High Stakes: A Wild Cards Novel

  She smiled at Cesar. “I wanted it to be normal. Nothing fancy. I grew up with all that fancy stuff and it didn’t make me happy.” A frown slipped across her face. “Her life isn’t going to be easy for so many reasons. I want her to know what normal feels like. Not that I have a deep well of that to draw from.”

  Adesina came into the room. She’d changed from her school uniform into fleece pants and a T-shirt. They were specially made for her body. Michelle didn’t think she really needed to wear anything, but she didn’t want Adesina to feel even more different from other children.

  “And this is my daughter, Adesina,” Michelle said. “Adesina, this is Mr. Clerc.”

  Adesina half fluttered, half walked over. “How do you do?” she asked, proffering her claw.

  Cesar smiled at her and Michelle was relieved. Though her daughter had a beautiful and sweet little girl’s face, her insect body made some people nervous.

  “How do you do?” he asked, taking her claw and giving it a gentle shake. “You may call me Cesar, if you like. I brought you something.” He gave her the gift bag.

  She pulled out the pink tissue paper and gave a squeal of joy.

  “I don’t have this one,” she said, plucking the plastic figure of Misty Mouse from the bag. “How did you know I like Ocelot 9?”

  He looked very pleased. “I met a woman called Ink, and I asked her what you might like. Apparently, your mother talks a lot about you at work.”

  Mollie stepped into the musty darkness of a one-bedroom apartment in central North Dakota. Months had passed since the last time she’d been to her Bismarck bolt-hole. The air was stale, and the odor told it’d been far too long since she ran water down the pipes. Mollie went through the apartment, turning on lights and running the faucets. The two-by-fours that she had installed in brackets behind the apartment door still barricaded the entrance. A considerable layer of dust dulled the glitter from the jewelry heaped on the battered card table in the kitchen. A pair of roaches scuttled down the drain when she swept the shower curtain aside.

  These weren’t the ritzy digs she’d always imagined for herself since the day her card turned—those had yet to materialize in a permanent fashion. But it was the kind of place where a person could pay a year’s rent and utilities in advance with postal money orders. She’d done that under an assumed name soon after Ffodor had taught her how to get a decent false identity. Just because she was raised as an unsophisticated hick from potato country didn’t mean she was stupid.

  It was very quiet and very very private. Even Ffodor hadn’t known about her place. She sure as hell never told Berman about it. And she’d never had anybody over. Not because there was nobody to invite, she quickly reminded herself, but because she wanted it that way. If she really wanted to bother with it she could easily find people to hang out with. Easily. She’d just been too busy. For years on end.

  She swept aside boxes and shopping bags until she’d carved out enough room to flop on the bed. A pile of laptops and tablets teetered at the foot of the bed, many still in their packaging. Mollie took one off the top, opened it, and tossed the box aside. It landed on another pile of unopened loot.

  This was getting ridiculous. She had to start making time to pawn the stuff she snatched, otherwise what was the point? Yes, indeed. What was the point of all this? But that was a dangerous train of thought, so she shied away from it. Instead she power-cycled her wireless router and got comfortable on the bed while waiting for the tablet to find the network. Web surfing wasn’t particular exciting—everyone knew that half the people on the Internet were trolls, the other half assholes—but it gave her something to do until her stomach growled.

  She put the tablet aside, then opened a new pair of gateways: one in the bedroom wall a foot away, and another inside the refrigerator of a farmhouse a half-hour drive outside Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.

  A sharp metallic snap echoed within the refrigerator, accompanied by a stab of agony in her fingers. Mollie yanked her hand back through the opening into her own apartment. She pried the mousetrap from her fingers and flung it aside. It bounced off the wall hard enough to leave a ding in the drywall (Great, another chip off the deposit) before tumbling under the bed.

  It hurt so much that at first Mollie thought the fucking thing had broken her fingers. But she could still bend them. She flicked the portal egress from her parents’ refrigerator to the freezer and (after checking for another mousetrap) grabbed some ice. She used another opening to grab a washcloth from the bathroom. Having made a makeshift ice pack for her fingers, she glared into the Steunenberg kitchen while nursing her fingers. It smelled faintly like sour milk but also like pot roast. The TV blared from the living room; Mom and Dad were watching Wheel of Fortune. A pang of homesickness caught her off guard. But then she inspected her fingers, which were already swelling up like sausages, and remembered why she didn’t come home more often. She hadn’t felt welcome at the farm since Noel had killed her brother Todd, stabbed her brother Brent, and shot her dad. Nobody ever came out and said it was her fault. (How could it be? Mollie just provided the opportunity. Dad and the boys were the Einsteins who’d come up with the actual plan.) Still, Todd’s death had left an ineradicable pall on her family relationships. Including Mom and Dad. But they hadn’t been the ones to set the mousetrap. They weren’t that childish.

  Mollie leaned through the hole in space, and shouted: “Brent, you greasy turd! You’ll regret this!”

  After closing the hole she went into the kitchen—her own kitchen, in her own apartment, walking there on her own two feet like a nat—and poured a bag of frozen stir fry into a skillet. While it simmered, she went into the bathroom and took a leak. She didn’t flush.

  Eating dinner beside a fist-high pile of stolen jewelry, some that she’d snatched over a year ago and never bothered to pawn, she couldn’t help but wonder why she did this. She wasn’t a kleptomaniac; she liked money, wanted money—wanted a metric crapload of it—and didn’t steal just for the thrill of it. Her ace made stealing practically trivial. So why was it that without the drive to be a good pupil for Ffodor she’d become so lazy about turning the goods into cash?

  Mollie wondered if mountain climbers ever felt like this after topping Everest.

  She’d stolen an entire country’s gold reserves. On her very first foray as a professional thief. Granted, there was a team involved … her thoughts skittered around Ffodor again … but she had personally handled millions upon millions of dollars in gold. (And, like anybody would have done, she’d seized the opportunity to widen her cut. Which would have worked out just fine and wouldn’t have hurt anybody, fuck you very much Noel Matthews.) After that, almost nothing seemed worth the effort.

  Which is why she’d pushed Ffodor for something fun, something challenging, something worthy of two kickass aces on a tear. She’d worked so hard to convince him she wasn’t the clueless, immature naïf he’d first met. And it worked. Soon after that, word had come through the grapevine about a casino somewhere in Bumfuckistan, which led to—

  No. She shook her head again.

  She set the alarm for oh-dark-thirty before crawling under the sheets. At first she tried sleeping on her stomach, like she usually did, but the residual tingle in her chest made that impossible. Nearly an hour passed before the irritation with herself for being so careless as to let the gendarmes take her by surprise, coupled with the shame of acting like Ffodor hadn’t taught her a goddamned thing, subsided to the point where she could fall asleep.

  The alarm woke her. Mollie didn’t bother to get out of bed. She created an opening at the bottom of the toilet bowl and twinned it to another about two feet over the head of Brent’s bed. She held the fold in space long enough to hear a splatter, a shout, and disgusted sputtering echo from within the ceramic bowl in the next room.

  “OH MY GOD you are SO DEAD you UNBELIEVABLE CU—”

  She closed the twinned portals, unplugged the alarm, shut her eyes, yawned, and nestled back into her pillow
s. Only to find herself wide awake a moment later. Wide awake and cursing herself.

  The casino.

  The empty, unguarded casino.

  The empty, unguarded casino that, last time Mollie had seen it, was filled with seven metric shit-tons of money. Cash money. Fucking snowdrifts of currency.

  God damn it. Maybe she was just a stupid hick from potato country after all.

  “You liked Cesar okay?” Michelle asked. She and Adesina were flopped on the sofa. Episode 13 of the All Ocelots TV show was cued up on the DVR and ready to go. Adesina had Misty Mouse clutched in her claw.

  “I think he’s very nice. And not just because he brought me the toy.”

  “But that didn’t hurt,” Michelle laughed.

  “Well, no. But he really listened to us and he helped with the dishes.”

  “Yeah,” Michelle said, turning on the show. “He is nice. And gets big points for helping clean up.” On the TV, the Cherry Witch was pursuing some nefarious plan to take over the Ocelot 9 forest. Every week there was a nefarious plan. It was kind of comforting.

  Michelle glanced down at Adesina curled up beside her and saw she’d fallen asleep. She picked her up and carried her to bed. After she tucked the pink sheets around her daughter, she turned on the nightlight. Even in the half-light, the stars she’d painted on the ceiling in glow-in-the-dark paint lit up.

  She kissed Adesina on the forehead, then slipped out of the room.

  This was the time of night that Michelle didn’t like. With Adesina in bed, she was alone. And when she was alone, her thoughts turned to Joey. And that was a complicated mess. Not just because of the sex—which was alternately tender and horribly violent—but because Joey was broken in specific ways and, no matter how hard she loved her, Michelle couldn’t fix that.

  She pulled Skype up on her tablet. A list of contacts appeared, Joey’s name at the top. Michelle’s finger hovered over her name a few times, debating whether or not to call. Then she tapped the screen.

  To her surprise, Joey answered on the second ring.

  “Hey, Bubbles,” Joey said. Her silky Creole voice made Michelle miss her more. “Adesina asleep?”

  “Yeah,” Michelle replied, running a hand through her hair. “How’d you know?”

  Joey laughed. “The only time you call now is when the niblet is in bed.”

  “What are you doing at home? I would have thought you were out fleecing the tourists.” This was better. Giving Joey a hard time was better than trying to really talk to her.

  “Fuck you, Michelle,” Joey snapped. “I don’t tell you how to run your life. You’re still working for those Committee dickweeds.” A couple of zombies appeared behind Joey.

  Pretty standard Joey stuff, Michelle thought. Get pissed. Get zombies. This was familiar territory. She lay back on the couch, propping her head up on a pillow. She folded the tablet cover into its standing position, then put it on her chest.

  “They do a lot of good, Joey,” Michelle said defensively. “I wouldn’t have Adesina without them.”

  Joey’s expression softened. “You got a point. Don’t suppose the two of you can come down for a visit? It’s been a long fucking time.”

  Oh, yes, it had been a long time. Michelle felt a stab of desire shoot through her. But instead of saying what she wanted, she said, “I don’t know, Adesina’s in summer school and I’m doing a bunch of work for this L’Oreal thing.”

  “Oh, fuck that shit,” Joey said angrily. “You could get out of that if you wanted to. A week. Are you really saying the Amazing Bubbles can’t get a week off? That’s some fucking bullshit.”

  She was right, of course, Michelle could probably get the time off, but she was scared. Scared of how much she wanted Joey. And how that usually turned out.

  “It’s not…” she began, and then Adesina’s scream drove everything else from her mind. Michelle jumped up from the couch, her tablet hitting the floor with a thunk. Long ago, she’d discovered that that scream was the most terrifying sound in the world. Michelle ran to Adesina’s room, slamming her foot and hip into the doorjamb. She didn’t feel the pain, just absorbed it into her body.

  Adesina was tangled up in her pink floral sheets, moaning, with tears running down her cheeks. “Adesina,” Michelle said, giving her a little shake. “Baby, please wake up.” But her daughter continued to scream. Michelle pulled her close and started running her hands across Adesina’s wings. That had always worked in the past to calm her down, but the only thing it did now was turn the screams into a horrible low guttural moan.

  “Adesina!” she said frantically. She smoothed the cornrows out of Adesina’s face. “Adesina, it’s just a dream. It’s just a dream. Wake up! Baby, wake up!”

  But Adesina wouldn’t open her eyes. She ground her teeth, and the horrible growling grew louder.

  “Jesus!” Michelle gathered Adesina even tighter to her chest, but it didn’t help. That awful sound couldn’t be coming from her daughter. A cold sweat broke out across Michelle’s back. “Jesus! Baby, please, wake up!”

  “They’re coming,” Adesina said in a thick, guttural voice. Her eyelids snapped open, but her eyes were rolled back and the only thing visible was the sclera.

  Then she blinked. Her brown eyes stared up, and Michelle could see the fear there. Adesina pressed her face into Michelle’s chest and put her arms as far around Michelle as she could.

  My God, Michelle thought. She felt sick to her stomach. It’s finally happened. All that shit that went down in the PPA has finally caught up to her. The psychologist said it would.

  Her little girl was reliving that nightmare. Being taken by those soldiers from her parents. The charnel pit. All the dead children. Even Michelle had had more than a few nightmares about that.

  “It’s okay,” she said, rocking Adesina. “You’re home. We’re safe here. Nothing can happen to you here.”

  But Adesina didn’t answer, just kept crying and burying her head in Michelle’s chest.

  Michelle didn’t know what to do. She could blow shit up. She could make it rain bouncy bubbles. She could absorb the blast of a nuclear bomb. But she didn’t know how to keep night terrors away from her daughter.

  She hadn’t felt frightened or helpless since her card had turned. Until now.

  TUESDAY

  THEY HADN’T MADE IT far. Once they were in the hills Baba Yaga tapped the driver on the shoulder, and nodded toward a pull-off into a stand of trees. For the first time the old woman had looked not just old, but frail as well. It was now full dark and the plan was made clear when the guard gave Baba Yaga his coat and she lay down in the backseat.

  Franny wasn’t sorry they’d stopped to rest. The wounds in his side and shoulder were hurting, and despite being cold and hungry he managed to sleep. He only awoke when a door was slammed. Morning mist crept along the ground and through the trees and reflected back the light from a small campfire. The guard had a couple of fish on sticks over the flames. The smell of the charing skin was maddeningly delicious.

  Franny moved and hissed in pain. Whatever painkillers he’d been given at the hospital had worn off. He was stiff from sleeping in the van, and the bullet wounds were grinding points of agony. He finally climbed out of the van, and rubbed at his arms to try and warm up. Baba Yaga was huddled by the fire. He joined her.

  “Can you point me toward where those guys came from?” he asked, pointing at the fish. “I’d like to wash up.”

  She indicated the direction with a jerk of her chin. Franny walked off and found the stream a short distance away. The water was bracing as he splashed his face feeling the rasp of thick stubble against his palms. A day or two more of this and he was going to look like the homeless guys in New York—bloody, dirty, and dressed in ill-fitting mismatched clothes. He paused to unbutton his shirt and inspect the bandage on his side. It was dark red with blood and some had trickled down his side. He sluiced off the blood, unzipped, and relieved himself against a nearby tree. He returned to the campfire.
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  Stache offered him half a fish. He accepted it with a nod of thanks. Baba Yaga was picking at the other half. Stache had a whole fish to himself. Franny supposed that was fair; he was a big guy topping Franny by four inches and Franny was damn near six feet tall.

  He studied the old woman from beneath his lashes, but she noticed. “What? What do you want, boy?”

  “I want you to level with me. I think you know a lot more about what’s happening than you’re letting on.”

  “I do.”

  “So tell me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because … because that way if only one of us makes it the word will get out about … well, about whatever it is that’s happening.”

  She gave him one of her bleak smiles that had nothing to do with amusement or joy. “And if I tell you you drop me flat. Why be slowed down by the old woman? That’s what you would think. No, this way you will be careful to keep me safe, and get me to people who might be able to stop what is coming.”

  “And maybe you’re just bullshitting, and you have no more idea than I do what’s going on.” He measured stares with her.

  Finally she gave a sharp nod as if she had resolved an internal question. “What did you feel?” she asked. “In the hospital.”

  “I told you.”

  “No, you told me what you saw. What did you feel?”