His eyes were bloodshot and wild. In front of him lay a dwindled pile of checkered chips; ahead of him, if his luck didn't turn, a cold tomorrow. But he had a hunch, which came to him in the form of a voice that seemed to originate outside his body but to be lodged in the very center of his being, and clutching his remaining chips, he reached across the felted table to place his bet on Number Five. Five fingers in a hand, five prayers, five combos to the Big Money, five paths to glory. But suddenly, the hand seized up, became a fist, a knot of clenched and trembling muscle. It was the right hand, the hand farthest from the heart but closest to the avid, thinking brain. In the gaming halls of Aksagetta, where thought was captive to desire and cupidity ran rampant, this rebellion of the distal forelimb happened frequently enough that it had a name, the Claw, sometimes also called the Tetany. To this some people tacked on Greed, the Tetany of Greed, as greed was felt by many to be the cause behind the reflex, rooted as it was in the fear of letting go.
