“That’s reality.” I finished my drink. The ethanol burned. “I can get you close to the office. You handle the security and the vault yourself. Can you do that?”
“I can handle it.”
“Then we have a deal.” I stood. Flinx shifted on my shoulder. “But if you get caught, I don’t know you. Clear?”
“Crystal.” He smiled. “See you in four days, Curator.”
I pocketed the comm and left before he could say anything else. Before I could second-guess. Before common sense reminded me that trusting a Vinduthi con artist was dangerous.
Flinx sent as we climbed back toward the main levels.
“We have the components. We have the routes. We have the timing.” I kept my voice low. “We didn’t have a ship. Now we do.”
“I know. But we’ve been planning this for years. Building everything we need piece by piece. The only thing we were missing was the way off Valyria.” I adjusted my grip on the ladder. “He’s offering the final piece. That makes the plan actually possible.”
“Then we improvise. Same as always.”
We reached the upper levels. Staff corridors. Bright lights and monitored spaces. I turned my comm back on and walked toward my quarters like nothing had changed.
But everything had changed.
Four days until the gala.
Four days until I either escaped Valyria or destroyed everything I’d spent years building.
Flinx sent.
“Everything worth doing is high risk.” I keyed open my door. “We’ve been careful for six years. Time to stop being careful.”
Time to be free.
BREVAN
The Aphelion Club occupied the top three floors of Valyria’s central tower. The walls were vast panels of transparisteel overlooking the manufactured ocean. Money changed hands at tables where a single night’s losses could buy a starship.
I adjusted my cuffs and stepped into the main gaming floor.
The crowd here was different from the reception. Fewer pretenses. More calculation. These were people who understood that wealth was a tool, not a destination. They played games to measure each other, to establish hierarchies, to find weaknesses.
Perfect.
I’d spent the afternoon researching Senator Valerius. Valdorian, like Tarsus. Similar age, background, and ambitions. But where Tarsus cultivated an image of refined collector, Valerius positioned himself as the populist politician. The man of the people who just happened to own three resort planets and a voting bloc that controlled Valyria’s import tariffs.
The rivalry went back decades. Old money versus new influence. Collection versus commerce. Every social interaction between them was a strategic positioning of pieces on an elaborate game board.
And I was about to become a very useful piece.
Valerius sat at a corner table, playing something called Cascade, a high-stakes betting game that required reading probability streams and opponents simultaneously. Four other players occupied the table. Two Fanaith, an Orlian, and a Lyrikan who tracked every card with sharp attention.
I approached the table manager, a Nexian female with copper-toned skin and the kind of posture that suggested she’d physically removed troublemakers before. “I’d like to join Senator Valerius’s game.”
She assessed me. Vinduthi. Unknown quantity. Potential problem. “Buy-in is fifty thousand credits. Minimum bet is five thousand per hand.”
“Acceptable.” I transferred the credits from my account to the table’s secure chip system. Varrick had set up the funds three days ago. Legitimate money from legitimate accounts, all traceable back to Brevan Korven’s perfectly constructed financial history.
