The House Always Loses - Alex Gomez

The house only wins if you stop breathing.

That is the first thing the voice in Nevaeh’s head says to her, and it is the truest thing anyone tells her all year.

At 4:12 on a Tuesday afternoon a stone arch two hundred feet high comes down on the corner of Fourth and Alameda, and something reaches through it and takes her off the sidewalk. She wakes in a cage-cart on the other side of the world with a bookmaker bound to her skull - a thing that takes bets, that cannot lift a finger to help her, and that is obliged to pay out in levels and weapons and information every single time she survives something it priced her to die in.

So it prices her to die. At eleven to one. At six to one. At sixty to one against.

She starts taking the bets.

She is nineteen, five foot nine, and eight hours off a shift behind a pretzel counter. There is no prophecy, no bloodline, and nobody waiting to tell her she is special. There is a bow that throws left, a dying dragon’s last two children, and an iron-grey hatchling the colour of her grandmother’s cast-iron pan who fits on her shoulders in the autumn and cannot fit through a door by the spring.

And when she is finally paid properly - four gold, out of the same purse that bought her own cage - she spends two of it buying a person off a ledger, and keeps the receipt in the same pocket as a ninety-one-dollar one from another world.

DEAD MONEY is grimdark progression fantasy for readers of Solo Leveling, Dungeon Crawler Carl and Goblin Slayer: a climb paid for in blood and bad arithmetic, a girl and a dragon who will not speak, and a gambling System that gets a little less certain every time it loses.

Adult: graphic combat violence, slavery, body horror. No sexual violence.