Wild Cards

The kids shook Kimmie’s hand, chatting about the songs each band was going to play.

“Michelle, what are we going to do about those protesters?” Robin asked. “They’re going to hassle the kids for the entire time we’re here.”

“They’re obviously reptoid people.” That was Jan, Robin’s landlady. Jan was a conspiracy nut. Pure tinfoil hat stuff. Michelle wasn’t entirely sure why Jan had come along on the trip. But she was getting on Michelle’s very last nerve.

“They’re not lizard people, Jan,” Michelle said with exasperation. She’d had about enough of the whole lizard people, gray aliens, Denver Airport, and MKUltra conspiracies to last a lifetime. Well, in all fairness, the MKUltra stuff was true.

“Jan,” Michelle continued. She glanced over at the kids. They seemed to be enjoying meeting Kimmie and talking about music. It was a relief. She’d been afraid that everyone would treat her kids the way God’s Weenies did. “You do know that all this conspiracy stuff is just, well, bullshit?”

“Ha!” Jan said with maniacal glee. Blue sparks glittered between her teeth and the veins in her temples pulsed. Despite Jan’s all black attire and dark sunglasses, she couldn’t hide that she was a joker. And it was clear she wasn’t really trying to hide it much anyway.

“An alien virus created all the wild cards,” Jan continued. “And MKUltra is a real thing. It just follows that there are other secret shenanigans going on. And they’re reptoid, not lizard people.”

“Sweet baby Jesus,” Michelle groaned. “That doesn’t follow at all.”

“Well, you’re a part of the Committee and we all know they’re nothing more than lackeys for the New World Order. And they’re butt monkeys for the Gnomes of Zurich. Also, you’re a product of aliens messing with human DNA.”

Arghhhhhh, Michelle thought. Just enough truth balled up with the crazy to make things sound real.

“Give it up, Michelle,” Robin said. “You’ve lost that fight. Those suitcases should have been here already.”

Michelle took a real look around the lobby of the Gunter.

The Gunter was sponsoring the competition and had also discounted the rooms, which made them affordable for the students. Most of the kids in the Mob came from families without a lot of disposable income, and instruments and music lessons weren’t cheap. Michelle had paid out of her pocket for the band’s transportation to San Antonio with the promise from the band’s director, Sharon Oberhoffer, that no one was to know it was from her.

Sharon was a joker, too. When her card had turned, she’d been a professional trumpet player, but now her lips were freakishly small and puckered tight like a rosebud. It had prevented her from playing trumpet professionally anymore. Because she couldn’t speak, she whistled or used ASL to communicate. But mostly she whistled. It was like trying to carry on a conversation with Harpo Marx.

“Snazzy place,” Michelle said as she looked around the lobby. Sharon gave a low whistle in agreement.

Adorning the lobby ceiling were intricate, bright white crisscrossing moldings. Enormous chandeliers hung from medallions centered in the squares created by the crisscrosses. The walls were painted Texas sky blue. The second floor had a balcony overlooking the lobby.

“I’ll check us in,” Michelle said to Jan and Robin.

She walked to the front desk and gave the clerk her best professional model smile. “Hello, there are five rooms under the name Pond.”

“Yes, Mrs. Pond,” the clerk replied, returning Michelle’s smile. “Your rooms are ready.”

“It’s Ms. Pond. Are the rooms together?”

“Oh yes, we planned for that.” A few moments later the clerk slid the keycards across the desk. “You’re on the sixth floor. Elevators are just over there.” The clerk leaned forward and said, “But you should know, that floor is haunted.”

The Secret Life of Rubberband (#ulink_504a8d7a-fbe1-50f4-9d2a-bf37edc3df2c)

by Max Gladstone (#ulink_504a8d7a-fbe1-50f4-9d2a-bf37edc3df2c)

Part 1 (#ulink_504a8d7a-fbe1-50f4-9d2a-bf37edc3df2c)

THE BAGS WERE LATE, protesters howled outside, and Robin Ruttiger, guidance counselor of Xavier Desmond High, had lost a student.

“You have so many,” observed his unhelpful friend Jan Chang, who nobody called Sparkplug where she could hear them, before she turned the page of her highlighted and ballpoint-pen-annotated National Enquirer. She wore black jeans and a black leather jacket and would have looked completely foreign to San Antonio, Texas, even without the pulsing blue veins that webbed her skin. “Surely you can miss just one.”

Robin scanned the posh chaos of the Gunter lobby, which boiled with teachers, parents, and kids who wore the T-shirts of eight different high school jazz bands. He covered the mic of his phone, even though the hold music probably didn’t care about the noise. “Antonia was over by the ferns a second ago. You’re sure she didn’t come out this door?”

Jan did glance up this time, over the rim of the thick black sunglasses she wore to protect other people’s eyes from hers. Robin raised a hand to block the electric glare. “That would require my having any clue what she looks like.”

“Why did you even come, if not to help?”

She rolled her eyes, then pressed her sunglasses back into place. “I’m here because my niece is competing against your students in a band meet or match or whatever they call these things; said niece, charmingly devout, is convinced that residing in a historically haunted hotel puts her soul at risk; my breeder kid sister indicated that if I showed up to protect her against the ghost, she’d stop bugging me about having forgotten the birthdays of her various spawn for the last six years; and you owe me half a month’s rent and don’t get to throw shade.” She turned the page. “If one of your kids has been kidnapped by our reptoid overlords, that’s your problem.”

“I’m more worried about those asshole protesters, who do exist, than about the reptoids, who don’t.”

“Spoken like a reptoid stooge. And I don’t think they’re protesting assholes.”

“When there are real aliens in the world, I don’t know why you feel the need to invent—” He stopped himself. “Antonia’s a dark-haired girl, about five four, black gloves.”

Jan raised the tabloid between them.

“Fine.” He turned from her, covered the mic again—the hold line had started playing what he really hoped was not a Muzak cover of James Brown’s “I’ll Go Crazy.” “Wally, have you seen Antonia?”

The enormous pile of iron whose birth certificate read Wally Gunderson, and whose ace name was Rustbelt, though most people shortened it to Rusty, shrugged. Joints creaked and red flakes drifted down to the lacquered wood floor Rusty was trying not to scuff with his enormous boots—or were those feet? Rusty didn’t need to wear clothes, but Robin was glad he made the effort, even if his sharp metal edges pressed disconcertingly against his lime-green polo shirt and dad jeans. “Oh, she’s here for sure, yeah. We brought them all in from the van, right through the door, and then Bubbles told off those jerks outside. The kids are fine. Have you got through to that delivery company there about our bags yet?”

Robin didn’t know what he expected an enormous metal man to sound like, but the strong North Range accent always caught him by surprise. “I’m listening to the hardest working hold music in show business.” Outside, the protesters’ roars gained a rhythm: Hell no, jokers gotta go. Christ Jesus. “I just—I really need to know where everyone is. Okay?” How could he have lost a kid already?

“Well, that’s Yerodin right there.” Rusty pointed through the crowd, past mounds of instrument cases, to his adopted daughter, Yerodin, who he hadn’t let out of his sight all day. Yerodin, who the other kids called Ghost, hovered over the arm of a couch, hugging one leg as she talked with Adesina Pond, who looked like an animate obsidian statue with cobalt wings.

“That’s two out of seven, at least.” The speaker on Robin’s Nokia hadn’t worked right since he dropped the phone in a vat of acid six years back, but even with the pops and fuzz he could hear the bad synths had marched on to “Try Me.” “Hold this.” Wally took the phone with the care of a man trying not to break a butterfly wing, and raised it to the geared pit where his ear should have been.

Robin craned his neck over the crowd. He was six feet two, and would have had a decent angle on the lobby even without playing his card—especially since most of the crowd were teenagers. But he was here to chaperone the students of Xavier Desmond High, and he’d just shouldered through a horde of angry nat protesters after an armed standoff. No use pretending to be normal.

So he stretched.

Body mass pressed up into his neck. Skin expanded. The bones he was very good at pretending to possess stopped mattering. His chest caved in, his arms grew frail, his watch clattered to the floor, and it all felt so relaxing. He smiled, and made himself stop when his neck was only twelve feet long.

From up here he could see most of his students, though the Xavier Desmond High School Jazz Band—the Jokertown Mob—was certainly living up to the “Mob” part of its name. Lanky Peter Jacobson, aka Segway, zipped through the crowd on his wheels. Morpho Girl, there, was still talking with Ghost—a ten-year-old girl raised, if you call it that, by people who hoped she’d one day be a weapon. Ghost, intangible, glanced over her shoulder at the crowd beyond the hotel doors. Marissa, aka something—she changed her handle every few weeks—had struck up a conversation with a Chinese girl wearing a bright silver cross and a Detroit Detonators T-shirt. He spotted Asti and Sean showing something he really hoped was not a fake ID to the lobby bartender, and—

“How’s it going, Mister R?” Jacobson hopped over a luggage cart, spun midair, and landed with a squeal. A bellhop glared.

“Fine,” Robin called down. “Segway, have you seen Antonia?”

Jacobson beamed at being called by his card name. Robin often wondered what it was about drawing the card that triggered an obsession with pseudonyms. Not that Robin Ruttiger himself, aka (no matter how he tried to forget it these days) Rubberband, had a leg to stand on in that regard. “She looked tired. Maybe she, like, went upstairs for a nap?”

“Thank you.” He snapped back down to size. Segway swept past, bent down, and tossed Robin his watch. He stretched his wrist thin to slide it on. “Wally, can you watch the door? And stay on the phone?”

“You bet.” Rusty stuck up his thumb, ground his jaw, and listened to James-less Brown.

Robin flattened himself, everything except his feet. (He didn’t need shoes, but he liked wearing them.) He caught his watch in his hand this time—no sense testing the “full shock-absorbing power” any more than necessary—as he snaked through the crowd. “Excuse me. Pardon. Pardon me. Passing through.” The mothers and kids and hotel employees didn’t notice, or did and didn’t care, or did and recoiled in horror, for which he didn’t blame them. Flattened out, he looked like people did in cartoons after they’d been bulldozed by an enterprising coyote. He wriggled to the stairs, stretched his arms up fourteen feet—ten years of practice and it still felt weird reminding himself he didn’t have shoulder joints anymore—caught the overhead railing, pulled his skin like a, well, like a rubber band, and snapped up through the air to land on the second floor in a tangle of overextended limbs.

The mezzanine, at least, was quiet. He sorted himself out, adjusted his watch, and straightened his collar.