It was Day 2 of The Big Drop. Eram had woken up early. Or, more accurately, he had given up on sleep once the pearl dawn light had entered the hotel room. Sharing a bed with Gehna had made for a surreal night, and he was almost sure he hadn’t slept. How could he have? He had been too aware of her body beside his. He had tried to keep as still as possible so as not to wake her, but Gehna held no such lofty ideal. She twisted her body ninety degrees every quarter hour, unconsciously mimicking the clockwork movement of a minute needle—face up, face right, face down, face left, face up again. This meant that every hour, for a brief period, she was facing him. It was the anticipation of those few minutes that prevented him from falling asleep. Tendrils of her hair tickling his cheek, the natural scent of her skin, the cat-like purr she made in her throat. Gehna was an abundant, almost luxuriant sleeper. She used about three pillows anyway, nestled all about her, and Eram got the distinct impression that he was the fourth. On occasion Gehna would throw a leg over his and hook an arm across his chest. He didn’t mind, except it made his task of letting her sleep undisturbed that much tougher; he could lie still—arms and legs unmoving—and even stifle his yawns and coughs, but how was he to control an erection or the thumping of his heart? Eram couldn’t believe that neither had woken her.

The thing that had got Gehna muttering under her breath was the Delta Queen. She had been to a proper casino in Atlantic City, where her parents had taken her along on their annual summer vacation. But offshore casinos in Goa attracted a wholly different crowd. More than half of the tournament participants were young men in their twenties with bad skin, and the rest were older, overweight men who looked as though they mismanaged textile businesses and shouted at their wives if the rice was cold. Gehna knew she was being judgy but couldn’t help herself.

Eram could feel Gehna’s disapproval in the way that she narrowed her eyes at him.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Having fun?’

‘Where are the girls, Rat?’

‘Girls? What girls?’

‘Exactly. This place is a sausage fest. I don’t like it. Don’t any girls play poker?’

‘Sure they do.’ Eram glanced around the main deck where the players were slowly finding their way to their assigned tables. Yesterday he had noticed a handful of young women sprinkled amongst the overwhelmingly male field. ‘Look, there’s one.’

He sounds, Gehna thought, as excited about the discovery of a poker-playing girl as if he were a conservationist who’d just spotted a kakapo. The kakapo was a type of flightless parrot so rare there were only a hundred and forty-eight of them on the planet. Seeing a single one only highlights the scarcity.

The girl Eram had pointed out was collecting her chip stack from the cashier. She was wearing skinny jeans, a V-neck cropped tee that emphasized her breasts, striking eyeshadow and dangly hoops in her ears that flashed whenever she flicked her hair, which she did often enough. Gehna knew her. Or rather, she knew the type; women working in male-dominated spaces either dressed conservatively, even dowdily, in order to slip under the radar of the male gaze, or they went the other way. The only poker-playing girl on the Delta Queen that day was clearly the latter. She was owning her sexy and Gehna silently rooted for her to do well.