Daniel Abraham - Inside Straight

Ana sighed. Now that was going to play well on TV. She didn’t know if the contest was going to get better, but it was certainly going to get more interesting.

Of all the contestants, Earth Witch still seems the most nervous in front of the camera. Like an underground creature that’s suddenly been pulled into the light, which somehow seems an appropriate metaphor for her. But now, at the moment of her great victory, she’s smiling. She’s sitting a little taller, and her face is flushed.

She shyly ducks her gaze. “Yeah, of course it feels great to win the challenge. But I don’t think I could have done what I did without the rest of the team backing me up, you know? It sounds corny, but I feel like they really believed in me. I couldn’t disappoint them, especially Kate. What else can I do?” She shrugs, purses her lips in thought, then shakes her head. “I don’t know. I’ll have to work on that. Right now, I think I’m going to see what I can do about winning this thing.”

Better than television

“ST— hic —OP THAT!” Joe Twitch yelled.

“It’s not me,” Spasm said with his shit-eating frat boy grin.

“Seriously, just because I can do that doesn’t mean every time you get the hiccups, it’s because of me.”

“Bu— hic —llshit,” Twitch said, pointing an accusing finger at the newcomer. The camera crew was eating the whole thing up with a spoon. “Just be— hic —cause you think I moved your— hic —junk out of that room hic …”

The new round of losers had arrived that afternoon—Blrr, who was probably as fast or faster than Twitch, but only when she was wearing her rollerblades; Spasm, who had taken the bedroom across from Joe, only to find his things transported to a smaller, more distant room (to leave the first room available for one of the women, it was assumed); and Simoon, the girl who could become a dust storm. It was just an hour past dinner, and things had already devolved into a shouting match.

Jonathan was secretly pleased. Another few days with just King Cobalt and Joe Twitch, and he would have lost his mind.

Plus which, Simoon had taken the bedroom across from his.

Jonathan sat on a couch in his bedroom, trying to avoid his fellow inmates. He could hear the argument between Twitch and Spasm coming in from the hall. In the front room, the television was yammering on about events in Egypt; antijoker rioting was causing problems, the Egyptian army was threatening to impose a curfew, and the new UN Secretary-General was using the whole thing as an opportunity to show he could handle the job. There was a special report coming up on how the new Caliph, Abdul, had ordered all his brothers strangled, and whether that was going to be a stabilizing move politically, just in time for a switch to Entertainment Tonight. King Cobalt was obsessive about watching the entertainment news on the show. Blrr was probably going around the block for the three thousandth time that hour. And Jonathan just sat there, staring off into space. He had his arms folded so that no one was likely to notice that his right thumb was missing, small green wasps crawling over his skin where it used to be.

His attention, you could say, was elsewhere.

The beach wasn’t empty, even at night, but it was close. There were only a few college-age kids down by the pier, an old lady walking a dachshund with a frilly pink leash, and Drummer Boy sitting near the water with his middle pair of arms propping him up and his upper and lower pairs wrapped gently around someone. The wasp, bright green in daylight, was hard to see by the moon; the sound of its wings was muffled by the surf. So it could get in pretty close.

“We probably shouldn’t be here. You know. Like this,” she said. “We’re enemies, after all.”

Jonathan recognized the voice: the woman from Team Spades who pulled cards from a Mexican tarot deck and got a different power with each draw. Rosa Loteria. That was her name.

“Whatever,” Drummer Boy said. “It’s just a game.”

“I guess,” Rosa said. “They’re going to get rid of me. So then it won’t matter, right?”

“Why do you think they’d lose you?”

“They don’t like me,” she said. “Especially Cleopatra. She finds out I’m out with you …”

“Who? Pop Tart? She won’t care,” Drummer Boy said. “That’s over.”

“I thought maybe,” Rosa said. “I’m sorry about that.”

Ah, Jonathan thought. The oh-poor-you approach. Ham-handed as seduction techniques go, but it wasn’t like Drummer Boy was what you’d call a difficult lay. Still, the man was quiet for long enough that Jonathan and Rosa both started rethinking her tactics.“Why did you do it?” she asked. She traced the ink on one of his arms with her fingertips. “Get on the show, I mean.”

“I thought, you know, if I won… I thought maybe I could make a difference. You know, really do something.”

Oh puh-leeze! Jonathan thought, but Rosa shifted around in the cage of Drummer Boy’s arms. Her face tilted up to gaze into his eyes. The hush of the waves almost drowned out her words.

“You don’t need this. You can make a difference now.”

He kissed her. Because of course he did.

“It’s not like that,” Drummer Boy said. “The band… the band’s great. They’re really great guys. And we’ve cranked out some wicked shit. It’s just that I thought this would be a way to, you know, talk about the music. What it does. What it means.”

Rosa kissed him again, so the negotiation was going pretty well so far. Back at the Discard Pile, Jonathan propped his legs up on the couch. From here on in, things were going to get predictable.

Together, they walked out to the edge of the surf, the near-invisible wasp overhead at a discreet distance. They said something more that he couldn’t make out, and then Rosa slipped out of her clothes, Drummer Boy did the same, and they dove together into the water. So that was it. Show’s over. He took his wasp up into the salt-rich, thick air, spun around the beach a few times until he found the camera crew who’d been following the couple, and then headed the wasp back to the Discard Pile.

The incident might be good for a line or two when it came time to write the book, something about how the famous aces get all the sex maybe, or the total lack of privacy. Or exactly what the hell a loteria deck was anyway, and what kind of sad-ass power someone might gain from drawing El Pescado or El Melon. Nothing much more than that.

One fishing expedition officially a bust.

Jonathan shifted his attention.

“You’re really going to add a lot to the show,” Berman said.

“I tell you, we had quite a furball working out the rights with your agent. She’s a machine.”

They were on the deck of what Jonathan assumed was Peregrine’s house. Los Angeles spread out below them like a fire. Peregrine herself was just inside the huge glass wall, looking classy and talking to a young woman who Jonathan was pretty sure he’d seen on a magazine cover. Out here in the open air, it was just Berman and this other guy.

“Thank you,” the guy said. It came out like tank you , with very round vowel sounds. The wasp on the rail buzzed by for a closer look. Natural blond, blue eyes. German accent. It rang a bell. Something about BMWs. “But what does this mean, furball?”

“A disagreement. A little dustup. Nothing serious. Just that she really knows her stuff.”

“Genevive is a very smart woman,” the German guy said.