Daniel Abraham - Inside Straight

“Hey,” Jonathan said. “That cloud up there. The long one with the thin bit in the middle?”

“Yeah?” Joe Twitch replied.

“Looks kind of like a fish, if you squint a little.”

“Huh,” Twitch said. And then, “Cool.”

The public address system whined. The Harlem Hammer was going to put the poor fucker out of his misery. Jonathan was half sorry to see the guy go. Only half.

“Mr. Stormbringer?” the Harlem Hammer said. “Really, Mr. Stormbringer, thank you very much for coming. If you could just…”

“The darkness! It comes!” Stormbringer said in sepulchral tones. “The storm shall break!”

An embarrassed silence fell.

“You know,” Jonathan said, “if we wait long enough, it’s bound to rain. You know? Eventually.”

“Mr. Stormbringer,” the Harlem Hammer tried again, while behind him Digger Downs pantomimed striking a gong. “If you could … ah… John? Could you take Mr. Stormbringer to the Green Room, please?”

The vaguely familiar blond guy detached himself from the clot of technicians and walked, clipboard in hand, to escort the man out of the stadium. Jonathan squinted, trying to place him—café-au-lait skin, a little epicanthic folding around the eyes, blond hair out of a bottle.

“Aw, man,” he said.

“What?” Twitch demanded.

Jonathan gestured toward the blond with his chin. “That’s John Fortune,” he said.

“Who?”

“John Fortune. He was on the cover of Time a while back. Pulled the black queen, but everyone thought it was an ace. There was this whole, weird religious thing about him being the antichrist or the new messiah or something.”

“The one Fortunato died trying to fix up?”

“Yeah, he’s Fortunato’s kid. And Peregrine’s.”

Joe Twitch was silent for a moment. The only thing that seemed to slow him down was trying to think. Jonathan wondered if he could buy the guy a book of sudoku puzzles.

“Peregrine’s producing the show,” Twitch said.

“Yup.”

“So that poor fucker’s working for his mom?”

“How the mighty have fallen,” Jonathan said dismissively. A new ace was taking the field—an older guy, skinny, with what appeared to be huge chrome boots, a brown leather jacket, and a ’40s-era pilot’s helmet, with straps that hung at the sides of his face like a beagle’s ears.

“Thank you,” the Harlem Hammer said. “And you are?”

“Jetman!” the new guy announced, rising up on the little cones of fire that appeared at the soles of his boots. He struck a heroic pose. “I am the man Jetboy would have been.”

“Oh good Christ,” Jonathan muttered. “That was sixty years ago. Let the poor fucker die, can’t you?”

Apparently, he couldn’t.

Of the constant stream of wannabes presenting themselves to the world, Mr. Stormbringer had been the worst so far, but the guy who called himself the Crooner hadn’t managed to do much either. And Jonathan’s personal opinion was that Hell’s Cook—a thick-necked man who could heat up skillets by looking at them—was really more deuce than ace, but at least he was a good showman.

And there had been some decent ones, too. Jonathan’s benchmate, Joe Twitch, had made a pretty good showing and also managed to be so abrasive it was clear he’d be a good engine of petty social drama. The six-five bear, Matryoshka—who split into two five-eight bears when you hit him, and then four five-footers, and so on, apparently until you stopped hitting him—had been decent. The eleven-year-old girl carrying her stuffed dragon had seemed like a sad joke until she made the toy into a fifty-foot, fire-breathing, scales-as-armor version of itself. She’d also had a bag of other little stuffed toys. Even Digger Downs had dropped his comments about wild card daycare. Jonathan was willing to put even money she’d make the cut.

Jetman finished his presentation to polite applause, and the blond—John Fortune—appeared at Jonathan’s side.

“Jonathan Hive?” Fortune asked.

“That’s me.”

“Okay, you’re up next. We’re going to be filming from cameras two and three,” he said, pointing at a couple of the many setups in the stadium. “The judges all have monitors up there, so if you have the choice, it’s better to play to the cameras than the people.”

“Great,” Jonathan said, mentally remaking his presentation. “Okay, yeah. Thanks.”

“No trouble,” Fortune said.

“Any other advice?”

Fortune looked serious for a moment. He was a good-looking kid, but maybe a little lost around the eyes.

“You’re the guy who turns into wasps, right? Okay, the guy on camera two is really afraid of bees, so anything you want to do up close to the lens, go for camera three.”

“And that one’s camera three?”

“You got it,” Fortune said. Jonathan redid his routine again.

“Cool. Thanks.”

Jonathan took a deep breath, rose to his feet, and walked forward to the clear area that Jetman had vacated. Jonathan nodded to the judges, flashed a smile at the other aces, and stepped out of his loafers. The grass tickled the soles of his feet.

“Anything you’d like to say? No? Well, then, when you’re ready,” Topper said.

It felt like breathing in—the comfortable swelling of the chest and rib cage—but it didn’t stop. His body widened and became lighter; his field of vision slowly expanded. Distantly, he could feel his clothes drop through where his arms and legs had been. A couple bugs were tangled up in them, left behind like nail clippings.

Jonathan rose up above the crowd, seeing them all at once through hundreds of thousands of compound eyes. Hearing their voices even over the hum of his wings. He had no particular form now, and the joy of flying, the freedom of his swarm-shaped body, thrilled and vibrated in him. He hadn’t really cut loose in days. He had to focus and think about his routine. He brought his multiform attention to bear on the crowd, picked a woman sitting in clear view of camera three who looked game, and sent a tendril of wasps to her. When they landed on her lap, he could see her stiffen, and then as he moved the tiny bodies to spell out words, relax slightly.

It is okay. Do not be scared.

He covered her in a bright green, crawling ball gown, then burst back up into the air and sped to the end of the stadium and back, circled around, and then it was time for the grand finale. It was hard to consciously form his body, and his kinesthetic sense was fairly rough, so he sent a couple wasps to sit on top of camera three and concentrated on the view through their eyes.

Slowly, carefully, he adjusted the swarm into a smaller, tighter, angrily buzzing mass. When the insects were thick enough to block the daylight, he moved. It was like dancing and also like trying to balance a pencil. The swarm that was his flesh took shape—huge, floating, ill-formed letters. EAT AT JOE’S.

He took the swarm back to his fallen clothes, the insects crawling into the spaces within the cloth and pushing gently out to allow another few wasps in and then more and more as the bugs congealed again into flesh. He was tired and exhilarated. He took a bow to the polite clapping. The judges asked a couple of questions—yes, the wasps could sting; there were around a hundred thousand wasps in the swarm; yes, if he flew through insecticide, he would get viciously ill. Digger Downs called him Bugsy, the Harlem Hammer asked about his blog (an extra couple thousand hits if that made it to the final cut), and it was over. He walked back to his seat on the benches.

“Nice,” Joe Twitch said.

Someone gently tapped Jonathan’s shoulder. The woman he’d volunteered for his demonstration. She looked different, now that he could only see her from one angle at a time.