Busted Flush

  I don’t particularly enjoy the sweat, diesel, and overcooked boiled vegetable smell that fills the working-class pub, but I like to keep on good terms with my fellow members in the Silver Helix, and I want to hear from Bruckner about his runs to Nigeria. Not that I don’t trust Flint . . . it’s just that I don’t trust anyone. And it was Flint who taught me that.

  From the alley I can see the big lorry parked illegally in front of the pub. There’s the twist and pull as my flesh resumes its normal shape. I tighten the belt a couple of notches and cross the street to the pub. It’s called the Saracen’s Head, and a picture of a turbaned, bearded head with blood flowing from the severed neck adorns the sign. I’m glad the Highwayman doesn’t know that in my other life I’m Bahir.

  Bruckner has seated himself where he can look out a window every few minutes and check on his ride. A bell over the door rings as I enter. Bruckner’s foul cigar has trumped the cigarette smoke. I don’t even think my Turkish fags could compete.

  The bartender, who is bald with a sagging heavy belly and an array of tattoos on his wobbling upper arms, pulls me a pint of stout. Everyone in the pub is white. Not the easiest thing to find in London today. The big men hunched at small tables eye me as I cross the room, but relax into acceptance when I sit down with Bruckner. John is obviously the arbiter of social acceptance here. A modern-day and male version of the patronesses of Almack’s.

  “What the fuck are you grinning at?”

  “Nothing.” I reluctantly release the image of Bruckner in a poke bonnet and Empire dress. Still, I had better get control of my errant thoughts. I take a pull on my stout and savor the dark, peaty taste. I like a beer you can practically chew. “John, have you run any armaments down to Port Harcourt or in the Urhobo region?”

  “Yeah, that’s where we’re having a spot of trouble.”

  “And what is encompassed in the word . . . ‘trouble’?”

  “The bloody jigs in the Oil Rivers region have started mucking about with the pipelines.”

  “Why?”

  “Usual bloody whine.” He pitches his voice into a high squeaky plaint. “Oh, we’re being oppressed. We’re so poor. Those big mean corporations. The evil government is making us get off our lazy black asses and work.” He grunts, coughs, and takes an enormous swallow of lager.

  “Anybody dying?” I ask.

  “Good Christ, when aren’t they dying on that miserable continent?”

  “I’m just trying to find out if the Lagos government is doing something naughty. We don’t want our ambassador at the UN to plead innocence, and then find himself with his knickers down.”

  “As far as I know the bloody niggers in Lagos are no worse than the rest of the bloody wogs in any other crown colony. And why does it have to be Britain’s problem when they are shits?”

  I drain my mug. “White man’s burden?” I suggest sweetly and leave.

  The mattress sinks under my weight as I arrive in Lohengrin’s bed. The steady rhythm of the thunderous snores doesn’t alter. For some reason it infuriates me. I think about the long thin knives I carry stashed about my person, and contemplate letting the boy wake up to find a blade at his throat. I always get cranky when I’m tired, and right now I’m positively homicidal.

  I plaster on a smile, and lay a hand on his bare chest. He snorts, jerks, and comes up from beneath the sheets like a broaching whale.

  “Was? Was ist?” He finally focuses on me. “Ah, Liebling,” and I’m crushed in a massive embrace. “When you called I thought I would be alone and lonely all night, but now here you are.” His lips find mine. I can taste the beer and sauerkraut in his sleep-clogged mouth, not pleasant, but I close my eyes and think of England while we fence with tongues. Eventually he comes up for air.

  “What did you do today?” I’ve settled back in the crook of his arm while he jams pillows behind his back.

  “Ah, we heard a report from China. Tinker is doing very fine work there building pumps for wells. We do such good things, my Lili.” Just listening to him maunder on about all the wunderbar, fabulous, brilliant things the Committee has done in the past twenty-two hours gives me mal de tête.

  Even though he’s blond he’s got a pretty good mat of chest hair. I twine my fingers through it. “Tinker is quite a charmer, isn’t he?”

  “Ja, nice fellow.”

  “It seems that DB has abandoned us to be a rock and roll star.” I inject regret. “I understand why he did it, but it makes us so vulnerable.”

  Lohengrin’s arms tighten around me. “Are you afraid? Don’t worry. I’ll keep you safe.”

  “I know you’ll try, but we’re not always paired together and it just seems that the problems never stop and never get easier.”

  “We destroyed a much more formidable foe in Egypt.” He pokes me playfully in the side. “And you didn’t think we could do it.”

  “Well, DB did it. He really is the most powerful ace we have.”

  There’s a shadow in the wide blue eyes. Satisfied, I pull his head down and start kissing him in earnest. Oh, I’m going to be sore tomorrow, but I’ve got him already wincing.

  Just Cause: Part I

  Carrie Vaughn

  ECUADOR

  THE HILLSIDE HAD MELTED, engulfing the street. Mud was moving, swallowing structures. The rain poured, and the slough of mud had turned into a soupy flood, drawn down by its own weight. There had been a town here: the edges of tin roofs emerged from mounds of gray earth, mangled fences stuck up at angles, cars tipped on their sides were mostly buried. And the rain still fell.

  Before the jeep even stopped, Ana jumped out and ran into the thick of it.

  “Ana!” Kate called.

  “Curveball, we got other problems,” Tinker said. He gestured to a crowd shoving its way along the road. Some of the people saw Ana and called out to her, “¡La Bruja! ¡La Bruja de la Tierra!” Earth Witch. They recognized her, and knew she’d come to help. The refugees needed to get to higher ground, up the next hill, to escape the flood. Ana could handle the mud. Kate and Tinker needed to get those people to safety.

  Not every rescue depended on ace powers, she’d learned over the last year. Sometimes you just needed to offer a hand. Provide a working vehicle for people who couldn’t make the hike.

  Kate’s jacket wasn’t doing anything to keep her dry, but she wore it for warmth. This was supposed to be the tropics, but they were in the mountains, and it was cold. Didn’t seem fair. Water dripped in streams off the brim of her baseball cap, a blue one with the UN logo John had given her. The poor thing was starting to look ragged, like it had been through a war zone or three. Which it had.

  She helped Tinker with the evacuation, but she always kept an eye on Ana.

  Now Ana knelt on the muddy slough covering one of the houses. She looked feral, kneeling in mud that had splashed her legs, shorts, and T-shirt. Her black hair was coming loose from its braid and sticking to her round face. Hands on the mud, she glared at it with a knotted expression, setting her will. She called to someone in Spanish, and someone shouted back. People were digging, scooping, and flinging away buckets of dirt in the search for survivors.

  A sound rumbled, like distant ocean waves. A couple of the guys on the roof cried out and jumped to the road. The dirt under them started moving, particles slipping, falling in waves, dirt pouring out of windows, slumping away from the house. In moments, Ana knelt on a sheet of mud-streaked corrugated tin.

  Bodies broke free.

  A woman and a child rode the swell of earth that came out the windows. They were limp, their limbs pushed to odd angles by the dirt’s movement, their clothing tangled around their bodies. Another child remained hung up on the windowsill. Shouting erupted, and people surged toward the victims.

  Kate fought her way to the woman. She was still warm, still had color. Still had a pulse. Her hair and skin were caked with mud. Kate cleaned the mud out of her mouth. Please, let us have gotten here in time.

  The woman choked, sputtering back
to life. Other rescuers revived the children. People wearing Red Cross jackets appeared. The convoy must have caught up with them. Kate, Ana, and Tinker had pushed ahead in the hopes that Ana’s power could save lives.

  Ana didn’t stop after freeing the house. She scrambled off the roof and set her hands on the road, which cleared before her. Buildings emerged, and still the wall retreated, groaning, reluctant. Ana crept forward, always keeping one hand on the ground, and pushed the earth back. Rescuers searched the other houses and found more victims who’d been swallowed up, and now spit back out. Not all of them lived, but many did.

  When Ana reached the end of the street, a wall rose at the edge of the town, a barren mound of churned-up mud, a tumor against the backdrop of the green jungle. The wall of mud served as a dike, diverting the flood of water around the village, buying them time.

  Kate approached her, hesitating, not wanting to break her concentration. Ana, head bowed, was breathing hard, her back heaving.

  “Ana?” Kate touched her shoulder.

  Ana said something in Spanish. Then her eyes focused, and she smiled. “Wasn’t that something?”

  “Will it hold?”

  She shook her head. “Not with this rain. They’re still going to have to evacuate.”

  “What about you? You holding up?”

  “Same as always.” She took a deep breath and briefly touched the quarter-sized medallion she wore. Kate offered her a hand up and was startled at how heavily Ana leaned on her. She held her side, at the place where a bullet had struck her a year before. The wound still hurt her sometimes. “I’m going to go help clear the rest of those houses.”

  Kate knew better than to try to argue, however hurt or tired Ana seemed. She went back to Tinker and the jeep.

  The Red Cross had set up a tent and was distributing blankets and coffee. Hypothermia was an issue in the rain and cold. Tinker—Hal Anderson, a burly Australian ace with a beach-bum tan and weight-lifter muscles—had let the jeep stall out, which meant he was now burrowed under the open hood, doing who-knew-what to the engine. He’d rigged the thing to run on tap water—great publicity, not using any of the local fuel supplies during a global oil crisis. If he could mass-produce his modification, he’d be rich. But the device needed adjusting every time the engine shut off.

  They’d been at this for three days, driving from village to village, staving off mudslides and evacuating towns. They needed a chance to catch their breaths. That was all she wanted.

  Someone screamed and cried out a panicked stream of Spanish.

  A river was pouring off the mountain. Water lapped the top of the wall Ana had made to hold back the flood. The edges crumbled. Suddenly the whole thing disintegrated. It was just gone, turned to soup by the rain, and the flood roared through the village. Ana was in the middle of it. Holding a little girl’s hand, she knelt in the street, hand on the ground, looking up at the wave pouring toward her. This wasn’t the slow, creeping wall that Ana had pushed back earlier. This was a mass of water so powerful it had picked up tons of debris—rocks, trees, a mountain’s worth of topsoil—and carried it barreling down.

  Too fast for Earth Witch to hold it back. More water than mud, she couldn’t control it.

  “Ana!” Horrified, helpless, Kate watched.

  Ana reacted instinctively. She held the child close to her body and hunkered over, protecting her. Then, both of them disappeared in the torrent.

  Kate started to run to her, but Tinker held her back, hugging her to him.

  “I can break them out, I can blow through the mud!”

  “No, you can’t!”

  She struggled anyway, trying to break free, but he held her trapped.

  Then someone yelled, “¡Mira!” Look.

  The river of mud flowed in a steady stream, but something in the middle of it moved, turning like a whirlpool. Then, a shape broke the surface. A platform of stone rose, carrying two figures clear of the flow, which frothed around the interruption. The tower of bedrock stopped some six feet above the surface. It was only a few feet in diameter, but it was enough. Ana crouched there, the child safe in her arms. Both were drenched in dripping mud. Even from where she stood, Kate could see Ana gasping for breath.

  “Christ,” Tinker breathed.

  Kate cheered, laughing with relief.

  The little girl shifted in Ana’s arms and clung to the woman. Ana cleared the mud from both their faces. She looked up, raised her hand. Kate waved enthusiastically.

  Ana touched the ground, and a faint rumble sounded, even over the sound of the flood. More ground broke free, a line forming a narrow bridge from the platform to the hillside. Soon, Ana was able to walk to safety, carrying the girl.

  One of the refugees, a young woman, broke from the crowd and cried out. The girl in Ana’s arms struggled. “Mama!”

  Ana let her go, and she ran to the woman, who swept her up, sobbing. Holding her child, she went to Ana, touching her reverently, crying, “Gracias.” The ace bore it with a smile.

  Kate ran to meet her and pulled her into a hug, mud and all. Like she would notice a little more mud after this week. “Are you okay? Come on, you have to get warmed up, get something hot to drink.”

  Smiling vaguely, Ana hugged her back. “I’m okay. It’s nice to be saving people for a change.”

  And it was.

  The next morning, back in their hotel room at Quito, Ana was asleep. She’d been asleep for ten hours. She didn’t even look relaxed, curled up in a ball, hugging the blankets tightly over her shoulders, like she was trying to protect herself from something.

  They all needed a break. They’d been running all over the world for a year now. Ana, Michelle, Lilith, and a couple of others had been asked to use their powers almost nonstop. What did that do to a person?

  Kate pulled a chair close to the window, took out her cell phone, dialed. John answered on the first ring.

  “Hey, Kate. You okay?”

  “Hi, John,” she said, smiling. That was always his first question: you’re okay, you’re not hurt, you’re coming home. “I’m fine. We’re all fine. We saved a lot of people.”

  “I know, the networks have been carrying the story. What a mess.”

  “Yeah, half an hour in the shower and I still haven’t gotten all the mud off.”

  “Maybe I can help you with that when you get back.” She could hear the suggestive grin in his voice and blushed gleefully. “Speaking of which, aren’t you supposed to be on a plane back?”

  She sighed. “I made an executive decision to stay an extra day and give Ana a chance to sleep. She’s really wiped out, John. I’ve never seen her this bad, not since Egypt.” Egypt, when she was shot in the gut, after she’d cracked open the earth wide enough to swallow an army.

  “Is she going to be okay?”

  “I think so, eventually. But she could use a break. We need her too much to let her burn herself out.”

  “I know. She’s not the only one.” He sounded as tired as she felt.

  “Promise me you’ll give her a break after this. She hasn’t seen her family in months. I think a trip home would do her good. You’ve brought in half a dozen new aces, more people from American Hero—surely you won’t need her for a few weeks.”

  “Okay. Yeah. That should work.” Then he sighed, reminding Kate that Ana wasn’t the only one who was wiped out. “I’ll figure this out.”

  There he went, taking it all on himself again. I, not we. This was the Committee, not a dictatorship. But Secretary-General Jayewardene had named him the chairman, and John took that position seriously.

  She was too tired to argue about it right now.

  Then John said, “How about I send Lilith to come get you—”

  Ah yes, Lilith, who could wave her magic cloak and whisk them around the world in a heartbeat. But only at night, which was somehow appropriate, considering what seemed to be Lilith’s other favorite activity. She’d turned the Committee into a soap opera all by herself.

 
“It’s daylight here, John.”

  “Oh. Right. Maybe later, then.”

  Or not. “We’ll be home tomorrow anyway.”

  “Fine, okay. But there’s something else I wanted to talk about.”

  “Oh?”

  “I was watching news footage. You weren’t wearing your vest.”

  She wrinkled her face, confused for a moment, then remembered: the Kevlar vest that had spent the trip stuffed in her duffel bag.

  “That’s because no one was shooting at us,” she answered. “There weren’t even any soldiers. It was the Red Cross and us.”

  “They don’t have to be soldiers to have guns, and you never know when someone might take a shot at you.”

  “It wasn’t a Kevlar situation,” she said.

  “Is it really that big a deal to wear the vest?”

  “It is when you’re in a humid tropical country and need to move fast. The thing makes it harder to throw.”

  “And you couldn’t throw at all if anything happened to you.”

  “And a Kevlar vest is not going to save me from drowning in mud. Or from getting hit by some lunatic jeep driver.”

  “Now you’re making shit up just to argue with me.”

  Funny how he got all worked up over her not wearing Kevlar, but didn’t seem to notice that Ana had been in shorts and a T-shirt. This wasn’t supposed to be about her, it was supposed to be about the team.

  She opened her mouth, ready to snap back at him, her pleasant flush at hearing his voice turning to frustration. These were stupid arguments, which didn’t stop them from happening.

  Sitting back, she made herself relax and said, “This is when I’d kiss you to break your concentration.”

  Saying so had about the same effect. She could imagine the nonplussed look on his face. Then he laughed, and the knot in her gut faded.

  “I worry about you. I don’t know what I’d do if something happened to you.”

  This, too, was an old conversation. She should have been pleased at how much he wanted to protect her, and she was. But it also felt like being put in a box.