Sham hurried out of the Loopkeeper compound, scanning his surroundings for signs of Kryl. He saw nothing, only the black and brown rolling piles of debris that formed this part of the city.

‘Think, Sham. Where will he head?’ Recollection prompted him.

Sham continued onwards, stumbling for a moment as he caught his foot on loose brickwork, but feeling none of the pain in his ankle that he might’ve done pre-Vigour. In front of him, the Tower loomed, its height even more dramatic in this district, contrasted with the levelled buildings around him. To the Diplomatic District. That was where Kryl would head—either for the district itself or the nearest tram stop.

A disturbing thought had occurred to Sham, back when he’d been talking with Ariel. Kryl was desperate to break the Loop—Sham already knew that—but he’d never offered a compelling reason as to why he’d go so far as to lock in the death of his own sister. Kryl was many things, but he wasn’t mad. He was many, many things, but Sham couldn’t believe he’d let his own sister die.

Not without good reason. Not without a reason that Kryl hadn’t seen fit to share.

Finally Sham caught sight of the man’s long back coat, its tails flapping in the gentle wind up ahead. He slowed, settled into Kryl’s pace, and kept a comfortable distance between them. After all, if Sham was going to follow him, he couldn’t risk being seen.

He followed Kryl through the twisting streets closest to Haven’s centre, expecting to see the man pass through to the Sunset District to some other—calculatedly unmentioned—hideout. But instead of heading straight through, or boarding a tram out, the man Sham pursued swung a left. Towards the Dripcanal.

‘Think you know what this means, don’t—’ Recollection started.

Sham physically batted the thought away, as though the movement would actually achieve something. ‘Yeah, yeah. I got it. Guess there’s no need to follow him now.’

But Sham stayed on him anyway. He knew that Kryl was keeping things from him. From Riot, too. And how could he know what? Maybe there were other hideouts out there, maybe there were other old friends and associates. Maybe Kryl wouldn’t head straight for Harcourt’s casino.

Sham arrived outside Harcourt’s casino a little under an hour later, having followed Kryl directly there and having remarked increasingly over the course of his journey how much he was enjoying this whole Vigour business—which the living skill was massively smug about, naturally. In days now past, Sham wouldn’t have been able to even dream of walking across—or… pursuing a mysterious acquaintance across—a third the breadth of the city. Not without suffering the consequence of the sickness rising within him.

But now… nothing. Only—

‘Strength,’ Vigour agreed.

‘Yes.’

A bouncer at the casino door flashed Sham a curious glance as he walked on through—likely relating to his clothing being shabbier than their usual patron—but made no attempt to stop him. Relieved, Sham stepped through the doors, out of the yellow hues of dusk and into the bright lights of the casino.

The gambler’s den was heaving on this night, and the mood merry. Patrons from all around the city—

‘No,’ Recollection interrupted.

Patrons from all around the Sunset District were dressed in their finest garments and risking amount of money that Sham couldn’t have dreamed of possessing in a lifetime.

‘If the roof were to fall in, would it be a great loss?’ Vigour asked.

Sham struggling to resist answering in the positive. He didn’t like to joke about loss of life, even… Even with these sorts. The buzz was to be expected at this point in the Loop, Sham supposed. The fear of the Loopkeepers had not yet had time to take a hold of the city’s richest citizens, not yet having had the days to worm its way into their paranoid souls.

He eventually caught sight of Kryl at the far side of the casino floor, talking to Harcourt in the very spot that Riot and Sham had first found him. It was from where he surveilled his domain, Sham supposed—the raised bar area affording him a vantage point over the dozens of green felt tables.

Sham kept to the edges of the room, using the crowds around tables to shield him from sight, only occasionally catching glances of Kryl through gaps between bodies. As he skirted around the room as close as he dared, Kryl and Harcourt suddenly made a move, striding with purposes towards the rear of the building, to the employee-only area.

Only one security guard stood at the access to this area, his eyes scouring the crowd for trouble. There was only this man, then, that Sham would have to sneak past.

He approached the rearmost crowded table—a craps table at which a buzz of excitement was quickly building—and acted as though he was bewitched by the action unfolding. Sham glanced at the bouncer by the employee-only area, at the table, at his surroundings. He needed a distraction.

[HEART OF JANUS] A DISTRACTION: SUCCESS

There’s an awfully big stack of chips on that table. An awful amount of money depending on the next roll of the dice. You know just what to do.

Vigour began to snicker; he too knew what had to happen next. Taking great glee in the matter, Sham positioned his knee next to the table, tested the swing of his leg, and then…

FEAT OF STRENGTH (VIGOUR)

Nice stack of chips you have there. Would be a shame if someone…

At the strike of Sham’s knee against the side of the table, three separate stacks of chips fell across the playing area, obscuring who had bid on what just at the moment that the dice roll was announced as an eight. Riotous shouts erupted around the table, both better and spectator alike grabbing at one another and so quickly placing blame.

Sham retreated from the table and watched out of the corner of his eye as the bouncer at the rear of the building rushed over to the table. Ten seconds later, Sham was into the back rooms and completely out of sight.

Here stretched a long corridor painted in a hue of beige pale enough that suggested it had once been white. It didn’t seem so much that this area of the casino was in disrepair—far from it, really—but that without patrons heading down this way it didn’t require the care and attention that was given to the decoration of the casino floor.

Sham passed from plain beige door to plain beige door, listening for signs of life inside, when suddenly he heard voices approaching from ahead of him, from around the corner at the end of the corridor. Sham jumped into a room at random, thanking his lucky stars that it was only a store room, and then watched through the cracked door at the voices approached.

As they came closer, Sham recognised them as Kryl and Harcourt. Who else would be back here, he supposed. They walked past his door speaking about something about a return, or someone returning—Sham couldn’t understand it without context—and soon were out of earshot once more. He opened the door slightly further so he could see where the suspicious pair were headed, and watched as they entered a door at the far end of the corridor, leaving it ajar. Even down the length of the corridor, Sham could hear loud metal clunks, as though a large security device was being unlocked. It was the sorts of sounds he was used to hearing in his… Well, in the old days.

‘No time like the present…’ Recollection muttered, and this prompting sent Sham on his way back down the length of the corridor. As he approached the door, Kryl and Harcourt’s voices become comprehensible once more.

‘...take court at the Tower, I suspect,’ Harcourt was saying.

Sham peered around the edge of the door, moving as slowly and as quietly as possible, and then was forced to stifle a gasp at what he saw before him. Through a giant metal door, in the centre of a pristine room—even more pristine than the casino floor itself—and sitting atop a small plinth on a purple velvet cushion was…

‘The crown,’ Recollection said, his voice sounding just as surprised as Sham was.

And it was. It was the crown. Not just any crown, but the crown. The crown that Sham remembered from his childhood. The crown that once sat atop an unpopular king’s head. The crown that was seized in the coup. The crown of a toppled monarch.

Head spinning, Sham staggered away from the door and back down the corridor, so many thoughts invading his brain at once that he struggled to focus on any one of them. What did this mean? How could Harcourt have this? How could it involve Kryl? And what would the government’s agents do if they knew?

Sham gulped back the shock as he strode back out onto the casino floor, not quite recognising that the bouncer was back in his place by the entrance to the rear rooms. He continued walking none the less, as though he had done nothing wrong, as though it had been his place to be there. But…

‘Oi!’ Sham heard behind him. He froze. Perhaps this voice wasn’t shouting at him. It was a casino, after all; maybe someone was cheating. Was counting cards, or something. Maybe—

‘Oi!’ the same voice shouted again.

Sham turned on the spot, slowly, to spot a broad, muscular bouncer staring at him from across the casino floor. At his side, small in comparison—though not a short man, by any means—Kryl glared at Sham, his arm raised, his finger pointing squarely at him.

Sham turned on the spot and began to hurry for the door, not quite running in case he alerted one of the other bouncers, but moving as quick as he felt he could get away with. As he passed between the blackjack tables, however, another guard—just as broad as the first—stepped in front of him.

‘Throw something at him!’ Vigour shouted in Sham’s mind.

Sham reached for the first thing he could see, and launched it at the assailant’s head.

FEAT OF STRENGTH (VIGOUR)

Err… you know you just chucked a loose stack of playing cards at him, right?

The cards fluttered across the casino, slowing in a fraction of a second by the resistance of the air, and rained down around the burly guard.

‘...Something heavy?’

‘Balls,’ Sham mumbled, meeting the bouncer’s confused gaze. At once, they both began to sprint. Though Sham was, as of late, as strong as he could ever want to be—

‘You’re welcome, mate.’

—he was hardly quick. That would have been Fleet of Foot’s whole deal, not Vigour’s. And so he soon felt a hand on the scruff of his shirt, yanking him backwards towards the floor.

As Sham fell, he made the decision to use this momentum to his advantage, thinking himself all the cleverer for it. He curled his back, raised his legs as far forwards as he could, and then fell into a roll.

The roll itself was successful. The direction of travel… not so much.

Sham’s feet collided with the bouncer while still upside-down and mid-roll, and the hard stop made it difficult to orient himself. But the muscular man standing over him was groaning, Sham noticed, and it no wonder really; his feet had collided with the flesh between the guard’s legs.

Seizing the advantage, he made another go at running, hopping atop and over a roulette table and sending chips flying in the process. He jumped back down on the other side to find the bouncers not far behind him, and continued onwards.

A patron—maybe enraged by the chaos Sham had been causing to her chips—stuck a leg out in front of him, and Sham didn’t have time to react. He tumbled to the floor and began scrambling underneath the table as a pair of hands wrapped themselves around his ankle.

Sham grabbed at the heavy table leg to stop himself from being dragged back out into the open, but this had the impact only of giving the security guards more time to approach. Before he knew it, there were so many pairs of arms yanking him out that even a legendary grade Vigour skill wasn’t enough to stop it.

The four burly men hauled him out into the open, and Sham stared up at them as two new faces wrestled their way in: one belonging to the casino owner, one belonging to Kryl.

‘You,’ the latter snarled. ‘What are you…’

‘A friend of yours?’ his equally posh friend asked.

‘Not exactly.’

‘Saw him come out the back, boss,’ one of the bouncers added.

Harcourt and Kryl glanced at one another with a wary gaze. ‘Do you think he…’ the casino owner started, leaving the rest for Kryl to fill in.

Sham kept his face neutral, determined not to give anything away, but Kryl was just paranoid enough to see through it.

‘Into the vault,’ Riot’s brother spat.

‘You need us to—’ one of the guards began to ask, but Kryl cut him off with the pulling of a revolver from his jacket.

‘No need.’

And so soon Sham found himself bound to a chair in a vaulted room, the crown of a discarded monarch as well as two snobbish gentleman looming over him, and all he could think to say was, ‘So what the fuck is all this, then?’