Critical Point

by S. L. Huang

  He needed someone, and I wanted to be that someone. Forever.

  He pushed himself up to sitting and faced away, his back a wall shutting me out. Something shivered in my head, a bleak rejection, a rattling unease.

  “Because I don’t want you here,” Simon answered me thickly. “Now. Get Rio. Please.”

  I still didn’t want to leave him. But he kept insisting, over and over, pushing and pleading. My emotions spiked in strange cycles, half insulted, half confusion. I proposed taking him with me back to Diego’s house, but he shut that down too, saying he didn’t want to be around anyone right now, but especially me.

  That stung.

  “Send Rio,” he repeated, and I reluctantly agreed.

  It took walking away in the outside air and a good five minutes of Rio unraveling my strange, concerned behavior over the phone before my headache spiked along with an absolute fury at Simon, concussion be damned.

  Fucking telepaths.

  I sat down hard on the bumper to Pilar’s Yaris. Rio’s voice was still in my ear, but I didn’t hear it. I didn’t care that Simon hadn’t been in control, that it hadn’t been his fault. The thought of his mind slithering into mine made the back of my throat close. The way I had fawned over him—for an instant, I had deliriously opposite fantasies of stabbing his pathetic face through the eye. He wanted me to love him? So much his deepest and most unfettered desires would force me?

  “Cas,” Rio was saying. “Cas, speak to me. You said you saw Teplova’s changed man again.”

  “If Simon didn’t yank it all out of my head—”

  “How long ago? I may be able to track him.”

  I glanced at my watch. Cold sweat prickled when I saw it was midmorning. I’d fought the man before the sun came up. How much time had I wasted as Simon’s nursemaiding pet?

  “It’s been almost five hours,” I said to Rio, anger and helplessness strangling the words.

  “Unfortunate. It is unlikely I will be able to pick up his trail again.”

  “He asked for my help.” It was one of the only things I could remember. “Like he was begging. He said help me.”

  “Then perhaps he wishes to escape his master. That could be to our advantage.”

  “Maybe…” He’d done more than ask for help. Bits and pieces of the encounter scattered themselves incoherently, like beads off a broken string. The image of him slashing himself … he’d hidden his face and then mutilated himself in front of me, and it had barely dented whatever Teplova’s haunting alterations had been. At most, a desperate sliver that had let me fling the limpest of defenses. “I don’t think he was very coherent.”

  Or sympathetic. Even setting aside whatever piece of him now pressed every fear center in my brain, he hadn’t started with polite entreaties, I remembered that much. The popping throb in my right knee attested to it, as did the bloody nose, split lip, and deep bruise on the back of my skull.

  And the body of the young man he’d murdered for daring to be afraid.

  I remembered what Simon had said about Oscar. The mind is a malleable thing, Cas. What would happen to a person’s mind if nobody could ever see them?

  What would happen to a person’s mind if nobody could ever cease to fear them?

  But the question was academic. Whoever this man had been, whatever forces had brutalized him—it didn’t change what he was now. A dangerous killer.

  “He said something else.” I couldn’t remember. Why couldn’t I remember? “He told me something, something about where he was going…”

  I squeezed my thoughts like I wanted to wring them out. Simon couldn’t have snatched the whole encounter from me. I had to be able to recall more—

  As if I’d wrenched it out of the depths, I saw myself and the same man sitting at a table, a chess board discarded to the side next to empty glasses and crumpled napkins.

  “They didn’t tell us what this was,” he said sadly, with the warmth of someone who’s imbibed to just on the other side of openness. “They asked me to come train people. I didn’t know what they were doing. I want you to know that.”

  My mouth moved, responding to him. “I’m not bothered.”

  “I know. But I am.”

  I felt my shoulders shrug, harshly, carelessly. “They gave us a gift. Some people weren’t strong enough for it. That isn’t on you.”

  The skin around his eyes tightened, like he wanted to argue the point, but then he changed his mind. “I don’t regret meeting any of you. That’s not what I mean, you know.”

  I laughed. “As they say, you’re one of the good ones.”

  He shook his head. “You were children. You still are. I should have … There’s no excuse for any of us.”

  My hip hit the ground so hard, I lost my grip on the phone. I’d fallen off Pilar’s bumper into the street.

  “I remember,” I said aloud. I scrambled for the phone. “Rio, I remember. They—we—we called him Coach. He was a—he trained us, he designed how we…” Who was we? I grasped for it and it slipped away. “He was more than a trainer. He was like a—a parent, or a big brother, or something—”

  “Cas,” Rio said urgently. “You must stop. You know how this could damage you—”

  I screamed, thrashing on a pallet, delirium making the room spin. “I’m not weak, I’m not weak, I’m not weak!”

  Coach turned to someone in the shadows. “This is the same as the others. You have to get her out of here.”

  “I will,” said Simon’s voice.

  “He said he was going to help me.” The moment crashed back with terrible clarity. “Rio, I think he was following me. From the police station—maybe even from the mission, if he knew what D.J.’s plans were and picked me up there. He must have recognized me at the wellness center, and he wanted my help, and when I didn’t say yes, he said he was going to…”

  The body of the young driver broken on the street crossed my vision again.

  “I don’t know what he means by that.” I was almost babbling, a frightened pleading. “I don’t know what he’s going to do.” If I didn’t give him what he wanted, what lengths would that drive him to? What would he do if Checker or Pilar or Arthur—or someone like Tabitha—happened to be standing next to me at the wrong moment?

  I saw the man—Coach—again, gripping me by the shoulders and looking into my eyes. “Go,” he said. “Good luck.”

  And I turned and followed Rio.

  “Oh, God,” I said. “Rio, he was … he was my friend, wasn’t he?”

  twenty-two

  “I RECALL the person you speak of, and I believe you did consider him so, yes,” Rio answered. “Now I strongly suggest you cease this attempt at discovering more.”

  “He was my friend…” And now he wanted my help.

  Just as Arthur had needed my help. I’d sworn I’d break apart the world to find him, struggling so hard to claim that identity for myself. Promising myself I wouldn’t fail my friends as Willow Grace had failed hers.

  I wasn’t a very good person, by almost any metric. I wasn’t even Rio, with his impressive consistency, no matter how many repugnant acts he still allowed himself. But recently, I’d begun to cling to the idea of the people in my life who mattered to me. To the promise that I could protect them.

  Now I wasn’t even sure if Arthur and Checker thought that way about me in return—maybe they never had. And the sudden remembered emotion about the person I’d called Coach …

  It cratered into a desperate obligation. A need to prove myself in some way I couldn’t even define.

  “Maybe I could help him,” I said recklessly. “Teplova’s surgeries, they’re just math. I can figure out what she did. I could find someone to undo it.” I wasn’t at all certain about any of that. But if Coach had any chance, it was probably me.

  As long as he didn’t kill me before I could try.

  Voices hummed dissonantly in the back of my brain. Rio was right, I was shaking everything loose, destabilizing my own coherence just when I nee
ded to be able to think.

  Too late, too late, Valarmathi mocked me.

  “D.J. must have forced Teplova to make him into that. As a, as an experiment,” I plowed on. “Nobody would choose this. Nobody.” And once done, I could think of a dozen ways such a victim could be controlled, from dangling the prospect of changing them back to being the sole person who didn’t run in fear. D.J. must have figured out some way to interact with his own creations.

  The horror lanced through me of Teplova at that operating table, threatened into putting a knife to someone she considered a close companion. Distorting his face and body into something people would react to like a monster in the dark.

  “I am pessimistic a rescue in this case is possible,” Rio said. “Even if you could transform him back to his prior form, someone like him may never be able to return fully from such an experience. He is a serious threat right now, Cas.”

  “You’re suggesting we put him down, then?” I demanded. “Shoot him in the head and be done with it?”

  “There may not be a choice in the matter.”

  I pushed myself up aggressively and swung around into the car. “I’ll make it a choice. We take down D.J., we rescue Coach, and we make sure everyone’s safe. That’s the new plan.”

  Arthur and the others would back me up on that. They saw the value in never letting go of a person’s humanity, even if Rio didn’t. Even if I wasn’t so sure either. They’d take my side.

  Assuming Coach didn’t kill any of them first either.

  * * *

  THE SPECTER of Coach’s promise to help pressed me to urgency. What did he know about me? Who might he hurt, in a state of mind that had been so forcibly wrenched from reality?

  He wasn’t like that before, a sneaking defense spoke up. I flashed on his hands wrapping mine with tape, handing me a bottle of water, giving me a mock salute before I ran and ran and ran faster than anyone could catch me.

  Christ, if this kept up, I was going to crash the car. I consciously did the full fluid dynamics equations of threading through LA’s weekday morning traffic, even if I didn’t need to, and tried to conjecture what Coach’s next move might be.

  Rio had relayed that the whole family—sans Elisa, who was at the police station with Checker—were now at the hospital where Arthur was. If Coach came after them for some reason, Rio would keep them safe. And if I could get back to Checker before he was released, I could watch over him and then everybody else too while Rio headed back to Simon. Then we’d work on taking down D.J. and saving the people he’d destroyed.

  I should have been more worried about leaving Simon alone with a head injury and a killer out there who used to know him. The vindictive part of me muttered that it would serve him right if he was the one Coach came after.

  I allowed myself a brief and malicious imagining that Simon’s murder might be how Coach chose to “help” me … not that I really wanted him to.

  But I’d been in such a haze about helping Simon that for hours I hadn’t kept up with any of the people who actually mattered to me. I checked my phone as I drove, hoping it would help keep me balanced against whatever fissures I’d started cracking open in my own head. Rio had called six times throughout the morning, Pilar four. Eventually Pilar had segued into sending texts, half of which were worried and the other half of which were updates. Arthur was now out of surgery and reported stable, something Rio apparently hadn’t felt was important enough to pass on. The doctors weren’t letting anyone in to see him yet, but all the kids had trooped down to sit around the waiting room and be ready to descend the moment their dad was allowed visitors.

  I sent Pilar back a few texts of my own—I didn’t feel like enduring her well-intentioned concern over the phone. The screen immediately lit up with replies, the first with delight that I was okay, the second an acknowledgment of my warning about the possible danger from Coach and my directive to stay near Rio, and the third and fourth another update. She told me they’d just been with Arthur, who’d been torn up something awful (her words) but all things considered was doing really well, and according to the doctors, should recover without trouble as long as he didn’t strain himself. She concluded the message by telling me two detectives were in with him now, so Checker should definitely be out soonest, with a smiley face.

  I tried to remember why I liked Pilar again. Oh, yeah. She was good with a gun.

  Also because she sent another text a few minutes later saying, Oh and remember Oscar! Who has run away, so maybe you don’t want to remember him.

  No. Running away made me want to remember him more. But he’d have to wait.

  I ran six red lights and cut through four gas stations to get to the police station faster. The last thing I needed was Checker and Elisa heading out of there unprotected with who knew what waiting. The streets wavered in front of me in the midday heat, and I couldn’t tell if it was exhaustion or anxiety or my own attempt at fucking up my brain.

  My fatigue had trenched bone-deep by the time I finally made it. Now that it was daylight, I slid into the station’s parking lot like a regular upstanding citizen and got out. No more updates from Pilar, and it had been thirty-seven minutes since her text that the detectives were interviewing Arthur. That had to be enough time for them to finish and make a phone call, didn’t it?

  I swung toward the front doors of the station, fully intending to walk through and demand …

  I stood foolishly by the door to Pilar’s car. After two years, I didn’t know Checker’s last name.

  But what would demanding do for him anyway? I kept forgetting I couldn’t punch the cops into acquiescing to me. They were either already releasing him, or they weren’t. Yelling at them would only make them look more closely at me, which was not a situation I wanted to provoke. Hell, being at a police station in the first place was like voluntarily giving myself dental surgery—Checker better be grateful.

  There did exist a person whose yelling was supposed to work, though. I texted Pilar for Elisa’s number.

  When I called Elisa, it hit voicemail. But Pilar’s message had been a name card including her surname as well as her number, which gave me a different idea.

  I marched into the police station, trying to ignore the cameras while at the same time keep nervous eyes in all directions. “I’m looking for Elisa Carpintero,” I said to the uniform behind the desk near the entrance. “She’s my lawyer.”

  The uniform tried to be as unhelpful as possible, but I finally got her to pass on a message and sent Tabitha’s name as my own. Even after acquiescing, she shot me a poisonous look and said something about “no funny business, today of all days.”

  Come to think of it, a lot of the cops around here seemed jumpy, their eyes flicking over their shoulders and their hands to their holsters, even inside the station. Was that all because of my little harmless bomb?

  Whoops.

  I sat down to wait on one of the benches against the wall and covered my own hooded watchfulness by fiddling with my phone. I was still using one of the stolen ones from the night before; I hadn’t been coherent enough to exchange it for a burner from the apartment where I’d left Simon. Simon and … a vague itch made me check the messages from Pilar again.

  Oscar. Right. Fuck. The guy who had tried to blow up my office, and was now in the wind.

  “You must be Cas Russell.”

  I whipped to my feet, probably too combatively for a police station, but managed to stop there. A young, heavyset Hispanic woman with an aggressive posture had come around the corner. She folded her arms and stared down at me in a way that reminded me eerily of Diego. Like father, like daughter, apparently.

  “Elisa, I’m guessing,” I said. “Where’s Checker?”

  “Still in holding. Do you have anything new?”

  I didn’t waste time. “I think someone might be after him. Possibly more than one someone.” Both his old friend and mine. “You need to get him out of here. Detectives have already been in interviewing Arthur—can you
expedite this?”

  She nodded, but a frown appeared between her eyes. “I’ve gathered that’s a concern. But if he’s in danger, he might be safer in custody for the moment.”

  “No. He isn’t. Trust me.” Mostly because I’d have no guarantee of getting in there to protect him. “Get him out.”

  “Noted. I’ll go continue making them all hate me, then. Squeaky wheels.” And with no more pleasantries, she strode off the way she had come.

  I decided I liked Elisa. I took a steadying breath and forced myself to sit back down.

  The bright sunlight outside the glass front doors winked through the shadows of people flickering back and forth. Every one of them felt like a threat. It was all I could do not to keep a hand on the grip of my Colt.

  Christ, I was tired. Or the cops’ jumpiness was rubbing off on me.

  But my appreciation for Elisa was tripled when she and Checker came out together half an hour later, with no handcuffs this time.

  I shot up off the bench. Checker looked awful. He clearly hadn’t slept much either—deep shadows gouged themselves under his eyes, and his hair stuck up in all directions. But he had a little bit of a smile and energy to his movements, and I surmised Elisa had told him about Arthur being found alive and not permanently harmed.

  Finally, something that had gone right.

  “Hey,” he said to me, but led the way out into the sunlight before further conversation. I couldn’t blame him.

  I did make sure to step a little way in front of him as we got outside, though. Just to be safe.

  “Are you two going to join them at the hospital?” Elisa asked.

  “Yeah,” Checker answered for both of us without checking. “Lise, are you sure…?”

  “I’ll see you,” Elisa answered smoothly, with a friendly prod to his shoulder. “Keep out of jail this time, sport. It was nice to meet you, Ms. Russell,” she added to me, before heading out into the parking lot to her car.

  I realized too late that I probably should have told her to ride with us. I was reacting to everything too slow. At least she was the much lower profile target—trying to keep track of this many people was shit.