There was some laughter at that, and Ana flushed with relief. I survived.
Curveball’s crack at the safe—simple, elegant, effortless—was the perfect end to the replay. Hearts hadn’t just succeeded at the challenge. They’d made it look easy.
Harlem Hammer delivered the verdict this time: “Team Spades, you got lucky. If Dragon Girl hadn’t had that particular stuffie in her sack, what would you have done? On the other hand, Team Hearts pushed their abilities to the edge. They’re mastering their powers, and they’re doing it as a team. For that reason, tonight’s victory and immunity go to Team Hearts.”
They cheered, all of them together, and hugged, a chaotic mass of people—with a foxtail stuck out and waving. DB waded into the middle and picked up Kate with one set of arms and Ana with the other. They squealed with surprise and laughter as he lifted them into the air.
Grinning fiercely, Kate leaned over and spoke across the top of DB’s head to Ana, “I’ll see you in the finals!”
Hearts House had a party that night, because they didn’t have to stand around the table and pick cards. Didn’t have to kick anyone out. Music played—Wild Fox put a Joker Plague CD in the stereo, which immediately endeared him to Drummer Boy and made up for all his pranks. The drummer entertained them by adding live accompaniment, tapping the membranes on his torso and pounding out improvised rhythms.
Drinking sodas, Ana and Kate watched from the kitchen bar.
“Winning feels pretty good, doesn’t it?” Kate said.
“Yeah,” Ana answered. In fact, the whole world had opened up.
“It only gets better from here, I bet,” Kate said. Her smile fell, though, as Drummer Boy made his way over to them. The song had ended, and after grabbing a beer from the fridge, he veered to the bar, throwing a glare at Ana like he wanted her to leave.
He wasn’t going to scare her off that easy.
Expectantly, the two waited for him.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” Kate said back. Ana waved. Again, he gave her that glare. She kept smiling like she hadn’t noticed.
He ducked his gaze, which almost made him look sheepish, and said to Kate, “I was wondering if you maybe wanted to take a walk or something. Or just go out back and talk. To celebrate. I’ll sneak you a beer.” He showed off the beer bottle in one of his left hands.
She smiled thinly. “Still trying to get me into bed?”
His expression showed a moment of hesitation, like he was trying to decide which way to play this. Then he decided, offering a broad grin. “You can’t blame a guy for trying.”
“Yes, I can.” Her smile cut like glass.
DB walked away, draining half the beer.
Kate blew out a breath she must have been holding. The front door opened; Kate looked over her shoulder at it. Wild Fox and Hardhat were stepping outside.
“I was sort of hoping John would stop by,” she explained to Ana, then took a long drink of soda to hide her expression.
The next time the front door opened, Ana was in the fridge getting more sodas, but she heard Kate hiss, “Oh my God!”
Ana looked. “What is it?”
A man in his late thirties had just come in, a white guy with sun-streaked blond hair and stunning blue eyes. He stuck his hands in his jeans pockets and looked around like he was lost.
“Is that Brad Pitt?” Kate said. “That looks like Brad Pitt.”
It certainly did. Despite her whispering, the actor heard her. When he saw Kate, his blue eyes lit up and he came over.
More Hollywood magic. Ana was glad she had a front-row seat for this.
“You’re Curveball,” Brad said. “I recognize you from American Hero.”
“Yeah,” Kate said, nodding and gaping.
“I heard there was a party, so I thought I’d stop by. Is that okay?”
“Yeah. Sure. Cool.” Kate was still nodding. “Um…can I get you a Coke or something?”
“Sure. That’d be great.”
Kate took one of the cans from Ana’s hand and handed it to him. His famous grin widened.
Ana studied the actor—the well-known actor who just happened to show up on their doorstep. She wondered…and decided she had to try it. If she was wrong, she could apologize and go back to being the socially awkward member of the team with no harm done.
She put her hand on his shoulder and shoved. Brad Pitt disappeared in a shimmer of light, leaving Wild Fox holding the soda. He cringed, trying to maintain his charming smile. But he couldn’t pull it off like Brad could.
Kate took a moment to register the transformation. Then, she shouted, “Oh, you son of a bitch!”
“Hey, I was just having fun! Don’t throw anything, don’t throw—” He ran, and she chased him, cocking an empty can like she really was going to throw it. Last Ana saw, they went over the sofa and out the back door.
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.”
Jonathan Hive
Daniel Abraham
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 el
sewhere.
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.
“She sure is,” Berman agreed with a smile.
He hates her, Jonathan thought, or he is fucking her. Or both. He made himself a mental note to find out which.
“The guest aces episodes are going to be central to the show. Really central. And having someone of your stature gives the whole thing a sense of that international respect. That’s what we want. A real demonstration that American Hero isn’t just about America.”
The penny dropped.
Lohengrin. He was the guy who could generate a suit of medieval-looking armor and a sword that could cut through more or less anything. All very Neuschwanstein. He’d made a big splash a few years ago over something, but it had only played for about five minutes on American news.
So what exactly was it he was doing here? He had to be the Kraut Berman had been talking about before.
“I wanted very much to help promote heroism,” Lohengrin said. “There is not enough of it in America.”
“I’m glad you feel that way, too,” Berman said.
The wasp landed on the rail, just a few feet away. Still close enough to hear and see.
“When am I to meet with the team that I am to lead?”
“Ah,” Berman said. “That’s actually changed a little. The part where you lead the team was just preliminary brain-storming. No, what the network settled on was having you face off against the team. Part of their task will be getting past you.”
Because American Hero isn’t just about America, Jonathan thought. It’s also about beating up foreigners. Lohengrin’s expression told him that he’d drawn the same conclusion.
“Genevive didn’t mention that change?” Berman said, oozing apology without actually offering one. Lohengrin smiled coolly. Jonathan saw Berman flinch when the sword appeared in the German ace’s hand, and flinched himself when the sword darted at his wasp. It felt like being pinched.
He hoped the display had proven Lohengrin’s point. He didn’t have a backup wasp there, though, so he’d never know. It was a bummer. That angle might have been juicy.
The wasp in the fold of Curveball’s purse took to the air as Jonathan’s attention inhabited it. It took a moment to get his bearings.
“I…I don’t really talk about it, you know,” Fortune said. The bar roared dully behind him, half a hundred conversations running in parallel. The décor was unfinished wood, painted ductwork, and odd signs and objects epoxied to the walls in lieu of actual character. “I spent most of my life with Mom trying to keep anything from setting off the virus. She’s great, you know. I mean I really love her.” He paused. “That’s not something guys are supposed to say about their mothers, is it?”
“Probably not,” Curveball agreed. “But it’s okay. I know what you mean.”
Curveball and John Fortune, sitting together in a booth at the back of some unholy Bennigan’s clone. There didn’t seem to be a film crew nearby. Either they were really well-hidden, or John Fortune had used his connection to the show to sneak Curveball out of the panopticon. And if that wasn’t reason enough to go out with a guy, Jonathan wasn’t sure what would be.
The wasp high on the wall edged down, keeping its green carapace hidden behind the fake antlers and 1950s outhouse humor. Jonathan tried to make out what the body language was saying; Fortune with his hands on the table, a little slumped over, Curveball sitting forward too, leaning on her elbows. Listening, but not flirty. She had her hair down. It was the first time Jonathan had seen her without her ponytail.
“And then, when I drew an ace… when I thought, you know, it was an ace. I don’t know. It was wild. Everyone was calling me the savior, or else the antichrist. And the thing with my dad. The thing with Fortunato.”
Fortunato dying to save me, he didn’
t say. Now that Fortune laid it out like that, Jonathan could see how there’d be a certain amount of couch time called for.
“Intense,” Curveball said.
“Yeah. Yeah, intense. And now,” Fortune shrugged, “it’s all over. You know? I used to have guards around me all the time. And then I was one of the most important aces in the world. And now I’m Captain Cruller.”
Curveball shook her head, shifting her hand from the opposite elbow to the beer bottle in front of her. Dos Equis. Jonathan would have thought she was a wine cooler girl. “That’s Drummer Boy,” Curveball said. “Blow him off. He’s a dick.”
And dicking away, even as we speak, Jonathan thought.
“He’s not wrong, though,” Fortune said. “I mean it’s weird being ordinary, you know? Not being anyone in particular.”
“Maybe you should get on a TV show,” Curveball said.
The wasp was in a pretty good position to see Fortune’s face while that sunk in.
“Shit, I’m sorry, Kate. I didn’t mean anything about you guys. I wasn’t… I didn’t mean to slag on you.”
“No, it’s okay. I mean, apology accepted, but it’s not what I was thinking.”
“What was?” Fortune asked.
She looked up, half-smiling a question.
“What were you thinking?” Fortune asked.
Curveball frowned, picked up the beer bottle, drank a little, and put it down with a thud. Fortune let the silence stretch. If it had been a manipulation, it would have been a good one. The poor bastard was sincere, so it was even better.
“I’m thinking about the reasons we all came to this thing,” she said. “Drummer Boy, Earth Witch. Me. It’s been fun, and I’ve met a lot of people who are really great. And some that aren’t so great. But the thing that… the thing that’s weird in me? I want to win. I came here and I thought, whatever. I’ll try and we’ll see what happens, but I’m around everyone, and it’s like it’s important. I want it. I want to be the American Hero.”