“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Pocket asked. Seven glanced at him from across the table, where he sat buried in a bowl of what the restaurant optimistically called ‘stew’. They were tucked away in a quiet booth, a curtain drawn around for privacy—or what passed for privacy in LMC-owned mining town, anyway. She’d cashed out her single shard for the meal in front of her and a couple of spare copper chips, but it was hard to focus on the meal with the dice in her hands.

  “Not really,” she finally replied, turning the dice in her hands as it pulsed gently. “But I don’t see another way to get it into the mines undetected.” Several of the pancakes nearby disappeared into Pocket, and she sighed, watching him. “I don’t suppose you have room for it? You’re like a bottomless pit.”

  He shook his tiny head, humming faintly, his voice a singsong of joy over the pancakes. “Like chewy dice, fluffy pancakes big and nice.”

  Seven rubbed her temples, annoyed. This slime would be the death of her. But, well, at least he was content.

  She stared at the dice in her hands, unsure how much further she wanted to take it. It glowed faintly against the scratched surface of the table, and she was grateful for the privacy of the high back and the dim lighting. Still, her heart hammered against her ribs just watching the dice.

  She’d spent the last of her shard money on this meal—real food, not nutritional paste—and cashed out the rest to save for her next few meals without involving Emmet.

  And yet, it didn’t solve the bigger problem of what might happen if she palmed the thing. She’d waved Juno off, but he was right about the risks; palming wasn’t just dangerous—it was forbidden. And, while most people weren’t foolish or crazy enough to actually try palming a dice, Seven was desperate.

  It was the first dice she’d ever been able to properly roll without gloves on. The first one she hadn’t drained dry within seconds. The first she could sense further uses in—even if they were few. And besides that, the skill it housed—while extremely niche—would serve her and Emmet well in their quest to map the mines and bring LMC to justice. She had to preserve the dice somehow. It was hers for however long it lasted, luck take her.

  And yet, she’d read a little too much about palming. Best-case scenario, she ran a fever for a while. Worst, her body would reject the palming and she’d be dead or back to square one. The effects, it seemed, were varied and strange, and every palmer reacted differently to the dice. Some were able to palm several at once, where others couldn’t manage the one.

  Most of what she’d read was ancient, of course, and there were few modern-day texts that documented the process. She wasn’t even sure it was going to work at all.

  Pocket eyed her, his little face gone serious again. “You know, you’ve had a lot of bad ideas, but this one takes the pancake.”

  “I know,” Seven snapped, then felt guilty. Pocket, while annoying, had a point. And he was only trying to help.

  But of course, she did know. She knew too well, really. But it wasn’t about the danger of the palming, or the foolish idea she’d come up with. No, it was that this was her first dice.

  Six siblings before her. Six dice given, their ceremonies individually grand affairs held in the Veil’s highest chamber, attended by nobles, dicemasters, and neighboring kingdoms. A dice to match every child’s role in the future.

  Her oldest brother had been given a dice that granted authority so absolute that crowds knelt when he spoke. The next oldest, Seven’s sister, claimed a dice that let her see the possibilities of fate and the threads shimmering around each decision. There were dice for supernatural combat instincts. Charisma dice. Probability manipulation. Juno’s quiet futuresight dice. All powerful, all dazzling.

  And then there was Seven. Alone in a grimy cafe with nothing but a slime for a companion, staring at what might have generously been called a spelunker dice—useful for mining, maybe, but hardly the stuff of legends. Hardly something fit for a princess—if Seven had ever fit that mold in the first place.

  “What dice do you think I was supposed to get?” she asked suddenly.

  Pocket looked up from his stack of pancakes. “You were supposed to get a dice?”

  Seven smiled a little sadly. “Me and all of my siblings.”

  Pocket nibbled at the edge of a pancake. “What were you, royalty or something?” At this point, it was impossible to tell whether Pocket was serious or not. Seven had pressed him for the truth, but he’d been evasive at best. He couldn’t have known who she was, but even if he did, it hardly mattered. “Maybe a probability dice,” he mused. “Something you could use to turn the odds in your favor.”

  Seven nodded glumly. She’d certainly imagined such a dice long before her curse had damned her. Maybe one that could read her opponents at the gambling table. A dice to manipulate chance, or turn a game in her favor. Something that would have made her unbeatable at the high-stakes tables where a probability dice was the ticket to a game of skill, more than luck. With everyone on the same level, the real games took place. And those who could navigate that treacherous system successfully were feared and respected across the kingdom. Worshipped, even.

  Instead, she had this.

  She picked up the spelunker dice, turning it in her hands. It was a strange little dice, but she had to admit that it was beautiful in its own way. There was something alive about it as the colors shifted across its surface in a way that none of her siblings’ dice had done.

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  And yet it was still a mining dice—highly specialized, useful only for utility. It was just too specialized. And too…pedestrian.

  “Maybe it’s here for a reason,” Pocket said quietly. “You did need a way to map everything. Maybe it means something.”

  Seven laughed bitterly. “It doesn’t mean anything, Pocket. It was an accident. An abomination. It shouldn’t even exist.”

  “But it does.”

  Well, that much was true. Sometimes Seven hated Pocket’s unassailable honesty, even if it was, well, honest. But, this time, she wondered if he was right. Shards shouldn’t have been able to form together at all. The little dice in her hands was impossible. It shouldn’t have existed at all. But what if that didn’t make it an abomination at all, but a miracle?

  Maybe there was more to it than simple chance.

  Still, she frowned at it. “Dice mean something when you palm them,” she said, rolling it across the tattered table idly. “They change who you are. What does this make me, Pocket? A miner? Someone hunting desperately for scraps in the dark?”

  “More like a treasure hunter,” he said. “Not a lot of miners are willing to go deeper after they’ve nearly had an entire shaft collapse on them—not that I’m encouraging you to reenact that or anything. Unless you’re offering more pancakes.”

  Seven considered his words, even as he chattered on about the pancakes. It was true that there was a spirit of adventure in her, deep down. She’d been the sibling to map the castle’s secret passages, to drag her older siblings through old pathways in the garden to bathe in the ice-cold lake forbidden by her parents. She was the one who found old tomes buried in the library, artifacts of an ancient era. Even her gambling addiction had been its own form of exploration, seeking out games and opportunities that others were unable or unwilling to risk.

  She was a risk-taker at her core. A gambler. And maybe the dice knows that too, she thought. Maybe it knew who I was when it formed.

  The dice pulsed gently, as if responding to her thoughts, and she flinched in spite of herself. She blew out a harsh breath of air, trying to steel herself.

  “No turning back,” she said, half to herself. “Once I do this, I’m…I’m not royalty anymore.”

  “Were you ever?” Pocket asked innocently, his mouth half full. Seven gave him a dirty look, but the words hit harder than they should have. No, she wasn’t royalty. Had never been, perhaps. She’d never fit into the world that her siblings occupied. Had never been anything more than a spare. And now she was just a girl with massive debt, a dangerous job, and people who needed protecting, even if she didn’t have the resources to do so.

  But maybe this dice could give her what she needed. If she was willing to risk it all.

  She closed her eyes tightly and, with shaking hands, pressed the dice firmly against her scarred palm. At first there was pain, and she gritted her teeth together, refusing to even look at her hand. It was like reliving that night she’d been thrown out—the shame, the fear, the white-hot burn and the smell of seared flesh. Only this time, nothing burned her skin at all.

  The pain turned to a warmth, intensifying and spreading down her arm like fire. Something moved within her, like her soul was making room for something else. Seven stifled a gasp as power hummed through her limbs, and she opened her eyes. The tavern was brighter, more colorful, the lines sharper, somehow.

  It wasn’t the raw power of her siblings’ dice, or the strange ethereal feel of the dice her parents wielded. No, this power was rawer. Untested. Unproven. And, while she’d called it pedestrian just a few moments before, she felt like it was anything but. Seven felt a desperate urge to see what lay hidden. To find value in things forgotten and discarded. To survive where others might perish.

  When she checked her palm, the dice was gone. Only a faint scar remained to mark its presence, the dimple in her skin nearly buried beneath her burn marks. Seven let out a shaky breath and flicked open her palm. This time, a window did appear—one formed by the dice itself, not LMC’s mining bracelet.

  [Spelunker’s Die][d12]

  Type: Utility / Exploration

  Primary Effect (on Roll):

  1–3: Reveal Ore within short range.

  4–6: Reveal Ore within medium range.

  7-9: Reveal Ore within long range.

  10-12: Reveal Ore within a wide range.

  Auxiliary Effects:

  Echo Sense: Detect faint sounds of stone shifts or movement underground.

  Torchlight: Emit a miner’s glow for several minutes.

  Sure Grip: Briefly gain a climber’s hold on stone and rope.

  Payday: 5% chance of small ore bonus payout upon roll.

  Set Bonus (3+ Exploration Dice):

  Rewind: Once per day, re-roll a failed check against collapse, cave-in, or trap.

  [Cooldown: 8 hours]

  [Duration: 2 hours]

  Well that explains the headache last night, she thought, remembering the flashing lights that had dotted her vision long into the evening. The duration was generous, to say the least, but it was also dangerous; if she spent too long distracted by the glowing ore around her in the mines she’d pay not just with her quota, but with her life.

  “Well?” Pocket asked, his voice small as if he was afraid of the answer. Around them, other miners chatted away, oblivious to what had just taken place. The setting was oddly calming, Seven decided. She felt, oddly, like everything and nothing had changed at once.

  She flexed her fingers, feeling a slight weight there. She could sense the dice there, ready to be rolled. She did feel far too hot, and far too tired, especially with her other powers, but then, maybe there were limits even to those.

  “Like…like myself, I guess.”

  “Is that bad?”

  Seven peeked out through the curtain at the tavern—at tired miners nursing cheap drinks, at flickering lights that didn’t quite drive away the shadow of the evening, at the life she’d just adopted. A week ago, she would have only seen failure in the little tavern. Proof of how far she’d fallen.

  But now, with a strange sort of companion in Pocket, real food in her belly, and possibility in her palm, Seven almost felt a little thrill of hope in her gut. There were people at LMC worth fighting for. People her family had long since abandoned. They were worth playing for, even if the rules were rigged against her.

  And she couldn’t help but think as she watched them, that they’d been wronged by Rook too. She had something in common with these miners, even if it hadn’t seemed so at first.

  “No,” she said, surprised by the strength of her voice. “I don’t think it is.”

  Maybe the spelunker dice wouldn’t make her a queen.

  But it might find her a spot at the table once more.

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