Chapter 36: Fire and Rain

Chapter 36: Fire and Rain The rain bent in sideways, even under what was left of the weather station’s roof. Cale and Nik had lashed a tarp over the east corner, anchoring it with stone and the weight of their collective disappointment, but water still found its cunning routes: dripping from beam to knuckle, sinking into the fibers of their sleeves, gathering at the base of Apollo’s spine until his skin prickled with the cold. The fire’s smoke tangled with the steam lifting from their bodies, seasoning the air with the flavor of desperation and scorched lichen. Yiv complained about the draw every fifteen seconds, as if the correct arrangement of sticks and spit would shift the odds back into his favor. "You’re choking it," he accused, stabbing a finger through the fog at Cale, who seemed to rearrange the fuel out of nothing more than muscle memory. Cale’s hands, those immovable, unhurried levers, ignored the heckling and broke the kindling down with a precision that had nothing to do with heat and everything to do with order. "All fires eat," Cale said at last, not looking up. "This one just chews its food." He laid a log across the embers, slow as a man playing chess with a child. Nik liked this. He lifted his battered dice cup and shook it, the rattle almost drowned by the patter of rain. "Who’s in?" he called. "Wager is whatever you’d hate to lose most." Renna grinned, which on her face looked close to a threat. "That’s how I left my last family," she said, and pulled a beaded charm from her coat pocket, setting it on the stone beside her. "I’ll call you, thief." Thorin huffed. "Don’t gamble with men who smile before they’re sure," he warned, but the urge to outlast Nik’s luck was stronger than caution. He rummaged in the depths of his traveling pants and produced a wedge of silver, dull where the stamp had worn away but still obvious as currency. He set it beside Renna’s trinket, then folded his arms as if someone might try to snatch the winnings before the game even started. Lyra glanced at the pile, weighed the odds, and pulled a slender vial from inside her boot. The stopper was waxed and the fluid within glowed faintly, a street apothecary special. She balanced it atop the charm and silver, giving Nik her best dead-eyed stare. "If you palm a roll, I cut off your favorite finger." Nik made a show of looking hurt. "You can’t prove anything in advance. That’s the beauty of probability." "Sure," Yiv said, "but you can’t cheat physics," and he dug from his own coat a spool of copper wire, polished down by worry. He set it on the stone, then crossed his arms tightly over his chest, as if exposing the contents had cost him something vital. Apollo watched. Rain trickled down one side of his face, snaking around his jaw before vanishing into the collar of his shirt. He had nothing worth the stake. He felt the heat of Torgo’s amber against his thigh, but the idea of putting it up for dice was laughable; even Nik would recoil at the sacrilege. So he hung back, content for once to observe, to let the others play at luck. Nik rolled first, all flourished wrist and theater. "Three-fours," he announced, grinning into the suspicious faces of his audience. Renna snorted. "Show me." He did: the dice read exactly as promised. Lyra rolled next. The dice clattered and spun, then settled: "Two fives," she said. Thorin’s turn. He rolled, then grunted, flicking his tongue against his teeth. "Pair of aces. Call." He eyed Nik, who looked wounded and made a protest about the rules, which no one listened to. When Yiv rolled, the dice came up one and two. He swore in a language Apollo didn’t recognize, then laughed. "No luck for a man who bets on rain," he said. Renna took the cup, rattled it with a flourish, then rolled a perfect six and five. She smiled, a slow-motion event, and slouched back against the column, boots extended. "That’s game." Nik blinked, then shrugged, and gathered up the pile. "We all lose to the house, eventually," he said, but Apollo could see the resentment in his jaw; he hated losing more than rain, more than hunger. They played two more rounds. The stakes grew steadily more ridiculous, a lock of Nik’s hair, Lyra’s prized flint, Thorin’s finger-length of solder, which he insisted had sentimental value but no one believed. Renna lost her charm on the third round but won back twice as much on the fourth, and by the end the only real constant was the relentless, consuming wet. When the dice began repeating more often than not, Yiv called fraud. "You sanded the edges," he accused. "I can see it." Nik, wounded, held the dice up to the firelight. "Examine for yourself." Yiv did, rolling them between his palms, then throwing them on the stone ten, twelve times in a row. The bell curve was too sharp. "You’re a liar and a cheat," Yiv pronounced, but without heat; it was, to him, an intellectual crime, not a moral one. Renna pressed Nik for a confession. "How many sets do you travel with, really?" she asked. Nik considered, tilting the dice cup in his hand. "Three," he said, then softened: "Four, if you count the old imperial set, but those are weighted in favor of the house." Cale, who had not played, watched the banter with impartial interest. He sat with his back to the ruined weather station wall, hands palm-up on his knees, like a man waiting for an answer he already knew. "In the old city," Cale said, "cheaters were rewarded with amnesty if they could explain their method before the morning bell." He let the statement linger, as if daring Nik to invent a better defense. Nik grinned, eyes bright. "I’d have emptied that vault in a week." "Not a chance," Cale replied. "They retired the game after a month. Everyone who tried to beat the law ended up working for it instead." Yiv snorted. "That’s how they get you. Let you think you’re clever until it’s too late to go back." This was the moment Renna, bored with gambling, suggested stories instead. "We’re stuck together until the roads dry," she said, "so let’s hear how we all got here. Loser starts." She jabbed a thumb at Yiv. He rolled his eyes, but launched into a tale, a convoluted mess involving a milk goat, a stolen password, and a noble’s daughter whose only distinguishing feature was her ability to drink every hired guard under the table. The story ran long, punctuated by Yiv’s own giggles, and ended with him fleeing the city with nothing but the shirt on his back and the copper wire he’d wagered tonight. Nik rated the story a "solid eight on the liar’s scale," then delivered his own: a tale of seduction gone wrong, gambling debts, and a last-minute escape from a burning brothel. Lyra, unimpressed, told a brusque version of her first kill, no embellishments, just a sequence of facts, the memory iced over until it hardly qualified as a story at all. When it was Thorin’s turn, he took a moment, then said, "Once spent a winter holed up with a merchant’s daughter, both of us too drunk to remember her father was still alive. He caught us, duel at dawn, and I married her for six hours before we convinced a judge to annul." He punctuated this with a grunt and a sip from his flask. "Never saw her again. Hope she’s running the family business." Renna laughed, actually laughed, and Apollo realized it was the first time he’d heard anything like joy from her. Even Lyra cracked a smile, small and sharp. When the circle reached him, Apollo hesitated. He thought of Torgo’s last words, of the city’s veined memory and the cold fire he carried in his hip, and wondered if honesty had a place at all in games like these. "Not much of a story," he said. "But I once spent five years in a city people called the Spire. Streets were rivers, and the tides changed directions with the seasons. Nobody walked, not even the beggars. Buildings swayed if you listened at night. I left because one morning every window on my street had been painted over, blue on the inside, red on the out." Nik stared at him, caught off guard by the detail. "That’s the weirdest lie I’ve ever heard," he said. Apollo shrugged. "Still beats being chased by a goat." They all laughed, the sound bouncing off glass and rebar and the ruined skeleton of the roof. Even Cale allowed himself a smile, though it flickered and vanished so quick it might have been a trick of the fire. The storytelling wound down. They banked the flames and coiled closer to the warmth, each reluctant to admit that, for tonight, there was nothing left to run from. Apollo watched the faces around the fire, all battered and imperfect, all rendered beautiful by the fact of their survival. Lyra slouched against the tarp, eyes half-closed but tracking every whisper. Nik practiced shuffling the dice with one hand. Renna and Yiv debated the merits of cheating in games where the only real stake was hope. Cale stared into the embers, as if reading a language only he could understand. Apollo pressed his hand to the pocket and felt the warmth of the amber, remembering the way Torgo had laughed at the very end: knowing, but kind. There was a pattern to these evenings, rain, fire, stories, and a sense that the world outside had been measured and found, temporarily, wanting. He let himself relax, just a little, into the rhythm. The rain kept falling, but for once, it didn’t feel like the world was trying to wash them away.