Seven couldn’t breathe. Pocket squealed on her shoulder, but he could do little against the centipede’s iron grip. Something sharp bit into her side, grazing her arm, and Seven gritted her teeth. Each time she wriggled, the thing’s grip only seemed to increase, and a searing pain burned into her side. She tried to find Emmet in the chaos and caught a blur of motion just out of the corner of her eye.

  There! Emmet charged with his pickaxe, but it bounced off with a dull thud. The creature swung its head and Emmet slammed into the wall, then slumped over, lying still.

  Not good, she thought, panicking as her air grew short. The cave blurred and twisted, her vision failing, and even Pocket’s shrill chirps made little difference. But what could she do? She’d already gambled with all of Emmet’s dice. And even if she’d kept a few to drain, she wasn’t sure she could channel Luck through her body again without a break—she’d already lost far too much blood. Her sword was pinned against her side uselessly, and Luca had obviously disappeared in the chaos.

  There has to be something I can do, she thought frantically. She glanced at the blindingly bright channels of Luck coursing through the centipede, then followed the lines as they disappeared into the ground. She blinked, then had an idea.

  She wiggled her hand free just enough to grab the dagger she’d shoved into a side pocket by her leg, then slammed it into one of the Luck channels. She barely grazed the thing, but the effect was immediate; the golden river sputtered and died, and the centipede thrashed in pain, tightening its grip on her in the process. Seven gritted her teeth, her world going dark slowly at the edges.

  I drew a bad hand, she thought sluggishly. Something warm and sticky trickled down her arm, pooling in her empty hand, and dimly, she realized that it was her blood. Just when her lungs were screaming and the edges of her vision were darkening, the centipede suddenly relaxed its grip, dropping her with another roar that shook the tunnel.

  She hit the ground hard, then took a huge gulp of air, the dust of thousands of tiles of mosaic searing her lungs on the way in. Her vision lightened, but didn’t clear entirely. Still, she didn’t need it to see why the creature had let go. Beside her own hole in the side of the thing, that was Pocket, hanging there by his…teeth? Yes, those were definitely teeth.

  Now on her belly, Seven took stock of their situation. Emmet was bleeding from his head, slowly coming to by the wall. His bracelet was still flickering dimly, his dice on cooldown. Luca huddled behind a pillar, and while it would have been easy to think of him as a coward, there was little he could really do to help. Pocket held on for dear life, but the centipede seemed determined to shake him free, and looked like it was about to burrow into the ground. Other larvae the size of horses had now spawned, clicking their mandibles menacingly, and Seven…she was useless. Redundant.

  It was easy, lying there, to think about all of the people she’d let down, all of the opportunities she’d let slip from her grasp. She’d never been a proper member of her family. Had never played the game, had never quite fit in. And, though she’d certainly tried to carve her own path, that had ended in utter failure, exile, and quite possibly her soon-to-be-demise.

  And yet, she’d finally found a way—however small—to fight back. She’d found at least some of Rook’s corruption, and besides that, she’d discovered her Luck, at least—even if she was now too drained to use it. Exile hadn’t been kind to her, perhaps, but it had given her a way forward. She just had to figure out a way to use it.

  She closed her fist and tried to straighten, but her side barked in protest. Okay, so maybe she wasn’t quite redundant, but she was definitely injured. And none of them—not Emmet, Pocket, Luca, or Moore—would be here without her. She had to find a way to turn this bet around and win. But how?

  As she gripped her fist, her fingers suddenly closed around something warm and pulsing. She opened her palm and nearly dropped what she found in revulsion. A d20, blood-red and still wet from her own fresh blood. The surface was covered in golden symbols she didn’t recognize, and they shifted and writhed whenever she wasn’t directly looking at them.

  “What the hell is this?” she muttered, still dazed from being in the centipede’s grip. She turned it in her hand, marveling at the strange texture.

  “Seven, you’ve got to move!” That was Emmet’s voice, strained and desperate. He was half-standing against the wall now, his knife out as three larvae advanced on him. Blood trickled down the side of his head.

  Seven looked at the dice in her hand again. There was something wrong with it. Something that made her skin crawl. She had no idea what it did, or where it had come from. Maybe it was one of Emmet’s dice that had slipped out of his bag? But if so, why hadn’t he used it? It practically oozed power, though of what kind, she couldn’t be certain. For all she knew, it might make her day even worse somehow. But Emmet was about to become bug food, and Pocket was about to become a pancake—which is precisely what he was squealing as the centipede wriggled its tail to descend back into the earth.

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  “Screw it,” she said, and pulled herself to her feet with a wince. Weaving in place, dizzy and sick, she rolled the dice.

  The moment it left her fingers, there was a click and a noticeable sort of shift in the air. She’d never attuned to the thing, but it landed in midair anyway as an attuned dice might have. An eleven. Seven’s gut fell. An eleven wasn’t terrible, but was it good enough to get them out of this mess?

  There was a pause, and then the cavern was plunged into silence. Seven gasped as her mind cleared, the dizziness and pain from before fading, replaced with a humming sort of energy. Far better than Luck, far stronger than Luck, that energy was like plunging into a pool of cold water—bracing, shocking, and invigorating all at once.

  The centipede went still as a strange series of harmonics echoed through the tunnel, ethereal and so faint she almost couldn’t hear them. Then the dice exploded into a geyser of crimson light, engulfing her entirely. It punched a hole through the ceiling, wrapping around her in liquid fire, shimmering much as her Luck did. Seven gasped and nearly stumbled backwards. She could feel everything suddenly—every larvae, every crack in the stone, the unstable nature of the mines themselves, every drop of blood splattered in the tunnel, every terrified beat of her own heart.

  Another golden triangle flared on her palm, and power flooded into her veins, washing away the rest of the pain, washing away her doubt and fear. Her vision sharpened again until she could see the individual facets of the shattered dice embedded into the centipede’s hide. Her hearing now registered every little click of each larvae’s mandibles, Emmet’s harsh breathing across the room, Luca’s quiet swearing in the distance. And, most terrifyingly of all, she felt her own strength. It wasn’t in her body, exactly, but her mind, somewhere close to where her Luck usually sat. And yet, if Luck had been a raging river, this power was a broken dam. And whatever it was, was, it was raw, simple, and pure—and hers to command.

  Heart hammering, she realized that she knew exactly where to send it.

  Seven lifted a single hand and aimed it first at the nearest larvae. It puffed into tiny wisps of air, those wisps flaming and dying like tiny embers. The rest of the larvae paused, then tried to flee, but Seven raised her hand again and simply willed them gone. They dissolved into crimson mist, and she turned back towards the centipede. Its head snapped towards her, and it hissed, looking genuinely alarmed. Pocket seemed to sense his chance and vaulted with his tiny little body from the centipede, landing squarely on her shoulder.

  “No pancakes today,” he said smugly, lighting up red to match the power roaring around her. “Isn’t your first month at work a little soon for this kind of meltdown?”

  Seven laughed, and when she spoke, her voice echoed strangely with the same harmonics as the dice. “It was a really bad first month.”

  The centipede lunged at her, but she gestured almost casually at the rivulets of golden light still flowing through the centipede, and the source stuttered and stopped, the centipede going dim all at once. Light burst forth from the tiny fissures in its body—the same crimson light she was now bathed in, and the creature thrashed and screamed, its dice-encrusted hide shattering like glass.

  The centipede exploded in a crimson glow, and Seven lost her own. As the light faded, her feet touched the ground again—had she been floating?—and she was back to normal. Or whatever her normal was, anyway. Shaking and exhausted, she gasped as the pain from her wounds came back all at once. She checked her arm, and there was green sludge along the edges of the cut, the wound barely inches from where the last wretched creature had taken a bite out of her. Her side was in no better shape. The tunnel was now silent but for their labored breathing, and she collapsed to her knees, her vision going blurry again.

  Poison, she thought. But she couldn’t be bothered to care right now. She was tired. Too tired, in fact. And, well, didn’t she deserve a rest? But she caught Emmet staring at her from nearby. His footsteps approached, but he kept a respectful distance back, his eyes wary. He stared at her like she’d just grown a second head.

  “Seven,” he said quietly. “What the hell are you?”

  She shook her head, but before she could answer, something cracked overhead. Seven flinched, throwing her hands over her head instinctively, but looked up again as tiny rocks began to pelt her. Not rocks, but dice. Pieces of them, anyway.

  They rained down like hail, clattering against the stone to form a tiny pile in front of her. Combat dice, summoning dice, arcane dice, utilities—she even spotted some legendary shards glinting in the pile like fallen stars, full to bursting with Luck. They poured through the crack in the ceiling until there was a tiny pile in front of her.

  “Not a bad loot haul,” Emmet said nearby, his wariness of her apparently forgotten in the presence of so much wealth. Nearby, Luca crept towards them, wringing his hands as he checked the structure overhead. “Though I think you vaporized most of what the centipede had. This more than pays our way out, even if it’s rigged.”

  “Emmet,” she said, her voice strangely slurred. Her tongue felt thick again as it had with the last monster she’d faced—like she couldn’t quite get the words out. “If LMC so much as asks me for a single shard, it’ll look like that centipede had a good day.”

  Emmet laughed, but Seven barely heard him, her vision fading at the edges. Her world went dark, and she couldn’t help but feel a little annoyed as it did so.

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