George R.R. Martin - [Wild Cards 18] by Inside Straight Read Free Book Online Page B

dashboard captured an image of profound disappointment, and it would play on millions of TV sets for all the world to see.

    Ana Cortez—Earth Witch, so-called—thought through the scenario again and again, and wondered what she could have done. Dug a hole. Dug a ditch. Undermined the building. And what good would that have done? None. Now the team had lost, and one of them would get voted off.
    Almost, she wished she’d get the boot so she could go home and forget about all this.
    Team Hearts headquarters was a sprawling West Hollywood manor, with a gated driveway, stucco walls, a luscious lawn and flourishing garden—the kind of place that played well on television and promoted the fantasy of a Southern California paradise.
    All of it was just a backdrop for the drama.
    Curveball—Kate Brandt—stormed from the garage into the combined kitchen and dining area. In her, the stunned disappointment of their failure had changed to fury. Jaw set, she turned on her slower teammates.
    “They should have given us some kind of warning. If we’d been able to plan—”
    Hive laughed. “That’s the whole point. We’re not supposed to plan. We’re supposed to face the unknown. Battle the unexpected.” Arms raised, he flashed his hands to emphasize his sarcasm.
    “I thought they’d start with something small,” Andrew Yamauchi, Wild Fox, said. His tail revealed his disappointment, hanging almost to the floor. “Rescuing kittens from trees or something.”
    Hardhat—T.T. Taszycki—leaned against the counter. “Makes you wonder what the fuck is next, don’t it?”
    Hive just wouldn’t let up. “Look at it this way—that farce back there was highly entertaining. It should get us a lot of air time.”
    Curveball turned on him. “Would you shut up? There was nothing entertaining about that! We were awful!”
    Curveball and Hive faced each other down across the too bright kitchen, and any friendly sparks that had lit betweenthem over the last week vanished. The others lurked around the edges of the room. Even Drummer Boy, all seven feet of him, managed to slink out of their way.
    Jonathan Hive was too slick. He had a studied detachment, a journalistic objectivity that went a little too far—he was always an observer. He’d put himself on the outside, and he was used to commenting on everything.
    He regarded Curveball and said with wry amazement, “You’re actually taking all this seriously, aren’t you? That’s kinda cute.”
    He’d failed to observe that she’d already taken a marble out of her pocket and gripped it in her fist.
    Ana spotted it. “Kate, no—”
    Too late. Curveball wound up her pitch and threw the missile at him.
    “Whoa!” His eyes went wide, and his shoulder—where the marble would have struck—disintegrated with the sound of buzzing. The cloth of his shirt collapsed as the flesh dissolved into a swarm of tiny green particles, which scattered before the marble as he flinched away. A second later, the hundred buzzing insects coalesced, crawling under his collar and merging back into his body. The marble didn’t touch him, but hit the wall behind him. A faint insect humming lingered.
    To her credit, Curveball hadn’t thrown the marble hard. She hadn’t put all her anger into it. It would have only bruised him. But it did embed itself in the wall behind Hive and send cracks radiating across the paint.
    He glared at the wall, then at her. “I guess this would be a bad time to ask if you, ah, wanted to have dinner with me. Or something.”
    She stomped out of the kitchen and through the French doors to the redwood porch. A moment later, Drummer Boy followed her. No doubt another camera would capture them and whatever heart-to-heart conversation they were having.
    Back in the kitchen, Hive shrugged away from the wall, straightened his shirt, and for once seemed uncomfortable that he was the center of attention. Without a word—uncharacteristically without a word—he hunched his