Talia
How did she think she was going to win the tournament when she hadn’t even touched a card in years?
I’ve got a secret weapon nobody else has, she reminded herself.
Don’t be emotional. Do the math.
The probability of the remaining player having a better hand was not high.
Bluff it is. She pushed 5,000 chips into the pot and hoped it was enough to fool him.
“Nice try,” her opponent said. “Call.”
Fuck. Talia glanced at her watch.
But she shook her head at herself. She was still in the tournament—no need to cheat. Talia did wish she had her phone or Omni 3Ds, because Ideal Life Queen Elizabeth would surely have had a good suggestion for a mental reset, but of course, devices weren’t allowed in the tournament.
Okay, fine, her watch might technically be a “device,” but she hadn’t turned it in at the ballroom door with everything else, because they hadn’t asked her to. It was analog… or something.
Talia started the next round with a pair of aces. Score! As Sam would experience later today (in version nine of playing against Louise Enger), two aces were hard to beat.
Unfortunately, probability was not on Talia’s side for the rest of the cards.
She lost everything.
“What? No!”
“Seat open at table one,” the tournament director announced.
Talia gaped at her losing hand.
That was it. She was out of the tournament at 1,244th place.
No winnings.
$5,000 buy-in, gone.
And the $1 million hole for Ideal Life now felt like a bottomless pit.
“Ma’am,” the dealer said, when she hadn’t moved. “You’ll have to vacate that seat now.”
She looked up at him.
Then Talia shook her head. “No. I won’t. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Ma’am,” the dealer said, louder. “You must—”
She rewound the watch’s crown to the beginning of level 5, and this time, she played it right. She kicked ass in level 6, too.
That’ll show ’em.
There was a spring in her step as she exited the ballroom for the second break.
They had an hour before competition would resume, so the hotel had set up a small buffet in the corridor.
With over 700 players still in the tournament, though, the hall was crammed to the gills with people waiting for food.
By the time Talia got anywhere near those steam trays, they would be empty and she’d hardly be able to eat before she’d have to report back into the ballrooms.
So instead, she went out to her car, drove to a sandwich place a few minutes away, and grabbed a roast beef and cheddar on rye—analytically, it seemed like the right balance of protein, fat, and whole grains to sustain her for three more rounds of play before the next break. Assuming she made it to the next break.
Talia looked at her watch.
It’s still just in case, she told herself.
She knew it wasn’t technically fair what she was doing, but she thought of Erin and Jody and Jonathan and everyone else at Ideal Life.
Talia was here to save the company so they could keep doing what they believed in.
So she could save them from a future under Omni’s reign.
She got back to the Magnolia Hotel with ten minutes to spare and stopped into the ladies’ room. When she exited, she gasped and retreated, plastering herself inside the door.
Sam was in the main corridor outside the ballrooms, filling his water bottle at a dispenser.
What is he still doing here? Level 6, when he lost, ended an hour ago. He should have been home at Lighthouse Books by now.
Unless he hadn’t lost? Talia took out her phone and looked up the Summer Million players still in competition.
Samuel Chang was definitely still in the tournament for level 7.
“How?” she asked.
A woman washing her hands at the sink looked up. It was Louise Enger, the woman Sam had previously lost to during level 6 over the course of eight iterations.
“How what?” Louise said. “Do you need help?”
Talia shook her head. “Sorry—just talking to myself. Actually… what table were you at in the last level?”
“Table 14 in ballroom B. Why?”
“I thought you looked familiar is all, but I’m in ballroom A, so I must be mistaken.”
Internally, though, the cogs in Talia’s brain were whirring at full speed. During the earlier rewinds when she’d been trying to help Sam win, both he and Louise had been at table 23. Why had Louise’s table changed now?
Maybe because me being here shifted the player assignments for the tournament, and that set off a cascade of little variations in how each hand was played because there were sometimes different people at the table than before?
And something in that butterfly effect allowed Sam to make it through level 6, whereas he had lost eight times in a row when the rewinds were identical.
Talia had known that her past rewinds would result in small butterfly effects, but she’d never actively sought out what had changed.
She’d only focused on the big revisions and hoped that the other ones were inconsequential.
You can’t be sure that any change you make would have made this world better or worse, she’d reasoned.
But this change—Sam still being in the tournament—was okay, right? It was great news that he was still here. If he placed higher, he could win something to put toward the bookstore.
So why was Talia hiding from him in the restroom?
Guilt wrapped its tentacles around her heart.
Not only had she broken her promise (many times over) not to use the watch on him, but she was also cheating.
Talia thought the end justified the means—by winning the tournament, she would prevent Omni from merging Ideal Life with CerebraLink and creating a Frankenstein AI capable of brain horrors she couldn’t even think about.
But that didn’t mean Sam would see her “strategic use” of the rewind mechanism in the same way.
She wasn’t even sure if she really saw it that way.
It wasn’t until Louise opened the bathroom door and left that Talia poked her head out to check if Sam was still there.
The coast was clear.
She slipped back into ballroom A. At least for the rest of today, the tournament would keep the players in their respective ballrooms, just whittling down the number of tables in each.
Tomorrow, they would consolidate into one room, and if Talia and Sam were both still playing then, there would be no way to avoid him.
But she’d figure out later what to do if that happened.
Right now, she had level 7 to concentrate on.
Talia breezed through the rest of the evening.
Well, perhaps “breeze” wasn’t the right word, since she had the benefit of redoing her strategy should any particular hand not go as she’d hoped.
At first, she wasn’t sure if she should keep using her watch, since it was clearly having an inadvertent effect on Sam’s life, too.
But Talia decided that because she was working toward a greater good, it was okay.
Besides, Sam had lost in level 6 all the previous times; the fact that he had made it past that now was gravy, right?
The only side effect was that headache, nausea, and dizziness were now her constant companions.
But for better or for worse, she was getting used to functioning with a baseline of feeling ill.
Maybe this was what it was like to have morning sickness.
(Was Libby feeling this way? She reminded herself to catch up with her sister once this was all over.)
In any case, if Talia messed something up because of brain fog or otherwise, she simply undid it and tried again. A little sicker, but with knowledge of what the other hands would be and what she needed to do to win.
By the time level 10 concluded, Talia was ranked 82nd out of the remaining 471 players.
Sam was doing even better, ranked 16th. Not that the current standings really mattered; all that counted was what you were ranked when you finally lost all your chips, and you’d better be in the top 200 if you wanted to go home with anything.
Still, it was a relief to make it to the second (and final) day of play. Hopefully Sam wouldn’t look past the top twenty-five or so names on the leaderboard tonight, and Talia could avoid talking to him about her presence at the tournament until tomorrow.
As she walked out of ballroom A, though, Sam stood waiting with his arms crossed.
“What are you doing here, Tal?”
“Um…” A couple of other players stopped, anticipating some drama and hoping to eavesdrop.
Talia crossed the hallway to Sam and lowered her voice a little. “I decided to sign up and play in the tournament.”
The right corner of his mouth twitched. “You don’t play anymore. You haven’t since college. And never in a real tournament.” He looked pointedly at her watch. “And yet here you are, ranked in the top one hundred. How curious.”
“Sam, I can explain.”
“No need. I understand perfectly.” He turned and strode away.
“It’s not like that!” Talia chased him down the hall and grabbed his arm. Now people were definitely watching.
Sam jerked out of her grasp, turned, and glared straight down at her.
Talia shrank. Never in their years of friendship had he looked at her with so much anger.
So much disappointment. “It’s not like what?
” Aware of the onlookers, his voice was a furious whisper now.
“Not like you using that watch to go back in time and redo any hands that didn’t turn out the way you wanted? ”
“I swear the money’s not for me. Come on, Sam—you know me! I have to do this because I found out something awful will probably happen if I let this deal with Omni go through, so I have to kill the acquisition, but there’s a one-million-dollar termination fee in the agreement.”
He kept staring at her.
“The company doesn’t have that kind of money to spare, so if I don’t come up with it, Ideal Life goes bankrupt. All my employees lose their jobs. Everything we’ve worked hard to build—a really amazing technology that could be helpful to the world if it’s in the right hands—will go up in flames.”
Sam bit his lip. She hoped he could understand. “And what about me?” he asked.
“What about you?”
That was the wrong thing to say, though, because he clenched his fists and turned to walk away.
“I’m sorry,” Talia said. “That didn’t come out right.”
“My parents are waiting at the lighthouse to take me out to dinner. I have to go.”
“Sam, please.”
He turned back around slowly. “You promised not to rewind my life without telling me. But I’ve been here at this tournament, too, apparently replaying every level whenever you decided to undo it and try again.
Were you even going to tell me? Did you think I wouldn’t notice at some point that the woman I love was on the leaderboards? ”
Talia’s mouth fell open.
“The… the woman you love?” Talia frowned. “But when I kissed you, you didn’t kiss me back. I thought—”
“When you kissed me?” Sam’s brows knit in confusion for a split second. And then his eyes went wide as realization dawned.
Oh, fuck.
Talia reached for her watch.
“Don’t you dare.” Sam wrapped his fingers around her wrist so she couldn’t wind the crown. “So today isn’t the first time you’ve undone my life?”
“Sam, I—”
“Who are you anymore, Talia?”
She looked at the ugly carpet at her feet and shook her head.
“I’m the same person you’ve always known.
I’m just… I’m trying to make things better, but sometimes I do it wrong!
Let me rewind today. Please, Sam.” She looked up at him now.
“Let me go back to the beginning and tell you that I’m going to play in the tournament. Let me make it right.”
He closed his eyes for a long moment.
When he opened them again, the light that usually danced in them was gone. He let go of her wrist and said quietly, “Ideal Life made you obsessed with the future, but the watch opened up that same addiction to the past, too. And now you’re suspended in the middle.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Sam sighed. “You can’t move forward, because you keep rehashing the things that just happened.
And even when you aren’t, you’re incapable of being in the present, because you’re always thinking about how you can be better in the future.
But when are you going to stop trying to optimize every situation, Tal?
When are you going to stop rehearsing for life and actually live it? ”
“I am. It’s just… wouldn’t you want the best version of your life if you could have it?”
Sam shook his head sadly. “I liked my life exactly the way it was.”
And with that, he finally did turn and walk away.