Inside Straight

You can bag the whole thing, a voice whispered … a small, devilish voice. Do something really stupid next time, get yourself voted off, and that’ll be that.

But Roberto would know. Roberto would never let her live it down if he thought she’d thrown the contest.

Over the last week, Kate had spent hours in the backyard throwing things at makeshift targets, practicing. Maybe she had the right idea. Ana touched the medallion under her shirt.

She left the porch and sat cross-legged in the middle of the lush green lawn. Closing her eyes, she buried her fingers in the grass, pressing down to the roots, to the earth. The soil here wasn’t like the desert—this was softened by the vegetation, by constant watering. This would be easy to dig. She could even feel what wasn’t dirt—gas lines, sewer lines. She could dig around them.

She could drill a hole straight down, hundreds of feet. She could open a furrow ahead of her. Make it as deep or wide as she liked, limited only by the space available, though she’d never dug much more than a backhoe could do in an hour or so of work. She’d limited herself. She didn’t want to cause too much trouble, do too much damage, so she’d always stayed within the boundaries of the sandbox, whatever sandbox she happened to be in.

This had all started in the sandbox, on the playground. If she’d grown up in a city full of concrete and asphalt, she might never have discovered her power at all. That might have been better.

Absently, without effort, she made little holes, because she couldn’t think of what else to try. Scooped out handfuls of earth. They didn’t even make a sound. Then, she dug two holes at once. Two dimples formed, one on either side of her, each with a mound of scooped-out earth beside it. Well, she’d never done that before. So she tried three. Hands in the grass, laid flat against the ground, she could feel the infinite particles of it spread all around her. They moved at her command. She clenched her hands and thought of digging—three holes, then four. With a faint sound of ripping grass, as the soil under the lawn tore free, a circle of holes appeared around her. A dozen of them, all at once. Patterns in the earth. She shifted her right hand, pointed to make a trench, but instead of making it straight, she made it turn. It ran in a perfect circle all the way around her, joining all the holes.

She hadn’t played with her power like this since was she small. She barely remembered. Her father had put her to work tilling the neighbors’ garden patches almost as soon as she’d dug her first hole.

“You are really making a mess.”

Hands on her hips, Kate stood at the edge of the porch.

Sheepishly, Ana brushed off her hands. The yard looked like gophers had struck: Dozens of mounds, holes, and trails marred the whole lawn. Great, she thought. Now they’re going to start calling me Gopher Girl.

“Sorry,” she said.

“Don’t apologize,” Kate said. “It’s kinda cool. But can you do anything else?”

Ana shrugged and glanced hopelessly around the damaged lawn. “I’m trying to figure something out.”

Kate left the glow of the porch light and came into the dark, picking her way around piles of dirt and finding a spot of grass near Ana to sit on. “Not that there’s anything wrong with digging holes. If you did something like this under a building you could bring the whole thing down. Or a bridge, or a car, or … or anything. You could stop anyone by digging a hole under them.”

She could dig a trench around herself a dozen feet wide and no one could ever reach her. “It’s all just digging. It’s never going to rescue someone from a burning building.”

“Tell me about it,” Kate said. “You dig holes, and I blow shit up. Hey—if this hero thing doesn’t work out, maybe we can start a business: ’Team Hearts: Demolitions and Excavations.’”

“‘Environmentally friendly,’” Ana said, and they both giggled.

Then Kate looked around, studying the lawn, turning serious. She put her hand on one of the mounds of dug-out soil and squeezed her fist around it, letting dirt run through her fingers.

“What is it?” Ana said.

“Just thinking. Look at all these piles. What if you tried to make piles of dirt, instead of just digging? Think about filling in the space instead of digging it out. Does that make any sense?” She wrinkled her forehead, which made her look particularly young and studious.

Dios! It was so obvious!

It couldn’t possibly work. “I don’t know. I never looked at it that way.”

“Well, can you try it?” she asked eagerly.

All her life her father, the neighbors, everyone, said—dig this, put a trench here, drill a new well. Never build.