Chapter 5-1
2005 Words
Jack had set up a recreational space in one of the Scrappy’s storage rooms. The place wasn’t much to look at. Just four gray walls with a single lamp shining down on a round table. Arin and Rajel were sitting there now, each man inspecting his cards. Jack had printed a braille deck so that his friend could play.
He sighed.
This little room had no windows. Those were something of a rarity on warships like the Scrappy. Windows were a structural weakness, which was something you generally wanted to avoid when designing a ship that would spend much of its time dodging incoming fire. Still, there were moments when he just wanted to look out and see stars. All the TV shows he had grown up with had starships with windows.
Reclining in a chair, Jack held his cards up in front of his face. He felt a smile coming on. “I raise fifty.” He tossed a few chips into the pile.
Arin was directly across from him, hunched over the table and frowning like he was trying to solve one of those equations where all the terms were Greek letters. “Fold,” he muttered after a stretched-out moment.
Rajel sat halfway between them with his cards in a neat, little pile. The guy was a block of ice. Not a hint of emotion in that stony face. “Not me. You’re bluffing, Hunter. And I’m not gonna let you get away with it.”
“How can you tell?” Arin pressed.
Rajel turned an ear toward Jack. “His heartbeat,” he said. “It sped up a little when he decided to raise the stakes.”
“There is no way you can hear his heartbeat.”
way“Are we gonna play or not?” Jack snapped.
Rajel ran his fingers over the little towers of chips he had stacked near the edge of the table. He selected a few and held them up as if to make a point. “Your fifty…” Then, to Jack’s dismay, he doubled the bet. “And fifty more.”
He tossed them all into the pile.
Resting his elbow on the table, Jack pressed his palm against his forehead. “It’s yours,” he sighed. When he had invited Rajel to play, he had been sure the other man could compensate for a lack of vision by relying on his other senses. He had not counted on super hearing.
Rajel leaned over the table with an enormous grin, wrapping his arms around the chips and pulling them toward his pile. “I am your worst nightmare.”
“Why exactly are we playing this Earth game?” Arin muttered.
“For fun and lost profit!” Jack exclaimed.
Arin held a card between his first two fingers, deep creases lining his brow. “Fun,” he said. “You enjoy losing chips?”
“And I suppose your definition of a good time involves long stretches of sitting quietly, punctuated by the occasional moment of self-flagellation.”
“Much of that self-flagellation is deserved.”
“You’re not that person anymore, Pol.”
Arin flinched, turning his head to fix a death glare on Jack. His eyes smoldered with the fury of a dying star. “I’ve asked you not to use that name.”
Rajel had finished stacking his chips and now sat with one arm draped over the back of his chair. “Why not?” he inquired. “It’s your real name, isn’t it?”
“Pol is dead!” Arin snapped. “I am what I am!”
Leaning back with his arms folded, Jack raised an eyebrow. “And what exactly is that?” he asked. “The man who let Grecken Slade define his destiny? Or the man who took control of his own life?”
Their discussion was cut short by the hiss of the door opening. Corovin marched into the room, claiming the empty spot at the table and grinning when he saw the collection of chips that Rajel had accumulated. “I see my love is winning,” he noted. “I would expect nothing less.”
Rajel blushed.
Jack picked up a little tower of chips, holding them between his thumb and forefinger. He hit Corovin with a playful smile. “Want in?”
The other man’s response was a sneer. “What is the point of a game with no stakes?” he asked. “Wouldn’t this be more interesting if we were playing for actual money?”
“The point is psychology,” Jack replied. “The entire game is about learning to read your opponents, learning to spot a lie, to recognize the patterns that differentiate a bluff from a value bet. For someone like me, that’s a good skill to practice.”
“Very well.”
“Glad to hear it,” Jack said. He passed a pile of chips to Corovin along with the deck of cards. “Newcomer deals.”
He insisted on that because he was sitting on Corovin’s left, which would leave him at a disadvantage for the rest of this game. Jack liked playing at a disadvantage. The world felt right when the odds were stacked against him. He slid one white chip to the middle of the table, and Rajel added two more.
Corovin dealt the first two cards to every player. Jack received the Two of Clubs and the Seven of Hearts. Not a great start. Truth be told, he would rather be playing stud poker – that was the version his grandfather had taught him – but communal cards would make things easier for Rajel.
Arin held up a single blue chip for all to see. “Your twenty…” He dropped that into the pot and then added another one. “And twenty more.”
Corovin grunted, matching the bet.
Jack and Rajel did so as well. So, they were all playing cautiously, except for Arin. A bit of a reversal from the way things usually went. Arin was downright stingy with his chips. So far as Jack could tell, he almost never bluffed.
Corovin discarded one card and then dealt three more, face-up. The Ten of Spades, the Two of Diamonds and the Queen of Spades. Corovin announced them for Rajel’s benefit, but the blind man still leaned over the table and felt each card just to be sure.
“Check,” Jack said. No need to live dangerously, not with the Terminator over there listening to everyone’s heartbeat. Summer was amused, and Jack was fairly certain that he could guess why. She probably thought that Rajel was exaggerating his ability. She was probably right.
Rajel turned an ear toward Jack, then grinned as he grabbed a couple chips. “Twenty,” he said, tossing them into the pot.
“Forty,” Arin said, adding four more. b****y hell! Another raise? The guy had to have something good in his pocket. Maybe a pair of queens. Unless…Unless he was trying to put on a show. Everyone knew that Arin didn’t bluff, but was that just what he wanted them to think? Maybe he had been playing conservatively all night so that no one would call when he finally decided to pull a fast one.
The more Jack thought about it, the more it started to make sense. Arin always looked down at his chips before placing a bet. It was a subtle tell but a useful one if you knew what to look for. He would glance at his ever-shrinking pile, doing the math in his head, trying to determine how much he wanted to wager.
He hadn’t done that this time.
Arin was one of the best fighters Jack had ever met, but he had the personality of a tree stump. If he was out here strutting his stuff, it had to be a bluff. Jack had already decided to stay in when Corovin announced that he would do the same.
The next card was the Seven of Spades. Jack had two pairs, but not the best two. If Arin really did have a pair of queens in the hole, things would turn out very badly. Still, it was time to make these guys sweat.
Jack looked down at his winnings – deliberately giving himself a fake tell – then his eyes flicked up to the man across from him, and he smiled. “Thirty,” he said, adding three more chips to the pile in the middle of the table.
Rajel took one of his little towers and dumped the whole thing into the pot. “Sixty,” he said. Arin started to fidget nervously, trying to make up his mind. At long last, he sighed and mucked his cards. One opponent down.
Corovin eyed Rajel like a hen that had caught a fox sniffing around the fence. “No,” he said after a moment. “You’re not getting away that easily. I’m in.”
“Me too,” Jack agreed.
He had to suppress a surge of elation when the final card turned out to be the Two of Hearts. A full house! There was a good chance Jack would win this hand. One way or another, he was staying in until the Showdown. The real question was, did he want to play it safe and convince his opponents to fold, or did he want to grow the pot at the risk of finding out that Rajel had a better hand?
The latter, he decided.
It would be fun to take Rajel down a peg.
He had to convince these two yahoos that he was bluffing. Which meant he had to come up with a bet that was just big enough to seem desperate but not big enough to seem confident. To make matters worse, he had only nine white chips and four blue ones.
Licking his lips – another fake tell – Jack selected two of the latter. “Forty,” he said, pushing them into the middle of the table.
Once again, Rajel turned his ear toward Jack. Did the man really believe that he could hear someone else’s heartbeat? Could he hear someone else’s heartbeat? Jeez, that would be a useful skill! But no. It had to be an exaggeration.
CouldRajel didn’t need to hear his heartbeat. There were plenty of other audible cues: the sound of someone’s breathing, the hoarseness in their voice. Jack noted that as a weakness in his playstyle. All this time, he had focused too much on visual tells.
Time to change that.
“Eighty,” Rajel said, adding his chips to the pile.
“Fold,” Corovin grumbled.
Jack thought about the virus that Slade had used on him, the feeling of helplessness. He would spend the rest of his life at the mercy of a monster. Years of t*****e and cruelty with no way out.
Sure enough, a tightness formed around his chest. His palms were sweaty, his breathing hard and ragged. He had to force himself to calm down lest Rajel think that he was exaggerating. “Your eighty,” he said in a husky voice. “And eighty more.”
Rajel answered him with a grin that bordered on outright laughter. “Now I know you’re bluffing!” he teased. “You’re not very good at this, Jack.”
know“Are you in or not?”
The other man sighed, running his fingers over his much larger pile of winnings. “Fine,” he said. “Let’s settle this right now. Here’s your one-sixty, and just for fun, I raise you two hundred more. It’s up to you, Jack. Do you want to walk out of here with one chip or none at all?”
Jack threw his last remaining chip into the pot.
“Fine,” Rajel said. He turned over his cards, revealing the King and the Five of Spades. “Flush. Beat that.”
- Writer
