Free Three Moments of an Explosion by China Miéville Page B

at the sight of her fury. Her face looked bleached in the sun, and dust and dirt swirled about her business suit.
    “What’s going on?” Hensher said. He jogged heavily toward the confrontation.
    “She’s a fucking thief is what’s going on!” Paddick shouted.
    “Calm down. What’s she stolen?”
    “Yes,” said Gilroy. “What have I stolen?”
    In the red tent, by the half-man, was a new cast of clear set resin.
    It was an alien limb.
    It was small and intricate. The width of a thin human arm, its three joints extending from each other in contradictory directions. At its end, blurry with the slow motion of years of earth, was a mitt, a claw in scissoring intersection. It glowed like illuminated lucite.
    Within the crystalline limb were facets, flecks of light. There were stones and the husks of insects embedded in it, too, and shards of metal, swept up, not fallen to what had been the bottom of the body’s hole, or fallen once but risen again, suspended alongside those glinting colors.
    Everyone stared at it. Hensher kept them back.
    “She stole it!” Paddick shouted. “Then fucked off in her glad rags to report a find to the ministry.”
    Gilroy made a disgusted noise and walked out. “Hey!” Hensher went after her. The silence within the canvas was strained. Everyone listened to Hensher remonstrating with Gilroy, and that she did not respond.
    “Show them,” Paddick said to his colleague.
    “Fuck you,” Sophia said.
    “Show them!”
    The other man looked pleading. He thumbed through files on his phone and held it up for McCulloch to see a picture.
    “This morning we dug that up,” Paddick said.
    Another cast, another of the extraterrestrial immigrants. It lay on its side smashed against the wall of a ruined plaza. It stared toward the camera, a sad alien death in plaster.
    The thing was missing one of its top two limbs. McCulloch looked at the jewel-like arm at his feet.
    “See?” Paddick said. “You see? She stole it.”
    “You found that this morning,” Sophia said. “She found this two days ago .”
    “Yes,” Paddick said. “ After we invited her to our dig. Where we’d already started pouring plaster into the hole. It’s not enough that she snakes Banto away, now this …”
    “Wait,” McCulloch said. “I don’t get it. What are you saying? That she stole a bit of hole? She stole a bit of your hole and replaced it with earth?”
    Paddick looked at him in uneasy fury. “Well I don’t know, ” he shouted. “But look at it, look at the joins. This is clearly the arm from our body.”
    “We found this,” Sophia said. “Days ago. By the pottery dump.”
    “Look at all that shit in it,” Paddick said. “What’s she put in it, bits of crystal?” he said. “She’s not a scientist, she’s a fucking jeweler …”
    Will said, “This way we can see what’s inside.”
    “It’s a hole, ” Paddick said. “That was once an arm. If there’s anything inside it it’s bugs and bones. It’s not like we don’t do X-rays, you know …”
    “So crack it open,” Gilroy said, walking back in, Hensher behind her. “Crack open your cast. To show there’s nothing inside.”
    If you broke it and ground it up there would be no specimen, only dust. Take a second cast of it before you did, to make another model, and all you’d end up with was an echo of a hole. Anything there ever had been within would be gone.
    Hensher kept Paddick and Gilroy apart. “You’re leaving,” he said to Paddick. “Do I make myself clear? Take me to your dig. It’s that or I’m arresting you.”
    McCulloch sat in his car. Will leaned close to the window to whisper to him.
    “She’s talking to the earth,” he said. “She’s talking to herself when she doesn’t think we’re listening.”
    “What d’you want me to do about it?” McCulloch said.
    “You want to help, don’t you?” Will said. “I don’t know.” His desolation startled McCulloch. “She wants me to do light analysis on