The Department of Favourable Outcomes

Hidden inside the world's most boring government agencies — offices no one would ever Google — there are people who can feel luck the way you feel heat. The most powerful of them can push. They can curve luck — bend the odds, tip the scales, make the impossible land on the right number. They've been doing this for millennia. They are the reason your flight didn't crash. They are the reason it did. Because luck is conserved. Every miracle costs something. Every lucky break thins the odds somewhere else. And the people who manage this invisible economy — allocating fortune, balancing deficits, deciding who gets the good day and who doesn't — are not wizards. They're civil servants. They file reports. They argue about budgets. Lev Voldin, nineteen, an economics student in St. Petersburg, has just hit four roulette numbers in a row in an illegal basement casino and discovered that he can feel the weight of chance. Two thousand kilometres away, in Moscow, a glass table full of sand just shivered. He is one of them but he doesn’t know it. And nothing about his life is going to be ordinary again.