Richards’s office, like all the underground spaces of the compound, was little more than a fluorescent box, everything pumped in and filtered. Even the light felt recycled. It was a little after two-thirty in the morning, but Richards got by on less than four hours of sleep a night, he had for years, so he paid this no mind. On the wall above his station, three dozen time-stamped monitors displayed every nook of the compound, from the guards freezing their asses off at the front gate to the vacant mess hall with its empty tables and dozing drink dispensers, to the subject containment areas, two floors below him, with their glowing, infectious cargo, and, farther down, through another fifty feet of rock, to the nuclear cells that powered it all and would keep the lights on, the juice flowing, for a hundred years, give or take a decade. He liked having everything where he could see it at a glance, where he could read it like the cards. Sometime between five and six A.M. they’d be taking a delivery, and he figured he might as well just stay up all night for that. Subject processing took a couple of hours at the most; he could grab a few winks at his desk afterward if he had to.

Then, on the computer screen, he saw the answer. It was right there, under the six: the black queen he needed to move the jack and free up the two and so on. A couple of clicks and it was over. The cards shot up the screen like a pianist’s fingers flying over the keys.

Do you want to play again?

You’re goddamn right he would.

Because the game was the world’s natural state. Because the game was war, it always was, and when wasn’t there a war on, somewhere, to keep a man like Richards in good employ? The last twenty years had been kind to him, a long run at the table with nothing but good news from the cards. Sarajevo, Albania, Chechnya. Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran. Syria, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, Chad. The Philippines and Indonesia and Nicaragua and Peru.