Three Moments of an Explosion by China Miéville Read Free Book Online

clouds of blue smoke.
    I showed nothing. Belinda’s hand twitched. I wasn’t afraid anyone noticed but to me it was as if she screamed, “Oh my God!”
    I went into my memory for whatever I had about the Four of Chimneys. What it would do in combination with my other cards. I weighed up possibilities.
    There was a lot of betting. I got tenser and tenser. When I eventually laid down my hand I cannot tell you how much I loved the sound of everyone’s amazement. They were calculating the extra losses my win would mean for them, they were gasping with envy, they were stunned at the sight of the card.
    No one asked what it was. Everyone present was a previous inductee. The only time that ever happened to me.
    People passed me their chips and their extra chips. They wrote down their secrets for me. I wondered what I’d do with the horses and keys that were now mine. I hadn’t only been dealt a hidden card; I’d played it well.
    I’ve told myself repeatedly that it was an instant’s insanity to do what I did, something I can’t explain. But then, I had been perfecting finger-tricks for a long time.
    As everyone relaxed and a heavy-faced ex-soldier picked up the deck and collected our hands, I laughed at some witticism and nodded and barely looked at him as I folded my cards and passed them. I don’t know if Belinda’s hand tightened again. I didn’t fear that the dealer, or anyone else, would notice the fleeting fingertip motion by which I extracted the Four of Chimneys from my hand and slipped it into my cuff.
    I didn’t know if it would still be there when I got home. But I sat in my bathroom and rolled up my sleeve and there it was, waiting to be folded back into the deck so it could leave as it arrived.
    “You’re going to have a long wait,” I whispered.
    Four chimneys, two by two, two facing up, two down, blowing smoke in strong dark blue and black lines.
    I felt shy. I put it away.
    “What a game,” was all Belinda or I ever said about that night. We carried on. We won more than we lost.
    I kept the card in stiff clear plastic in my wallet. I didn’t want to scuff it. Sometimes I’d take it out and glance at those block-print chimneys for a couple of seconds, until I got all anxious, as I did, and turned it over and looked for a lot longer at the back.
    I’ve played with super-expensive decks as well as with the gas-station plastic. Pros aren’t that precious; mostly we use the workhorse deck produced by Bicycle, as close as you can get to a default. It’s had the same meaningless filigree on the back for years. You want choice? It comes in red or blue.
    We’d been playing a red-backed Bicycle deck when I got dealt the Four of Chimneys.
    I kept up my finger exercises. I listened for stories about the hidden cards. I maybe listened extra hard for stories about hands with Chimneys. I was never superstitious but I did develop one tick. I liked to hold the card against my skin. I liked to feel it pressed against me.
    Before a big-pot game, I’d take my Four of Chimneys out of its little case—always with a thrill of excitement, surprise, regret and relief that it was still there—and slip it under a little band on the inside of my right forearm behind my wrist, under my shirt, a kind of simple cuff holdout. It made me feel lucky, is how I thought about it.
    Some freight shipping companies put aside a few cabins for paying customers. You can cross the Atlantic that way. We got word that one of them had set up a floating big-money game. Of course we booked passage. It was expensive, even though it wasn’t as if we were tripping over pleasure-seekers or looking down from our deck onto a sculpted pool. It was a merchant ship: our view was a deck full of containers.
    For two days we kept to ourselves. On the third day, before play, I was out under the sky and someone tapped me on the back.
    “Kid.”
    “Sugarface!”
    I was astonished he was still alive. He looked almost exactly the same.
    “Should have