The House Meridian didn’t have windows, just moving pictures of windows. Screens set into the curved walls threw up a choreography of suns and nebulae, of luxury ships drifting past like slow fish. The glass had a way of reflecting winning faces and flattening losing ones. That was the trick, Darian Holt thought as he stepped off the shuttle walkway into the hum of the casino. Make the light do the lying so the staff didn’t have to. The gravity here was a half tick heavier than standard and a half tick kinder than truth. His shoes sank with each step, a quiet reminder that even the floor was purchased.
“Mr. Holt,” said the concierge, an immaculate man in a suit the color of oil slicks. “On behalf of House Meridian, welcome. Your suite is prepared, but Director Keld requested that you stop by the floor first. ‘Stretch your legs,’ he said.”
Keld never said anything without a reason. Darian smiled as if he didn’t notice the message was meant to be overheard. “Stretch my legs,” he said. “Of course.”
He let the concierge lead him through the valley of tables. Meridian wasn’t as gaudy as some Outer Rim halls. Its owners knew their clientele. Core-world executives, Mid-Rim functionaries, and the occasional frontier governor who needed to be seen where the drinks were clean. The décor was subtler than the profits. A soft, amber-glow ceiling, lacquered wood inlaid with meteorite fragments, a soundscape tuned to hide the fall of chips but amplify laughter from the right corners.
A holograph at the center pit streamed the newsfeed on a ten-second delay, looping highlights of the debates. The Stability Act crawled along the bottom ticker with the inevitability of a tide. Darian avoided looking at it. He was here for one thing and one thing only, ensure the vote swung the way it was supposed to. After that, he could sleep for a week or a year.
He passed a clutch of Stellarion Transport executives smoking thin, tasteless cigars and pretending they hadn’t bought half the ships in orbit. Farther on, two men with the muscle-and-scar posture of private security joked in low tones about a contract from Voidstar Heavy. The House Meridian, rumor said, held a Stellarion license for docking and “hospitality.” It was a good rumor to have in a place like this. Better to whisper “Stellarion” than to say what everyone knew. Meridian existed because the United Terran Republic rewarded institutions that could keep powerful men entertained and taxable.
Darian peeled away from the concierge at a blackjack table near the floor’s edge. The dealer’s sign read MIN 10 CREDS, MAX 10K. He preferred small rooms where the odds were honest about their dishonesty.
The dealer looked up as he approached. “Evening,” she said. “Seat?”
She was somewhere in her thirties, with the profile of someone who had spent a long time in places where she didn’t want to be seen. Dark hair clipped to regulation ear length, hands neat, eyes direct. Dealer’s eyes, the kind that counted everything and took only what they needed. Her name tag read Sera Kade in tidy, stubborn letters that had been reprinted recently enough to still be sharp.
Darian sat. The chair sighed. A soft, unconditional sigh. He put a stack of chips on the felt and felt it take.
“House Meridian thanks you for your play,” Sera said, not unkindly. “Standard rules. Dealer hits soft seventeen, surrender allowed after the peek. You counting, sir?”
“Only my sins,” Darian said.
“Then you’ll have a lot of numbers,” she said, and dealt.
They played in comfortably impersonal silence at first, the way you play with someone you might have to kill later. Darian liked her shuffle, unshowy, exact, a dancer’s muscle memory without the music. He won two small hands, lost one, surrendered another. The shoe tasted fair.
“You from the Core?” Sera asked, casual as a cloud. Dealers were allowed to talk for two reasons. To loosen the player, and loosen the player’s story.
“Work takes me there.”
“Work takes everyone somewhere,” she said, smiling. “Some places don’t let you come back.”
He watched her flip a queen. “You ever try to go back?”
“Once.” Sera tucked the queen under a five like a magician hiding a bird. “The price had gone up.”
He smiled. The price always went up.
He didn’t look at the newsfeed, but he listened. The Stability Act had taken three names since morning. The Security Arbitration Provision, the Autonomous Jurisdiction Adjustment, and, memorably, “the leash.” His party, the Federal Unity types, called it a necessary consolidation. The Progressive Alliance called it a mistake measured in lives. The Frontier Coalition didn’t call it anything out loud, but their governors had been making quiet calls to rooms like this all week. Votes were a marketplace, and Darian was a buyer with a mandate.
Sera dealt him a ten. “You’re breathing like a man with a meeting,” she said.
“I find oxygen helps.”
“Hit, stand, or hope?”
“Hit.” He watched the eight slide over. “Stand now.”
The table was half-full. A married pair from Port Halcyon celebrating something with silent resentment, a silent man with the hands of a miner and the ring of a prisoner, a woman in a Zephyrite holo-jacket with the brightness of someone who had never been told no. The pit boss paused behind Sera, nodded to Darian, and moved on. Every few minutes, another staffer drifted near like a small moon, not noticing him, but noticing him.
“So,” Sera said in a tone that meant the opposite, “what brings you to the Meridian?”
“Work.”
“Dangerous.”
“Everything is.”
“Not everything is,” she said, thoughtful. “Some things are only expensive.”
He smiled. “Maybe I like expensive.”
She dealt herself a six, hit to a sixteen, then broke on a queen. “Everyone likes expensive,” she said. “But some men like paying.”
The miner edged a little closer to the felt, as if the cards were radiating heat. He had the tired aggression of someone who had saved up to lose. Darian’s eyes flicked to his sleeve. A faded patch with a pickaxe constellation, the Lazrin Dynamics logo of an older era. It had been illegal to wear that patch for five years unless you had a labor exemption. It was hard to keep laws straight when the corporations wrote them with erasable ink.
“You work for Lazrin?” Darian asked the miner.
The man’s eyes flinched, then steadied. “Worked,” he said. “Worked until they shut down Sigma Field. Said the grav veins were dry. Funny how the veins ran dry the same week the union vote hit.”
“What was the official line they used?” Darian asked, his voice low. “Let me guess. ‘Asset reallocation for operational efficiency’?”
The miner stared at him, a flicker of surprised recognition in his eyes. “Something like that. ‘A recalibration of risk modeling.’ Sounds prettier.”
Sera slid him a card without looking at Darian, but her knuckles were a shade whiter on the deck. “Hit?” “Hit.”
The miner took it. A ten. He exhaled. “You here to win, friend?” he asked Darian.
“I never travel for winning.”
“Good,” the miner said. “The House doesn’t like that.”
Sera’s hands paused over the shoe for a fraction too long, then resumed. Darian let his smile sharpen by a degree. The House was a word with two meanings here. The casino and the republic. You could tell a lot about a man by which he meant when he said it.
“Where’s Sigma Field?” Sera asked.
“Mid-Rim edge,” the miner said. “Lazrin pulled the Ironbound in to ‘secure the decommissioning.’” He looked at the table as if it were safer than anyone’s gaze. “They secured it right down to the bone.”
“Bets,” Sera said, gently. The miner pushed forward a small, angry tower. Darian mirrored it with grace.
They played two more shoes. Darian won more than he lost, but he kept his winnings where they couldn’t be counted by anyone but him. Sera’s rhythm adjusted to the drift of the table. A softer shuffle when the married pair’s hands trembled, a cheerfully neutral cadence for the Zephyrite girl when she laughed too loudly.
“You don’t talk like a Core boy,” Sera said to Darian, eyes on the felt.
“That’s because I’m not,” he said. “I worked my way in through a side door and tried not to get shot.”
“Hm,” she said, and the sound carried the weight of a precise opinion. “So you can read a door.”
“If it pays.”
She slid him a five. “Does it?”
“Sometimes.”
“And tonight?”
“We’ll see.”
The concierge came back as if to stretch his legs nearby. Darian didn’t look, and the concierge didn’t speak, which was the language of their kind. He kept playing until he felt the fourth drink settle into the place where the first one had taken cover. He had a meeting soon. Director Keld would be waiting, and Keld didn’t like scenes.
“Hold my seat,” Darian said.
“Standing room only for sin,” Sera said with a ghost-smile. “But I’ll keep the table warm.”
He tipped her by not saying anything sentimental, then bore right, away from the pit and into the velvet arteries that led to the private rooms. The air had the polite coolness of a refrigerator for flowers. Doors opened at his approach and closed behind him with a hush like breath held in polite company.
Director Keld stood with his back to a wall-sized screen displaying a planetary arc lit up like a jewelry display. He was wearing the same suit he’d been wearing for ten years in a hundred colors, expensive fabric cut to disguise power like a joke disguises pain. The man beside him was softer in the shoulders but harder in the eyes, the kind of governor the Frontier produced when it needed polite enemies.
“Darian,” Keld said with unadoptable warmth. “Governor Ulan and I were just discussing the language of the Stability Act. Rough edges.”
“Nothing language can’t smooth,” Darian said. He shook Ulan’s hand and felt the man’s grip measure his character like a scale.
Ulan didn’t sit. “Are you here to threaten me, Mr. Holt?”
“No,” Darian said. “I’m here to explain you to yourself.”
He laid out the frame with the part of himself that still took pride in frames. The Act was a consolidation. The border worlds would lose their right to self-levy and to contract infrastructure without central approval. In exchange, they’d get stabilized supply lines, protected trade lanes, defense guarantees. Ulan’s constituents would grumble but eat. Ulan could keep his chair if he learned how to sing the new song in the old key.
“And your sponsors get their billing paid on time,” Ulan said, flat.
“Everyone gets something,” Darian said. “That’s how we know it’s politics and not religion.”
Ulan’s mouth made a shape that might have been a smile if you squinted through a storm. “You grew up where?”
“Dock ten of a Stellarion station,” Darian said, which was near enough to a truth to handle. “My father maintained the air circulators nobody ever noticed until they failed. The night they failed, everyone noticed him. He never liked attention.”
“Mine died in an Aurora Nexus collapse,” Ulan said, as if they were trading cards neither wanted. “They called it energy instability. We called it a tremor caused by a missing inspection. The inspector was on a yacht two sectors away.”
“Make the vote, Governor,” Keld said, soft. “We can sell you as a pragmatist. It sells better than martyr.”
“You think I can be bought,” Ulan said.
“I think everyone can be shown the shelf where their price sits,” Keld said. “I think you did your shopping already.”
They moved numbers around like slow stones. Darian watched Ulan’s eyes, not his mouth. Keld dangled the usual packages. Campaign “infrastructure,” favorable export ratings, a whisper or two placed on the Zephyrite feeds. When Ulan finally nodded, it was less a surrender than an acknowledgement that he had just lost something he couldn’t afford to keep.
“You’ll be called a traitor by breakfast,” Keld said, not unkindly. “By supper, you’ll be called a leader.”
“The names matter less than the stones,” Ulan said. “I’ll pay yours. You’ll pay mine.”
They signed the necessary lies. Darian left before the congratulations could curdle. In the corridor, he paused long enough to breathe the refrigerated air and imagine he owned it. He didn’t. He owned nothing even when he held it.
On the way back to the floor, he made the mistake of checking the silent scroll of his wrist comp. The newsfeeds were already thick with pre-celebration. The Federal Unity Party’s whip had declared the Act “inevitable, overdue, and deeply responsible.” The Progressive floor gnashed its teeth intellectually. The Frontier Coalition’s delegates turned their cameras off and pretended the signal had failed. He tucked the comp away and walked into the casino’s hum. Sera wasn’t at the table.
A different dealer had taken her place, a man whose smile looked like a knife surrendering without faith. The pit boss who had nodded earlier avoided Darian’s eyes the way a guilty dog avoids an unkind hand.
“Evening,” the new dealer said brightly. “Back to make the House happy?”
“The House is a large category,” Darian said. “Where’s Sera?”
“Break.”
“She didn’t seem tired.”
“She didn’t seem a lot of things,” the dealer said, and cut the cards.
Darian sat out the shoe and let the room settle around him like a story he didn’t want to hear. The miner was gone. The married pair had moved to an argument in a corner. The Zephyrite girl was flirting with a camera. He played three hands and lost them without caring. The dealer performed a textbook shuffle and dealt again. Darian let him. It took a full minute for the two men in security black to appear at his elbows. They were polite enough to seem local.
“Mr. Holt,” the first one said, “could we have a moment? It’s nothing serious.”
Darian smiled at the table. “When men like you say that, they usually mean it’s expensive.”
“Only if you value your time,” the second one said. They escorted him to a small room that smelled faintly of antiseptic and lemon, the way you clean a place where you hope nothing happens.
A third man waited there, the pit’s assistant manager. He held a clipboard like a shield. “We’ve detected irregular play patterns,” he said, eyes bright with secondhand courage. “Possible collusion with a dealer.”
Darian didn’t sigh. “You’re accusing me of cheating at minimum bet blackjack,” he said. “You must be desperate for scandal.”
“Policy,” the manager said.
“Policy is a word people say when they want someone else to take the blame later,” Darian said. “Whose policy?”
“House Meridian’s,” he said, which meant Stellarion’s, which meant if you stretched the string far enough the Republic’s. Darian put his hands flat on the table where they could be seen. The men watched them as if he might turn them into birds.
“We’ll be retaining your chips pending review,” the manager said, and slid Darian’s small stack into the drawer like a secret. “We appreciate your cooperation.”
“I didn’t cooperate,” Darian said. “I just didn’t fight.”
“Wise,” the first guard said.
Darian stood. “Is the dealer under review?”
The manager’s confidence lost a little air. “We don’t discuss staff matters.”
“You just accused me of colluding with one,” Darian said mildly. “Seems like you brought the subject up yourself.”
The second guard shifted his weight. “She’ll be fine.”
“People like me are fine when other people aren’t,” Darian said. “That’s how we keep the ratio.”
Back on the floor, he let the bar seat take him like a confession. He ordered something expensive and drinkable and forgot its name as soon as he tasted it. Above the shelves of liquor, a Zephyrite entertainment channel looped a clip of a pop idol volunteering at a Core-world clinic. Her smile had the professional gravity of a collapsing star.
He thought of Sera’s hands, careful, counted, exact. He thought of the miner’s patch and Ulan’s not-smile and Keld’s immaculate suit. He thought of his father with his head inside a broken circulator, sweat blooming in the shape of a halo on his shirt, and the way he’d never take a tip unless it could be described as a favor. The drink became a friend he could afford.
The bartender slid a folded chip across the marble. Darian looked down. One of House Meridian’s chips, common as a lie. Someone had written on it in the thin, neat letters of someone who had been trained to write small: EVEN WHEN YOU WIN, YOU LOSE. The letters were familiar. He had been reading those letters for an hour and had decided not to decide what they meant.
“Who left this?” he asked.
The bartender wiped a ring off the counter as if removing an accusation. “A friend,” he said, with the tender ambiguity of someone who had learned how to survive by never knowing anything formally. “You’ll want to see the feeds.”
“I never want to see the feeds,” Darian said. But he looked.
The Stability Act vote was running at the bottom of the ticker now in a stuttering, celebratory font. The “ayes” had a mountain behind them. The “nays” had a hill with no flag. A commentator with hair that had cost a mortgage made a joke about adult governance and a childhood bedtime. Darian watched names scroll past, senators and delegates, party whips and committee chairs. He watched Ulan’s name make the turn from undecided to yea.
People clapped in parts of the room where other people could see. Stocks ticked and smiled. The Zephyrite girl’s jacket pulsed brighter. The married pair held hands in a way that made them look like hostages. Darian finished his drink and set the glass down with the ceremony of a man folding a flag.
The feed cut to a Security Bulletin with the gray-blue branding that said “official” in a voice colder than law. The announcer’s tone shifted from celebration to duty with the agility of someone trained to do it without hating themselves for the skill.
“In related news,” the voice said, “Union Security conducted a targeted detainment operation aboard the Meridian Station this evening. One individual, Sera Kade, age twenty-seven, is being held on charges including sedition, facilitation of unlawful communications, and interference with licensed gaming operations. Meridian management emphasizes its cooperation with the UTR in maintaining a safe, lawful environment for citizens.”
The image they used was not her best. It was not any human being’s best. It was the kind of picture that takes a face and teaches strangers how to despise it.
The bartender reached for the remote as if he could turn off the truth by lowering the volume. “You know her?” he asked.
“I know a lot of people for an hour at a time,” Darian said. The words felt like they were made out of someone else’s teeth.
He left before he could decide whether to order another drink or a better conscience. The floor felt heavier. The gravity was the same. The chips had not changed color. What had shifted, he realized, was the weight of the ratio, people like him being fine while other people weren’t.
Director Keld intercepted him near the elevators with the smile of a man who could lock his jaw around the world. “We did well,” he said. “Fast work with Ulan. The feeds are already calling it inevitable. The only thing better than power is inevitability.”
“I’m happy for inevitability,” Darian said. “It saves time.”
Keld glanced down at the chip in Darian’s hand. “What’s that?”
“A souvenir.”
“I thought we had more sophisticated tastes.”
“Sometimes I collect the cheap things,” Darian said. “They’re easier to lose on purpose.”
Keld’s face arranged itself into concern without conceit. “You’re not having second thoughts.”
“I don’t have first thoughts anymore,” Darian said. “I have schedules.”
They rode the elevator up in the silence of higher men. The suite was restrained and tasteful, the way expensive rooms often are when they anticipate the arrival of someone with a temper. The screen on the far wall offered him six curated views, a Core-world skyline, a famous Mid-Rim waterfall that had dried a decade ago, a slow nebula. He turned them all off. The room felt truer in the dark.
He washed his hands three times like a man coming back from a hospital, then sat on the edge of the bed and pressed the chip into his palm hard enough to make a print. Even when you win, you lose. He tried to be offended by the simplistic miserablism of it. He had built a profession on complex reasons for necessary evils. He had a whole vocabulary for it. He had never needed slogans.
He slept badly and woke early. The morning feeds were a wedding. The Act had passed. The Republic was stable again. The anchors’ smiles had the confidence of people who had never not known what would happen. Zephyrite commentary segments cut to corporate statements about “future-forward partnerships,” Aurora Nexus announcing infrastructure expansions for the stabilized border worlds, Novatek making noise about security packages (“optional but recommended”), Stellarion offering discounted logistics for compliant systems. No one said the word purchase, but the registry had been updated.
He dressed in the neutral elegance of someone who plans to be accused of something and intends to look blameless while doing it. Downstairs, the casino floor was a fresh layer of paint. The damage done by the night had been smoothed over. The tables gleamed with forgiveness. The miner was back, or a man like him. Darian thought of going over to say something that would make them both feel honorable. He didn’t. He took the long walk around the pit. The dealer at Sera’s table shuffled thin air in the moments when there were no players, a hand practicing hope. He found the pit boss.
“Sera Kade,” Darian said, like a password.
“Staff matters are private,” the pit boss said, meeting his eyes. He was good at his job and smart enough to be nervous about it.
“The feeds made them public.”
“Then you know the answer,” the boss said.
“Charges can be encouraged,” Darian said. “Charges can be dropped.”
The boss’s smile showed its gums. “Charges can be increased, too.”
Darian nodded once. It was important to respect skill when you recognized it in your enemies. He walked to the bar, took a glass of water he didn’t want, and stood looking at his reflection until it blinked like a man.
His wrist comp buzzed, Keld, scheduling breakfast with a senator whose money had the texture of Novatek plastic. Darian typed later and then deleted it, then typed on my way and sent it. He put the chip in his pocket and let the weight of it remind him he hadn’t thrown it away.
On the way to the lifts, he nearly tripped over a maintenance cart. The woman pushing it wore Aurora Nexus gray and the expression of someone whose job was to be an apology with hands. She looked at him without looking, then looked at him directly.
“You’re the man who won the game last night,” she said quietly.
“I lose better in daylight,” he said.
“She said you’d care,” the woman said.
He waited. The woman took a folded napkin from her sleeve with the ceremony of a prayer, then opened it to reveal half a playing card. He recognized it immediately, one of House Meridian’s queens. Its corner was scribbled with a coordinate and a time.
“She’s not on-station anymore,” the woman said, voice thin, eyes careful. “But there are people who would trade a queen for a king if you know which table to sit at.”
“Why tell me?” Darian asked.
“She said you don’t talk like a Core boy,” the woman said, and pushed the cart away before he could be the kind of man who turned a favor into a crime.
He stared at the queen until the face blurred. He turned it over and imagined the other half somewhere he couldn’t reach. The coordinate was within the Meridian’s service sector, docks not open to the public. The time was now, which was either arrogance or confidence or both. He went because he had to prove to himself that he still could.
The service corridors were colder and more honest than the casino floor. Here, cables ran in open channels, and the walls carried the scuffs of men who sweated for a living. He felt better here, which was either self-hatred or nostalgia. A door at the coordinate was painted in the same gray as regret. He pressed the panel. It didn’t open. He pressed again harder, as if doors could be bullied. It opened. Two figures waited inside. One was the maintenance woman. The other was not Sera Kade. The second figure wore a dockhand’s coat with shoulders too square to be accidental. He had the comfortable menace of a man who understood the difference between violence and action.
“You’re late,” he said.
“I’m not,” Darian said. “You are early.”
“Both can be true,” the man said. “We don’t have her.”
“I didn’t expect you to,” Darian said, which was also somehow true
“But we have this,” the man said, and placed a small, sleek data capsule on the crate between them. “Insurance. Leverage. Call it what you like.”
“What is it?”
“Proof,” the man said. His voice was flat, like packed earth. “It’s a record of how the House really plays. Maintenance logs, inspection waivers, falsified safety reports. All the little murders they paid to bury so they could call them accidents.”
Darian felt a cold knot tighten in his gut. “How specific?”
“Specific enough,” the man said, his eyes boring into Darian’s. “It has the unsigned inspection order for the Aurora Nexus collapse on Ulan’s world. And the real maintenance schedules for the air circulators on Stellarion Dock Ten. It has names. It has prices.”
“Why give it to me?”
“Because you’re the kind of man who has a shelf full of prices,” the man said. “We want to see if there’s anything on it besides money.”
Darian looked at the capsule. In the right hands, it could make someone a career. In the wrong hands, it could disappear into a filing cabinet labeled Necessities. In his hands, he could imagine either.
“I’m not a rebel,” he said.
The man’s mouth twitched. “No. You’re a bureaucrat with an ulcer. But ulcers eat their way out.”
“What do you want me to do with it?”
“Make it cost the House,” the man said. “Any House. Now or later. We’re patient.”
“And Sera?”
“She knew what she was risking,” the man said, which was the kind of truth that breaks teeth. “She asked us to make sure you had a choice.”
Darian took the capsule. It was heavier than it looked, like a small planet. “What are you going to do with her?”
“They are going to do something with her,” the man said. “We are going to make them pay for it, whether by coin or blood or the small, sharp currency of reputation.”
Darian nodded. He slipped the capsule into his pocket next to the queen and the chip. His suit dragged a fraction lower on that side, like a scale registering something it couldn’t name.
Back on the casino floor, the newsfeed looped a highlight reel of handshakes. President Thalor’s statement scrolled in gold, Stability is freedom’s backbone. A senator from the Progressive Alliance stood under too-white lights and said the word concern so often it lost its edges. Somewhere in the crawl, the Frontier Coalition’s press office reiterated that autonomy could only be protected by cooperation. Somewhere else, a commentator from the Sovereignty Bloc made the usual noises about tradition and purity and locking doors tighter until everyone suffocated. Darian barely heard it. He had a new noise in his ear, the hush of a door closing in a service corridor and the memory of a woman saying she said you’d care.
He left without cashing out anything, which was a sin here. The concierge tried to intercept him with a smile so wide it was almost anatomy. Darian brushed past and gave him the kind of nod that could be interpreted as tip or warning or nothing. On the shuttle back to the orbital spine, he sat among men whose teeth were too white and women whose laughs were trained to end on a note that let men think they were winning. He watched the Meridian recede through the faux window as the shuttle separated. From this angle, the casino looked like a jeweled clasp holding a very expensive cloak to a very tired shoulder. The stars did their indifferent work.
He took the queen out of his pocket and put it on his palm next to the chip and the capsule. Together, they looked like a trick. He closed his fingers and closed his eyes and, for a moment, allowed himself the idiotic superstition that if he arranged the objects differently, the past would rewrite itself into a fairer deck. When the shuttle docked, he stood and tucked the three items into three different compartments. He walked down a corridor that smelled like what it was and ignored the screens that said what they had to say. Director Keld would be waiting with a new schedule and a better tie. There would be a breakfast where food would be served like apologies. There would be laughter that sounded like chairs scraping.
Darian would decide not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon whether the capsule belonged on someone else’s desk or someone else’s grave. He would decide whether to be good in a system that made goodness an expense, or to be merely efficient. He would decide, which was the only power a man like him ever had. He suspected that either way he would pay. At the turn toward the diplomatic level, he stopped for a moment under the quiet hum of a ventilator like the ones his father had tended. He reached up and touched the grille, just once, like a blessing or a theft.
“The House always wins,” he said to nobody, to the ship, to the screen, to the memory of a dealer he had known for an hour. “But it still pays for its lights.” He walked on.