The God's Game System

Chapter 11

The sedan pulled away from the Grand Palace with Croft's black envelope still tucked inside Leo's jacket, and before the car reached the end of the block, he opened the system market.

"Sovereign," he said under his breath, keeping his eyes on the back of the driver's head. "I need to see what people are hiding. Is there anything for that?"

The red interface unfolded in the air in front of him, and the familiar voice rolled into his head with open amusement. "You are asking for a skill? Not paper money, not a larger hotel room, but an actual skill?" The Sovereign made a sound that might have been a laugh. "I may need a moment to recover."

"Is there one or not?"

"There is a basic appraisal function. Two hundred points."

[Purchase Skill: Eye of Truth]

[Cost: 200 System Points]

[Effect: Reveals true market values, hidden debts, physical condition, and lies in the people and documents you examine.]

Leo pressed confirm. A cool pressure settled behind his eyes, and when he blinked it away, the street outside looked the same as before, except that every billboard, car, and pedestrian now seemed to carry a second layer, as if someone had pinned a page of notes behind each of them that he could read whenever he wanted.

[Remaining Balance: 300 System Points.]

"Do not waste it on shop clerks," the Sovereign said, and then he was gone.

St. Jude's County Hospital was where the city sent people who couldn't afford anywhere better, and the third-floor ward showed it. Gurneys were parked end to end along the corridor, a television bolted to the wall was playing the morning news to nobody, and every chair in the waiting area held someone who looked like they'd been there since yesterday.

Leo saw Mia before she saw him.

She was sitting in a wheelchair against the far wall with an IV pole beside her and a canvas overnight bag on her lap, the same blue bag she'd carried to every hospital stay for the last four years. An orderly stood next to her filling out a form on a clipboard, and through the open door behind them, Leo could see that someone had already stripped her bed.

She was staring at the floor. With a sick turn in his stomach, he understood that she'd been sitting there a long time, long enough for the people walking past to stop noticing her.

"Mia."

Her head came up. For a second she only stared at him, and then her whole face crumpled in a way she tried to hide by pressing her lips together, which only made it worse. "You came," she said. "They told me they couldn't reach you. They said your phone was off, and I thought..." She stopped and shook her head hard, as if she could knock the thought loose. "I thought something happened to you."

Leo crouched in front of the wheelchair so they were eye to eye. "Something did happen," he said. "But I'm here."

He turned to the orderly. "Where's billing?"

The billing window sat at the end of the corridor behind a pane of scratched plastic, and the woman on the other side looked as worn out as the building. She pulled up Mia's account, told him the overdue balance was eight thousand four hundred dollars, and waited for whatever excuse he was about to give her, because she had obviously heard a hundred of them already that morning.

Leo slid his card under the plastic. "Please pay that, and put fifty thousand on her account for future treatment. I'd like her moved to a private room with security on the door, and I want a specialist assigned to her full time."

The woman ran the card and then checked her screen twice, as if it might change its mind. When it didn't, she picked up her phone and started making calls.

An orderly arrived to take Mia upstairs before the receipt had finished printing, and Leo walked beside the wheelchair all the way to the elevator and up to the seventh floor. The room they wheeled her into had a real door, a window that looked out over the river, and a bed with sheets that hadn't been washed thin. Two security guards took up positions in the hallway outside, and the orderly kept glancing back at Leo on his way out, as though he were trying to work out who this man was.

Mia waited until the door closed. Then she set the canvas bag on the bed and folded her hands on top of it, and Leo watched her knuckles turn pale.

"Leo," she said quietly. "I know about Andres."

He'd been hanging her jacket on the back of the door, and he stopped with it still in his hands.

"One of his men came to the ward last week," she went on. "He sat right next to my bed and asked how I was feeling, and he smiled the whole time. He said my brother owed his boss a lot of money, and that it would be a shame if something happened to either of us." Her voice wobbled, and she waited until it evened out before she continued. "That's where the surgery money came from, isn't it? You borrowed it from a loan shark. For me."

There was no point lying to her, and there never had been. "Yes," he said.

"And now there's fifty thousand dollars sitting on my account." She looked up at him with wet eyes. "So what did you do? Please tell me you didn't borrow from someone worse."

"The debt's paid," Leo said. "All of it, last night. Andres has no reason to come near you again, and if he tries, those two men in the hallway will stop him."

She searched his face for a long moment, and then her expression shifted from fear into confusion. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

"Like what?"

"Like you're reading a menu." She tried to laugh, but it came out thin. "You always get this crease between your eyebrows when you're worried, and you scratch your neck when you're lying, and right now there's nothing there at all. You don't look like you."

Leo realized what she was seeing. The passive skill he'd earned in Andres's warehouse was still running, smoothing every feeling off his face before it could reach the surface. Last night it had kept him alive in a room full of armed men. In front of his sister, it made him look like he didn't care.

Turn it off, he told the Sovereign.

The answer came back almost at once, flat and unbothered. "Passive skills do not have switches, boy. It hides what you feel from everyone who looks at you. It does not stop to ask who is looking."

So Leo did the only thing left to him. He sat on the edge of the bed, took both of her hands, and said out loud what his face wouldn't show her.

"I was terrified, Mia. Last night I thought I was going to lose you, and I've never been that scared in my life. I can't tell you where the money came from yet, but I promise you it's mine, it's clean, and nobody is ever going to come after you for it. I need you to believe me, because right now my face is useless."

Mia looked down at their hands for a while. Then she gave a small, wet laugh and wiped her nose on the sleeve of her hospital gown. "Your face has always been useless," she said. "I'm just used to being able to read it."

"Read this instead," he said, and squeezed her hands.

She leaned forward until her forehead rested against his shoulder, and he felt her breathing shake for a minute before it settled. Neither of them moved. Outside the window, a barge was working its way down the river, and Leo followed it the whole length of the glass, because that was easier than thinking about how close he'd come to never sitting here again.

The door opened without a knock.

The woman who came in was reading a chart as she walked, and she kept reading it all the way across the room. She looked to be in her thirties, with dark hair twisted up and held in place by a pen, a paper cup of coffee in her free hand, and a brown stain on the cuff of her white coat that she had either missed or stopped caring about.

"Mia," she said, finally looking up, and her voice gentled when she spoke to the girl in the bed. "I'm Dr. Hale. I'll be handling your care from now on." Then she turned to Leo, and the warmth left her voice. "And you must be the brother who bought me."

Leo stood. "I asked for the best specialist in the building."

"And administration gave you the one who was already awake," she said. "I'm on hour thirty-one of my shift, Mr. Leo, so let me save us both some time. Money buys a nicer room and a nurse who answers the call button. It doesn't buy test results." She nodded toward the door. "Can I talk to you outside?"

Leo used the Eye of Truth on her for the first time, almost without meaning to, and a thin column of text appeared at the edge of his vision.

[Dr. Serena Hale. Nephrology.]

[Condition: Severe sleep deprivation.]

[Last statement: True.]

[Concealed: Fear.]

He read the last line twice. Whatever she wanted to tell him in the hallway, it frightened her enough that she was hiding it.

"I'll be right back," he told Mia, and followed the doctor out.

In the corridor, Serena set her coffee on a supply cart, woke the tablet tucked under her arm, and turned the screen toward him. It showed a grey scan of a kidney, and scattered through the tissue were white shapes with thin branches spreading out from their centres, the way frost spreads across a windshield on a winter morning.

"When your sister came in, everyone assumed these were kidney stones," Serena said. "They aren't. Stones are calcium, and calcium shows up a certain way on a scan. These don't match anything. We tried every treatment we have for dissolving deposits, and none of them did a thing, so I sent a sample to the state lab." She swiped to the next image, a lab report with most of its fields left blank. "It came back unclassified, which means the lab doesn't know what it is either."

Leo stared at the white branches on the screen. "So her kidneys aren't failing on their own."

"Her kidneys are failing because something is growing inside them," Serena said. "And it's getting bigger."

Leo noticed he'd stopped breathing and made himself start again. "Then tell me what you need. Equipment, other specialists, a different hospital. Whatever it costs, I'll pay for it."

"I believe you would." She took the tablet back and held it against her chest, and for the first time since she'd walked into the room, she seemed unsure of what to say next. The fear the Eye of Truth had shown him was in her face now, and she had stopped trying to hide it.

"Mr. Leo," she said, "your sister isn't the first patient I've seen with this. She's my third this month. The other two came from the harbour district."

She paused, and her eyes went to the closed door of Mia's room.

"Both of them are dead."