Inside Straight

"I can control your mind." He grinned wildly.

Downs stared back. "Is that so?"

"Yeah. And you're going to let me on the show. I'm going to be one of your contestants, and I'm going to win!"

"Right. Sure. Next, please!"

"Hey, wait—"

Security hustled him away before he could get in another word. The auditions continued. For every dozen duds or fakes, someone came along who left the audience gasping.

Early on, a woman who called herself Gardener—slim, black, and intense—trailed a handful of seeds on the ground, in front of the judges' table. Instantly, they grew into trees, towering conifers that left the judges in their own little forest. Auditions halted for an hour while one of them, the strongman Harlem Hammer, uprooted them and cleared them away.

Later, a good-looking, dark-haired guy in his twenties stepped onto the field and flexed his fingers. Donning a cocky grin, he flung out his arms like he was throwing a ball, and a stream of glaring blue flames jetted from his hands and struck the frame of a gutted car. A layer of frost and icicles formed on the metal, even in the midday heat. Then he fired yellow flames at the pile of Gardener's uprooted trees, which caught fire. Assistants were on hand to put out the flames with fire extinguishers. Finally, he faced the judges, hands raised, and he was on fire. His head and hands burned with writhing purple flames, and he was smiling, unharmed. He called himself the Candle.

This was exactly what Ana meant when she told Roberto there'd be flashy stuff here.

"Sixty-seven!" one of the production assistants called, checking her clipboard. "Sixty-seven, Paul Blackwell!"

"Yes!" the guy in front of her exclaimed, then dashed for the field. He hadn't been able to shut up about how cool his power was.

For a long moment, nothing happened, and Ana wondered if he was another one of those nats who claimed vast mental powers. Then, one of the judges—Topper, the former government ace—sneezed. And sneezed again. And couldn't stop sneezing. Then the Harlem Hammer sneezed. Both of them were incapacitated, wracked with violent seizures of sneezing.

And Downs—he gripped the edge of the table, caught in some seizure of his own. He wasn't sneezing, but his eyes rolled partway back in his head, and his body twitched, almost rhythmically. Oh my, Ana thought.

Paul Blackwell crossed his arms and regarded them with a satisfied grin.

"Jesus Christ, would you stop that!" Downs shouted. The seizures stopped and the three judges slouched over their table, exhausted.

Topper wiped her nose with a tissue and said angrily, "Mr. Blackwell—"

"I am Spasm!" the guy said, punching both arms into the air.

"Fine. I think we've seen enough of your—I hesitate to even call it an ace—"

"Hold on, not so fast," Downs said, and Topper rolled her eyes. "Er, Spasm. You say you can do this sort of thing to anyone?"

"Yes, sir!" he said, grinning. "At least, so far."

The three judges leaned together to confer, and a moment later Spasm left the field, grinning. Downs scratched a note on the paper in front of him. Then the production assistant called, "Sixty-eight! You're up! Ana Cortez!"

Ana's heart raced. This was it. Finally. She spotted a guy up in the stands, waving both arms wildly. Roberto, among the spectators. He seemed so happy. The sight of him settled her.

Smoothing her hands on her jeans, she went to face the judges. The three looked so with-it, so assured of themselves. They'd recovered quickly from their encounter with Spasm, and their gazes were almost bored. Who could blame them? Surely they'd seen everything by now.

Downs asked, "What is it you do, Ana?"

She'd said it a hundred times by now. "I dig holes."

"You dig holes." His expression was blank.

"Yeah."

"Well." He shuffled some papers in front of him. "Let's see you dig a hole."

She stood alone at the edge of the field, a hundred yards of green spread before her. She'd never had an audience like this—not since she was little, digging mazes in the playground, when all the neighbors gathered and whispered, brujita, es una brujita de la tierra. This crowd didn't make a sound. The silence marked thick anticipation.

She closed her eyes so she couldn't see them.

Kneeling, she touched her medallion, then put her hands on the ground.

Had to be big. Something flashy. The holes she dug for work—nobody could see how far down they went. So she had to do something else. It didn't need to be precise, no one here was measuring. Turn the hole sideways, and dig it fast.

Now.

Particles moved under her hands, the dirt shifting away from her. The ground rumbled as it might in an earthquake. It vibrated under her, no longer solid, sounding like the soft roar of a distant waterfall. She opened her eyes just as a trench raced away from her. In seconds a cleft opened, splitting the earth to the opposite end zone. A hundred yards. Wide and gaping, it was four feet deep, angled like a steep canyon. Earthwork ridges piled up on either side, and a gray film of dust floated in the air above it. She'd cracked open the earth like an egg.

A few spectators coughed. The air was thick and smelled of chalk. She breathed out a sigh. Her heart was racing, either from the nerves or the effort. Her hands, still planted on the ground, were trembling, like they still felt the vibrations of the earth. She brushed them together, wiping the dust off.

Still, no one said anything. Ana didn't know what to do next. Stand up, she supposed. Go home. She'd shown them her trick, done what Roberto wanted her to do. Now he could take her home, as soon as the judges told her to leave.

The judges were staring. Ana realized: the whole crowd was staring, wide eyed, eerily silent.

She stared back for a long time before Downs pointed his pen at her. "You're in."

When he met her outside, the first thing Roberto said to her was, "Told you so."

The next week passed in a haze. The production company took care of everything—plane tickets, schedules, publicity. Even a stipend. She gave the whole check to Roberto. They weren't going to have her pay anymore, at least not until she got back. She assumed she'd get back quickly—that she wouldn't win.

The production assistant with the tattoos, who called herself Ink, wanted to know what Ana's name was. The show seemed to have hundreds of assistants, each with their own little task, clipboards and cell phones never far away.

"Your ace name," Ink explained. "What we're going to call you on the show."

"I don't have an ace name," Ana said—then realized she did. She always had. She'd just ignored it.

"Well, we need to come up with one. Any ideas?"

"Brujita—" she started to say, then changed her mind. That was a name for a little girl. If she was going to do this, she ought to do it right. "La Bruja de la Tierra. That's what people call me."

Ink frowned. "That's kind of a mouthful. What is that, Spanish?"

"Uh, yeah."

"What's it mean?"

"Witch. Witch of the Earth."

"Earth Witch." She scribbled on her clipboard. "Yeah, cool, that's great."

She walked off before Ana could argue.

She'd grown up in a rickety trailer home at the edge of the desert, surrounded by Mexicanos like her, yet marked as different by her power, always the odd one. Now, suddenly, she'd been plucked from her old life and set down in a new one. She certainly wasn't the odd one here.

At the meet-and-greet party in the dining room at a fancy old hotel in Hollywood, the contestants met each other for the first time and learned their team assignments. All of it was being filmed. Don't look at the cameras, Ana kept telling herself.

After a while, she almost forgot they were there.

She recognized the Candle, Gardener, and even Spasm from the Denver audition. Spasm waved at her across the room, hoisting his drink in salute. Everyone else was new, and she tried to figure out who they were and what they could do. There was Diver, the woman who had real gills. Rustbelt, whose skin was iron, whose touch could turn a car to rust, and who clanked when he moved. Then there was Drummer Boy, already a star as the front man for the band Joker Plague. Hard to miss, at seven feet tall. Not to mention his six arms. Ana felt even smaller among these—sometimes literal—luminaries.