The Debt

Junie Salt had been clean for three years, and her brother undid all three of them in the time it took to drink a cup of coffee. She knew it was bad the second he walked into the diner, because Theo had a face that couldn't keep a secret to save its life — that had always been Theo's problem, the whole of it really, a face like a window — and the face that came through the door at half past nine on a Tuesday was the face of a man who had done something and needed his big sister to make it not have happened. "Don't," Junie said, before he'd even sat down. "Don't what." "Don't do the thing where you order food first so I can't shout at you." She pushed the menu across the table out of his reach. "Sit. Tell me. Fast, like ripping a plaster, before I've finished this coffee, because once the coffee's gone so's my patience." So he told her. And it was, in fact, exactly as bad as the window of his face had advertised, and the badness had a name, and the name was Castor Vane. Junie set her cup down very carefully. She had spent eleven years in and around the card rooms of this city before she got out, and in eleven years you learn the geography of who you can owe and who you cannot, and Castor Vane was the bottom of that map. Vane ran games. Not the legal kind with cameras and a licence on the wall — the other kind, the kind that moved between a different back room every week, where the buy-in was high and the house always, somehow, in the long run, won. People who couldn't pay Vane did not get a stern letter. People who couldn't pay Vane got rearranged. "How much," she said. Theo told her how much, and Junie closed her eyes, because the number was not a number a person like Theo could ever assemble, not in a year, not in five, not by being careful and good and selling everything he owned. "I know," Theo said miserably, into her closed eyes. "I know, Junie. I know." "How did you even —" She stopped. It didn't matter how. It never mattered how; the how was always the same sad story with the nouns swapped out. What mattered was that her little brother, who had a window for a face and had never once in his life been good at anything dishonest, owed the worst man in the city a sum that ended with the word rearranged. And here was the part Junie hated, the part that had been waiting for her since the second he walked in, because she had seen this coming the way you see weather coming, from a long way off, with plenty of time to feel sick about it. She could pay it. Not with money. She didn't have the money and never would. But Junie Salt had a different kind of currency, and she had spent three years pretending she'd thrown it away. Junie was a mechanic. Not the engine kind. The card kind. She could deal you a hand off the bottom of a deck while you watched her hands and swore she hadn't, she could read a riffle and remember it, she could make fifty-two pieces of card do quietly whatever she needed them to do, and she had been, before she got out, one of the very best in a city that did not lack for talent. Getting out had not been about losing the skill. You didn't lose the skill; the skill lived in the hands and the hands didn't forget. Getting out had been about deciding never to use it again. "There's a game," Theo said, very quietly, watching her face now the way she usually watched his. "Vane said — he said there's a game. He said if you sat at it. He said he'd clear the whole debt if you sat down at one particular game and —" "Stop." Junie's voice came out flat and cold and three years older than it had been a minute ago. "Stop, Theo. I know what game. I knew what game before you came in here. Vane didn't lend my idiot brother that kind of money by accident. He lent it to you because of me. The debt was always bait. I'm the thing he's fishing for." Theo's window of a face crumpled, because he hadn't understood that, and now he did, and understanding it was worse. Junie picked up her coffee, found it had gone cold, drank it anyway. Eleven years of card rooms had taught her one true thing above all the others, and the true thing was this: there is no such thing as one last game. The phrase was a lie people told themselves on the way back in. She knew that. She knew it completely. And she was going to sit down at the table anyway, because the alternative was a brother who got rearranged, and some debts you can only pay with the exact thing you swore you'd never touch again. "Tell Vane yes," she said. "And then tell me everything you know about the table — because if I'm cheating my way out of this, Theo, I need to know I'm not the only one at it who came to cheat."