Frozen: Heart of Dread, Book One (3 page)

T
HE CASINO WAS BUZZING AS USUAL WHEN
Nat arrived for work that evening. It had never even closed, not for a day, not for an hour; management didn’t care that there was a hole in the roof as long as the slot machines kept ringing. She nodded to Old Joe as she walked in and the wizened card shark smiled in greeting, his eyes disappearing into his cheeks. Joe was an anomaly, a rare bird, a man who had lived past his fiftieth birthday. He was also a legend at the casinos. Supposedly he’d been one of the smartest and most successful card sharks, and one of the most elusive—he’d brought down many a gambling hall, decimating coffers, staying just one step ahead of security. When he made his way to the Strip, the Loss offered him a job on the inside, rather than watch him walk away with their profits.

“You remind me of my niece who died in ’Tonio,” Joe had said when he’d hired her right off the felt, a skinny, starving thing who was on a winning streak at the poker tables. “She was like you—too smart for her own good.” Joe made her the same deal he gave all his fellow card counters. Work for me, help us turn in the other pros, I’ll give you a decent salary and keep you from getting beat up by the casino goons. He didn’t ask any questions about how she came to Vegas or what she was doing before, but he’d made good on his word, and got her set up.

Ask him,
the voice ordered.
Ask him about the stone. Do what we came here for. You have delayed long enough. The Map has been found,
the voice kept telling her.
Hurry, it is time.

What map?
she had asked, even if she had a feeling she already knew the answer. The pilgrims called it Anaximander’s Map; it was said to provide safe passage through the rocky, perilous waters of Hell Strait to the island doorway that led to the Blue.

“Joe?” she asked. “You got a sec?”

“What’s up?”

“Can we talk privately?”

“Sure,” he said, motioning that she should follow him to a quiet corner, where a group of tourists were robotically feeding credits into the video poker stations. The smell of smoke was overpowering, and it reminded her of her dreams.

Joe crossed his meaty arms. “What’s on your mind?”

“What is that?” she asked, pointing to the stone he wore around his wrinkled neck. The one she had noticed the first time they had met, the one that the voice in her head demanded she ask him about the moment she had set foot in the city, and in this casino. She had put off the voice for as long as she could, fearing what would happen if she did as she was told.

“This?” the old man asked, lifting the stone to the light, where it shone brightly against the dim cocoon of the gambling hall.

That is the one! Take it! Take the stone. Kill him if you must. It is ours!
The voice was frenetic, excited, she could feel the monster’s need thrumming in her veins.

“No!” she said aloud, shocking herself and startling a nearby gambler who dropped her token.

“What?” Joe asked, still admiring the shining stone.

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s pretty.”

“I won it at a card game a while back,” he said with a dismissive wave. “It’s supposed to be some kind of map, but it’s nothing.”

Take it! Take it! Take it from him!

“Can I hold it?” she asked, her voice quavering.

“Sure,” Joe said, slowly removing it from his neck. He hesitated for a moment before handing it to her. It was warm in her palm.

She studied the small blue stone in her hand. It was the weight and color of a sapphire, a round stone with a circle in the middle of it. She put it up to her eye and jumped back, startled.

“What happened? You see something?” Joe asked excitedly.

“No—no . . . nothing,” Nat lied. For a moment, the casino had disappeared and through the hole in the stone, all she could see was blue water, shimmering and clean. She peered into it again. There it was. Blue water.

That wasn’t all. Upon closer inspection she saw there was more, an image of a charted course, a jagged line between obstacles, a way forward, through the rocky and whirlpool waters of the Hellespont Strait.

The stone contains the map to Arem, the doorway to Vallonis,
the voice murmured reverently.

This was why the voice had led her to New Vegas, to the Loss, and to Joe. It had facilitated her escape, it had brought her freedom, and it was relentlessly pushing her forward.

Come to me.

You are mine.

It is time we are one.

“There’s nothing,” she told Joe.

His shoulders slumped. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. It’s just a fake.”

She closed her fist around it, unsure of what would happen next, afraid of what she’d do if Joe asked for it back and hoping that he wouldn’t.

She stared down the casino boss. The monster in her head was seething.
What are you waiting for! Take it and run! Kill him if he stops you!

“Give it to me,” she whispered, and somehow she knew he would do as told.

Joe flinched as if she’d hurt him. “Keep it,” he said finally, and walked away from her quickly.

Nat leaned against the wall in relief, glad for Joe’s sake that he had given it freely.

Later that evening she was awoken by the sound of a scuffle. Joe lived two rooms down from her, and she heard them—military police? Casino security? Bounty hunters? Whoever had come had kicked open his door and was taking him from his bed. She heard the old man begging, screaming and crying, but no one came to his aid. No neighbors dared to peer down the hallway, no one even asked what the matter was. Tomorrow no one would talk about what happened either, or what they had heard. Joe would simply be gone, and nothing more would be said. She huddled in her thick blankets as she heard them tearing his room apart, throwing open closet doors, upending tables, looking . . . looking . . . for something . . . for the cold blue stone that she now held in her hand?

If they had found Joe, it wouldn’t be long before they found her as well.

Then what? She could not look back, she had nothing to go back to, but if she kept moving forward . . . She shuddered, and her mouth tasted of ashes and cinder.

She held the stone in her hand. The map to Arem, doorway to Vallonis.

From the window, she saw them take Joe away in a straitjacket, and she knew what awaited her if she stayed. They would send her back to where she came from, back to those solitary rooms, back to those dark assignments.

No. She could not stay. She had to leave New Vegas, and soon.

What are you waiting for?

H
IS MOTHER HAD BEEN A SHOWGIRL. One
of the prettiest in the business, his dad had liked to say, and Wes was sure he was right. Dad had been a cop. They were good people, fine citizens of New Vegas. Neither of them was still alive, each succumbing to the big C years ago. Cancer was a disease that was a matter of when, not why, and his parents had been no exception. But Wes knew they had died long before; they were empty shells after what happened to Eliza. His little sister whom no one could save.

He had his parents to thank for his good looks and his sharp wits, but not much else. As Wes walked away from the four-star meal, he was angry with himself for turning down Bradley’s offer, but angrier that it was the only avenue open to the likes of him. He could starve, he had starved before, but he hated the boys going hungry. They were the only family he had left.

When he was little, his mother would make him tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. It didn’t happen often—she worked late nights and wasn’t usually awake when he was home from school. But once in a while, she would appear, last night’s makeup faint on her cheeks, smelling of perfume and sweat, and she would turn on the stove and the smell of butter—real butter, she always insisted they save up for it—would fill their small house.

The sandwich would be gooey on the inside and crisp on the outside and the soup—thin and red—was tart and flavorful, even if it was from a can. Wes wondered if he missed his mother or those sandwiches more. She had hid her disease from them, beneath the makeup. She had worked until the end, and one day, had doubled over, vomiting blood backstage. Dead in a matter of days.

Dad had tried to keep it together for a while, and his girlfriends—cocktail waitresses with outlaw accents, the occasional lap-girl from the clubs—(his mother would never have approved, she was a
performer,
a
dancer,
not a cheap grab-and-grope-girl) had been kind to Wes, but it was never the same.

When his father died in hospice, a shriveled twenty-nine-year-old man, Wes was orphaned.

He was nine years old and alone.

The world had ended long before the snows came, his father liked to say. It had ended after the Great Wars, ended after the Black Floods, the Big Freeze only the latest catastrophe. The world was always ending. The point was to survive whatever came next.

Wes had promised his boys work, had promised them food, had promised them they would eat tonight. He had also promised himself he would never go back there, never do anything so stupid and dangerous again. But there he was. Back at the death races, so named because to drive one of the beat-up jalopies in the game was to risk everything. The tracks ran through the carcasses of old casinos on the street level. The cars were patched-up wrecks with souped-up engines, although once in a while they were able to find an old Ferrari or a Porsche with an engine that could still zoom.

“Thought you said you were done,” said Dre, the gangster who ran the track, when he saw Wes.

“Things change,” Wes said grimly. “How much?”

“Ten if you win, nickel if you place. Nothing if you don’t.”

“Fine.” He’d always been good at being fast. He could drive fast, he could run fast, he even talked fast. In a way, it was a relief to do something that came easily to him.

Wes got in a car. No helmet, no seat belt. No rules except to try to stay alive, to try not to crash into one of the walls, or into the glass panels, or to flip off the ice onto another car. The cars were named for the great racehorses of old. Ajax. Man o’ War. Cigar. Barbaro. Secretariat. He looked up at the boards that would broadcast the race to the OTB network—his odds were low and he felt gratified at that, that the bookies remembered him, that they bet that he would live. When the checkered flag was raised, Wes revved up the engine and flew down the course.

The course took him past the city’s relics, the Olden Ugg, Rah’s, and R Queens, ending on the corner where the neon cowboy waved his hat.

There were a few cars ahead of him, and Wes decided to keep up with the pack, make his move on the final round, best not to be the lead car—somehow the lead always ended up in fourth place. Finally, it was time. Only one more car in front of him. The yellow flag was flying, meaning to use caution; the ice was probably more slippery than usual. He slammed the gas pedal and muscled his way to the lead. The other driver saw it coming and tried to block his way, but his wheels slipped on the ice and his car slammed against Wes’s, sending both of them against the wall. Wes’s car scraped the ice on its right wheels, and flipped up once, twice, and he hit his head on the roof and fell back to his seat with a crash. The other car was a fireball at the end of the lane, but since his own car was still running, Wes gunned the engine and the car reared up and shot across the finish line.

The race was over. The engine finally died, sputtering, the wheels spinning on ice, but it was all right.

He’d survived.

Wes slid out through the window, his cheeks red, his heart pumping. That was close. Too close. For a moment there he hadn’t thought he’d make it.

“Nice work. See you tomorrow?”

Wes shook his head as he counted the hard-won watts in his hand, barely enough to buy the boys dinner. He couldn’t do this again. He would have to think of another way to feed his crew. His friend Carlos at the Loss owed him one. After all, Wes had refused to torch the place earlier in the year, and it wasn’t his fault their rivals had found someone else to take the job. Maybe it was time to try his luck at the casino tables again.

In Vegas, there was always another game.

“H
EY, MANNY,” NAT CALLED, MOTIONING
to her pit boss.

“Yeah?” Manny counted out a roll of five hundred watts as he approached. There was the New Vegas that was run by the real-estate overlords and their ambiguous military connections, and then there was the Vegas that was still Vegas—run by the mob, by the gangsters, by people like Manny, who kept the place packed, the patrons happy, the drinks potent.

“You know anyone with a connection to a ship?” she whispered. “A runner?”

Manny shook his head and wet his finger with his tongue, continuing to count the money. “Why you wanna leave New Veg? You just got here. This is the best place around,” he said, motioning to the busy casino. “Where else is there?”

The man had a point. After the world ended, in a rush to dominate the earth’s remaining resources, the country had expanded its borders, colonizing and renaming regions as it did so. Africa became New Rhodes, Australia divided into Upper Pangaea and New Crete, South America—a wasteland called simply Nuevo Residuos. There were a few independent sectors left, like the Xian Empire, of course, the only country that had the foresight to preserve its agricultural industry by spearheading the indoor-farming movement before the ice came. But what was left of the rest of the world—swaths of Russia and most of Europe—was overrun by pirates and led by madmen.

Visas were more expensive than a working space heater, more costly than clean water. Acquiring one was near impossible, not to mention the endless blizzards that made travel precarious and expensive.

Nat shrugged. “C’mon, Manny, you know everyone in this snow globe.” She had asked around, but her dealer friends laughed in her face. They all did, from the valets from Nuevo Cabo, to the waitresses from Mesa Sol, to the topless dancers from nearby Henderson. There was no way. They all told her to forget about it, those who tried to jump the borders were crazy, and you never saw them again. The only thing the Vegas hands knew was that jumpers were unlucky, and unlucky had no place in the casinos.

The pit boss tucked the roll into his back pocket, sucked his teeth, and worked a toothpick through his molars. “No, baby. Not gonna happen, don’t want to see you shot in the head, floating in that black water. There’s pirates—scavengers—out there, too, don’t you know? Taking slaves, selling ’em to the outlaw territories.” He shook his head. “Besides, remember what happened to Joe? Bounty hunters find out you’re itching to jump, they’ll turn you in for the reward for snitching.” That was what everyone believed—that Joe had been turned in for blood money. Jumper watt, someone had snitched. “Besides, you need mucho credit to pay a runner.”

She sighed, counting her small stack. Tips had been steady all evening. She had almost twenty credits, not enough for a proper heat suit, but maybe a pair of those seal-fur gloves or a cup of real chicken soup. She dealt the next hand. All day she’d had a good, steady stream of players, a group celebrating a bachelor party, a few pros who made their living from the tables.

“Slow night?” a voice asked.

Nat looked up to see a guy standing across from her. Tall, with caramel-colored hair and honey-brown eyes. He smiled and she thought she recognized him from somewhere. Her breath caught at the sight of his handsome face, with his kind eyes and somewhat familiar mien. She swore she knew him but couldn’t remember where from. He was dressed in layers, and she noted the worn edges of his sleeves, and the burns on his jeans that could only have come from driving the blood tracks. She didn’t think she knew any of the death-wish boys, but she could be wrong. Whoever he was, she sensed mischief from the way he hovered around the edges of her table.

“Can I deal you in?” she asked in her crisp dealer tone. “If not, you’ll have to step back. Casino rules, sorry.”

“Maybe. What’s the ante?” he drawled, even though the neon sign was blinking on the table. Fifty heat credits to play.

She pointed at it with a frown.

“That all?” he asked, all smooth and suave. “Maybe I’ll stay, make sure these clowns here don’t give you a hard time.” He smiled as he motioned to the players seated around her table.

“I can take care of myself, thanks,” Nat said coolly. She knew the type. She had no patience for pretty boys. He probably broke a dozen hearts just by walking across the casino floor. If he thought she would be one of them, he was wrong.

“I’m sure you can,” he said, shooting her a sideways grin. “What time do you get out of here? What say you and I . . .”

“My shift ends at midnight,” she said, cutting him off. “You got enough to buy me a glass of water, I’ll meet you at the bar.”

“Water. A purist.” He winked. “My kind of girl. Done.”

She laughed. There was no way he could afford a glass of water. He couldn’t even afford a proper winter coat. Clean water was precious but synthetics were cheap and sanitary, so like most solid citizens, her only choice was to drink Nutri, a supposedly vitamin-and-nutrient-rich, sweet-tasting concoction that was spiked with faint traces of mood stabilizers, just the thing to keep the population obedient. The chemicals gave her a headache, and more than anything, she just wanted a taste of pure, clear water. Once a week she saved up enough for a glass, savoring every drop.

“Hey, man, either you’re in or you’re out. Holding up the game here,” a young day-tripper snarled, interrupting. He was a flashy kind, the type of player who tried to flirt with the dealer or when that didn’t work, complained loudly whenever someone made a move he didn’t approve of—“That was my ace!” or “You’re messing up the shuffle.”

“Relax, relax,” the new boy said, but he didn’t take a step back.

“Sir, I’m really going to have to ask you to move,” she told him, as she laid down her hand. Eighteen. She made to collect the players’ chips.

“Twenty-one! Woot!” crowed the annoying player.

Nat stared at his cards. She could have sworn he’d held a ten and a six, but now his six of spades was an ace of clubs. How did that happen? Was he a lockhead? A hidden mage? Had he figured out a way to cheat the iron detectors as she had? She sucked in her breath as she calculated his bet, which meant a payout of— She shook her head.
No way. No one was that lucky. The house always wins.

“What are you waiting for, girly? Pay out!” He slapped the table and the chips wobbled on the felt.

He was a cheat, she was sure of it, even as she began to count out four platinum chips on the green felt, and she hesitated before pushing them his way.

“I’m sorry, I’m going to have to ask for a rollback,” she said, meaning she’d have to ask security to check the cameras, make sure nothing funny had happened. But when she looked around, Manny and the other supervisors were nowhere to be found. What was going on?

“Pay out, or else,” the kid said in a low, menacing voice.

Now Nat saw that he was holding a gun underneath his jacket, and it was pointed right at her.

Before she could protest, there was a swift and sudden movement, as the handsome boy slammed the guy facedown on the table and pinned his arms behind his back, effectively disarming him in one go.

Nat watched with grudging admiration as he reached into the thief’s pocket. “Beretta. Old-school, good taste,” he said, laying the gun on the felt. He emptied the other one and a flurry of aces fell to the carpet. Nat understood now. The kid had used her interest in the good-looking boy to switch the cards and win the chips.

The chips . . .

Four platinum ones.

Equal to twenty thousand heat credits. Enough to pay a runner, enough to hire a ship. Enough to get her out of here . . .

She looked up and caught her newfound hero’s eye and they stared at each other for a heartbeat.

When she looked down at the table again, the chips were gone.

The handsome boy blinked, confused.

“Here,” Nat said, slipping a few plastic chips into his hand. She thought of those warm gloves she’d been saving up for. “For your trouble.”

“Save it for that glass of water,” he said, giving her chips back and walking toward the exit.