Rafael Santoro's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Rafael Santoro lost three thousand crowns in one hour, and he could not say how. He stood at the roulette table in his own casino, watching his clockwork wheel spin. He wanted a wheel that no cheat could ever fool. Tonight it was fooling him. A young man in a grey coat kept winning. Rafael read faces for a living. His father had taught him that. But he could not read the trick behind this man's luck. He flipped a chip across his knuckles and watched the wheel slow. Red again. The young man laughed and pulled in his winnings. Rafael's own clockwork accessories ticked steady time against his wrist. The wheel did not keep time like that. It should have. Every spin should have been honest. Someone had reached inside his machine. Rafael waved the dealer off and closed the table. He carried the wheel to a back room himself. He turned it over and studied the gears beneath the base. Nothing looked wrong. That was the problem. He had built this thing to be perfect, and a stranger in a grey coat had beaten it. He needed a second pair of eyes. He knew only one man who might see what he could not. He sent for Cho Cogsmith. Cho ran a curiosity shop and never stopped talking. He arrived with goggles pushed up on his head, trinkets clinking as he walked. He carried a strange gadget in one hand, turning it over even as he crossed the room. "Rafael! You never call unless something's broken. What is it? Wheel? Clock? Both? Oh, both. Look at this poor thing." He set his gadget down and bent over the roulette wheel at once. "A man beat it," Rafael said. "Fifteen spins. I can't find how." Cho grinned. "That's because you're looking at the gears. Nobody touched your gears." He spun the wheel by hand. His fingers stopped on the brass crank at the side. He pressed it, then pulled. It shifted a hair too easily. "There. Feel that? Someone filed the crank pin. A quick twist mid-spin and the wheel drags left. Toward red. You'd never see it from the floor." He wiggled the loose pin between two fingers. Rafael took the pin and rolled it in his palm. Filed clean. A patient job, done over many nights. The young man had not cheated the wheel tonight. He had prepared it long before. "Then he's been in this room before," Rafael said. "With time to work." Cho's grin dropped. "That's not a lucky gambler. That's someone with a key." Rafael closed his fist around the filed pin. The trick was solved. But a worse thing now stood plain. His locked back room was not locked to everyone. Someone he trusted had let a cheat inside his casino. Rafael flipped the chip once, caught it, and did not smile. He meant to find the hand that held the second key.