George R.R. Martin - [Wild Cards 18] (12 page)

“What?” Kate said, laughing.

“Come on, I saw you talking to John Fortune this afternoon.”

“I was asking him some questions.”

“Yeah, asking
him
some questions, not anybody else.”

Her smile turned shy. “Well, yeah, but—”

“But what?” Ana prompted.

“He’s definitely kind of cute.”

“Who else has been making eyes at you?”

“No one.”

“Jonathan Hive?” Kate rolled her eyes. Ana listed: “Stunt-man? Spasm?” That time, she winced. Then Ana said, “Berman?”

“Oh my God, no!” Kate threw her pillow at her, and Ana grabbed it, laughing. The pillow threw off a static tingle of energy.

They settled back, too weary to exert much effort, too wired to sleep, and stared at the faded shadows the bedside lamp cast on the ceiling.

After a moment, Ana said, “You should enjoy it.”

“Enjoy what?”

“All those interesting men are looking at you. Enjoy it.”

Ana couldn’t read Kate’s expression, her thin smile, the narrowed, sleepy gaze. She seemed to be working something out.

Then her smile widened. “It doesn’t mean anything if I can’t decide who to look at back.” She glanced over. Now
that
was a wicked look.

“Oh, now you can cry
me
a river!” Ana threw Kate’s pillow back at her, sending them both into a new fit of giggling.

For the first time since she’d arrived at the auditions, Ana started to relax.

Days passed. No telling when the next challenge would arrive—when the alarms would scream, when they’d all pile out of the house to the Hearts’ Hummer—and how stupid was it being Team Hearts? It was way too cute, way too
obnoxious, like they were an ad for Valentine’s Day—and they’d fight about whether they had enough gas or who could read the GPS locator correctly. At least Ana’d been able to do that much for the team—reading GPS coordinates was part of her job back home. Thank goodness Hardhat had been able to drive their monstrosity of a vehicle. Wouldn’t that have been embarrassing, failing as heroes to the point of not being able to get the car started—all on national TV.

Ana thought she didn’t care. But really, she’d prefer
not
looking like an idiot on national TV.

After supper she went out to the backyard. The sky had turned dark, and the air had cooled, though it still smelled tangy, metallic. This whole city smelled like an industrial work site. At home, even after a day of working around oil rigs and diesel fuel, she could walk away from it and smell real air—hot, dusty, but real. She was homesick.

You can bag the whole thing
, a voice whispered … a small, devilish voice.
Do something really stupid next time, get yourself voted off, and that’ll be that
.

But Roberto would know. Roberto would never let her live it down if he thought she’d thrown the contest.

Over the last week, Kate had spent hours in the backyard throwing things at makeshift targets, practicing. Maybe she had the right idea. Ana touched the medallion under her shirt.

She left the porch and sat cross-legged in the middle of the lush green lawn. Closing her eyes, she buried her fingers in the grass, pressing down to the roots, to the earth. The soil here wasn’t like the desert—this was softened by the vegetation, by constant watering. This would be easy to dig. She could even feel what
wasn’t
dirt—gas lines, sewer lines. She could dig around them.

She could drill a hole straight down, hundreds of feet. She could open a furrow ahead of her. Make it as deep or wide as she liked, limited only by the space available, though she’d never dug much more than a backhoe could do in an hour or so of work. She’d limited herself. She didn’t want to cause too much trouble, do too much damage, so she’d always stayed within the boundaries of the sandbox, whatever sandbox she happened to be in.

This had all started in the sandbox, on the playground. If she’d grown up in a city full of concrete and asphalt, she might never have discovered her power at all. That might have been better.

Absently, without effort, she made little holes, because she couldn’t think of what else to try. Scooped out handfuls of earth. They didn’t even make a sound. Then, she dug two holes at once. Two dimples formed, one on either side of her, each with a mound of scooped-out earth beside it. Well, she’d never done that before. So she tried three. Hands in the grass, laid flat against the ground, she could feel the infinite particles of it spread all around her. They moved at her command. She clenched her hands and thought of digging—three holes, then four. With a faint sound of ripping grass, as the soil under the lawn tore free, a circle of holes appeared around her. A dozen of them, all at once. Patterns in the earth. She shifted her right hand, pointed to make a trench, but instead of making it straight, she made it turn. It ran in a perfect circle all the way around her, joining all the holes.

She hadn’t played with her power like this since was she small. She barely remembered. Her father had put her to work tilling the neighbors’ garden patches almost as soon as she’d dug her first hole.

“You are
really
making a mess.”

Hands on her hips, Kate stood at the edge of the porch.

Sheepishly, Ana brushed off her hands. The yard looked like gophers had struck: Dozens of mounds, holes, and trails marred the whole lawn.
Great
, she thought.
Now they’re going to start calling me Gopher Girl
.

“Sorry,” she said.

“Don’t apologize,” Kate said. “It’s kinda cool. But can you do anything else?”

Ana shrugged and glanced hopelessly around the damaged lawn. “I’m trying to figure something out.”

Kate left the glow of the porch light and came into the dark, picking her way around piles of dirt and finding a spot of grass near Ana to sit on. “Not that there’s anything wrong with digging holes. If you did something like this under a building you could bring the whole thing down. Or a bridge,
or a car, or … or anything. You could stop anyone by digging a hole under them.”

She could dig a trench around herself a dozen feet wide and no one could ever reach her. “It’s all just digging. It’s never going to rescue someone from a burning building.”

“Tell me about it,” Kate said. “You dig holes, and I blow shit up. Hey—if this hero thing doesn’t work out, maybe we can start a business: ’Team Hearts: Demolitions and Excavations.’”

“‘Environmentally friendly,’” Ana said, and they both giggled.

Then Kate looked around, studying the lawn, turning serious. She put her hand on one of the mounds of dug-out soil and squeezed her fist around it, letting dirt run through her fingers.

“What is it?” Ana said.

“Just thinking. Look at all these piles. What if you tried to make piles of dirt, instead of just digging? Think about filling in the space instead of digging it out. Does that make any sense?” She wrinkled her forehead, which made her look particularly young and studious.

Dios!
It was so obvious!

It couldn’t possibly work. “I don’t know. I never looked at it that way.”

“Well, can you try it?” she asked eagerly.

All her life her father, the neighbors, everyone, said—dig this, put a trench here, drill a new well. Never
build
.

She held her hand flat to the ground, fingers splayed,
feeling
. Build, make—positive space, not negative space. Feeling the earth under her hand, she reached for it, gathered the particles to her—not for shoving them away, but bringing them together. It almost felt backwards. Make the mound of dirt instead of the hole.

Before her, the earth came alive. It moved, crawling like a million tiny insects, swarming together. A lump formed, then grew into a mound, then a tower, a cone of brown earth rising from the lawn. All around the tower, the level of the ground sank, as the dirt in the center rose. Reverse ditch digging.

The tower reached a height of two feet before Ana pulled her hand back and clutched the medallion under her shirt.
Her heart was racing, and her eyes were wide. If she’d been able to build a tower outside that burning building, she could have saved someone.

Kate’s face brightened with an amazed smile. “That’s so cool!”

“Yeah,” Ana said. “Wow.”

“You could do anything, I bet. Bridges, tunnels, castles—hey, have you ever worked with sand?”

Ana laughed. “No—I’ve been in California over a week and I still haven’t seen the ocean.”

“That’s crazy.” Kate’s gaze was unfocused, still clearly thinking of all the ways Ana could use her power. “You know how during a big earthquake the ground is supposed to ripple, like you can see the waves moving through it? What if you could do something like that—make your own earthquake and knock down an entire army or something.”

The image horrified Ana. She gave a nervous shrug. “They’re not going to be putting us against armies. I hope I never have to do anything like that.”

“Nice to know you could, though. If you had to.” Kate beamed at her, as proud as if she had the power herself. Her smile was clear, brilliant. Honest.

“Why are you helping me?” Ana said abruptly, and regretted it. She didn’t want to sound ungrateful, not for Kate’s help. Not for her friendship.

Kate shrugged, looking briefly confused, like she really didn’t understand the question. Like she hadn’t considered. “Because I want to help.”

“But you see how it is,” Ana said, nodding toward the lighted windows of the house. “They—the judges and them—all talk about teamwork, how we’re supposed to work together. But we’re all competing against each other. In the end, we have to turn against each other. We have to vote each other off. It doesn’t help you at all if I—I—” She stumbled a moment, at first uncertain what to say. “If I’m stronger.”

Again, for just a moment, Kate seemed young—a kid in a ponytail getting ready for softball tryouts. “If we win the next challenge, then nobody gets kicked off. That’s the way I want it. The more you can do, the better chance we have of winning.
It only makes sense.” Her smile brightened again, and turned sly. “Besides, when it’s the two of us in the finals, it’ll be one bitchin’ catfight.”

The two of them fighting each other? No, it wouldn’t be like that. The only word Ana could think to describe it was …
fun
. Her and Kate in the finals? That would be the best thing in the world. Alight now with possibilities, her power tingled in her hands, limitless. Her imagination built castles of earth, dug moats, moved mountains, continents.

She wasn’t sure she’d ever want to change the world that much, though. It was enough to have control over her little corner of it.

And so, feeling strong, feeling mischievous, she moved the little square of earth Kate sat on. Tipped it back like a lever.

Letting loose a shriek, Kate fell back, rolling head over heels. She landed hard on her backside, and for a regretful moment Ana was afraid she’d been hurt—a broken bone or twisted joint—and it would be Ana’s fault.

Kate blinked and gained her new bearings. The lawn where she’d been sitting looked lumpy—that was the only sign anything had happened. It was enough of a sign.

“Oh, you
bitch!
“ But she was laughing when she said it. Then her hand closed on a nearby clod of dirt.

Ana knew exactly what was coming next. She reacted before the clod left Kate’s hand. Hand on the ground, she whispered a quick prayer—and up rose a wall of earth, a protective swell like a soldier’s quickly dug foxhole. Ana put it between her and Kate and nestled down to hide. Not that it helped, because Kate’s thrown projectile—glowing yellow-hot and throwing off sparks—flew over the barrier and came zipping straight into Ana’s hiding place. She squealed and rolled out of the way as the clod dropped hard to the ground just short of where she’d been sitting. Kate hadn’t been aiming for her. Still, the missile kicked up a spray of dirt that pelted Ana.

Kate ran, dodging around Ana’s foxhole, and her hand held another missile. Ana waited for her; Kate took aim, wild laughter glinting in her eye.

“You surrender?” she said.

Ana tried something new—that’s what this was all about, after all—and once again felt for the ground under Kate’s feet, but instead of rocking it, or digging it, she made it climb. She was getting better at making these mounds, these towers. She made the soil flow and creep over Kate’s shoes, up her ankles—then held it.

“What the—” Kate jerked her feet, kicking them free. The earth wasn’t hard and didn’t hold her long, but it gave Ana time to scramble to the other side of her shelter.
Imagine what I could do with more
, she thought. If she could build the earth up around someone’s whole body, bury them up to their necks so they couldn’t move at all …

Now Kate had marbles in both hands. “That’s it. No more Miss Nice Guy.”

Suddenly Ana was in a war zone, dodging bullets that pounded into the ground all around her, zooming in from all sides. They weren’t very big, and none of them came right at her—this was, after all, a game. But they kept her from fleeing, locking her into a small space on the lawn, and she was laughing at the dirt flying everywhere, at Kate’s wild expression, and the increasingly chaotic state of the lawn.