Plastic Smile (Russell's Attic Book 4)

by Huang, SL

  We stared at each other. I needed to escape, or kill him, or break his bones until he told me everything he knew about me that I didn’t.

  I wasn’t going to do any of those things. Shit. Shit, shit, shit.

  “Cassandra, I’m not trying to—I won’t make you do anything against your will, I wouldn’t. I promise. I haven’t been, and I’m not now. I tried not to be noticed, I admit, and I’m, I’m effective at that, but I wasn’t doing anything to you. I swear.”

  “That sounds like a distinction without a difference,” I said. I lifted my Colt back up, slowly, cautiously. “If you’re not doing anything to me, why does it feel like I couldn’t shoot you no matter how hard I tried?”

  His head straightened back and his hands hitched higher. “There are some things—I’m not doing anything consciously, but—Cassandra, please, it’s not an exact science.”

  “You just can’t help brainwashing everyone around you, is that it?”

  “No! That’s not—I’m not.”

  “I’m probably going to forget this whole conversation, aren’t I,” I said.

  “No.” His eyes stretched wide and scandalized. “Cassandra, I wouldn’t. I won’t. That’s why I’m standing here asking you; I wouldn’t have to if I didn’t…” His expression crumpled. “Cassandra. You trusted me once. Please.”

  That seemed unlikely.

  He ran a hand through his curly hair. “Cassandra, I’m begging you. You’re in danger, and I don’t know what, or how, not unless you let me—” He bit his lip again, cutting himself off.

  “Let you what?”

  “I need to—look closer. Please.”

  “You mean read my mind.”

  He closed his eyes. “Yes, but—”

  “No way. No way in hell.”

  “Only to figure out what kind of danger you’re in. That’s all I’ll look for, I swear.”

  “The only person I’m in danger from right now is you and your twisted brain-screwing powers.”

  He sucked in a breath. “Then tell me—what happened with Pithica? How do you know that word?”

  “How do you know it? How do you know me?”

  “Cassandra—”

  “Stop calling me that.”

  “Please!” He reached out to catch my arm. “Please let me—”

  I snapped my hand over his wrist this time instead, so fast it was a blur, and wrenched. Simon yelped, his body following his arm to stumble to the side as I let go.

  “I said not to touch me,” I said. “And I never, ever, ever want you in my fucking head.”

  Adrenaline and fear punched through my system. If he was really like Dawna, he could make me give him permission—whatever he felt he needed it for—and think I had done it gladly. Who knew why he hadn’t forced me to his side already, but Dawna’s machinations had been games within games, twisting my logical processes around until I’d lost which way was up.

  I backed away, edging toward where I’d left my car.

  “Cassandra!” he called again.

  “What did I say?” Raising the Colt was probably useless, but I did it anyway. “Get away from me and stay away. Don’t follow me. Don’t ever come near me again. Ever.”

  I got to my car, drove away, and kept driving. I switched cars and drove some more, crisscrossing the city half a dozen times before going to a hole in the wall I hadn’t stopped at in months.

  I didn’t sense anyone behind me, but that didn’t mean anything, did it?

  Fuck.

  I finally pulled over and leaned my head against the steering wheel. Every muscle ached, and the work gloves pulled at my scabbing hands every time I shifted my fingers.

  I should probably tell Checker what had just happened. That a man from my past had appeared. That a man from my past had appeared, and was a…was one of them.

  Heck, I should probably tell Checker and Arthur both, and Pilar, and Rio—anyone Simon might approach and attack with his powers.

  Rio—

  Try Los Angeles. It’s a big enough city. America will be easier to disappear in.

  I closed my eyes and tried to moderate my breathing.

  Shit. I’d left Simon outside Checker’s house. I hadn’t even been thinking about it. And I’d seen him outside Arthur’s office—he knew everyone I associated with, could approach any one of them, find out whatever he wanted, turn any of them into his puppet.

  Was Checker’s inane crusade to figure out my secrets already a part of this Simon person’s master plan? How much could I trust anyone?

  Or maybe he wants you not to tell anyone. Maybe that’s his plan, to convince you to keep him a secret, like a tree that’s fallen with nobody to hear it, an unobserved particle, until he’s gotten whatever he wants out of you.

  This was the trouble with psychics. I never knew which decisions were my own.

  But come on, what would I even tell Checker anyway? That a psychic man from my past had followed me for probably weeks and then demanded permission to read my mind? It was starting to sound mad.

  This isn’t a joke—Cassandra, listen to me, please, you’ll go mad—

  I jerked.

  You’re in danger, I heard Simon say again, overlapping with the memory of Checker: You could be in danger. You could have other enemies out there.

  Enemies. For all I knew, Simon might be one of them.

  Christ, I didn’t have time for this mess.

  I texted Checker to make sure he was okay, and he confirmed right away, which I supposed I could trust as much as anything right now. Then I toyed with the phone, considering, trying to weigh the pros and cons of what to do about Simon without fucking second-guessing myself. But after less than three minutes, I was interrupted by Checker texting again:

  GET 2 HOSPTL

  JP GOING AFTER ARTHUR

  I didn’t wait to ask how he knew. I accelerated so fast I took a layer of rubber off the tires.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck. This was what we got for going to a hospital, for reporting to the police like good citizens. Pourdry didn’t just have the game of evading law enforcement down. He had informants.

  If anything happened to Arthur, I’d burn Los Angeles down to get to Pourdry. Hell, I’d do that anyway. I was out of patience.

  Whoever Simon was, he and his stupid, bizarre, frightening pleadings could wait.

  Chapter 7

  Hospitals don’t have great security, but they tend to frown on people with guns. I left my carbine and carried my Colt concealed.

  I dashed into the ER, phone to my ear. Checker had been trying to reach Arthur but hadn’t been able to get through—he didn’t know whether Arthur was still in the middle of being treated or the hospital just had bad signal, but he was tracking medical updates in real time. “He’s in exam room four. Straight down the hall from the entrance, through the door in the back right corner of the waiting room, past the nurses’ station, third room on the left.”

  I snapped my senses into the mathematical overlap of fields of vision. There were too many people crowding the ER to make myself completely invisible, but I could at least dance around the staff. People who weren’t in authority generally wouldn’t speak up.

  I slid between peripheral fields of view like I was dodging lasers, ducking and sliding through the door and then crab-walking by the nurses’ station. In order to stop me they would have had to see me, and not a single person in scrubs or a white coat did. A patient or two caught the edge of my antics and frowned my way, but then they looked to those in charge, assumed they must have noticed me, and shrugged it off to go back to their own business.

  I escaped the crowded areas and sprinted down the hallway. Exam Room 4, third door on the left—

  I burst in, my gun raised. Arthur looked up. He was on his feet, but still in a hospital gown, and leaning heavily on the exam table. A wiry white guy was sprawled on the floor with a needle stabbed in his neck.

  “Oh,” I said. “Nice job. Are you good to get out of here?”

  “Hell
yeah,” he said. “Just gotta get some clothes on. Two minutes.”

  I turned my back while Arthur got dressed, keeping half an eye on the goon on the floor. He was breathing, but shallowly.

  “Probably not worth it to wait and ask for crutches,” Arthur mused. “Give me a hand?”

  I got under his arm and he leaned heavily across my shoulder. I cracked the door and peeked out. The moment the hallway had a lull in traffic, I pulled it open and helped Arthur hobble out. We hoofed it away from the waiting room and its many eyes, toward the emergency exit at the end of the hall, the one labeled, “Emergency Exit Only—Alarm Will Sound.”

  “Wait! Sir?” a woman’s voice called behind us.

  “Jig’s up,” I said, and pushed open the emergency door. The alarm blared after us into the night.

  “I got the detectives’ number,” Arthur said. “I can call ’em and straighten this out, soon’s we’re safe.”

  We piled back into the car and I zoomed us away, toward one of my bolt holes. Since knowing Checker I’d gradually acquired some without the necessity of stairs, just in case. It was coming in handy now.

  I tried to pick the most obscure address, the one it was least likely my telepathic stalker had stumbled across in my brain. Could he do that? Or would he have had to trick me into telling him, while the whole time I thought it was my idea?

  Maybe I had told him and forgotten…

  “Keep your eyes out,” I warned Arthur, unnecessarily.

  He held a finger up to me, on the phone with Checker. “Did you talk to—they safe? You sure? Okay. Good man. No, it’s best if I don’t know for now. Thanks…Ain’t know yet. You talk to Pilar? Yeah, best to be safe. Tell her I’m sorry.”

  “Pilar knew what she was signing up for,” I said. Occasionally needing to keep her head down from bad guys was in her job description, as far as I was concerned.

  Arthur shot me an annoyed look and spoke back into the phone. “Yeah, I’m gonna be in touch. You be careful, too, son.” He hung up.

  “All squared away?” I said.

  “No one should get shot at just ’cause they work with me.”

  “Probably no one should get shot at period,” I said. “In a perfect world. In the one we live in, grown adults can make their own decisions.”

  “Ain’t gotta like it.”

  “Didn’t say you did,” I said. “Don’t get your knickers in a twist at me, Tresting. I’m not the one trying to kill us.”

  He sighed. “What’s the plan? Seems Pourdry’s gone on offense.”

  Well, that was obvious. “You think?”

  “He might not be the only one, neither. We been pissing off a fair number of disreputable folk the past few months. If they start talking to each other—”

  “I’ll try to get some intel,” I said. “Meanwhile, Checker’s doing some research into Pourdry’s business. Once he does, we’ll offense right back.”

  “Your MO, always so elegant,” Arthur said.

  “When did you get so sarcastic?” Jesus, I wished it were more elegant. I was all about elegant solutions. “Elegance would be fighting back at the root. Going after each bad guy one at a time is ass-backward.”

  Arthur was a smart guy. “That what you was up to with all the maps?” he asked.

  “Yeah.” I studied the road.

  There was no particular reason I should tell Arthur what I was working on. In fact, there were plenty of good reasons not to, the first and foremost of which was that there was a better than even chance he’d side with Checker and try to stop me.

  Arthur had tried to stop me from doing things a couple of times in the past, and I’d always plowed right through his moral stance with a nice fuck-you and done them anyway. One of those times I’d gotten someone killed. The other time I hadn’t, but I only managed to avoid it by causing myself to be tortured with a car battery.

  Arthur hadn’t been happy. He was a hard man to read, but I was pretty sure I was still on probation with him. I’d promised to try to stop doing that shit.

  I licked my lips. “I think I have a way to clothesline the crime rate.”

  “Yeah?”

  I explained.

  Arthur let me talk without interruption as I outlined the plan: Arkacite technology, my math, and metropolitan Los Angeles as a testing ground. I kept my eyes on the road, steadily framing out his reaction.

  “And I think Pilar’s right. The technology, they had it functioning. It was just a matter of the mathematics,” I finished out my summary.

  “How does it work?” I couldn’t tell yet from his tone what he thought.

  “Well, I don’t have the technical specs yet, but I can give you the report summaries.” I put on my best reasonable voice. “First, they discovered the unique brain pattern that comes from the deindividuation state. You know about brain waves?”

  “Know they exist.”

  “We’ve been able to categorize brain waves for a while—what they look like in the normal waking state, what they look like in deep sleep, that kind of thing. But their researchers figured out the unique Fourier series—or, I should say, the narrow range of Fourier series—”

  “English, Russell.”

  “What I’m saying is, they managed to pick up what the brain is doing when you hit that deindividuated state. The mathematical characteristics of the brain waves.”

  “And then what?”

  “It turns out brain entrainment has been around for a long time,” I said. “It’s fascinating, really. People have discovered all sorts of ways to sort of, um, get a subject’s brain frequencies to align with an imposed frequency. Like, they’ll play beats in the subject’s ears and get their brain frequencies to slow down to a more meditative state.”

  “Subject,” said Arthur. “You mean a human being.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “People. We’re all math inside.”

  He shifted in his seat. “Go on.”

  “It’s only recently that the social psychologists and the neuroscientists started to cross over and talk to each other more. They did heavier research into the neuroscience of different psychological states, and somewhere along the way someone with funding got wind of it.”

  “Arkacite.”

  “Yeah, or the military grants, or some combination. Anyway, the important part is, they figured out how, when someone is in that deindividuated place—they figured out how to use a combination of audio and electromagnetic frequencies to realign the brain out of it.”

  “Side effects?” Arthur asked. “Is it dangerous?”

  “No more dangerous than listening to music.” That wasn’t strictly true. After all, as Pilar had said, when it hadn’t worked properly it had caused some…unexpected behavior. I sighed. “As long as it’s working the way it’s intended, it’s not dangerous. All it’s doing is realigning brain frequencies to a more normal level, taking them out of that state. It’s returning people to normal.”

  “What about people who ain’t doing no mob thing? What kind of effects does it have then?”

  “None.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. It’s mathematically impossible for it to take people out of a normal brain state.”

  “Thought you said we got more than one normal brain state. Like when people sleep or meditate.”

  “It won’t affect those either. It’s, um—” I thought about how to explain. “It’s too far off. Have you ever seen the thing where people break glass with a resonant frequency?”

  “Like opera singers? That happens for real?”

  “Sure,” I said. “But it’s not like any frequency does it. It has to be resonant with the glass. This isn’t quite the same thing, but—mathematically, what they put together, it’s too far off anything else to affect states other than the particular range of waves they wanted it to.”

  “Then what’s the catch?”

  I told him about how they hadn’t been able to figure out a way to blanket a large area evenly. “Basically, they could do it if
the experiment subject was one person standing still—they tested it on people playing video games and such, for instance—but in real-world mob scenarios, that’s never going to be the case. It’s always going to be a lot of people over a big area, and they couldn’t get the right combination of frequencies to stay constant enough over a large field.” When people had moved out of the sweet spot and into the places where the frequency bands weren’t correct anymore—that was where any trouble had sparked. “And for what we want, well, we want an even bigger scale. We want a consistent impact and we want it everywhere; we don’t want people to wander in and out of the effects.”

  “We don’t?” said Arthur dryly.

  “For two reasons,” I argued. “This isn’t going to have a large-scale impact if the people who are in vulnerable situations—kids in gang neighborhoods, for instance—” I leaned on that, thinking of Katrina and Justin—“are just going to get indoctrinated once they wander over to the next city block. And second, we want to be able to see if there’s actually a statistically significant effect, and for that we need to test it out over a large area.”

  “So, what, you suggesting all of LA? That’s a hell of a lot of ground to cover.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It is. But I did a back-of-the-envelope. As long as we can build the things and adjust the calibration the way I need to, setting enough of them will take some time, but it’ll be doable. Especially if Checker and Pilar will help.”

  “And you say the math, it works out.” He spoke like he was feeling through things. Digesting them.

  “Yeah. I’m getting closer and closer. I think I’m going to be able to adjust these things and position them around the city in a way that’ll work. I’ll be able to blanket the whole metropolitan area evenly, more or less—at least, everywhere will be within the frequency band necessary for this.”

  “So a racket like Pourdry’s, or the kids in South LA who get sucked into the life…”

  “I’m going to get Checker to run some simulations, but it should have a nontrivial impact.” My heart beat faster. Was Arthur actually agreeing with me?

  “Right. Okay. Russell, I realize you ain’t asking my permission, but…I worry, you know? About what we ain’t thought of.” He cleared his throat. “But if this got even a chance of helping…you say it only gonna affect people who are caught up already, right? No one else?”