Daniel Abraham - Inside Straight

“Sometimes you can’t have what you want just ’cause you want it.” She hefted the marble; her arm arced back and forward almost too fast to see. He heard the hiss of the glass ball through the air. A moment later, far out in Lake Nasser, a fountain of white water erupted. “I like you, Michael. I do. You can be charming and funny and empathetic, and when you drop the rock star act there’s actually a great person underneath.”

“But?”

“I can’t trust you. You’ve proven that.”

He spread all six hands wide. “How can I show you you’re wrong, Kate?”

“You can’t. And …” She stopped.

“And you’re with him. Fortune.”

One shoulder lifted. “I’m not here because of John. I’m here to stop the genocide. You should understand the difference.”

“You can trust him , with that thing in his brain? That’s not even Fortune talking half the time. What if he’s just a marionette dancing on Sekhmet’s strings? Remember how he was when we first met him? Just Berman’s toady, Momma Peregrine’s little fetch-it boy. We all thought that he was a joke. Even you, I bet.”

“Shut up, Michael.” Her cheeks flushed. “Look, I’m—I’m glad you’re here. I’m sure we can use your strength.”

He flexed his arms reflexively. “My strength. But that’s all.”

She caught her lower lip in her teeth, as if trying to stop herself from saying more. “We should get back,” she said finally. “We’ll need to find you a place to sleep. Maybe you could share a tent with Rusty.”

“Toolbelt? The iron bigot? No fucking way.”

“He’s not that. We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him.”

“If you say so.”

“No. Here. Hold it like this.” Michael demonstrated the proper way to hold a drumstick to the child, a dark-skinned, dog-headed boy. He was thinking that Ahmed the cabdriver had been right: animal-headed jokers were common as sand among the followers of the Living Gods. He gave the drumstick back to the kid and a loud percussive crack followed as the boy slammed the stick onto Michael’s chest.

Michael lay on the ground outside his tent, his top arms under his head, the others set close to his body as a crowd of joker children gathered around him, laughing and jabbering excitedly as they played him as if he were a drum set. Parents and other adults watched, smiling from the periphery. Masud, his soldier fan, stood nearby, clapping and smiling. A joker with eyes set on long stalks and press credentials draped around his neck pulled a heavy, professional video camera to his shoulder and put his eyestalk to the viewfinder. A red light pulsed next to the lens.

The racket was incredible, and Michael’s neck throats yawned open as he let the sound boom out. There was a definite beat—the two kids kneeling by the lowest of the tympanic rings on his abdomen poured forth a subsonic phoom that was more felt than heard, a steady rhythm that struck the onlookers like invisible, soft fists. The children playing the higher-pitched, smaller rings above unleashed a cascade of varied tones as Michael shaped the noise with the matrix of vocal cords layered in his thick neck.

The noise radiated out, forte.

Rustbelt came out from the tent, yawning with a groan like ancient hinges. One of the kids rushed to him and began tapping at his leg with a drumstick. “Hey, you’re not a half-bad cowbell,” Michael said to him, half-shouting.

Rustbelt glanced at the knot of kids flailing at Michael’s body. “Cripes,” he said. “What are you doing, fella?”

“Getting to know the locals. Kids are kids, no matter where you are.”

Rustbelt glanced at the joker with the videocam. “Yeah.”

Some of the aces and the Living Gods had come to investigate the racket as well. Through the crowd, Michael could see Lohengrin and Fortune standing several yards away, looking at the scene as Fortune shook his head and whispered something to Lohengrin. Slightly behind them, he glimpsed Kate and Ana. He lifted a middle hand to wave to Kate. She nodded. Michael glanced over at Rustbelt, who was also looking in Kate’s direction. “‘I like kids’ can’t be a bad message.”

Rustbelt grunted. It sounded like a dump truck farting. “Not so long as it’s true.” Eyebrows lifted above the rust spots on his face. He stepped away carefully from the child banging on his leg and walked toward the other aces. Kate glanced back once, but through the arms and the blur of drumsticks, Michael couldn’t see if she was smiling or not.

He awoke to predawn explosions—a stutter of blasts muffled by distance and reverberations, sounding almost like a distant thunderstorm. He blinked, wondering if he’d dreamt the sound, but as he dressed quickly and splashed water over his face, Rustbelt came clanking into their tent, his massive steam shovel jaw half-open. “What the fuck’s the racket?” Michael asked him.

“The Living God fellas are blowing up the airport so the Caliph can’t land his soldiers in airplanes,” Rustbelt replied.

Michael blinked, rubbing at sleep-rimed eyes with his top hands. “They could have waited until daylight.”

“They could have.” Michael wasn’t sure what that meant. Rustbelt hooked a thumb toward the entrance of the tent. “Come on. Lohengrin said to get everybody up.”

Fifteen minutes later, most of the aces were gathered in the command tent, Michael wearing a long, loose white shirt with holes torn in it for his multiple arms and a blue scarf turbaned around his shaved head. The scene reminded Michael of the tryout sessions for American Hero , with so many of the former contestants standing there: Curveball, Earth Witch, Rustbelt, Bugsy, Holy Roller, Fat Chick, Simoon, Hardhat…

Most of them ignored him after a glance his way.

Fortune looked worried, but he looked up when Kate entered, nodding to her. Michael saw her give him a tightlipped smile in return—so it was Fortune and not Sekhmet running the body at the moment. “Here’s what we know,” he said. “The army of the caliphate is still advancing along the Nile. Right now they’re within thirty miles of Aswan, just leaving Kôm Ombo. They have Chinese WZ-10 attack helicopters providing cover and ground troops in APCs in the vanguard. The Djinn is back with Abdul, but we can’t assume he’ll stay there.”

“What about the fucking Egyptians?” Hardhat asked. “Is one ass-kicking enough for them, or do they want a fucking encore?”

“The Egyptians are staying out of it,” Jonathan Hive spat. A cloud of small green wasps detached from his cheeks and flittered around his head. One of them landed on Michael’s neck, and he felt a stabbing between two of his throat openings.

“Ow! Goddamn it,” he said, slapping at the thing. He looked at his hand and saw green goo on his palm. Crouching, he wiped his hand ostentatiously in the sand.

“Enough!” John Fortune’s voice cut through the rising hubbub under the canvas. Michael wondered who was really talking. “The Egyptian army no longer matters. The Caliph is our problem now. Him, and the Djinn. If any of you are having doubts …” He glanced at Michael. “… too bad. It’s too late to leave now.”

Lohengrin stepped up alongside Fortune. “Where they will attack first, we don’t yet know,” he said, his accent more pronounced than usual: “ vair zay vill…”

“Jonathan is watching them with his wasps. The Low Dam is most likely, ja , but some of us must remain here at the High Dam, if they come this way instead.”