Daniel Abraham - Inside Straight

Ana said, “Let me guess. He says you’re not like all those other girls. You’re ’real’ and he wants to get to know you better.”

“Not only that, he goes into this thing about how he flirts with all those girls because people expect it, because it’s part of the rock star persona, and that he actually gets tired of it.” She smirked. “He never seems to look tired when Pop Tart or Jade Blossom glue themselves to him.”

“Wild Fox said he heard there was a bet on that he wants to sleep with every girl on the show.”

Shaking her head, Kate said, “I don’t think he’s like that. I think he was serious about not being into the flirting. Just because everyone assumes he’s going to sleep around doesn’t mean he is.”

“You like him,” Ana ventured.

Kate shrugged. “Sure I like him. But do I like him? I don’t know. Not yet.”

Everybody—even Ana—looked at Kate and saw nothing but perfect. But her furrowed brow and pursed lips revealed something more going on under the surface. Kate certainly didn’t see herself the way everyone else did, and it made Ana warm to her.

Grinning, Ana hugged her pillow. “You want to wait and see who else shows an interest.”

“What?” Kate said, laughing.

“Come on, I saw you talking to John Fortune this afternoon.”

“I was asking him some questions.”

“Yeah, asking him some questions, not anybody else.”

Her smile turned shy. “Well, yeah, but—”

“But what?” Ana prompted.

“He’s definitely kind of cute.”

“Who else has been making eyes at you?”

“No one.”

“Jonathan Hive?” Kate rolled her eyes. Ana listed: “Stunt-man? Spasm?” That time, she winced. Then Ana said, “Berman?”

“Oh my God, no!” Kate threw her pillow at her, and Ana grabbed it, laughing. The pillow threw off a static tingle of energy.

They settled back, too weary to exert much effort, too wired to sleep, and stared at the faded shadows the bedside lamp cast on the ceiling.

After a moment, Ana said, “You should enjoy it.”

“Enjoy what?”

“All those interesting men are looking at you. Enjoy it.”

Ana couldn’t read Kate’s expression, her thin smile, the narrowed, sleepy gaze. She seemed to be working something out.

Then her smile widened. “It doesn’t mean anything if I can’t decide who to look at back.” She glanced over. Now that was a wicked look.

“Oh, now you can cry me a river!” Ana threw Kate’s pillow back at her, sending them both into a new fit of giggling.

For the first time since she’d arrived at the auditions, Ana started to relax.

Days passed. No telling when the next challenge would arrive—when the alarms would scream, when they’d all pile out of the house to the Hearts’ Hummer—and how stupid was it being Team Hearts? It was way too cute, way too obnoxious, like they were an ad for Valentine’s Day—and they’d fight about whether they had enough gas or who could read the GPS locator correctly. At least Ana’d been able to do that much for the team—reading GPS coordinates was part of her job back home. Thank goodness Hardhat had been able to drive their monstrosity of a vehicle. Wouldn’t that have been embarrassing, failing as heroes to the point of not being able to get the car started—all on national TV.

Ana thought she didn’t care. But really, she’d prefer not looking like an idiot on national TV.

After supper she went out to the backyard. The sky had turned dark, and the air had cooled, though it still smelled tangy, metallic. This whole city smelled like an industrial work site. At home, even after a day of working around oil rigs and diesel fuel, she could walk away from it and smell real air—hot, dusty, but real. She was homesick.

You can bag the whole thing , a voice whispered … a small, devilish voice. Do something really stupid next time, get yourself voted off, and that’ll be that .

But Roberto would know. Roberto would never let her live it down if he thought she’d thrown the contest.

Over the last week, Kate had spent hours in the backyard throwing things at makeshift targets, practicing. Maybe she had the right idea. Ana touched the medallion under her shirt.

She left the porch and sat cross-legged in the middle of the lush green lawn. Closing her eyes, she buried her fingers in the grass, pressing down to the roots, to the earth. The soil here wasn’t like the desert—this was softened by the vegetation, by constant watering. This would be easy to dig. She could even feel what wasn’t dirt—gas lines, sewer lines. She could dig around them.

She could drill a hole straight down, hundreds of feet. She could open a furrow ahead of her. Make it as deep or wide as she liked, limited only by the space available, though she’d never dug much more than a backhoe could do in an hour or so of work. She’d limited herself. She didn’t want to cause too much trouble, do too much damage, so she’d always stayed within the boundaries of the sandbox, whatever sandbox she happened to be in.

This had all started in the sandbox, on the playground. If she’d grown up in a city full of concrete and asphalt, she might never have discovered her power at all. That might have been better.

Absently, without effort, she made little holes, because she couldn’t think of what else to try. Scooped out handfuls of earth. They didn’t even make a sound. Then, she dug two holes at once. Two dimples formed, one on either side of her, each with a mound of scooped-out earth beside it. Well, she’d never done that before. So she tried three. Hands in the grass, laid flat against the ground, she could feel the infinite particles of it spread all around her. They moved at her command. She clenched her hands and thought of digging—three holes, then four. With a faint sound of ripping grass, as the soil under the lawn tore free, a circle of holes appeared around her. A dozen of them, all at once. Patterns in the earth. She shifted her right hand, pointed to make a trench, but instead of making it straight, she made it turn. It ran in a perfect circle all the way around her, joining all the holes.

She hadn’t played with her power like this since was she small. She barely remembered. Her father had put her to work tilling the neighbors’ garden patches almost as soon as she’d dug her first hole.

“You are really making a mess.”

Hands on her hips, Kate stood at the edge of the porch.

Sheepishly, Ana brushed off her hands. The yard looked like gophers had struck: Dozens of mounds, holes, and trails marred the whole lawn. Great , she thought. Now they’re going to start calling me Gopher Girl .

“Sorry,” she said.

“Don’t apologize,” Kate said. “It’s kinda cool. But can you do anything else?”

Ana shrugged and glanced hopelessly around the damaged lawn. “I’m trying to figure something out.”

Kate left the glow of the porch light and came into the dark, picking her way around piles of dirt and finding a spot of grass near Ana to sit on. “Not that there’s anything wrong with digging holes. If you did something like this under a building you could bring the whole thing down. Or a bridge, or a car, or … or anything. You could stop anyone by digging a hole under them.”

She could dig a trench around herself a dozen feet wide and no one could ever reach her. “It’s all just digging. It’s never going to rescue someone from a burning building.”

“Tell me about it,” Kate said. “You dig holes, and I blow shit up. Hey—if this hero thing doesn’t work out, maybe we can start a business: ’Team Hearts: Demolitions and Excavations.’”