George R.R. Martin - [Wild Cards 18] (25 page)

Then I felt crummy. Ink had been nice to me.

At least it still felt good to bubble. It tingled and sang in my bones and skin. Bubbling pulsed through my blood and throbbed like another heartbeat. Sometimes I thought I’d go crazy if I didn’t get to bubble more often—but the bubbling made me skinnier, and I couldn’t afford to be recognized.

“Are you okay?” Ink sounded worried.

“What’s going on?” I heard Tiffani ask.

I flushed the toilet and opened the door.

“You’re supposed to do a Confessional after Discard,” Ink said. She had changed her tattoos, and they scrolled across her arms like a crazy Mayan tally board.

“Are you okay?” Tiffani asked. She gave Ink a pleading look. “Can you guys give us just a few minutes?” If she had looked at me the way she was looking at Ink, I’d’ve agreed to anything. “Just have them turn on the shower cam. We’ll keep in range. I mean, it’s the bathroom. How far are we going to go?”

Ink snorted. “Fine. You have five minutes, and then I’m coming in with the whole crew.”

Tiffani and I went back into the bathroom and closed the door. The light on the shower cam blinked on.

“Okay, so why are you so depressed?” Tiff asked.

I sighed. “I guess it’s mostly getting rid of Matryoshka. He was a great guy. He didn’t deserve to go.”

Tiffani glanced in the mirror, then stuck her tongue out at her reflection. “I hate the way I look,” she said, then turned back to me. “Listen, this is a competition. There are rules, and we have to play by them. If we lose challenges, we lose teammates.”

There was a towel on the floor, and I picked it up and began folding it. “I know, I know. I just don’t get why we’ve been losing every challenge. I mean, we all try so hard. I just hate that we have to vote people off.”

Tiff grabbed a brush from my basket of toiletries on the counter. She closed the toilet lid, then sat me down and started working on my hair. “I don’t understand why you keep making your hair black with that crappy spray dye. You’ve got nice hair under this mess.” She sectioned off a chunk and started to braid it. It felt good to have her hands on me, even if she was just doing it out of habit. She had a bunch of sisters, and she’d told me they’d always braided each other’s hair.

The braiding was relaxing. “I’ve been feeling bad since Blrr,” I said. “Joe Twitch was… well, after he stripped you
naked in like five seconds, I wasn’t going to have him in the house anymore, but Blrr was a good kid and a great housemate.”

“Her power was useless without the right conditions,” Tiffani said as she started braiding the other section of my hair. “The other teams are all thinking the same way. Who’s good in challenges, and who you can’t stand to live with. Though how any one could live with Stuntman is beyond me. He’s such a jerk.”

Tiff tied off my braid. I stood up and looked in the mirror. I used to love the way I looked in braids, but not now. They just made my face look rounder.

“You don’t like them,” Tiff said sadly. “It’s not them. It’s my face.”

Tiff stood on tiptoe and gave me a quick kiss on my cheek. “There’s nothing wrong with your face, Michelle.”

I blushed and looked down. I didn’t know if she felt the same way about me as I did about her, but my cheek was burning where her lips had touched it.

There was a hard bang on the bathroom door. “All right, you guys,” Ink said. “We’re coming in.”

The door swung open, and the floating camera crew started to file in.

“We were just leaving,” Tiff said as she slipped past them. I couldn’t slip past anyone anymore and had to stand there, like an idiot, until they backed out of the room.

The sound guy clipped a mic onto the neck of my hoodie. I sat in the Confessional chair and started pulling the braids out of my hair.

“You don’t need to do that.” Ink had changed her tats again. Now there were a series of typewritten questions on her arms. But she had kept the Mayan images on her face and legs. “They look nice. You’re one of the prettiest girls on the show.”

I shrank back in the chair. Well, as much as my girth would allow me to. No one thought I was pretty anymore.

“So, why do we always have to drag you into doing your Confessionals?” Ink asked.

The red eye of the camera blinked on. They were rolling again, sucking me into that meat grinder. I looked at Ink so I wouldn’t have to look in the camera again. It didn’t love me anymore. “I know I haven’t done as many Confessionals as everyone else. I guess I just didn’t have much to say.”

A disappointed expression slipped across Ink’s face. I knew I was making her job more difficult, but of all the things we did on the show, this was the one that made me most uncomfortable. Tiffani loved Confessional. I don’t know why. The Maharajah had started calling her the Little Nun because she was always in there. So we had all called her that—until the Maharajah got voted off.

“So, what do you think about the other contestants, now that we’re getting close to a reshuffle?”

I noticed that the end of one of the ties on my hoodie was frayed, and I started to worry it. My hands had been so beautiful. Now the nails were ragged and the cuticles raw. I heard Ink make a throat-clearing noise, and I knew I had to answer her.

“I guess… I guess I like most of the other players.” I glanced up and saw Ink frown at me. “I mean, I like my teammates. The ones that are left. And I think Dragon Girl is sweet, even if she is, you know, kinda young to be on the show.”

“What about Rosa Loteria?”

I looked away from the camera. I wished she hadn’t asked about Rosa. “Well, I don’t know her all that well,” I said. “I’ve only really seen her at press stuff.”

“But how do you feel about her?”

I sighed. I had to talk—it was in that damned contract. “I don’t think she cares about being a hero. She only cares about making money and being famous.”

“And that’s bad, right?”

I looked up at the camera this time. “No, it’s not bad to want those things. But this isn’t about getting money or being famous. It’s about being a hero.”

“Do you think Tiffani is heroic?”

“I think she tries to be.” I assumed Tiff felt the same way about
American Hero
that I did. She had had my back. She’d told me she had never voted against me, not once.

“Well, what do you think a hero is?” Ink asked.

“It’s not just acts of physical courage. What’s a hero, if you can’t trust them to keep their word? What’s a hero, if they would betray a friend? What’s a hero, if they think of themselves before anyone else?” I looked Ink straight in the eye. “That’s not being a hero. Anyone can do that. We all do that. But a hero tries to do better.”

I dropped my head again, and my hair covered most of my face. I scrunched down into the chair and didn’t say anything else. After a few minutes, Ink told the camera crew to stop rolling.

“You did great, Michelle,” she said.

“You’re supposed to be calling me Bubbles,” I reminded her. She gave me a funny smile.

“What’re you working on now?” I asked.

Jetman was in the garage tinkering with yet another of his gadgets. Since the Maharajah had been voted off, Jetman pretty much kept to himself.

“I’m not sure what it is yet,” he replied. “Things just…
change
as I’m working on them.”

He started looking for something in his toolbox, and I handed him a Phillips head screwdriver. He grunted and took it from me. Sometimes I hung out with Jetman when he was gadgeting. Whenever he couldn’t find something in his toolbox, I gave him a random screwdriver. It seemed to work. Or maybe he was just humoring me.

“You know, I thought you were going to vote me off during Discard,” I said.

“Actually, I was thinking about voting Tiffani off,” he said. “But then I thought you might get pissed.”

It took me aback. I would never get pissed at Jetman for voting the way he wanted to. I told him that.

“Yeah, I realized that,” he said. “But I knew that you and
Tiff were planning to get rid of Matryoshka after the last challenge. So I figured, go along to get along.”

I leaned against the bench running along the west wall of the garage. I was baffled. “But we didn’t ha—”

‘C’mon, Diamonds!”
Tiffani yelled from the end of the driveway. “We’re going on a mysterious ride.”

“Our master’s voice.” Jetman wiped his hands on a greasy rag. We went outside, and he pulled the garage door shut behind us. There was an SUV limo waiting for us. Tiff was already inside, and Jetman and I piled into the spacious backseat. It was roomier now that there were only three of us left on the team. “Where do you think we’re going?” I asked.

Tiff shrugged. “Reshuffle. After all, all the teams have lost at least two players.”

“I hope it’s a reshuffle,” Jetman said. “We can’t afford to lose anyone else.”

The limo took us to the Warners back lot, where
American Hero
was taped.

We piled out of the back of the SUV, and Ink led us through one of the soundstages to makeup.

Peregrine was standing under a spotlight, arguing with one of the directors about her lighting. “I’m telling you, if you don’t put a decent filter on that thing I’m going to look like a crone,” she said.

“Peregrine, my goddess,” the director replied. “You will never look like a crone. I don’t care how hard you try.”

Peregrine gave him a lethal glare. “Shameless flattery is one way to get around me, but don’t think I’m not going to notice if you don’t fix that.”

Ink left us at the makeup area backstage. We were used to doing the whole makeup, blocking, hurry-up-and-wait routine that was part of the show taping.

The hair and makeup guys finished with us, and we took one last good look in the mirror.

Jetman looked as if he’d had no makeup done at all. He was a kinda plain-looking guy, but they’d made his skin perfect,
as if a blemish had never been allowed to mar his face. And Tiffani… well, she was as beautiful as ever. It was a pity she was so short. Had she been taller, she would have made a great model. I took a quick glance at myself. My eyes did look great, and they did bring out the best in my skin—as much as they could, given how crappy my black hair made it look.

Ink finally came back. “Okay, guys,” she said. “We’ll be taping a short segment with Peregrine.”

When we arrived back onstage, the Hearts were sitting in a row of director’s chairs. Three empty chairs faced them. Hearts had won the most challenges; there were five of them, and only three of us.

We sat in our chairs. Mine gave a loud groan. I heard a Heart laugh, blushed, and hung my head.

“Asshole,” I heard Jetman say softly.

Peregrine swept onto the stage. When I’d been younger, I’d really admired her. Not only was she a great model, but she still went out and did things with her wild card ability. I guessed she must be in her fifties now, but you’d never know it. She usually wore very revealing couture gowns, but today she had on long palazzo pants, a gold-sequined halter top, and four-inch-high sandals. Her wings fluttered behind her, making her look like a disco angel. “Are we ready to shoot this?” she asked.

“We’re rolling,” said the director. “Start anytime.”