64

Kai Zhou

October 8, 2047. Washington, D.C.

The defender watched the dealer turn the card. Kai watched the defender, who sat up straighter in his chair and licked his lips. Now Kai knew both of the defender’s hole cards. They were so absurdly easy to read, so clownishly bad at masking their reactions.

“Bet twenty-five thousand.” The defender, whose name was Sidney, slid oversized chips into the pot with his clawed fingers. The motion aired out Sidney’s armpit, causing his stress-stink to waft in Kai’s direction. When defenders were nervous they sweated profusely, and the stink was incredible.

Kai called the bet. This was a good hand to lose. It wouldn’t be obvious, given that Kai had a smaller two pair. He saw the bet and raised forty thousand, not worried about scaring Sidney into folding, because defenders didn’t know what the word meant. If they had a bad hand, most of the time they tried to bluff. They hated losing. Everyone hated losing, but defenders had turned sore losing into an art form. Kai had seen it once firsthand, when a defender named Francois had crushed Pete Sheehy’s head after Sheehy wiped him out with a bluff. What a horrible thing that had been—as bad as anything Kai had seen in the war.

Kai flipped his cards, feigned disappointment as Sidney revealed his paired king-ten, and watched as the defender gleefully raked in the pot.

“You’re a Poker World Series champion,” Sidney said.

“Yes, I am.”

“I’m an outstanding player, if I can beat you.”

“That would follow, yes.” The other human players at the table might have picked up the slightest hint of sarcasm in Kai’s tone, but they wouldn’t dare smirk. Kai’s own face generated nothing but earnestness as he looked up at Sidney.

If Kai had known from the outset how much defenders revered poker, he could have saved himself the stress of spending two months working at a nuclear power plant with no idea what he was doing. He really owed the people at that plant; they’d risked their lives covering for him.

Kai shifted to the left, then the right, trying to find a position that made his hip and side ache less. Sometimes it was hard for him to believe he was not yet thirty years old. He felt eighty.

Sidney raised old Paul Heller’s bet fifty thousand, proclaiming the raise with such ham-handed bravado that even a hamster would know he was bluffing. Kai folded.

He had probably been safer as a fraud in a nuclear power plant than he was playing poker with defenders. Once in a while you had to beat them, or they’d suspect you were patronizing them and they’d kill you. But you’d better be sure they were in a good mood when you beat them, or else they’d kill you then, too.

“Poker is war, disguised as a game,” Sidney proclaimed, apropos of nothing, as he raked in the pot after Paul folded.

Head down, Kai restacked his dwindling pile of chips. He still found it difficult, stacking chips and handling cards with only his left hand. Maybe he always would.

Poker wasn’t war; war was war. And if you lost a war, you’d better let the victors beat you at poker.

Kai’s phone vibrated. He checked it, saw it was a message from Lila.

It was so stupid, so pointless to be jealous, to feel angry at Lila for a situation she could not possibly control. Yet that’s what Kai felt as he read the message. Erik had turned their marriage into an incredibly dysfunctional sort of polyamory.

Yes, he punched, taking his frustration out on the keys. He wanted to say more, but there was always the risk that Erik, or some defender at ultra-paranoid Central Command screening messages for subversive content, might read his message. Another night of babysitting while his wife and her platonic lover went out on the town. Kai wasn’t sure how much more of this he could stand, but in the new order of things, he had no choice but to stand it.