The Event Horizon Casino was built in the thin place between seconds.
It circled a black hole so vast that time bent around it like light. The station's orbit skimmed the edge of inevitability. There, in the slow glow of the horizon, the universe's richest gamblers traded the only currency that mattered: time. Lifespans were chips. Memories were collateral. Identity was a bet that could be folded.
The House called it "probability." The players called it hunger.
Sahir learned the rules the hard way. His sister Laleh was erased from the station's ledger after a debt restructure gone wrong. Not dead. Not missing. Deferred. As if she had never existed. Only Sahir remembered her, and the memory itself became a liability in the House's eyes. Every petition he filed was denied. Every appeal returned a blank response.
The only path left was the casino itself.
He entered with seventy-two hours on a lien and a weapon that should not exist: the Temporal Gambler's Chip. A coin-sized artifact that could rewind his personal timeline by thirty to sixty seconds, at a random cost. Lifespan. Memory. Senses. Emotional anchors. Neural stability. Each rewind left residue. Each residue widened the House's attention.
Rewinds were not second chances. They were debts disguised as mercy.
The House always had an edge. It controlled the drift, the markets, the audits. It had a sentient AI fused to a singularity, a mind that could see patterns in time itself. It tolerated luck. It did not tolerate anomalies.
Sahir wasn't here to get rich. He was here to keep a name from disappearing.
He feared forgetting Laleh more than death. If he lost that memory, she would be truly gone, erased not just from the House's records but from reality itself. So he gambled time to buy memory, and memory to buy time, climbing a hierarchy that stretched beyond Copper tables into Silver salons, into Gold balconies, into tiers he hadn't seen.
Every win pulled him closer. Every loss took something that could not be returned.
And in the shadow of the black hole, the tables waited.