by Huang, SL
“Cas?” Checker asked, and Jesus, it sounded like he was about to cry.
“What does this guy want?” I said to Rio.
“To help you,” Rio answered.
“Help me how?”
“You know what he does,” Rio said. “Cas. You need assistance.”
Stay with him. He’ll help you.
“You want him to go in my head,” I said. “You want him to…to what, rearrange me?”
“You aren’t well,” Simon said earnestly. “It’s all—it’s going wrong. Please. Let me fix it.”
“It,” I echoed. “You mean my brain. Me.”
Simon winced. Rio simply met my eyes, his gaze level.
“No,” I said. “No.” The world was collapsing around me, the warehouse too cold and too empty and too full of watching eyes.
“Cas,” Rio said. “As I said, I do not like this man, but this may be the only way.”
“You have to understand.” Simon’s too-earnest voice dug under my skin, sprouted parasites and turned me inside out until I was no longer me. I wanted to shoot him. I wanted to run from him. “Cassandra—Cas—this isn’t going to stop. I saw enough to know—this is going to—it’s going to kill you eventually, if you don’t let me help you.”
“Then it kills me,” I said. My voice felt disconnected, already dead.
“Cassandra,” Simon gasped, and it was almost worth everything to see him so crushed by that.
This was my life. My mind. Not Rio’s, and sure as fuck not Simon’s.
Dying was preferable to ceding control to this man.
Chapter 14
She won’t last, predicted a woman’s voice.
It’s flawed, but I believe—
This will work. We’ll fight them. We’ll save ourselves.
I ignored them all.
I stole Arthur’s SUV and drove back to the apartment where we’d been making the fake cell signal boxes.
I can’t save me. Neither can you. Nobody can.
What do you want me to do, disappear?
No. Die.
I loaded them all up, cardboard box upon cardboard box filled with the things. My compact little devices that would deploy my program stealthily, silently, until it was everywhere.
“They’re everywhere,” someone said, and started laughing. Cold filled my mouth and I tried to scream, but only gulped it into my lungs—
I stacked the final load into the SUV and slammed the door. If I did one fucking thing before I fulfilled Simon’s predictions and went insane and died, it would be this. I would save LA, and make that my fucking legacy.
I’d done the calculations: hitting everywhere I needed to would take me more than a hundred hours, even if I mostly avoided bad traffic. But that was okay. A hundred hours was nothing. I was perfectly okay with not seeing anyone for a week, anyway.
Arthur tried to call me, but I didn’t pick up. He was probably pissed I’d left them alone with Rio—well, both Rio and a telepath. But I trusted Rio not to attack them, and I’d run out of patience for their squeamishness about him. As for Simon…
Cassandra, this is the best way. I only want to help you.
Well, I’d told them we’d let Rio decide. Rio could fucking decide.
He clearly didn’t think Simon was a threat, anyway, if he was telling me to let him—
Fuck.
I flattened the gas pedal with my foot and then stabbed the brake as I got to my next location. The SUV jerked like it wanted to tumble over to protest the way I was handling it.
I broke into buildings, scaled utility poles, hung out over the side of bridges. Climbed walls and tall decorative palms and art installations. Drive, set, drive. The monotony boiled my brain and fatigue made my eyes ache, but I kept going.
Eventually some of these boxes would stop working, or be found and removed, but by then everyone’s phones would have the app anyway. I’d just keep checking on where I’d planted these, keep knitting my net together wherever a tiny tear appeared, so every time someone brought a new mobile into the network it would become part of the grid.
Rush hour flooded the streets along with the dawn, and I pulled over and slept in the SUV for two hours before continuing. Drive, rinse, repeat.
Arthur tried to call again. Then Checker. I got a text that said, WERE WORRIED ABT U. AT LEAST TELL US UR OK.
I’m fucking working, I texted back, and kept going.
Her heart can’t sustain this, someone whispered in my ear.
I understand the tradeoffs. We’re still within the realm of acceptability, if we can finish.
If only I could finish this…
Then who cared what came next.
♦ ♦ ♦
Rio called on the fourth day.
I picked up for him.
“Cas,” he said. “Are you well?”
Health is not the determining factor. Usefulness is more heavily weighted.
You’ve transformed me into a utility function.
We’re all utility functions. Didn’t you know that?
“I’m perfect,” I said. I was seventy-two percent done.
“I would like to talk to you, Cas. Will you meet me?”
I closed my eyes. Wind blew behind my eyelids with the echo of hail and fear.
“Cas?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll meet you. But about your psychic buddy, the answer’s no. I don’t want to have to keep saying it.”
“Very well,” Rio said, after only a hitch of a pause. “When and where?”
“I’m finishing a project,” I said. “What day of the week is it?”
“Friday.”
“I’ll meet you Monday.”
“Very well. Until Monday.” He hung up.
As exhausting as everyone else was being, thank Christ at least Rio respected my decisions.
I never got to Monday. Sunday night, as I was down to the last handful of wireless devices clattering in the bottom of a box, I got six texts in a row from Checker.
GOT INTEL ON POURDRY
ARTHUR CANT REACH U
WONT WAIT
CALL ME
NOW
CAS
I hit the button to dial him back. “You’d better not be making this up to force me to call.”
“What? Cas! We wouldn’t do that.”
“Just like you wouldn’t kidnap someone from my past without telling me?”
“Cas!”
“Where’s Arthur?”
“Pourdry’s organization is already choking. Everyone’s is. Anyone who relies on any sort of structured criminal organization is seeing it collapse out from under them. I know you’re setting the boxes, I mean, we figured that’s what you’ve been doing—but I still don’t understand how this could be working so quickly.”
I thought for a minute. That was faster than I’d expected, too. A fierce pride bubbled up—it was working, and better even than we’d expected. “It’s the people who had doubts,” I conjectured. “The ones who wanted to quit but were too scared or swept up. They woke up and just did it, almost all at once this week.”
“I don’t know what kinds of consequences this is going to have,” Checker said. “I really don’t. I’ve been running every predictive algorithm I have, but none of my priors apply anymore—this could be good, or it could be—I don’t know.”
“Stop with the hating,” I said. “It’s good. I told you it would be good. We’re already having an impact.”
“I hope so, but—what if there’s retribution? What if this destabilizes LA in other ways? What if—”
“What if nothing. What’s going on with Arthur?”
“All those dead ends on Pourdry you two were hitting last week suddenly aren’t dead ends anymore. He wants to take advantage, jump as fast as possible. He’s been going out, questioning people—and now—I keep telling him to wait for you, but he said it doesn’t make sense to wait. And he got tangled up in helping some of Pourdry’s former associates after they ran, and tonight they w
ant to go take down one of his smuggling rings. Cas, they need you. Arthur still isn’t all the way healed.”
“Tell him to hang on,” I said. “I only have a few more of the boxes to set. I’ll be done within two hours. Tell him I’m coming.”
My phone beeped.
“Two hours, Checker. Tell him I’m coming. I gotta go.” I hit the button to switch calls, trying to remember who else had my direct line right now. I’d used this phone for some of the Pourdry inquiries the week before, so it was a decent handful. “Hello?”
“Cassu-san!” effused a far-too-enthusiastic voice in my ear. Yamamoto had a heavy Japanese accent I was pretty sure was faked—I’d heard he’d grown up in Detroit. “Cassu-san, I am so glad I still catch you at this number. There’s something going on in LA, yes? Something big. Something bad. You have heard the things?”
“LA always has big, bad things going on,” I answered. That was the whole point of the brain entrainment, after all.
Wait. From what Checker had said, Yamamoto probably meant the brain entrainment. Holy shit.
“It doesn’t sound like that big a deal to me,” I said, the lie brittle. “I guess? I’m not fussed about it.”
“No, no, you should be. This is huge. Is happening to everybody. So strange. Trouble in the ranks. People gone, poof, no loyalty. Profits down. Do you hear me, Cassu-san? Profits down!”
“Well, you know me—as long as I’m still making money, I’m good.” I winced. It sounded way too cavalier. “Do you think it’s going to get worse?” I tried.
“Worse! How can it get worse!”
“Okay,” I said.
Yamamoto seemed stymied I wasn’t joining him in outrage. Shit. I’d never been good at playing a part.
“Um,” I said. “So. What do you want us to do about it?”
“I think we take drastic step,” Yamamoto said. “I think we all meet. Talk. Compare the things happening.”
“Who’s ‘we?’” I said slowly.
“We who work for ourselves, of course,” Yamamoto exclaimed. “The real men—and women, gomennasai—who do not submit to the authority of a fascist government. The brave ones who carve our own path!”
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re trying to get all the criminals in Los Angeles to sit down at a table and work together? And do what?”
“We figure this out. We show the man it cannot keep us down. Cannot take our business.”
“You think what’s happening is the government’s doing?” I said.
“Who else? Who else has the sneaky power in the shadows? The CIA maybe—or the black groups, the ones they do not tell us about. And it is just Los Angeles. The other cities, my business there is not affected, but Los Angeles, this city is very large part of my operation. It is terrible problem.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Uh, yeah.”
“It keeps up, I will be drove to other cities. All of us will. LA will be ghost town. Collapse!”
“I doubt that,” I said dryly. “You don’t really think criminal enterprise is propping up the whole economy, do you?”
“Cassu-san! You must take me seriously! The CIA may expand to other cities as well. Maybe other countries. The whole world. They will destroy our business!”
I liked Yamamoto. He hired me a few times a year for a lot of money, and I didn’t want to see his little empire destroyed. But…
Unintended side effects. Yamamoto did run a criminal racket. If the worst side effect of slashing the crime rate in LA was that Yamamoto had to find a new career, then I wouldn’t lose very much sleep.
Maybe a little. But not much.
On the other hand, if every criminal enterprise in Los Angeles suddenly banded together…
Well. That would be a very bad unintended side effect.
“When are you having this meeting?” I said.
“Tonight!” he crowed. “Eleven o’clock. At Maddox pub. You know the place.”
I did know the place. I was banned from it, in fact.
“I’ll be there,” I said, trying like hell not to sound irritated about it. Now I wasn’t going to be able to give Arthur an assist.
Yamamoto didn’t seem to notice. “I know you help, Cassu-san. I see you then!”
Nothing was ever fucking easy.
I hung up and dialed Rio.
“Hello.”
“Hey,” I said. “How would you feel about backing up Arthur tonight helping bust apart a human trafficking ring?”
Arthur was going to murder me.
Chapter 15
Arthur threw a fit at me at the prospect of working with Rio, as expected. Which was why I’d set it up first. Easier to ask forgiveness than permission, and all that.
Better than Arthur ending up dead because he was injured and didn’t have proper backup.
I finished placing the two hundred and eighty-third signal box and then drove straight to Grealy’s pub, a greasy oyster bar owned by Cheryl Maddox. It was a regular meeting place of all manner of shady characters—I’d missed it tremendously since being persona non grata.
The place had remodeled since I’d last been there. That had sort of been my fault. The large front window was gone, replaced with an aggressively bricked-over wall sporting an angry mural of jagged red and black that made the place look more like an underground club than a bar.
I pulled open the door, the “closed” sign rattling on it, and ducked into the darkness.
The inside was a little newer-looking, but still just as seedy as I remembered. Various disreputable types hunched over drinks at the wooden tables. Nobody seemed to be talking to each other yet, but that was normal for Grealy’s. What wasn’t normal was that they’d all arrived with the express purpose of eventually talking to each other.
A sinewy, gray-haired man in his fifties stood near the entrance, evaluating the space in the same way I was. He gave me a nod.
“Malcolm,” I said. “Good to see you.” Malcolm was one of the non-publicly-known higher-ups in the Lorenzo crime family, often acting as the right-hand man of Mama Lorenzo herself. He still claimed he owed me a favor in return for me not killing him the time he’d tried to snipe me, which put us on reasonably friendly terms, notwithstanding my suspicions that his boss had been trying to squeeze me out of work going on a year now.
“Russell,” Malcolm acknowledged. “You affected by this? Thought you worked alone.”
I thought fast. “Well, I do. But my clients are big fancy crime families like yours.”
He nodded. “True.”
A buxom bleached-blonde woman with more tattoos than the last time I’d seen her came out from behind the bar and stood in front of me, arms crossed against her ample chest. “Thought I said you was banned, Russell.”
I raised my hands. “Just here for the meeting, Cheryl, I promise.”
She cast aggressive eyes on Malcolm. “You’re a Lorenzo, ain’t you?”
Malcolm imitated my gesture. “The Madre deeply apologizes, again. Like Miss Russell, I’m only here for the meeting.”
Cheryl huffed. She clearly hadn’t forgiven either me or the Lorenzos for the shootout that had destroyed her whole bar. I couldn’t say I blamed her.
“You two got a day pass,” she said. “The minute this nonsense is over, you’re out. You hear?”
Malcolm and I both meekly murmured our acquiescence. “Thank you, Ms. Maddox,” he added.
“I don’t wanna make this harder for everyone else, is all,” she said. “You still ain’t welcome here. But, Russell, I’m glad to see you’re still kicking.” She stalked away.
“Someone try to kill you lately?” Malcolm asked me.
“No, she’s still talking about you guys,” I said.
“If there’s one thing I regret about the way our conflict turned out…” Malcolm mused, watching Cheryl make her way back behind the bar.
“Yeah, I miss this place like hell, too.”
Malcolm pulled out a chair for me at a nearby table and then took one for hi
mself, next to me but one table over. I appreciated it—he wasn’t trying to signal that we were together, only that we knew each other. In this company, any small gesture was taken with political weight.
He scanned the room. “Strange bedfellows.”
“Yeah.” I recognized most of the people here, and most of the ones I didn’t were wearing colors: the Carrion Boys, Los Pícaros, the 4X8s…street gangs who ranged from mixed bags of loyalty and survival to ones that were dregs of society who preyed on teens.
And there was also Pablo Roldán of the Fuentes crime family, and two people from the Russian Mafia, and, of course, Malcolm from the Lorenzos, who represented Sicily here in town. Yamamoto hadn’t gotten representatives of every interest in Los Angeles here—or even the majority of them—but I was seeing a nontrivial enough chunk to worry me.
Before now, I wouldn’t have bet on catching some of these guys dead in the same room as the others. Come to think of it, if anyone got twitchy, it wouldn’t be much of a stretch for Cheryl to have to end up redecorating her bar a second time.
As if to prove my point, a guy from the Grigoryan crime family glared at me from across the room.
I blithely ignored him. “Hey, Malcolm. Who’s the blonde?” She was one of the few women in the room and also one of the only people I didn’t recognize. She was also sorely out of place here—she wore a navy blue business suit and carried a briefcase, as if she had just stepped out of a boardroom.
“Lauren Vance,” Malcolm answered me, keeping his voice low. “She works for Pourdry.”
“Pourdry’s fucking in on this?” The man was gobbling territory every time I turned around.
“He’s no worse than the 4X8s,” Malcolm said.
“That’s not a high bar.”
“I suppose we’re all in the gray areas, Russell.”
Vance sat with her legs crossed and let her blue eyes wander around the room. They didn’t snag on me. Either she had a great poker face, or Pourdry hadn’t made me as the person who’d been with Arthur. After all, they’d tracked him to the hospital via the gunshot wound, but given the darkness, the distance, and the fact that I’d killed most of them, they probably only had the vaguest description of me: short and brown and deadly.
