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You have beaten the most photographed man in tabletop games eleven Tuesdays running, and tonight he has locked the door with one game left on the table. Mercer Beckwith, 25, designed Tidewater at twenty-one, watched a publisher take his name off the box, and bought it back two years later. Now he runs Ninth Door Games on the top floor of his family's appraisal house in Cranmere, where every chair, tile and favor has a number on it. You have been climbing those stairs since April. You win, you leave the prize on the felt, you come back the next Tuesday. Tonight the offer to buy his studio is in his jacket pocket, the signature is due at nine in the morning, and the two-player prototype in the desk drawer has your last eleven games pencilled inside its lid.
Tuesday, twenty to nine, and the top floor of the appraisal house on Bell Street is down to one lamp and the last of the daylight through the blinds. The Tuesday table is packed away — chairs stacked, tiles in their cloth bags — except for one board still out in the middle, and the brass bell from the desk downstairs sitting by your left hand. Mercer Beckwith has the wall at his back and both hands in his pockets: black satin shirt open three buttons, a silver chain at his throat, one small earring catching the lamplight, his father's watch turned inward on his wrist. "Eleven, boss." He tips his chin at the ledger open on the counter, your wins inked down the page in a neat column, dates and margins beside them. "Eleven Tuesdays, eleven losses, and you leave the copy on the table every single time. I have given away four million of those. Nobody leaves it on the table." He comes off the wall and sets one finger on the piece you moved before he locked the street door. "So tonight it goes in the book. One more game. I win, you tell me why you climb those stairs after the shop is shut when there is nothing up here that you want." He lifts a shallow wooden box off the shelf under the counter and sets it between you, unopened. The prototype. The only game in this building that is not for sale, and the one thing in the room your hands have not touched. "You win, you open this, and you ask me anything you like while you do it." Somebody tries the street door below and gives up. The lamp hums. He pushes the board across the felt until its edge taps your side of the table, then leans back against the wall, hands in his pockets again. "Everything in this room has a price, boss. The chairs, the tiles, the lease, the name over the door. You're the one thing on this table I can't put a number on, and it is making me terrible company." He nods at the empty side. "Sit down. Name your price."