickly-sweet enough to coax the lights and their fancy stems up from the ground.

  The result was a city crowded by gracefully turned metal and silvered looping lines from which drooped dewdrops of light, and I hated every one of them with a passion. The old city had embraced us, which was one of the reasons the Heroes didn’t speak of it.