Chapter 23: Lottery Game (11)

Chi Wei rubbed her fingertips together. A few black specks sifted from between them.

They were tiny, and there were only a handful—like motes of dust. Unless you watched closely, you could easily miss them.

Hearts Girl asked, puzzled, “What’s that?”

She quickly reached over and pinched up a little from the tabletop to examine it.

“Iron filings,” Chi Wei said.

Hearts Girl looked at the tree card. Suddenly, she understood how the trick worked.

One of the three cards was magnetic.

Chi Wei had tucked iron filings between her fingers and moved her hand over the cards. It looked as though she were hesitating over which one to choose, but she was actually feeling the filings shift as the magnet drew them in.

That tiny movement told her which card was different from the others.

So that was how she’d cheated.

Hearts Girl didn’t blame Silver-Masked Woman for cheating. Gambling always involved some skill. If you couldn’t spot someone else’s technique, you had only yourself to blame for being outmatched.

She was angry with herself for missing such a subtle trick.

But Chi Wei had noticed it.

She hadn’t even been sitting at the bar. She’d just been driving her toy car around nearby!

Hearts Girl had lost the upper hand again. “How did you figure it out?”

“Mm… instinct, I guess,” Chi Wei replied vaguely.

It was a half-guess, half-inference. There was no need to spell it out for someone else and risk teaching her the wrong thing.

But then Hearts Girl picked up the tree card and set it beside the iron filings on the table.

The filings didn’t move at all.

She froze.

“That’s not the magnetic card,” Chi Wei reminded her.

The card that was actually magnetic was the one with the moon on it.

At first, after learning Silver-Masked Woman had used a magnet to cheat, Hearts Girl had assumed the magnetic card—the one that differed from the other two—was the tree card.

Even Chi Wei had thought so at first.

But when they tested it, they found that the magnetic card was the one with the moon.

Hearts Girl held the moon card over the filings, watching them jump toward it. She stared at it in surprise.

“So her odds of winning were only one in two.”

Silver-Masked Woman could have rigged the tree card and picked it every time. But she hadn’t. In the round where Hearts Girl had her choose the tree card, Silver-Masked Woman had cheated, yes—but she’d only raised her chance of winning from one in three to one in two. She’d made the game relatively fair.

And then, between the sun card and the tree card, she’d gotten lucky and chosen the tree.

Why had she done that?

Hearts Girl suddenly remembered what Silver-Masked Woman had said during the game: “Without risk, gambling has no meaning.”

She hadn’t made the game a guaranteed win for herself.

A chill crept over Hearts Girl.

Just then, Chi Wei said, “No. Her odds were two in three.”

Hearts Girl hurried to inspect the other two cards.

What else had she missed?

“The trick wasn’t in the cards themselves,” Chi Wei said.

“Then where was it?” Hearts Girl asked.

“The Three-Door Strategy.”

Chi Wei explained, “When she first asked whether the tree card was on the far right, she’d already decided she was going to choose the card on the right.”

Chi Wei arranged the three cards as they had been during Hearts Girl and Silver-Masked Woman’s game: moon, tree, sun.

Pointing to the sun on the right, she said, “At that point, the chance that she’d picked the tree card was one in three.”

“That means if you treat the other two cards as one group, there’s a two-in-three chance the tree card is among them.”

Chi Wei moved her hand across the cards. She stopped at the one on the left.

The moon card. She picked it up and stacked it with the tree card in the middle, then pushed the sun card on the right aside.

“That stack has a two-in-three chance of containing the tree card, and she’s already ruled out the moon. So she chose this stack and used her trick to identify the moon card. That left the unseen card—the tree card—with a two-in-three chance of being the right one.”

Chi Wei didn’t say the rest aloud: Hearts Girl’s loss had been perfectly understandable.

She’d been beaten by a woman with both skill and luck.

Hearts Girl fell silent for a while, then got up to leave. As she set down her glass, she said, “I’ve had enough.”

“Do you still remember our deal?” Chi Wei asked her retreating back.

Hearts Girl gave a derisive laugh without turning around. “Of course.”

But Chi Wei felt as though her back had grown more distant, less real.

It was because the sincerity had gone out of Hearts Girl’s voice. Their common ground had cracked, and that was why she seemed so far away.

Chi Wei sighed, touched her kitten mask, and rubbed her forehead. Then she used the service robot at the bar to order herself a drink.

On the third day of the second round of the Lottery Game, Team One chose Cooperate, bringing the Lottery Pool’s total prize money to 6.5 million yuan.

Team Two entered the Lottery Room, but because their Prediction the day before had been wrong, they had lost their Voting Rights for this round.

When they left the Lottery Room, the Lottery Pool still held 6.5 million yuan.

Afternoons always seemed to drag. Team Three wouldn’t enter the Lottery Room for another six hours.

After lunch, Chi Wei found another player from Hearts Girl’s team in the billiards room.

He wore a cape and a top hat, and his username was Magic King. He practically reeked of show business, so Chi Wei simply called him the Magician.

That afternoon, Ink in Water also sought out the two remaining members of Team Two.

Chi Wei played a game of snooker with the Magician.

But they had an audience.

Silver-Masked Woman sat on a sofa nearby, leaning back against it as she watched them, apparently at her leisure.

“I’ve really enjoyed playing with you,” the Magician said with a smile, setting down his cue.

Chi Wei gathered the balls and reset them. “You’re too modest. You’re better than you let on.”

“Snooker’s just a hobby. I wouldn’t claim to be that good.”

“So your real profession is magic?”

The Magician spread his gloved hands. “Is it that obvious?”

“Hard to miss,” Chi Wei said with an amused laugh.

“Well, we’ve finished snooker. How about a different game? Interested in the Magician’s favorite—playing cards?”

With Teams One and Two cooperating, their members were clearly friendlier with each other than they were with Team Three.

For instance, the Magician hadn’t paid Silver-Masked Woman any attention at all. She wasn’t his partner—in fact, she’d betrayed him in the previous round. There was no reason to socialize with her.

So, with the afternoon free, he’d invited Chi Wei to play.

Could be fun, Chi Wei thought.

“How do we play?”

The Magician took off his gloves, pulled two decks of cards from his pocket, and slipped off the rubber bands. Then he placed both decks on the billiards table for Chi Wei to see.

“The game is called Duplicate Duet. It uses two decks with the jokers removed, so there are 104 cards in total.”

“I’ll lay all 104 cards facedown on the table in no particular order. We’ll take turns turning over cards. Each turn, you flip a pair. If the two cards are identical, you get another turn. If they don’t match, you turn them facedown again and the other player goes. Simple enough—it’s like those matching games on a website. There are 52 pairs in all, and the first person to find 27 pairs wins.”

After explaining the rules, the Magician smiled. “So, what do you think? Want to play?”

There was nothing else to do, so Chi Wei said, “Sure. Let’s give it a try.”

The Magician shuffled the cards, laid all 104 facedown, and scattered them across the billiards table in an irregular pattern.

Without neat rows and columns, it would be harder to remember where each card was.

But the game itself wasn’t difficult. If you got lucky, you could theoretically turn over every pair in a single go.

“You don’t mind me laying them out like this?” the Magician asked.

“Not at all,” Chi Wei said, shaking her head.

“Since I brought the game, you can have the first turn. Seems only fair.” He gestured for her to go ahead.

Chi Wei didn’t have to think long about her first move. She turned over the two cards nearest the edge.

The two of spades.

The jack of clubs.

Unfortunately, they didn’t match. Chi Wei memorized their positions, then turned them facedown again.