“Nothing.” She sounded unconvincing even to herself.

He raised his eyebrows. “Then stay. Play a round with me.… Please.”

Kira hesitated. As much as she didn’t want to talk, she also didn’t want to be alone. Not right then. Not with the leaden ache in her chest and the fighting going on in the system around them.

That by itself wasn’t enough to change her mind, but then she thought of the scars on Falconi’s arms. Perhaps she could get him to tell her the story of how he acquired them. The idea appealed to her. Besides, there was a part of her—buried deep inside—that really did want to tell someone about what she’d learned. Confession might not make things any better, but perhaps it would help lessen the pain in her heart.

If only Alan were there. More than anything, Kira wished she could talk with him. He would understand. He would comfort and commiserate and perhaps even help her find a way of solving the galactic-level problem she’d caused.

But Alan was dead and gone. All she had was Falconi. He would have to do.

“What if you ask something I really don’t want to answer?” Kira said, a bit of strength entering her voice.

“Then you fold.” But Falconi said it as if he were daring her otherwise.

A sense of rebelliousness stirred within Kira. “Fine.” She settled back down, and he let go of her wrist. “So teach me.”

Falconi examined the hand she’d poked and then rubbed it against his thigh. “It’s a points game. Nothing special.” He shuffled the cards and started to deal: three cards for her, three for him, and four in the middle of the table. All of them facedown. The remainder of the deck he set aside. “The goal is to get as many sevens or times sevens as possible.”

“How? By multiplying the cards?”

“Adding. One plus six. Ten plus four. You get the idea. Jacks are eleven, queens twelve, kings thirteen. Aces low. No jokers, no wild cards. Since each player has seven cards, counting the shared ones,” Falconi indicated the four cards on the deck, “the highest natural hand is a straight sweep: four kings, two queens, and an ace. That gives you—”

“Seventy-seven.”

“For a score of eleven. Right. Cards always keep their face value, unless—” He held up a finger. “—unless you get all the sevens. Then sevens are worth double. In that case, the highest hand is a full sweep: four sevens, two kings, and a nine. Which gives you…” He waited for her to do the math.

“Ninety-one.”

“For a score of thirteen. Betting is normally done after each shared card is turned over, but we’ll make it easy and just bet once, after the first card. There’s a catch, though.”

“Oh?”

“You can’t use your overlays for the adding. Makes it too easy.” And a message popped up in the corner of Kira’s vision. She opened it to see a prompt from a privacy app that would lock their overlays for as long as they both chose to use it.