Mardock Scramble полностью

The point tally hovered around the plus five mark for some time. At one point it reached plus nine, but a number of minus cards followed in quick succession. Balot started to feel a little worried—what if the cards continued in this way, never showing a decisive opening? But all she could do was sit there and play the hands that she was dealt.

Then, just as they started getting into the game, something happened. The woman won big—well, it had been bound to happen sometime, probably—and drew a blackjack on a stake well in excess of a thousand dollars. The dealer congratulated her—conspicuously—and at the same time consoled the Doctor, who had bust, the dealer suggesting that he was so close.

“That’s the way the game goes, I’m afraid, sir. Whenever someone wins big, there’s always going to be someone next to them who loses. On the other hand, the opposite is also true, so that’s something you have to look forward to.”

In response, the Doctor turned away from the lady and toward Balot. “It’s not as if we’re going to keep on losing forever. If we need to pay our dues before Lady Luck finally decides to smile on us then so be it—let’s not begrudge her.”

So saying, the Doctor bet on the next hand. Big.

Balot snarced Oeufcoque.

–Did the Doctor do all that deliberately?

–Of course. He waited until the dealer honed in on his target and pounced. He’s playing the dealer in return, turning the dealer’s tricks back on him. This idea that when one player loses, the other inevitably wins. What the dealer is trying to do is to get the Doctor to bet big once the woman starts losing. The woman is caught in thedealer’s snare right now, and the dealer is going to move straight on to the Doctor once the woman’s sucked dry. He’s leaving you till last.

Leaving her till last. The very thought brought up nauseating memories for Balot. The idea that she was dessert, something to be savored at the end of everything. She remembered how one of her customers back in the old days told her that her name made her sound delicious…

Something inside Balot stirred. Something ruthless. So, you want to leave me to enjoy at the end, do you? Well, I’ll be waiting for you, smiling sweetly. I’ll be a juicy, ripe apple, ever so inviting, right up until the moment you bite into me and discover the razor blade waiting for you inside…

These thoughts spun around in Balot’s head as she assiduously tracked the ebb and flow of the point tally. A casual onlooker wouldn’t have been able to spot any rhyme or reason in the fluctuations of Balot’s betting patterns, and neither could the lady, who commented, “What a fickle little thing you are, my dear, flitting from one thing to another. I remember a time when I myself was like that, once…”

Whether it was because she had just won a big payout, or whether it was her natural high spirits, the lady seemed in exceedingly good humor. Balot nodded meekly, as if to acknowledge that she was indeed feeling adventurous, wanting to try out all sorts of different things. The lady nodded back—good for you. Her large hands grabbed an even larger handful of chips, and she poured them out onto the table.

“I wonder if luck is flowing my way yet? I can feel something big about to burst…” The lady’s chips might as well have been large hunks of bloody meat that she was throwing to the piranhas that were the cards.

Far from satisfying their hunger, though, all she was doing was whetting their appetite.

She was right about one thing, though—something big was coming. Balot felt it too. Something from beyond the point tally. Balot tried to pin down this indefinable something of a feeling.

It wasn’t a feeling exactly like the one she had when firing a gun, nor was it like what she felt when she was in hot pursuit of the roulette ball. It was familiar and strange all at the same time, as if there were some sort of pattern, something she was intimately familiar with, except that the stages were all mixed up. She couldn’t quite work out what it was she was trying find; it seemed to ebb and flow, appear and disappear. How to nail it? She thought deep and hard.