Wild Cards VIII: One-Eyed Jacks

by George R. R. Martin

“I didn’t expect to find you on duty, Doctor,” Joann said.

  He made one of his expansive movements, arms raised, his good hand lifted, imploring the heavens. “This is the only place I feel useful. Can’t sleep, might as well work.”

  This hadn’t been his first all-nighter recently, judging by the shadows under his eyes.

  “Take care of yourself. This place needs you.”

  “Sometimes I wonder,” he muttered. “Well, what have you brought us?”

  “Doctor, meet Vlad. He’s … well. He’s an interesting case.”

  “Oh?” Tachyon’s sudden focus was wholly professional and intensely curious. Somehow, Vlad cringed even more tightly into himself.

  “It’s okay,” Joann murmured. “You can trust him.”

  Meeting Tachyon was a stroke of luck. His interest piqued, they got into an exam room right away, no waiting, and Joann lingered nearby while Vlad explained, haltingly, anxiously, about his feeding his urges. Tachyon produced a stethoscope and patiently asked to examine the kid, who nodded furtively. For all his faults and foibles, Tachyon was a good doctor, and he was able to draw Vlad out.

  “I’d like to get some X-rays, if you’re amenable,” he asked, and Vlad nodded, a bit more openly this time. “Will you excuse us for just a moment?”

  The doctor nodded at Joann, and they stepped into the corridor.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “I’ve no idea what the virus did to him. Just when I think I’ve seen everything, all the horrors—” He shook his head. “There are legal issues as well. He isn’t eighteen, is he? Any idea where is parents are?”

  “No, I just met him a couple hours ago. I wanted to get him here before the police picked him up.”

  “Ah. Yes.”

  “I don’t know what can be done for him. But you guys have counselors, social workers, some insight into this sort of thing. Maybe you can help him settle in a little better.”

  Tachyon blew a breath out. “I don’t know how much we can really do. But we’ll try.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You have but to call.”

  Joann felt like she’d actually done some good. Maybe helped one person, solved a problem for another. Cyclone would have said it wasn’t flashy enough. Wouldn’t make the front page. He’d be writing up a press release and trying to spin it as some great ace victory. Yeah, right, sneaking around in the middle of the night, making sure stray cats weren’t killed and some wild-card kid didn’t get ground up on the streets. Real flashy. But she was happy with the night’s work.

  Back at her hotel, she managed a few hours of sleep, and stopped by Federal Hall to see Maria Fuentes around lunchtime. She was working at her desk, the paperwork in a different configuration than it had been the day before. It hadn’t seemed to decrease at all.

  “I don’t think you’ll have any more problems with dead animals,” she said, after greeting her.

  “You found what was happening?” Fuentes asked, standing from her desk, her expression alight. “You stopped it?”

  “I think so.”

  “So what was it?”

  She didn’t want Vlad to face charges. Kid had enough to worry about. “Will you just trust me when I say it’s taken care of?”

  “You’re the only one who believed that anything was even wrong. If you tell me it’s over, and it won’t happen again—well, that’s the end of it.” Her smile was so earnest. “Thank you, Agent Jefferson.”

  “Call me Joann.”

  “All right, I will. And I’m not sure there’s anything I could ever do for you all over at SCARE, but—”

  “I’ll call, definitely,” Joann said.

  She took the train back to DC that evening, happy to be home, settled, and on to the next task. Maybe Cyclone wanted the razzle-dazzle, but Joann would be happy with a record of actually helping people, particularly wild-card victims. The way people had been there to help her, when her card turned.

  A family story went that right before the Civil War, her great-great-great-grandmother escaped from a plantation in Georgia, was guided to freedom by Harriet Tubman herself, and then went on to help other fugitives by providing food and shelter on their stops heading north. There was almost no way to verify the story, whether Joann’s ancestor really had met the famous woman. Escaped slaves changed their names, vanished into new communities. The Underground Railroad didn’t exactly keep records. But it was a great story, and her father had delighted in showing Joann storybooks about Tubman and telling her, over and over, “There’s what a hero looks like. Heroes help people, and we can all be heroes if we try.”

  Sometimes, Joann felt like a fool for believing that.

  The next morning, just exactly as she was arriving at the SCARE offices, the department secretary held up a slip of paper.

  “Agent Jefferson, you just missed a call.”

  “Oh?” She took the slip, even as Terri explained.

  “A park ranger in New York, I think? Marie Fuentes? She wouldn’t say what was wrong but she sounded upset.”

  Frowning, Joann sat at an empty desk and picked up the phone.

  “Hello, Marie?”

  Fuentes’s urgent voice answered. “Joann, it’s happened again. Another one. Whatever’s doing this is back, or there’s something else … I don’t know what to do! I thought you said this was over!”

  Joann rubbed her forehead. “Wait. What happened?”

  The woman’s sigh was tense, frustrated. “Another animal. A ranger found it on morning rounds. Same place. Does that mean there’s more than one thing doing this?”

  “Not necessarily. At least … give me a couple of hours, I’m going to make some calls. I’ll come back to New York today if I need to. We’ll take care of this, don’t worry.”

  “It’s really hard not to.” All the woman’s relief from the day before had vanished. Whatever trust Joann had earned was gone.

  “I know. Hold tight, I’ll call you when I have more information. Thanks for letting me know.”

  She hung up the phone, looked up the number for the Jokertown Clinic—it was in all the SCARE Rolodexes—and called.

  “Blythe van Renssaeler Memorial Clinic, how may I direct your call?”

  “Is Dr. Tachyon in?”

  “I’m sorry, he’s not avail—”

  “Tell him it’s Lady Black. He’ll talk to me.”

  “I’m not sure—”

  “Lady Black from the Special Committee on Ace Resources and Endeavors.”

  A pause followed, and then a cool, “If you’ll hold for just a moment, please.”

  Joann waited. She waited long enough that she was wrangling her next set of arguments and persuasions when the line clicked back on.

  “Yes?” came Tachyon’s harried, overworked voice.

  “Joann Jefferson here. I’m calling about Vlad, I got word he’s back on the street?”

  He groaned. “Oh, dear. I’m so sorry. What a tragedy, what an awful tragedy.”

  “Doctor, what happened?”

  “I’m sorry, we couldn’t hold him. He wouldn’t stay.”

  “Why not?” She didn’t mean for her voice to sound so accusatory, but she was losing patience.

  “I don’t know, why does a frightened teenager ever do anything? He was in a closed room with too many people and he got scared. He wouldn’t let us admit him, even though we have programs to pay for treatment for people like him— I don’t know, I simply don’t.”

  “You couldn’t hold him on some kind of mental health grounds, for his own good?”

  “Technically, he’s not sick. He’s definitely not contagious, and we couldn’t keep him on psychiatric grounds. Apart from some depression and anxiety, which frankly are quite to be expected in someone his age who’s homeless, he’s fine.”

  “Except that he’s homeless and depressed.”

  “Well, yes. We gave him information for some shelters and youth programs. But, well. He didn’t seem interested. He just wanted to leave. We’r
e not a prison here. Well, not usually.”

  It wasn’t that Vlad didn’t want to stay there, Joann realized. The kid wanted to go someplace else. When it was clear the clinic couldn’t cure him, but merely give him coping strategies, he left. “Because he wanted to go to the Rox,” she stated.

  “I’m hearing more and more about that place. What is going on there?”

  “I’d like to find out.”

  “Please, if you meet the young man again and can convince him to return—”

  “I’ll do what I can. Thanks, Doctor.”

  She hung up, and noticed Terri watching her from across her own desk. “What’s that all about?”

  Joann smiled grimly. “I guess I’m going back to New York.”

  She intended to track down Vlad on that stretch of the East River as soon as she could, and talk to him. If he would listen. Convince him that fleeing to the squatters on Ellis Island wasn’t the answer. She wasn’t quite sure how she was going to do that. She hoped that when he saw her, that he’d understand that she cared. That she wanted to help. Maybe that was naive. Well, she didn’t lose anything by trying.

  She wasn’t expecting to find Maria Fuentes waiting for her, parked in exactly the spot she was when she’d first taken Joann to the area. Well after dark, the woman looked out of place in her neat pantsuit and sensible low-heeled pumps. She didn’t even have a sidearm. Did park rangers even carry sidearms?

  “Ms. Fuentes,” Joann said evenly. “Hello.”

  “You going to tell me what’s going on now? What am I looking for?”

  “I think it might be best if you weren’t here, at least not for tonight.”

  “I deserve to know what’s happening here. How dangerous is this, really? This is my jurisdiction, my call.”

  That was debatable. In fact, half a dozen jurisdictions could argue over this corner of land. And depending on the perspective, they’d all be right. “It’s my jurisdiction because I was the only one willing to come down here and deal with it. Can you please let me finish what I started?”

  “I want to stay. I need to stay and see for myself.”

  Joann blew out a breath. “Okay. Fine. But be careful.”

  The sun was setting over Manhattan, and pale orange streetlights, the ones that weren’t broken, came on. Fuentes drew out a flashlight, started scanning the trees along the edge of the park.

  “Put that away, please,” Joann told her.

  “Why?”

  “Because you’ll scare him off. We just need to wait.”

  Fuentes frowned, skeptical. But she shut off the light. Joann walked the same circuit she had before, to see if anything had changed over the last couple of days. Nothing had. The site still felt forgotten, with lurkers in the shadows. A haven for people who didn’t want to be found. All Joann had to do was put herself in the middle of it. Glancing furtively around her, Fuentes stuck close. Too close, really. Joann’s skin prickled at her presence.

  “You still haven’t told me what we’re looking for,” Fuentes whispered.

  “You’ll see him soon enough. If he decides to show up.”

  “Who?”

  Truthfully, she wasn’t sure which one of the two, Charon or Vlad, she was waiting for. The latter wouldn’t reveal himself without the former appearing at the pier. So she had to hope for them both to appear. She had no guarantee that either one would.

  “We might be waiting a long time,” Joann said, sighing.

  Hours passed. Fuentes eventually went back to her car. She was going to try to nap and asked Joann to come wake her if anything happened. The ace had no intention of doing so.

  Joann walked her patrol. Her cloak rippled around her as she hugged herself. The night felt damp. The hazy sky, tinged orange by city lights and pollution, didn’t offer signs of rain, but the air smelled like incoming weather. If rain started, she’d pack this in and try looking for Vlad another night. He wasn’t likely to hurt himself. Probably wasn’t going to hurt anyone else. But she wanted him to get help. He needed help. If he would just let someone help him …

  The temperature seemed to drop, even as she waited.

  And why would Vlad even come back here? Because he was waiting for Charon, the joker ferryman. The last six weeks he’d stalked up and down along the edge of Manhattan, searching for the right place, hunting as he went until he found where Charon docked. He was trying to get to Ellis Island. So Joann waited to intercept him. He wasn’t going to leave this spot.

  And there, finally. A glow on the water. It might have been something natural, bioluminescent, if it didn’t move so steadily, unerringly to the pier. Even knowing what to expect, the weirdness of Charon’s shape and movement came as much of a shock as it had before. How was the man even alive? He had to have organs in there somewhere. Then again, maybe not.

  She wondered: would the joker talk to her? Would he be able to tell her if he’d seen Vlad? Stepping quietly, she moved closer to the pier, keeping her hood down and cloak close, to help disguise her.

  This time, Charon was delivering passengers to the mainland, not picking them up. A couple of kids, about Vlad’s age, nested at the bottom of the bubble. As soon as the joker touched land, they squeezed out, hands creating splits in the skin as they pushed through. Like insects breaking out of chrysalises.

  Joann stayed back. Didn’t interfere. The two kids, punk-looking, with interesting haircuts they might have done themselves without a mirror, and torn-up hand-me-down army surplus clothes and boots, raced off. They didn’t see her lurking nearby, ran right past her, on to whatever quest they were bound on.

  Before Charon could flee, she approached, pushing back her hood and calling, “Hey, can I talk to you?”

  Charon’s furtive eyes blinked at her, then looked past her, and Joann turned to see a hunched, scrawny figure race forward. So intent on the floating joker, he didn’t seem to notice Joann at all. He had a mission.

  Vlad, his hands grasping in front of him, fingers stiffly bent like claws, stumbled out on the pier. “Let me in. Let me in.” The words became a growl.

  Charon’s eyes went wide, what there was of his head leaning back. The cilia under his body vibrated rapidly—anxiously, even—and the joker drifted back from the pier.

  Yelling, Vlad burst into a run and jumped at the joker. Landed on him, meeting Charon’s gaze and snarling as his fingers dug into the swollen, translucent skin. But the joker’s body didn’t split to let him in. Charon splashed in the water, half-rolling and sinking as the cilia struggled to maintain balance.

  “Vlad, stop!” Joann dashed onto the pier.

  Charon was never going to help him. He seemed to have complete control over who entered his body and who didn’t, and he wasn’t going to allow Vlad. The kid seemed to know it, too, and he was finished asking. His hands clenched, gripping harder. Charon hissed, maybe in pain, maybe only in annoyance, and started to sink—he could just drown Vlad.

  But Vlad opened his mouth and suckered it, lampreylike, to the joker’s skin, the rounded slope of what might have been his shoulder, if he had arms. He lunged in, as if he could burrow into the other’s body, and his mouth worked, sucking. A physiological change came over him—a protuberance emerging from Vlad’s mouth, visible through Charon’s translucent skin. Charon groaned, and his eyes rolled back.

  Now a crime was being committed. This was assault.

  “Vlad, back off!” But the kid was lost in a haze of rage and hunger, his strange power driving him on. He was only focused on his target.

  Charon flailed in a panic, which translated to lurching and splashing, as if he were a great fish caught on a line, fighting at the water’s surface. Joann had to stop this; she wasn’t sure how.

  With little time to think, she acted. Lady Black unhooked the collar of her cloak. Swept it off her shoulders, dropped it to the ground. Everywhere, energy surged, reaching toward her. Her nerves crackled with it; her skin glowed. Even yards away, streetlights flickered on and off, going dark. More, she coul
d draw more to her, she could draw all of it.…

  Rolling, Charon lurched toward the edge of the pier. Vlad’s back faced her now. Leaning as far forward as she dared, she reached. She grabbed Vlad. And then her power reached. All he was flowed toward her, into her. His back arced in pain; he screamed. But he let go, and she yanked him back to dry land.

  Still his energy poured into her. Her skin flushed with power, her blood rushing—she could take in so much more. His body grew cold, his muscles wrenched tight, rigid with shock. She smelled of brimstone.

  Head swimming, vertiginous with energy that tingled on her skin—she imagined she could see sparks snapping around her body—she let go. Forced herself to scramble away from him, to break that flow of power. To starve herself of what her own wild card demanded. She was in control, not the virus. Backing off, she found her cloak and swept it around her. Insulated herself, and the power stilled. The flow of energy ceased. She took several slow breaths while the thrumming in her nerves subsided. Her mind cleared.

  Now, she was able to look at what she’d done.

  Charon had come to rest against the pier. His body slumped over the concrete and even seemed a little deflated. A line of blood dripped from a puckered wound near his head.

  “Are you hurt?” Joann approached. “Can I help?”

  He looked around, dazed. As he righted himself, he straightened, coming back to full buoyancy, bobbing on the water. In a soft, croaking voice he said, “You need to get out of here. None of this is your business.”

  “I’m trying to help—”

  “Word of advice: don’t.” Charon scowled at her. The mass of cilia pushed off from the wall, and he sank with the barest churning of water, until he was gone. Leaving her with the other person she’d tried to save.

  Vlad lay on the pier. His eyes were shut, he wasn’t moving. Joann wanted to touch him. To feel for a pulse, to squeeze his hand or smooth back his hair. She couldn’t do any of those things. Her power reached, drawing energy, every scrap of it, wherever it could find it.

  It found nothing from Vlad.

  She knelt by him, still catching her breath, her mind racing, wondering what else she could have done, what she should have done differently. His mouth hung open slightly. Nothing seemed different about it, nothing to suggest why he had to feed like he did. He seemed perfectly normal. She didn’t touch him. She didn’t want to touch anything, and so sat quietly, hugging her cloak around her.