The script called for Jamal, dressed in a leather outfit and mask as Derek Knight—wealthy amateur astronomer who, in the 1940s, discovered the approaching Takisian ship and tried to warn a skeptical America—to leap from the top of a water tank that had been painted the same color as the alien ship.

  The team had built a platform covered with foam rubber six feet below Jamal's launch point—out of frame. Jamal had practiced the leap four times, twice in daylight. He was ready to do it for Deladrier's camera.

  But as often happened in southern California in the spring, it had rained that day. Not just rained Seattle-style, but poured torrentially, like a typhoon. The surface of the tower was too slick for Jamal's boots. When he made the leap, he slipped—and missed the platform.

  The water tower was on a hillside. The drop to the base of the hill was, Jamal later learned, over a hundred feet. The base was jagged rock—not that he hit directly, he slammed into several tree branches before cartwheeling onto the rocks.

  What he remembered was the confusion of slipping, reaching for the platform—the horrified look on Deladrier's face as the director flew upward from Jamal's point of view.

  That was followed by the roller-coaster moment of freefall—no panic, just disbelief.

  Then a blinding, gasping impact, like being hit by a speeding truck. Shock mercifully suppressed the pain for a few moments. Long enough for Jamal to realize he had fallen ten stories onto the rocks and was still alive.

  He couldn't be certain. He was blind, deaf, without feeling in his arms and legs. For an eternally terrible moment he thought this was death.

  But then his vision returned, at least to where he could see the flash-lights of rescuers searching for him. As the roaring in his ears died down, like the temporary damage from a heavy metal concert, he heard voices, boots crunching on brush.

  A face appeared upside down above him—male, white, middle-aged, bearded. "He's here!" a voice called, far away. "Jesus Christ."

  The face turned away, and even through his damaged ears, Jamal could hear the man retching.

  Jamal Norwood lived; his wild card had turned. He was now an ace, albeit an ace whose power simply seemed to be the ability to bounce back from extreme violence, usually within twenty-four hours. The greater the damage, the longer his recovery.

  The accident changed his life in more subtle ways: in true Hollywood fashion, Nic Deladrier survived the near-disaster to land an assignment as director on Halloween Night XIII—and whether motivated by guilt or just the practical value of having an ace for a stuntman, the first thing he did was hire Jamal Norwood.

  Jamal resisted, until the pile of money got too high—and the offers to act never materialized.

  For the past five years he has gone from one gig to another, one set of gags—stunts—to another, well-paid, usually falling from a great height wearing pinhole cameras for that close close-up experience. He had been flung off a spaceship in One Against the Legion, dropped to the bottom of a pit and then buried under tons of cement in Hoover Dam, crushed by the giant stomping feat of a war machine run amok in the remake of Kronos. . . .

  Such was his life. It was almost Shakespearean, for God's sake. To fall, to almost die . . . and, painfully, to bounce back.

  Showered, with no visible signs of yesterday's damage, dressed, Jamal is ravenous. He heads downstairs for the kitchen.

  The Clubs are not expected to cook for themselves, any more than they are expected to choose wardrobe. "It's like we're back in grade school," Spasm had sneered, first day in the place. That was before they'd lost the second challenge, and voted his sorry ass off the team.

  Even so, meal times are fixed, and Jamal has missed breakfast. Nevertheless, he has been living on his own for five years and he is capable of cooking a meal. He begins searching through the refrigerator and cupboards for eggs, bacon, pans, cups, a process made more difficult because the mansion housing the Clubs has been designed for its visual imprint, not utility. To begin with, the kitchen has been painted a primary blue, a color that makes all food look unappetizing. And nothing is where it would logically be.

  He has managed to locate a frying pan when Jade Blossom enters. To Jamal's immense disappointment, she has exchanged the startling bikini for a tank top and baggy shorts, as if she were off for a morning at the mall. Still, she looks adorable. "That's ambitious," she says, noting Jamal's obvious search for the makings of a meal. "If you're looking for food after Holy Roller's been through here, good luck."

  "I'm just amazed the guy even fits in the building."

  "Or through the canyons."

  "They got him inside the truck. It was the truck that had to get up the narrow road." Jamal will never forget the comic insanity of Clubs move-in day . . . the face of the elderly female neighbor whose shiny Jag had to wait while the American Hero convoy of camera limo, Club Humvee, and moving van negotiated the hairpin curve just outside the gate. Riding with Jamal and Toad Man, Spasm had thought to have some fun with the woman. "What do you think, should I give her a little thrill? When was the last time she popped?"

  "You shouldn't distract the lady while she's driving," Toad Man had said with great indignity, beating Jamal by milliseconds. (There were useful wild card powers, and then there were the ridiculous ones: Spasm's ability to make other people orgasm or sneeze at will struck Jamal as proof that life made no fucking sense. Jamal wouldn't miss Spasm, now that he had deservedly joined the Discards.)

  Getting Roller out of the truck and into the mansion had taxed even the great minds of the American Hero team: ramps had been built to allow the gigantic ace to shuffle his way to the front door, but getting all five hundred pounds of the man out of the truck . . . well, it took both camera crews and a lot of sweating and cursing. "They should have used a crane," Toad had said, in all seriousness. "Isn't that what movie people use?"

  Jamal had failed to answer, as Holy Roller began, in his best Sunday-go-to-meeting voice, to alternately berate the grips for cursing ("Gentlemen, please! To hear the Lord's name and everyone else's taken in vain on such a beautiful day! It's a shame, it is!") while alerting them to the glories of God's plan ("Join the righteous, my friends! Find the joy!") was theater no one dared interrupt.

  Now, alone in the kitchen with beautiful, unapproachable Jade, Jamal is half-worried that Roller is right outside . . . listening . . . and, if listening, judging.

  "Now they have to use that truck to keep us supplied."

  "Another good reason to vote him off."

  Jade shook her pretty head. "They'll keep Roller around as long as they can. He's too much like the people watching this shit."

  "How'd you get to be so cynical, so young?"

  Jade can't be more than two years younger than Jamal. "Go to a few auditions as an actress and see what it does to you."

  Jamal realizes that beautiful Jade has no idea what he does—granted, their introductions had been perfunctory, but Jamal has since pored over the online bios. Jade obviously hasn't, or she would know that he has been on his share of auditions, too. More proof that he has no chance with her. "Why did you join American Hero, then? It's really the same shit, isn't it?"

  She has found a box of Cheerios and casually opens it. As Jamal looks for a bowl and a spoon, he sees Jade eating right out of the box. Not that he objects—she could put her mouth on anything he owns—but he's so hungry he's almost salivating. "I like shows like this. Laguna Beach, Survivor, Great Race. They're the only thing I ever watch."

  Nothing in this cupboard. "So you know exactly how to play the game."

  "Yeah." She crunches away. "They sort of cast these things. There's always the old guy, the biker, the crazy one—" and here she smiles "—the minority."

  "Only me?" Jamal gestures gracefully toward Jade. "What about Chinese-American girls?"

  "My category is hot girl. Hot girl trumps the whole minority thing." This is as true as it is irritating. "The other category in reality TV is freaks, but . . ." And here Jade smiles very fetchingly. At that instant, Jamal is lost—she can be as bitchy and self-centered as she wants, she will have to rip his heart out of his chest and stomp it. "On American Hero the freaks are the majority. Which is why even a . . . hugely fat white man is someone they have to hold onto. Will someone answer the fucking phone? Please?"

  Jamal realizes he has been hearing a chirping from the living room. Toad Man hollers that he will get it. "Hullo," they hear him say. "This is Buford."

  "So you've got your strategy all figured out. Be the hot girl."

  "And let you big strong men knock each other off."

  "How am I supposed to knock these other guys off? My wild card is nothing but defensive. I take a licking and keep on ticking. Big whoop."

  Jade is still crunching. "I thought you were the big jock!"

  This is a surprisingly perceptive thing for a woman as self-involved as Jade to say. "Who says I'm a jock?"

  "You walk like a jock. You talk like a jock. I know jocks . . . all my brothers play sports."

  Toad Man appears in the kitchen doorway, blinking, as always, in apparent bafflement. "Hullo. Ah, they want us. Griffith Park Observatory. Does anyone know where that is?"

  Wet, glistening, still in her bikini, just out of the pool, Diver drips in the hallway. "In Griffith Park."

  Holy Roller is at the other end of the hallway, blocking it like a cork in a wine bottle and—to Jamal's amusement—preventing Art and the camera crew for getting any useful footage. "Praise God. Another challenge. May the Lord be with us!"

  The Clubs disperse to their rooms for last-minute prep for cameras, including Jade Blossom. Jamal realizes that the woman has taken the box of Cheerios. And that he still hasn't had breakfast.

  Jade has come surprisingly close to explaining everything there is to know about Jamal Norwood. Forget the wild card—his life changed from what he wanted to something else long before that rainy night in 2001.

  Jamal's father, Big Bill Norwood, was the best athlete in a South Central neighborhood noted for NBA stars and NFL running backs, for all kinds of major and minor league baseball players. "No hockey players, though," Bill used to say. "No ice."

  Jamal was good, too, with the speed and eye-hand coordination of a world-class athlete. What he lacked was size, topping out at five-nine, 160 pounds in his junior year at powerhouse Loyola High. He could be the best basketball or football player the world had ever seen, but no scout or coach would look at him long enough to notice. That's assuming the coach's eyes noticed him at all, since he was a head shorter than his teammates.

  Jamal had already experienced the humiliation of being passed over for the varsity baseball team at Loyola, even though his batting average was the highest on the team. He made the mistake of complaining to Bill one night on the drive home.

  Big Bill simply shook his head. "Forget about being a pro athlete," he said. "You're never going to make it."

  "But I'm good, Dad! As good as the Wilkes brothers!"

  "I'm not talking about 'good,' Jamal! You are good, probably in the top five percent of all the athletes your age. I'm just saying you're never going to be a pro athlete. You've got too much going on."

  "I don't understand."

  Big Bill sighed. "You've got too much going on in your head." He must have realized that Jamal was still failing to see what he meant. "Look, you need two things to be a pro athlete: the skills, which you have, and the right kind of brain—which you don't."

  "Are you saying I'm stupid?"

  "I'm saying the opposite. I'm saying that you've got too many other things in your life to think about! What makes a kid a pro athlete is not having any other choices. You've got to be able to shoot hoops for six hours a day after school. You've got to bounce that ball off the step. And you've got to do because you can't do anything else! Because it is boring. If you get bored, if you find that you'd rather go to the movies or read a book or study or even chase girls, you aren't gonna be a world-class athlete."

  Jamal mumbled something about jocks getting all the girls. "True. But it's because the girls chase them, not the other way around."

  So he went off to USC determined to be the opposite of his father—not a jock, but an intellectual. He read Eggers and Pynchon and, yes, Stendahl. He discovered Marcel Duchamp and the Constructionists. He studied French film and Howard Hawks movies.

  He even saw The Jolson Story.

  Now that career had been sacrificed on the altar of the wild card. Jamal Norwood needs American Hero.

  "Today's challenge is the Scavenger Hunt."

  Griffith Park Observatory has just emerged from a five-year-long, $90 million reconstruction. Having been dragged to the site for field trips all through grade school, Jamal feels as though he knows the place—and to his eye, it has not changed. The only difference is that you could no longer park. If he and the other Clubs hadn't been driving their American Hero Humvees, they'd have had to take a bus.

  Not that it matters for the Clubs. They are the last of the four suits to arrive, joining the other convoys as well as the horde of production vehicles and honey wagons.

  Now Jamal and the other Clubs are lined up in front of a giant emblem so flimsy it flutters in the gentle morning breeze, and some kind of flat structure, like a scoreboard, covered with a colored sheet. The aces from the other suits, from Clubs to Diamonds to Spades to Hearts, all stand in front of Peregrine, all cleverly positioned so the light is in their faces. Peregrine herself steps onto a slick plastic circle twenty feet wide, bearing the American Hero logo.

  Jamal has been on a dozen film sets, and yet he is still amazed at the artifice. Maybe it's another sign that he is in the wrong business; he wants the characters on TV and in the movies to be real.

  Toad Man nudges Jamal. "Boy, I thought we were having tough times. Look at them," he says, nodding to the five Diamonds gathering in front of the symbol for their suit. They remind Jamal of an expansion baseball team about to take the field against the Brooklyn Dodgers. Only no expansion team had ever fielded such a sad-ass player as the Maharajah, missing two legs and one arm.

  The Hearts, on the other hand, look cocky. There are six of them, just as there are six Clubs. Both teams have won a challenge, and the immunity that goes with it. The Spades and Diamonds, losers both times out, are down to five players apiece.

  Jamal blinks—put them out of your mind. Think like Big Bill Norwood. They are all the enemy.

  "We have hidden five statues just like this—" Peregrine raises a golden figurine, a stylized Jetboy a foot tall, "at five different locations around Los Angeles. The team that returns here within four hours with the most Jet-boys wins. It's that simple."

  "Any rules?" Drummer Boy booms, shooting a shit-eating grin down at his partner in crime, Hardhat.

  "Of course," Peregrine says. "Just one: there are no rules."

  Most of the aces actually finish the phrase for her. Jamal can feel his heart rate rise, as it did when he walked from the on-deck circle to home plate . . . or his first moment on set.

  "Okay, may I present . . . the Scavenger Hunt!" Peregrine pulls the covers off a giant electronic display—currently blank.

  "Shit!"

  "One minute, Mom. They lost the feed." That from John Fortune, hand to earpiece, running toward a satellite truck a dozen yards away—no doubt happy to have an excuse not to be Drummer Boy's Stepin Fetchit.

  "Do the locations even matter?" Diver is behind him. "No matter what, I wind up fishing or swimming. The life aquatic. Christ."

  "Could be worse. You could be a tackling dummy like me."

  "A what?"

  Jamal sighs. "Think of a punching bag on a sled. Football players practice tackles on it."

  "Let's trade places. I bet I'd like being tackled more than you would."

  "You've got a bad attitude."

  "You have no idea." She forces a smile.

  "Okay, aces! American Heroes!" The board has been fired up successfully, a Mapquest look at Los Angeles County, with five beeping dots. One is in the Valley near the intersection of the 405 and Ventura Boulevard; one appears to be on a peak near Mount Wilson; one is in the middle of Beverly Hills; one is way the hell and gone in Venice, by the ocean; and one appears to be located just over the hill from Griffith Park Observatory.

  Jamal has no interest in dragging his ass all the way to Venice, or up some mountainside, and—as a Los Angeles resident—knows better than to face the 405 and Ventura area at any time of day. He'd also like to avoid getting into a battle anywhere near Rodeo Drive. Who needs the attitude? Besides, he has a good idea what that fifth location is.

  As Jamal watches, the screen changes, actual addresses and images popping up, to reactions that range from appreciative to confused.

  The fifth location is Griffith Park Zoo.

  Peregrine is posing for a trio of cameras. "You see your possible destinations. How you reach them and how you return is up to you. "She points to a huge, ridiculous clock, complete with American Hero hands, that has been dragged into the center of the circle. "When I say 'go' and the clock starts, you're off.

  "Any last questions?" Faux drama. Jamal finds this intensely annoying and turns away before he hears Peregrine shout . . .

  "Go!"

  The first challenge is the freakish mad scramble to decide which of the Clubs goes where. It takes two minutes of suggestions, argument, and actual shoving before it reaches total chaos. As Jade Blossom and Diver tussle over which of the pair would be best suited to search in Beverly Hills, Toad Man turns to Jamal and gives a half-smile. "This reminds me of a football huddle."

  "Yeah, but nobody is the quarterback."

  It's Holy Roller who uses his voice and bulk to restore order. "Dammit, people!" The uncharacteristic use of profanity shocks the team to relative silence. "Time, as they say, is a-wasting. Brother Stuntman, you know this godless city better than any of us. Why don't you give us some guidance—and quickly."

  Whether he likes it or not, Jamal is suddenly in charge. And the choices are obvious: "Brave Hawk, the mountain location. Reverend, you and Toad hit that Valley spot. Jade, Beverly Hills."