Inside Straight

Michael had heard enough. He turned and walked away as the debate went on.

~ ~ ~

He set the bottle down on the wall around the memorial. High above him, concrete petals held a ring encircling the half moon. Stepping back from the bottle into the center of the memorial, he pulled out the sticks he’d crammed into his back pocket and started to drum. The cadence was fast and rapid, the beat from his six hands so quick that it was difficult to hear the individual strokes at all. He ignored the painful objections from his wounded arm; instead, he focused the sound with his throat openings, shaping it until the bottle started to shiver. He tightened his throat, moving the sound up just a quarter step.

The bottle jumped an inch into the air and shattered. Glass shards sparkled jewel-like in the moonlight and rained down on the concrete with a sound like sand thrown against a window.

“Beer?”

Michael shook his head. “Water,” he answered. “Couldn’t find any beer.” He glanced over his shoulder. Kate was standing at the entrance to the memorial.

“Great talent you got there,” she said. “I thought only sopranos could do that.”

“I’m pretending it’s the Djinn’s head. Or maybe Fortune’s. I haven’t decided which yet.”

She didn’t laugh.

“How’s Ana?” he asked finally, when the silence threatened to swallow them both. “She gonna make it?”

“She’s stable, they tell me. But they need to get her to a real hospital soon.”

He nodded. He didn’t say how unlikely he thought that possibility to be.

“I talked to John,” she said.

Michael gave a bark of a laugh. “Did Beetle Boy give you my ‘assignment’? What am I doing tomorrow? Kitchen help? Bandage detail? Maybe I should sweep the sidewalks so no one dirties their sandals while running away from the Djinn?”

Kate let out her breath through her nose. She was wearing jeans and a tong-sleeved denim shirt with a large leather pouch around one shoulder, bulging with what Michael suspected were smooth, polished stones from around the riverbank, perfect for throwing. “You know what? John’s right about you, Michael,” she told him. “You refuse to listen to anything he has to say because you don’t like him, and that’s stupid. It really is. We can’t win here without taking out the Djinn, and we can’t take out the Djinn without everyone’s cooperation. Sobek, John, Lohengrin, and Bugsy are making those plans now; maybe you should be with them, helping.”

“The way you’ll be with Beetle Boy when he goes after the Djinn?”

Kate grimaced at the name, but only shrugged. “If that’s what he thinks is best,” she said, “yes, that’s where I’ll be.”

“Then that’s where I want to be, too.”

“Why?” she asked. “You think I can’t take care of myself, Michael? You think I need your protection?”

He walked over to where she stood. She watched his approach with near-defiance in the tilt of her head and the narrowing of her eyes. He towered over her as she looked up at him. “I want to be there because you’re there. No other reason. I’d think that would be obvious by now.”

“Michael—”

“No,” he said. His arms, moving, sent bars of shadows flowing over her body. “Listen to me. I can’t change what I did back in L.A., Kate. I was an asshole, I’ll admit it. It was a fucking game and I treated it that way. But there was something genuine between us, and I really craved the feeling I had when I was with you. You felt it too, at least at first; but that feeling’s never left me. Maybe what I did, being with Pop Tart and the others, killed it for you. I don’t know. But I can pray that something’s still there.”

When she didn’t answer, he allowed himself to hope. He hurried into the silence. “I can’t change what I’ve done, but I can change. I can. I have.”

She stopped him with a lifted hand that seemed to shake slightly against the moon-shimmer of Lake Nasser. “Michael, I really don’t know how I feel about any of this.” She stopped, shook her head again. “I can’t think about it now. I won’t. The truth is that it’s not important. Not here, not now. Maybe afterward, if …” She wouldn’t finish that sentence. “I’ve already told you: I’m not here for John, not at the core. And if you’re here for me, then you’re here for the wrong reasons. So why are you here, Michael? Tell me.”

Her eyes scanned his face, the question held in them waiting for his words like a knife. “Maybe afterward…“ He clung to the words, playing them over and over in his mind.

He opened his mouth. He tapped his chest nervously, sending the sound of a low drum into the night. His arms flexed and broken glass ground under the soles of his sneakers, but the words wouldn’t come.

“I thought so,” Kate said. “I’m sorry for you, Michael. I truly am.”

~ ~ ~

Fortune didn’t put him in the reserves. Michael wondered if that was Kate’s doing, or simply because there were no reserves. But he wasn’t with Kate, Fortune, and Lohengrin. He was teamed with Bubbles and Rustbelt.