Busted Flush

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.

“I’m sorry you were worried,” she said. “But the only way you can really keep me safe is to not send me out here at all. And that would just piss me off.”

“I know, and you can get killed crossing the street at home. Doesn’t mean I’m going to stop worrying.”

She smiled. “I love you, too, John. I miss you.”

“I miss you, too. Get some sleep, okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

NEW YORK CITY

Kate and Ana shared an apartment on the Lower East Side. They went home from the airport, and Ana crawled into bed for another round of sleep. Kate checked in on her, then went to see John.

While she and Ana had gone for austere college chic in a close-quarters studio, John lived in his mother’s penthouse overlooking Central Park. Peregrine was in Los Angeles for the second season of American Hero and had given her son the run of the place.

Kate felt the disconnect every time she went there. She’d grown up with Peregrine on TV and all over the covers of magazines. She was an icon, probably the most visible and famous wild carder ever, with her stunning presence and spectacular wings. And here was Kate, dating her son.

The penthouse was beyond posh. It wasn’t opulent or over the top—that was just it. Everything was tasteful and perfect, from the clean lines of the gray leather sofa set and glass coffee table, to the giant arrangement of hyacinths on the twelve-seater dining-room table. Real flowers, not silk, changed every week by the housekeeper. Last week had been orchids.

John grew up with this. He walked in here, and it was home. Kate still felt like she’d landed in a photo spread in Vogue. She was getting used to it—it was definitely easy to get used to. But sometimes she wondered if she’d fallen down a rabbit hole.

She set her bag by the wall of the living room and took a deep breath, happy to be anywhere that didn’t smell like a third world country.

“Hello?” she called. Her voice echoed.

“Hey!” John appeared from the kitchen, a bottle of wine in one hand and a corkscrew in the other. She was on him in a heartbeat, arms over his shoulders, pulling herself into a kiss. Awkwardly, hands full, he hugged her back. Their kiss was warm and long.

“Hi,” she said when they managed to separate.

“Hey,” he said, his smile bright. “Let me put this down so we can do this right.”

John set the bottle on the coffee table, where two glasses were waiting. Kate pulled him down to the sofa next to her.

The light from the other room glinted off the lump in his forehead. Sekhmet. A scarab-like joker living in John’s head. She gave him his power—he wasn’t an ace on his own, not anymore. But Kate didn’t like to think about it, that she and John were never really alone. Right now, moments like these, John was all hers.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” John said. “You still look beat.”

“I’m just starting to wake up.”

She pulled her leg across his lap, half straddling him, and kissed him again. She rested her hand on his cheek, ran it across his curly hair. His lips moved with hers while his hands crept under her shirt, pressing against her back. She drew on his warmth, and the tension faded. They sighed together.

“Welcome home,” he said.

“Thanks. It’s really, really good to be here.” She could curl up in his arms and never leave.

“Yeah. I worry less when you’re with me.” He ducked his gaze, hiding a smile. “If it weren’t for you, I don’t think I’d have lasted this long.”

So serious. Of course he was, this wasn’t a game. The pundits sometimes joked: what, you kids think you can save the world? But they could. They did. Little parts of it at a time.

Not wanting the anxiety to creep back, she joked, “And if it weren’t for you, I’d have a million dollars and be the designated ace guardian of San Jose.”

He laughed, and she laughed with him, their heads bowed together. He said, “You really want to be the designated ace guardian of San Jose? Showing up for your guest appearance on Dancing with the Stars?”

“Oh, my God, no. Poor Stuntman. No wonder he went to work for the government.”

John’s eyes held uncertainty again. Still worrying.

“John, I wouldn’t change anything. I don’t want to be anywhere but right here.”

Their next kiss was slow, studious almost, like neither one of them wanted to miss a single sensation. He worked her shirt off, and she helped, raising her arms, leaning into his touch as his hands slid up her back. He dropped her shirt on the floor, then tipped her back onto the sofa, and it was some time before they actually made it to bed.

Kate heard a voice. She thought she was dreaming, some kind of weird, lucid dream, because her eyes were closed, but she felt awake. Familiarity intruded. John’s voice, muttering.

But it wasn’t John. He wasn’t speaking English. She opened her eyes.

He was looking at her, but it wasn’t him. Part of him belonged to Sekhmet, and sometimes she took over. The look in his eyes became older, harder, more experienced. That other gaze was looking at her now, with an expression that was both sad and annoyed. The situation was complicated: Isra the joker had been waiting for a great ace with whom she could join her powers and become Sekhmet, the handmaiden of Ra. But John didn’t become Ra. He’d been cured of the wild card virus. Isra might call herself Sekhmet, but she never got the power she’d longed for. There was no Ra, now. Her frustration with John, and with those around him, was plain, whenever she came to the fore.

The voice whispered in Egyptian. Kate wished she knew what she was saying. She was afraid the joker was saying, “This won’t last.”

Self-consciously, Kate pulled up the sheet to cover her chest. “I wish you’d leave us alone,” she whispered.

Isra heard her. “You’re children. Just children. You don’t understand.”

Kate frowned. “That’s not fair. After what we’ve been through, after what you’ve put John through—”

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this. He’s such a boy.”

“No. You ask too much of him.” But how could she argue with something that was so much a part of him?

“You are just a child.”

Angry, Kate started to sit up, ready to yell another retort. But John closed his eyes, sighed, and seemed to sleep again.

She touched John’s arm. “John? John, wake up.” She kissed his bare shoulder, then again, until he stirred.

“Hm? What’s wrong? Is it the phone?” He thought Jayewardene was calling with a new disaster. He started to sit up, but she held him back. It was John this time, looking out of his own eyes.

“Nothing’s wrong. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have woken you up.”

Only half awake, he stroked her cheek absently. “You okay?”

She thought about telling him he’d been talking in his sleep—or that Sekhmet had been talking in his sleep. She’d told him on other nights when it had happened. This time, she didn’t. “I had a nightmare or something. It’s nothing.”

Then John’s phone did ring. They both lurched at the noise. Reflexively, he grabbed it and listened. His frown deepened. Jayewardene. Had to be.

“Got it. Okay. We’ll send someone down,” he said, then hung up.

“What is it?” she asked.

“There’s been an explosion in West Texas. Feds are saying a grain elevator went up, but that’s not what the people on the ground are saying.”

“What are they saying?”

“Terrorists. Sabotaging the oil.”

“Oh, my God. And we’re going?” She pushed the covers back. But John shook his head.

“Lilith and Bugsy can go. They can check things out and report back before we’ve even gotten to the airport.”

“But I want to go—they’ll need people, there’s got to be some kind of rescue operation—”

“We don’t know the story yet, so you’re not going.”

“John, I want to go. If you’re trying to keep me safe—”

He smirked at her. “Are you ever going to stop arguing with me?”

“You ought to be used to it by now.” She tried on a smile. Hoped he knew she was teasing.

He ignored the phone for the moment, wrapped his arms around her, and kissed her. Which was just what she needed. She leaned into him and kissed back.

And for a moment, everything was just fine.