Free The Fall of Chance by Terry McGowan Page A

that irritation only increased as the next dozen posts fell to people he didn’t care about in posts that didn’t concern him. It was only when Crystal was called that his attention spiked.
    Everything went very much to plan for her. Both her parents were doctors, she was smart and she had a whopping Talent Modifier of five in favour of the Medical Order. It worked out that only a double-six could bring about any other result. She rolled an eight and went exactly where expected.
    If Unt got the post he hoped for and anticipated, Crystal was unlikely to be his wife. Bull, on the other hand, shared the same Order and was in with a decent shot. An elbow to the ribs brought attention to that fact, as though he could have missed it.
    Dour old Olissa came shortly after and wound up as a plumber. Unt had no idea how that came about but it seemed somehow fitting. Colun, annoying idiot that he was, came along next and fell into the same Order of Makers. He would be a furniture maker, like his father. Perhaps Colun and Olissa would end up as a couple: it might suit them and it would be a dodged bullet for everyone else.
    It somehow seemed logical that Mélie would come after her friend but the system was designed to avoid logic. She didn’t come out in any of the draws that followed.
    Neither did Unt. The day had started with twelve posts up for grabs in the Managers Order: two Farm Managers and ten others. Two had fallen early on but there was a long gap before the next one fell. After that, they came up and were assigned at fairly regular intervals. Each time, Unt felt fear, then hope when the person got one of the other posts instead. But the field was constantly narrowing and he knew his danger was increasing.
    He imagined a room lit by twelve lamps. When all the lamps had been lit, the room had been full of abundant radiance but as each post went, so did one of the lamps and the room in his head grew dimmer. The loss was imperceptible at first, but as the number of lamps fell, each loss became more significant. The darkness threatened ever-faster.
    On the sixth time that the Managers Order was selected, the first Farm Manager post went. A mousey nothing of a girl named Kel fell into it after her Aptitude Modifier pulled her down from the Clerks. Unt was irritated by the bounce of her curly hair and her steel-rimmed glasses as she nodded her head in excitement.
    It was a big dent to his hopes but he still had a good chance at that point. There were sixty-three places filled at that point: more than halfway through and so long as Unt came up soon, he figured he’d be ok.
    But time ticked over, the numbers kept getting drawn and the posts kept filling. Three other Manager posts had been taken by the time the eighty-fourth candidate was finished. Three posts remained for the Order and one of those was Unt’s.
    Mélie came and went and Unt barely noticed, except to register relief that she wasn’t a Manager. She did well for herself, taking the last Educator post. She was the eighty-ninth candidate and that left twenty-eight left to be drawn.
    At ninety-seven, the world fell in. A wet-mouthed, woolly-headed sap by the name of Kroos took the last Farm Manager job. Unt’s heart and head dropped. He’d met the edge of despair. His future had been dashed and Kroos, hands on cheeks, was actually moaning that he hadn’t got another post.
    And Kroos should have got that job too. He had rolled bang on the money for the Medic post he was after but all the jobs in that Order had gone and one of those jobs had gone to Bull. It was painful to watch someone be handed his dream and then toss it to the floor but far worse was the realisation that he’d done this to himself.
    Bull had got his post among the Carers because of Unt. The man who Bull had taken the place of now had Unt’s post. Unt reflected bitterly that it was true what the elders taught: whenever man interfered with the natural order he only made things worse.
    “Never mind,