High Stakes: A Wild Cards Novel

by George R. R. Martin

  Joey. She stood watching him, looking at ease despite being out of place, urban casual. At first Marcus didn’t know what to make of the mildly predatory look on her face. When she opened her mouth slightly and ran the tip of her tongue along her teeth, he kinda figured it out. He flushed, and was glad to be able to look behind her at the rows of the walking dead that had paused with her. They stood crooked and deformed, vacant expressions on their hollowed, worm-eaten faces. Marcus slid close enough to catch the scent of them.

  “Who are your friends?” Marcus asked.

  Joey shrugged. “Fuck if I know. Dead meat is all. You’d think there’d be more bodies buried around here.” She considered Marcus again. “Heard you stopped some crazy-assed Russians from nuking Talas.”

  “I guess,” Marcus said.

  “Is that humility I hear?” Joey squinted. “You did it for the girl, didn’t you? What’s her name?”

  “Olena.”

  “You hitting that?”

  Marcus didn’t know what to say. He tried, “Uh…”

  “All right,” Joey said, smiling. “You don’t have to answer. Of course hitting it. International style. Got you a little Anna Kournikova.”

  “Who?”

  Joey shook her head. “Anyway, what was all that hollering about with the soldiers?”

  “Just trying to get some help,” he said. “The Russians have my villagers staying in a ruin.”

  Joey raised an eyebrow. “Your villagers?”

  “Not mine, exactly, but … you know, I owe them. They saved my life more than once.”

  Raising her hand and wriggling her full set of fingers. “I hear you. They did me a solid, too. I didn’t thank you properly for having the little guy heal me. I should do that. Thank you, I mean. Must be some way…” A number of things about the way she said this was suggestive: her tone, the pauses, the way her gaze slipped from his face and moved across his chest. Marcus was on the verge of squirming—literally and figuratively—when her eyes popped back up to his. “Fucking Russians. Some coldhearted bitches, ain’t they? Tell you what. Take me to this ruin.” She cocked her head toward the zombies and then swiped the blaze of red hair back from her face. “I’ll get my crew on it.”

  She ought to have taken a nap while Babel and company assembled images of the Highwayman’s prison.

  Instead, Mollie had gone to Idaho to check on the family. Farmhouses could be quiet at night, but they should never be empty. But hers was. She didn’t know where everybody had gone. Some were still in the hospital, she supposed. Maybe the rest were visiting. Whatever they were doing, they hadn’t bothered to tell her about it. Mollie even checked her phone to see if she’d missed a call, but of course she hadn’t. She wandered the empty Steunenberg farmhouse like a lonely ghost.

  Ffodor had been great at times like this. She wished she had never heard of that stupid casino. She wished she hadn’t badgered him into agreeing to rob it. She wished none of this had ever happened. She wished she hadn’t tried to steal that gold, and got Todd killed as a result. She wished Noel had never approached her. She wished she had never gone on that stupid TV show in the first place, because if she hadn’t Noel wouldn’t have found her later and none of this would have happened.

  She was still roaming the farmhouse and rehashing her life’s regrets when Babel called.

  “Mollie. We’re ready for you.”

  She didn’t ask where she’d gone, didn’t ask if she was okay, didn’t ask if she’d changed her mind. Babel acted like Mollie’s participation was a given, as though Mollie’s word were an inviolate covenant. Nobody believed that, not for a millisecond, but it was a nice gesture of trust.

  “I’ll be there,” said Mollie.

  And, after six attempts to open a portal back to Baikonur, she was.

  “I swear to God, Director, you hit like a tiny, fuzzy kitten,” Michelle said. Billy Ray had just delivered one hell of a roundhouse to her chin. It hadn’t hurt a bit, so now she just wanted him to go on hitting her. Even though it didn’t put on fat as quickly as the truck that had just run over her, knowing she could take a beating and have no pain was a relief. (But you’re going back into Talas, came a soft voice inside her that wouldn’t shut up. You know what happens there. Pain. So much pain.)

  Billy Ray stopped his next punch a fraction of an inch before he slammed it into her gut. “You’re really weird, Michelle,” he said with a hint of dismay. “You’re kind of taking the fun out of this.”

  Michelle looked around the makeshift headquarters at her companions and tried not to despair. Babel looked confident enough. But she always did. Mollie was shaking like a junky getting off meth. Joey looked pissed, but that was reassuringly normal.

  “I dunno, Billy Ray,” she replied as she released a little bubble and sent it bouncing across the floor. “My standard for weird has gotten pretty skewed of late.”

  He nodded, then pulled back to punch her again. “Michelle, for once, we see eye to eye.”

  Getting a portal inside the Belgian jail was shaping up to be a monumental pain in the ass.

  Utterly unsurprisingly, there wasn’t a conveniently placed webcam pointing at the Highwayman’s accommodations. Not even one showing the yard. Assuming war criminals were afforded the right to use an exercise yard; that seemed like a crunchy-socialist European thing to do. But St. Gilles might as well have been the center of the Australian Outback for the dearth of useful webcams.

  Even Babel couldn’t pull enough strings to get a blueprint or floor plan of the place. Not on such short notice, anyway. And the Belgians sure as hell weren’t sharing information about all the anti-ace contingencies they’d undoubtedly worked into the building.

  So Mollie would have to get the team on the premises, and portal them inside once she got the lay of the land.

  Probably while guards shot at them. Awesomesauce.

  Street-view images only showed the gate to St. Gilles prison, which huddled between two hulking towers complete with crenellations, turrets within turrets, and arrow slits—goddamned arrow slits—everywhere. It looked like something from HBO, or a history book. Very Gothic, this place. But the gate was closed in the street view, and the walls were thirty feet high, offering no way to see inside the prison grounds.

  Satellite photos showed the gate fronted an avenue along the north side of the prison. The walls enclosed a massive complex. The prison was built around a tall central tower from which radiated six long spokes. The space between the spokes housed a bit of green space and what might have been an exercise yard. One spoke connected the central tower to the main gate, suggesting they were built in a similar style. The other five looked more modern, or at least like they hadn’t been built during the fucking Crusades.

  Better yet, the modern spokes had skylights. That, and the layout, gave her the beginnings of a plan.

  “Okay,” she said. “I think I know how to get us inside. But it’s gonna take two steps, and then we’ll have to work our way to whatshisface’s cell.”

  “You mean Highwayman? His name’s Bruckner.”

  “Your plan rests on convincing him to effectively commit suicide. If he doesn’t help, we’re all dead. If he does, I’ll never meet him again. So I really couldn’t give two runny shits about his name.”

  “Wow, kid. You’re just a beam of sunshine,” said Ray.

  Bubbles said, “Tell us your plan, sweetie.”

  “First, we get on the roof.” Mollie tapped the screen with her fingernail. “There, I think. Near the skylights. Once I’m there I can peer through the windows and make a portal inside. We step from the roof to inside this long corridor.”

  Babel asked, “But how do we find Bruckner?”

  “I’m guessing this central tower controls everything. There must be a master alarm or security station. If we can get there, we can find him. We might even luck out with a CCTV feed, in which case I open a doorway right to his cell.” She shrugged. “It’d be a hell of a lot easier if I could create a shortcut
straight to the tower. But once on the roof I’d need a high-power telescope on a tripod and time to study the windows before I could try it. They’ll make us long before that. The skylight is farther away but it’ll get us inside a lot faster.”

  Or so I hope, she didn’t add. Assuming I can keep my shit together. Assuming I don’t lose control.

  “Huh.” Ray crossed his arms, frowning as though in grudging approval. “That’s … not half bad.”

  The others concurred. Mollie wondered how much of the agreement was tactical encouragement directed at her. Ray looked around the room. Babel and Bubbles nodded at him. “We’re ready when you are.”

  Mollie stared at the screen, concentrating.

  At least this time there wasn’t an imminent danger of the site getting absorbed by the Psycho Cannibal Flashmob Evil Insanity Zone. Hell, no. That was at least two days away, three at the outside. Why, if this idiotic plan failed, the world might persist for entire week before the last unsullied patches were overrun by the squamous rugose incarnations of malignant madness. And this time around the potential drawbacks of the plan going wrong didn’t involve nuclear weapons going off like a string of firecrackers. So the pressure on Mollie to get the ball rolling was considerably lessened, comparatively speaking.

  Didn’t help.

  The first shortcut she created inadvertently opened on an empty barn in Idaho. It was silent, too, but for the keening of the wind. Not even the shuffling of hooves or the lowing of cows to break the eerie quiet. Where had the livestock gone? Where was everybody? She gave the wind blowing in from halfway around the world a quick sniff, testing it for fresh manure, but couldn’t be sure.

  Ray said, “Oh, so that’s what a barn looks like on the inside.” He looked pointedly at the pile of dented battered slot machines lying abandoned on the dirt floor. The chipped Cyrillic lettering, the shattered teeth, and the blood-crusted crowbar gave the scene a postapocalyptic grace note. “I always thought barns contained things like hay and animals and maybe a tractor. The things I learn on this job.”

  “Oh, fuck off,” Mollie said.

  She killed the portal. Tried again. And got slapped in the face by a very confused koi riding the water that gushed into Babel’s makeshift office from the basin of a Paris fountain. In seconds the torrent doused everything. It rose to ankle level while everybody climbed the furniture and cursed at Mollie. The fish that smacked Mollie with its tail wasn’t the only one flopping on the floor when she finally closed the spacetime rift.

  Nobody said anything. The only sound was the wet slapping of koi convulsing on a ruined carpet. The office stank of fountain water and pigeon shit. The AC kicked in, causing Mollie to shiver. Soaking wet and humiliated to the bone, she could feel the others’ eyes on her, feel the judgment raking her flesh. She wanted to pluck their eyes out. How dare they judge her failures? She—

  “It’s okay, sweetie.” Michelle laid a hand on her shoulder. Mollie started, hard enough to bite her tongue. “We’re all scared. You’re not alone. We know you’re doing the best you can. We know you can do this.”

  Babel said, “Do you want to try the sedative?”

  Mollie shook her head. “No. Save those for the people who’ll really need them.”

  Save the drugs for the Talas Suicide Squad.

  A crowd of Russian soldiers and SCARE agents gathered outside Babel’s door. They’d traced the torrent to its source. A few chuckled when they saw the koi. It was the dull, forced laughter of men on death row.

  Babel shut the door. “Just ignore them.”

  The next shortcut opened on a T-shirt shop in Half Moon Bay. Police tape fluttered on the ocean breeze while a crime-scene cleanup crew scrubbed blood from the ceiling.

  Mollie screamed.

  Light spilled from Babel’s makeshift office in Baikonur to the rooftop of a prison five time zones to the west. A humid Brussels night wafted into the Cosmodrome.

  The extra illumination didn’t threaten to give them away—the spotlights bathing the prison would do that. The lights revealed a centrally peaked metal roof sloping away on both sides. The patter of rain beat a soft tattoo on the metal and sent little rivulets of water trickling down the roof. A few yards past the hole in space, the raised boxy panes of a skylight straddled the apex. It looked a bit like a greenhouse. Rainwater beaded the glass. It reminded Mollie of rainwater beaded on the windows of a French police car; she’d seen that once, a million years ago.

  Ray stepped through first. The metal gave little creaks of protest under his feet. He crouched with one foot on each side of the apex and crab-walked halfway to the skylight. It looked uncomfortable. “Careful,” he whispered. “It’s really slippery.”

  Bubbles went next, then Babel. They waddled past Ray to the skylight. The trio stared expectantly at Mollie through the portal.

  You don’t have to do this, said the small selfish coward voice in her head.

  Actual voices now. That was new.

  It went on: This is pointless and stupid and it’s not going to work. You could let these motherfuckers twist in the wind. Get as far away from Talas as you can and try to enjoy the earth’s final hours.

  “Shut up, shut up, shut up,” she muttered, stepping through the hole in space. At least the rain was warm.

  But she was too preoccupied with trying to close the portal to pay attention to her footing. She stepped to one side of the peak, rather than straddling it as the others had done. Her shoes had no purchase on the rain-slicked metal. Her feet flew out from under her. Her hip and head slammed against the roof hard enough to ring the metal like a gong. She slid toward a long drop. Woozy, head spinning, she scrabbled pointlessly for a fingerhold.

  Bubbles yelled, “Mollie!”

  A clang, a thud, and then a hand clamped around her wrist. She jerked to a halt. Ray lay sprawled over the roof, one ankle hooked around a pipe. “Careful, kiddo.”

  Spooky quick, that guy.

  Somewhere nearby, an alarm Klaxon pierced the silent night.

  “Well, shit,” said Mollie.

  St. Gilles prison smelled of testosterone and anger, of urine and fear.

  “Hey! Who are you people?” someone shouted in Belgian French: a man in a guard’s uniform, down below. Barbara opened her power, spreading it as widely as she could but leaving an untouched space around the four of them. The guard’s shout turned to gibberish as he touched the mic velcroed to his shirt, as Ray—moving faster than Barbara thought possible—slammed into the man, shoving him up against the nearest wall and hitting him twice, quickly. The man crumpled, and Ray stepped back, brushing at the front of his suit as if flicking away lint.

  Around the prison and in her head, Barbara heard prisoners calling out and guards shouting for clarification, but none of them could make themselves understood by anyone else. The chaos was spreading. Somewhere down on the first floor, an alarm continued to howl. They heard locks clicking shut on all the doors around them.

  They also heard the barking of dogs. “Dogs,” Ray said. “Why didn’t we know they had dogs? Do you speak Dog, Babs?”

  Barbara shook her head. “Fuck,” Ray muttered.

  Dogs. Michelle liked dogs.

  “You didn’t say anything about dogs,” she said. “I’m not killing dogs.” This is where I take a stand on killing things? Michelle thought. I may be as crazy as Mollie.

  “Then shut the fuck up and do something about them,” Billy Ray snarled. He looked like he was about to barrel straight for the guards and dogs.

  Michelle opened her arms wide. Twenty bubbles the size of oranges flew from her hands. They sailed through the air, soft and rubbery. They blobbed about like soap bubbles as they landed in front of the dogs, bouncing erratically. As she had hoped, the dogs went nuts. They shied away from the bubbles, barking and snapping at them.

  The guards tried to control the dogs, pulling on their leashes and yelling commands in French. But by now the guards were tripping over leashes and the bubbles themselves.


  Michelle released another wave. These were marble-sized. Several hundred bounced across the balcony, clacking like castanets as they hit. There was nowhere to step that wasn’t covered in bubbles. The guards and dogs that weren’t already going ass-over-tea-kettle began retreating down the grey metal stairs.

  Michelle glanced over the railing. Bubbles rose from her palms and began raining down on the courtyard below. The courtyard wasn’t that big, and she had plenty of fat. She filled it chest-high with iridescent bubbles so it looked like the largest, and prettiest, plastic-ball pit ever—minus the snotty, germ-filled kids.

  The guards and dogs were floundering in the bubbles when the marble-sized bubbles began rolling off the balcony, causing more mayhem below.

  Michelle had a small moment of pride. She’d managed not to kill another living thing this time.

  The floor shifted underfoot in the manner of a bathroom scale coming to a slow decision. The doors issued thunk-thunk-thunk sounds, suggesting a sequence of heavy bolts slamming into place.

  Mollie said, “What the fuck was that?”

  “I think we’re locked in,” said Babel.

  Ray cracked his knuckles. “Great. That means everyone else is also locked out. So let’s find Bruckner and get out of here.”

  Mollie joined him and Babel as they examined the control panels. She looked for anything that might enable the guards to switch between views from the roughly eight bazillion security cameras scattered throughout the prison.

  A faint tink echoed from the louvered air vents. The HVAC kicked in, blowing hard.

  “Uh, guys…” Bubbles pointed to one of the vents. A faint yellow mist gusted through the grate. Similar gas spewed from all the vents.

  Mollie gasped. That was a mistake. It felt like a grizzly bear had just shit lava in her throat.

  She fell to her knees, realizing at that moment why the floor felt like a scale: it was. This must have been some kind of precaution in case a group of prisoners tried to storm the security station. Normally the four of them shouldn’t have outweighed half a dozen guards. But with Bubbles in her current state, not exactly heroin chic at the moment, they did.