Busted Flush by George R. R. Martin Read Free Book Online

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 shewould 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 inhalf 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