Josef no longer saw the overseer, but my appointments held at once per week. They were always different. Each week he would ask me a new question, some personal, and some not. Once he asked about my family, and if I had any siblings. Another time he asked me how many Orran Sourcerers survived the battle of Fort Vernan. Sometimes I answered his questions without hesitation and other times I refused to answer no matter how innocent that answer might seem. I did it to keep the overseer guessing. Thinking back on it, I really had no other reason. I liked trying to confuse the man. It seems a silly game I was playing now, yet at the time it was so important. I never took the rewards he offered. Not once. More often than not I left the room in chaos, destroying as much of it as I could. It was petty, but I am petty, and I took my acts of rebellion wherever I could.
"You are difficult to play against," Hardt admitted, his hand clamped firmly over one of his Trust die.
"Thank you." I let slip a small smile.
The big Terrelan shook his head. "I didn't say you were good at the game. I said you were difficult to play against. You're too unpredictable."
Again, I smiled. I had chosen my own side long before my turn to play Hardt had rolled around. "I'm taking it as a compliment," I said.
"Don't," Hardt said with a grimace. "Unpredictable to your enemies is good. Unpredictable to your friends is bad. Hard to catch a person when you don't know which way she'll jump."
I shrugged. At the time I still took it as a compliment. I revelled in the fact that no one knew much about me. Even those who did had no idea what I would do from one moment to the next. It took some time, and some loss, before I understood the lesson Hardt was trying to teach me.
"You think we're friends?" I asked. I didn't consider Hardt a friend. Back then I had only one friend and he was a terrible Trust player.
"Allies, at the very least." Hardt's voice was always deep, but also soft. I liken it to the rumble of thunder in the far distance. Even quietly, it demands you stop and listen, and when you do it's almost comforting. But you also know there's violence there, terrible and unrestrained.
Alliances, real alliances, are built from trust. They need it as a foundation if they are to survive. Alliances built from need are doomed to fail just as soon as one no longer needs the other. I didn't trust anyone.
I nodded. "Allies, then," I said. Hardt smiled and I shifted my hand just a little to turn the face of the die over. "Ready?"
We lifted our hands at the same time. Hardt's dice showed friendship, mine showed betrayal. I reached over and took the man's die, holding his disappointed stare all the way. "I am the weapon," I said quietly.
Eventually Hardt chuckled. "One day, girl, you might learn the point of the game," he said. "Then you really will be dangerous."
I scoffed, thinking myself smart. Thinking myself already more dangerous than Hardt could know. I was a foolish girl. I lost that game on the roll of the dice, but such is the way when everyone knows you'll betray them. I lost far more often than I won, and seethed quietly every time.
Later on, in the evening, and again I call it that only to keep some sense of structure for my time in the Pit, Josef and I were curled up together, the threadbare blanket draped over us. I pressed myself close into his back and felt the heat build between us. It could get bitterly cold in the Pit, or sometimes it could be uncomfortably warm. I never did quite get to grips with the climate down there.
"Hardt was wrong," Josef said quietly. "You're not unpredictable."
"No?" I quite liked the idea of being unpredictable.
Josef started to shift and rolled over until he was facing me. He looked tired; his young face gaunt with lines I hadn't seen before. There was a dusting of hair on his cheeks and chin, and I wondered how I had never before noticed it. He was just seventeen, but the rigours of the Pit made him look at least a decade older.
"No," Josef said with a smile. "You're just terrible at the game."
I punched him in the stomach and he laughed it away.
"I'm serious," he said.
"You're a shit-sniffing liar, is what you are." I've never liked being told I'm bad at a thing; anything really. My tutors at the academy realised this early on. They always expected so much of me but not nearly as much as I expected of myself. I've never been able to decide if I worked so hard to impress them, or simply not to hate myself for failing. "Besides," I said. "If I'm bad at the game, you're worse. For once you're worse at something." I wonder if I sounded as bitter as my memory suggests. "You always lose first."
We were close enough that I could smell Josef's breath. It was as rancid as my own. He grinned and shook his head. "I always lose first. But I'm an excellent player."
I rolled onto my back to stare up at the roof. "I don't understand," I said. It took a lot for me to admit that. The words were hard to push out, and I could never have said them to anyone else. I think I probably sounded sulky as only a young woman can.
"It's not about the game, Eska," Josef said, his voice already light as though he were drifting off. "It's never about the game. It's about the players."
Chapter 7
It's easy to look back on my time in the Pit and remember only the bloody digging. It certainly took up enough of each day. But there was more to life underground. There had to be. The foremen, Prig included, worked us scabs hard, that much was undeniable, but they also wanted the work done quickly. The sooner they could ditch their scabs, the sooner they could head off to the arena or the Hill.
For Deko's captains and their foremen, positioning and respect was everything. Prig had a lot of respect, thanks to the overseer's interest in me, but he was never happy with how quickly we got the digging done. He was never happy with his positioning on the Hill. I always wondered why he didn't just have us dig less each day. I had no idea, at the time, that the foremen were handed daily work orders by Deko himself, and Prig's association with the overseer was not something Deko shined upon. My team had to dig further each day than any other, and that was one more thing Prig resented me for.
There were things for us scabs to do as well. The Pit had a thriving trade community. Some items were more easily obtained such as extra food rations, or bandages, while others were far more difficult and needed to be smuggled in by the Terrelan guards. I never found out which guards did the smuggling; all my contraband came from trade and winnings.
Along with any sort of trade community came the gambling. It has always been a mystery to me why people with nothing feel the need to fritter it away on games of chance. The game of choice for most was a simple one, though it required a basic understanding of numbers. Each player took turns pulling a small stone triangle out of a bag and the little stones had a variety of numbers etched onto them. The aim was to get as close to twenty-one as possible without going over. Why the desired number was twenty-one, I still do not understand. Perhaps because it is one more than a terran's digits combined and therefore as high as most of the uneducated masses can count. Perhaps there is a special relevance to the number, laid down by the Rand or Djinn many thousands of years ago. Some significance they would, no doubt, claim no terran could understand. Then again, perhaps it was just someone's favourite number, and they decided to invent a game around it. A sad fact of life and time is that insignificant things often outlive their significance.