How to Move Spheres and Influence People: A Tor.com Original

by Marko Kloos

Overview

For over 25 years, the Wild Cards universe has been entertaining readers with stories of superpowered people in an alternate history.

In Marko Kloos's short story "How to Move Spheres and Influence People" an outcast learns how to fit in at her school and much more...

T. K. hates a lot of things, but at the moment, it's how she becomes the #1 target during dodgeball at gym.
Everything changes, however, when she discovers that she has the ace ability to direct spherical objects. With this newfound ability, she makes her classmates pay! But her powers are made for more than petty revenge, as she soon discovers while on a family vacation.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250206879
Publisher:	Tor Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/27/2019
Series:	Wild Cards
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	32
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

MARKO KLOOS was born in Germany and raised in and around the city of Münster. In the past, he was a soldier, bookseller, freight dock worker, and corporate IT administrator before he became a novelist and got ruined for most other forms of work. He's the author of the bestselling Frontlines series of military science fiction and a member of George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards consortium. Marko lives in New Hampshire with his wife, two children, and roving pack of voracious dachshunds.
MARKO KLOOS was born in Germany and raised in and around the city of Münster. In the past, he was a soldier, bookseller, freight dock worker, and corporate IT administrator before he became a novelist and got ruined for most other forms of work. He's the author of the bestselling Frontlines series of military science fiction and a member of George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards consortium. Marko lives in New Hampshire with his wife, two children, and roving pack of voracious dachshunds.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Card, Turning

The first time it happens, she's in P.E. class, because of course it has to be P.E.

It's fashionable to hate P.E., and most of the other girls at Mapletree Academy claim they do, but T.K. really doesn't mind it. It's only twice a week, and they mostly stick to sports she can do with her one working arm. She knows she could easily get out of P.E. by pulling the Cripple Card (although she never calls it that; her parents and teachers would flinch in horror at her own insensitivity toward herself, go figure), but she doesn't because she likes to run around even if she's not very good at it. She also doesn't want to give her stuck-up classmates the satisfaction of being able to shoot her pitying glances as she sits on the sidelines and eats Goldfish crackers while doing her math homework. Truth be told: it's the only time during the week when T.K. doesn't feel like everyone's pussyfooting around her disability.

They're playing dodgeball that day, at the end of the class. T.K. is pretty good at it considering she can only use one arm, even if she gets nailed by the ball a little more than the other girls. But this session is a shooting gallery, with her as the target. Again. It's just two girls who are targeting her specifically — and her left side, too, where she can't block — but they're stealthy about it so Mrs. Williams, the P.E. teacher, doesn't come down on them. For some reason, Brooke MacAllister has decided that if T.K. wants to play with the varsity, she can take the hits too. And for this week, she seems to have recruited Alison Keller to be her wingman, because T.K. is getting targeted fire from two angles. Mapletree has a special version of dodgeball where you have to crank out five push-ups on the spot if you get hit. Mrs. Williams wanted to give her a waiver on the push-ups, but T.K. refused the special treatment. She's not strong enough for one-armed pushups, but she can do crunches just fine, so she does those instead. And today, she's doing a lot of crunches courtesy of Brooke and Alison. In the middle of her fifth set, a ball comes in and beans her on the left side of the head just as she is coming up from a crunch.

"Ow!"

T.K. glares in the direction of the ball's origin and spots Brooke, who gives her a curt and jock-like "Sorry!" without even the slightest tone of apology in her voice. T.K. doesn't want to make anything of it, so she doesn't even look for Mrs. Williams, but she has her limits, and Brooke's attention is starting to poke at the edges of them. She finishes her crunches and gets back up to rejoin the ranks. Another ball shoots past her face, so close that she can practically smell the rubber, and she ducks and flinches. This one came from the other side of the court, from Alison's direction, but Alison pretends to not notice T.K.'s glare as she conspicuously picks another target. T.K. grabs a ricochet off the gym floor and chucks it at Alison, but it misses her by a foot and smacks into the mats lining the wall behind her. Alison looks over to T.K. and smirks, which only serves to crank up the dial of T.K.'s Pissed-Off-O-Meter another notch. She can't really complain about them throwing balls at her, because that's what the game is about. But getting singled out for no good reason takes the fun out of it.

"One minute," Mrs. Williams shouts from the sideline. "Wrap it up, ladies!" Then she turns around and checks her cell phone. T.K. groans.

"Don't you —" she calls over to Brooke, but Brooke does, and so does Alison. Of course they were waiting for the opportunity for one last cheap shot. Alison's shot hits T.K.'s right thigh and bounces off. Brooke's ball comes in a flat arc, and T.K. knows that she'll take the stupid thing right on the bridge of her nose.

That's when the thing happens.

Later, she'll puzzle about what triggered it. She's hot and sweaty, angry at Brooke and Alison, hurting from the shot to the bare skin of her leg, and the muscles on her left side, the one with the paralysis, are taut enough to snap, which is what happens when she overexerts herself. But she knows that she feels a swell of fresh anger, and something goes snap in her brain. There's a hot, trickling sensation, like someone just opened the top of her skull and poured a cup of coffee directly on the back side of her brain and down her spinal column. T.K. raises her hand to keep the ball from hitting her in the face, even though she knows it's too late for that. But then the strangest sensation follows the hot trickle. She can feel the ball not three feet in front of her face — its roundness, the way it displaces the air around it — and she gives it a tiny little shunt with her mind, and it's the best feeling she's ever had, like finally scratching an itch you couldn't get to for an hour, only a hundred times better. The ball — the one that was about to give her a nosebleed — hooks ever so slightly to the left and whizzes past her left side, close enough to her ear that she can hear it whistling through the air.

Nobody notices. T.K. isn't even sure that Brooke saw the ball didn't fly true, that it made a little skip at the end of its arc. There are still half a dozen other balls in the air, and there's a lot of movement and yelling, kids paying attention to throwing or not getting hit. But she is dead sure that she caused that little skip, because she knows that for just that half second, the ball was in her control, and that it went precisely where she had wanted it to go.

* * *

They hit the showers and get dressed, and T.K. is too amazed and shaken to seek out Brooke and Alison to bitch at them. Now that P.E. is over, nobody pays attention to her anymore. In the first few weeks after she joined the class, her awkward-looking one-handed maneuver to get back into her bra and shirt got some interest from the other girls in the locker room, but that's old hat now, and she finishes up and leaves as quickly as she can.

P.E. was the last class of the day, and now they have an hour of library time before dinner. But T.K. doesn't feel much like going to the library. Instead, she unloads her backpack at the dorm and then goes back to the gym.

She had figured the place to be empty by now, because Mrs. Williams usually leaves on time. But when she walks back in, Mrs. Williams is still there, walking toward the door with a bag on each shoulder.

"Tilly," Mrs. Williams says, and T.K. tries not to frown. Most of the teachers address her by her chosen name instead of Tilly, which she hates almost as much as its proper long form, Lintilla. She knows she's named for a great-grandmother she never even knew, but "Lintilla" sounds like a species of exotic rodent to her. So she was Tilly until she was thirteen, at which point she decided that "T.K." was edgier than "Tilly Kendall." Like she's a New York City spray tagger or a skateboarder instead of a skinny fifteen-year-old redhead from rural Vermont with freckles and left-side hemiparesis. But Mrs. Williams insists on using her actual name, which strikes T.K. as slightly disrespectful.

"Mrs. W," she replies. "I, uh, forgot something in the locker room."

It's a quick and shoddy lie, but Mrs. Williams, loaded down with bags as she is and clearly in a hurry, buys it without trouble. Besides, the gym is always open for the students anyway — there's a keypad at the door and everyone knows the code, and what kind of trouble can you get into in a school gym?

"Well, go get it. But make sure the door is latched when you leave, okay? The latch sticks sometimes if you don't push it shut all the way."

"Will do, Mrs. W," T.K. says. "Have a good evening."

"See you tomorrow, Tilly."

T.K. heads toward the girls' locker room and pauses in the doorway to wait for the "click" of the sticky door latch. Then she turns and goes to the door that leads into the gym. That feeling she had just a little while ago, when she moved that ball away from her face, had been the most wicked rush of her life, and she wants to see if she can repeat it.

The balls in the gym are neatly stashed away in nets hanging from the wall on the back of the gym, right next to the equipment lockers. T.K. walks over to one of the nets and pulls it open. She fishes out a ball and tosses it into the middle of the gym, where it bounces a few times and rolls to a stop.

"Here goes nothing," T.K. says to herself. Her voice echoes a little in the empty gym.

She's afraid that the moment of total control during the game was a fluke, a one-time thing, some momentary and non-recurring phenomenon, maybe a glitch in her brain. That she'll stand here in the gym and stare at that ball like an idiot for a bit while nothing happens. But when she concentrates, that control comes back with absurd ease. It's like looking at the curve of the sphere throws a switch in her mind, one that wasn't there before. It's not as strong as it was the first time around, but when she feels the curvature of the ball with whatever new sense her brain has flipped on with that switch, that feeling of deep satisfaction comes back, and she knows that it wasn't a momentary thing. It feels like she's holding that sphere in the palm of an invisible hand, one that's much more strong and limber and precise than her own.

T.K. laughs with relief. Then she picks up the ball with her mind and flicks it halfway across the court to the basketball rim on the far end. The ball hits the rim and bounces off. Before it can hit the gym floor, she picks it up again without effort, raises it slowly, and dumps it straight through the hoop.

"Holy shit," she says and laughs again.

She has superpowers. She's a damn ace.

For the next hour, well into dinnertime, T.K. practices in the empty gym. She pitches the ball all over the place, and every time she does, she gets more accurate with it. It's like her new talent is a muscle that can be made stronger with practice. When she tries to manipulate other things, other shapes, that feeling of control evaporates, almost like the angles on the thing poke through whatever force she uses on the spheres and pops the bubble. But if it's round, she is in full control of it. She tries one of the heavy medicine balls out of the equipment locker, the ones she can't even lift with her own physical strength, but with the new power she just turned on, it's just as easy to throw those as it is to pitch a basketball. She throws the medicine ball around until she gets a little too giddy and tries to slam-dunk it onto the hoop rim. It smacks against the backboard hard enough to make the nearby windows shake, and the crash from the heavy ball on the board is so loud that she's sure they'll hear it all the way up in the library. She quickly picks up the medicine ball and moves it back to the equipment shack, before someone can come in and wonder how the partially paralyzed girl managed to move a twenty-five-pound ball ten feet up in the air by herself. Then T.K. tidies up and leaves the gym to head back up the hill to the dorm, with some reluctance.

CHAPTER 2

Soda Cans and Brick Walls

The next day, T.K. can barely muster the patience to sit through her classes. She was up until three in the morning, playing with tennis balls and marbles in her room, experimenting and chasing that euphoric feeling of control. The tiredness makes the day even longer and more unbearable. She has an idea for the afternoon, and she can't wait for the clock to hit 3 p.m.

When classes are finally over for the day, she rushes back to the dorm to dump her backpack and her books. Then she leaves the school property to go to the mixed-use building that sits just a quarter mile away from campus on the rural road. There's a country store here and a pizza joint, and the back of the building houses a little post office and a hardware store that's much bigger than it looks from the outside. T.K. usually comes here to get snacks, just like lots of other Mapletree students, but today the stuff she wants is in the hardware store.

The store has quarter-inch ball bearings at seventy cents apiece, individually bagged. She cleans off the whole peg, a dozen bags, and carries them to the register. T.K. has an alibi handy if they want to know why she needs a dozen ball bearings — school science experiments — but she must not look particularly shady, because the clerk rings her up without comment. Then she spots little plastic containers of BBs on the shelf behind the clerk and asks for one of those too, fully expecting to be treated like an aspiring terrorist any second. But the clerk just adds the total to the bill — eight bucks — and bags her stuff for her. She reads the label on the pellet container right before he bags it: 2,400 BBs.

Well, I wanted to know if I can do multiple spheres at once, she thinks. Guess I'll find out.

* * *

There's an old abandoned factory half a mile away from Mapletree Academy, dilapidating away on the bank of the Connecticut River. A few of the juniors and seniors sometimes go there to drink, but the place isn't much of a hangout, littered as it is with old factory debris and broken glass. But it's away from people, and there's nothing T.K. can break here that's not already broken.

She brought a twelve-pack of soda from the country store, and for her first experiment, she lines up three cans on a crumbling brick wall in the central yard between the buildings. Then she walks back fifty yards and unbags her ball bearings. They feel weighty and serious, both in her hand and in her mind, when she lifts them one at a time with her power. T.K. expects the first one to drop to the ground when she lifts the second one, but it doesn't. She grins as she repeats the process, and three quarter-inch ball bearings are floating in the air in front of her.

She gives the first one a push, about as much as she pushed the basketball yesterday. It shoots off and knocks the first can off its perch. It lands on the pock-marked concrete with a huge dent in the center. T.K. finds that even at fifty yards, aiming the spheres isn't difficult at all. She pushes the second ball bearing a little harder than the first. This one streaks across the yard in a blur and punches into the second can dead-center, sending soda spraying everywhere.

T.K. concentrates on the last floating ball bearing and pushes it as hard as she can.

The third can disintegrates in a spray of soda and aluminum shrapnel. She knows the ball bearing went through the can and into the brick wall of the building twenty yards behind because she can see the puff of brick dust and hear the shattering brick as the bearing cracks it.

"Whoa," she murmurs, awed by the power she just unleashed with nothing more than half a second of concentration. She could seriously hurt somebody with this ability, even kill them.

T.K. steps up to the brick wall of the building she just shot with her ball bearing. Several of the bricks are cracked from the impact, and one of them is almost completely gone. She can see the hole the bearing made as it passed through. It went right through four inches of brick, and she suspects it also went through the back wall of that building, because that quarter-inch ball of steel was moving fast.

She spends half an hour experimenting with the rest of the ball bearings. She target-shoots the rest of the soda cans and finds that she can modulate her power very precisely, right down to the point where she can send a sphere right into a can with just enough power to knock it down without even denting it. Used like this, she can retrieve her ammunition and reuse it instead of having to dig it out of holes in broken bricks.

Then T.K. opens the container of BBs. They're so much tinier and lighter than the ball bearings that it hardly seems she'll be able to do much with them, no matter how fast she pushes them. So she pours them out on the ground in a pile and then tries to lift as many as she can at once.

They all rise like a little silver cloud in front of her — all 2,400 of them.

"No way!" T.K. laughs.

Then she starts playing with them like they're a flock of birds, moving them in one direction, then another, sideways, up, down. It's weird — she can feel each individual BB in her mind, but she can move them all as a mass, and it feels almost like she's manipulating a liquid made of thousands of perfectly spherical little drops. A hundred of those BBs don't weigh what one of the ball bearings did, but with so many of them in front of her at the same time, she realizes that not much can get through to her if she keeps them moving quickly. She directs the BB cloud into a stream around herself, around and up, then down and up again until it looks like she's the vortex of a metallic tornado. The BBs move so fast that she can't make them out individually anymore. They're just a blur of flashing silver.

It's like armor, she thinks. Like a suit of armor you can carry around in your pocket.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "How to Move Spheres and Influence People"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Marko Kloos.
Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Card, Turning,
Soda Cans and Brick Walls,
P.E., Reloaded,
Edinburgh,
Aftermath,
Ace, Outed,
Ripples in the Pond,
Copyright,