Plastic Smile (Russell's Attic Book 4)

by Huang, SL

  Died.

  I woke, and jerked upright, the blanket tangling around my legs. No no no no—I needed to run, run run run—

  How fast can she run?

  All of the physical skills are at the upper limits for a human.

  I spasmed. My head hit the wall and my pulse banged against my throat like an out-of-control drum set.

  “I’m awake,” I growled. I was awake, and in control, and I wasn’t going to allow this. I had a choice. I could figure this out.

  Figure everything out.

  I drew my knees up and dropped my head between them. You can handle this, I reminded myself. Remember what you can do. You’re as powerful as Simon or Dawna or any of them, and more powerful than Rio. You can win.

  If my own brain didn’t fuck me over first. I cast about for the whiskey bottle.

  My mobile rang.

  I groped through the blankets for it, almost hoping for an emergency and hating myself for the thought, but anything to do would focus me, and I needed to stay focused, dammit, because Rio was working against me and this was all on the verge of disintegrating—“Hello?”

  “Miss Russell, it’s Sonya.”

  “What the fuck.” I was too fried to filter the sentiment. I hadn’t thought of Sonya Halliday in weeks.

  She didn’t seem bothered. “I always so enjoy your eloquence.”

  “I’m not in the mood for sarcasm,” I said. “What do you want?”

  “Are you finished with your job yet?”

  My job. Yes. Right. The job that had worked but had obligated me to the whole world, the job that had worked but made me a target, the job that had worked but caused Rio to try to smash an entire metropolitan area if I didn’t reverse it. The job that was over now, technically, except for all of those things.

  I tilted the whiskey bottle against my teeth, lapped its fire down my throat.

  “Miss Russell?” Halliday said.

  “Yeah.” I coughed. “It’s over. Sort of.”

  “Then you are free to meet.”

  I pressed the bottle against my forehead. The last thing I felt like was meeting with anyone, let alone someone I had to make polite small talk with, someone who wanted to talk to me about math and remind me of everything I wasn’t.

  But if I stayed here, slipping into dead time when what I really needed to be doing was working out what to do next…

  Are we in some sort of hurry here?

  She is. I don’t know about you, sir.

  Very funny.

  I didn’t have time to meet with Halliday. But I also didn’t have time to let myself get dragged into an alcoholic stupor. Fuck.

  I thumped my head back against the wall. “I can meet. But you’re getting the rude, drunk version of me.”

  “My favorite kind,” she said dryly. “Shall we say three o’clock, our usual place?”

  I didn’t know what time it was now—I hadn’t even realized it was day again, though I supposed it must be—but I said yes anyway. I didn’t care if I was late.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Halliday was waiting for me, at one of the chess tables in the park near her university. She already had a deck of cards out and was shuffling with neat, precise movements.

  I thunked the whiskey bottle down next to the cards. “I hope you don’t mind if I have lunch while we play,” I said sourly, gesturing at it.

  “You’re more cantankerous than usual.”

  “Deal the fucking cards.”

  She dealt the cards.

  I won our first few games handily, as usual, while Halliday tried with little success to drill me on the merits of a new theoretical computer science paper by one of her colleagues—or rivals; I wasn’t sure which. I usually got at least some satisfaction out of poking holes in the proofs of overly confident academics, but this time I kept my responses short and snappy. Snappish might have been the better term.

  “It’s not that they’re wrong,” I said grumpily. “It’s that they’re dressing up something obvious in fancy language and pretending it’s nontrivial.”

  My pen flew over the paper, unspooling pseudocode. “What did you say about technology?” someone asked wryly, behind me. I ignored him.

  I realized I’d lost the card count. Crap. I glanced through my own hand and Halliday’s discard, trying to backfill what I’d seen already.

  “Forgive me for saying, Miss Russell,” said Halliday, “but many things appear obvious to you that may not be to others.”

  “Then they’re stupid,” I said. Since I had no higher mathematical intuition, if I could see something, it was obvious by definition.

  “I’m glad to know your evaluation of my own abilities.”

  Are they still human?

  More than human. Superhuman, if you will.

  I lost the count again. “If you need my affirmation of your genius, you have bigger self-image problems than the guys who wrote that TCS paper just to hear themselves talk.”

  “I’ll consider that a compliment.” Halliday frowned slightly, the barest line between her eyebrows, as she examined her own hand and the three of spades I’d just discarded. Then she picked it up, tucked it into her hand, and laid down the whole thing. “Gin.”

  She said the word like she was surprised. Probably because she was. I’d never lost a game to her before, ever. She’d occasionally remarked that we should switch to playing war.

  I tossed down my losing half-finished melds and took a long pull from the whiskey bottle.

  Halliday’s hands stilled on the table, and then she reached out and pushed aside both the cards and the pot she had won. “Miss Russell,” she said. “I know we are not friends, precisely. But if I may, I would be of support to you.”

  “You may not.”

  She waited for a moment and then collected the cards to her to shuffle.

  “I don’t need support,” I said into the silence. I wondered what she’d say if I tried to tell her everything, that I was here playing cards with her in a university park while Los Angeles was going to hell and while I was going insane and I couldn’t figure out what to do about any of it.

  Do you really think this will improve anything?

  There are two kinds of improvement. The type that makes things better, and the type that puts us in control.

  Halliday didn’t speak for a few moments, as if she’d drifted off into a mental world of her own, too. Then she said, “I have come to acknowledge how many more shades of gray the world has, in the past years. I do not know if that makes me an easier ear than Arthur, in some ways.”

  “Arthur fucking lives in shades of gray,” I said. “He just doesn’t acknowledge it.”

  She didn’t say anything, concentrating on her shuffle. I’d been baiting her, a little—Halliday and Arthur might still have some difficulties between them, but whenever I said anything on the off side about Arthur, she behaved as if she didn’t hear me.

  I sighed. “Arthur knows most of my fucking problems.” The memory ones, at any rate. “For the record, it’s not his fault he’s not fucking helpful. Nobody could be.”

  “Is that a mathematical truth, or an emotional one?” asked Halliday.

  Every neuron, every cell, every enzyme and protein receptor and biochemical nuance—they sparked through me in a million interactions, and I could feel every one.

  “Everything,” I gasped. “I control it all.”

  “Precious. Not all.”

  I swam back to the surface. “Neither. Both,” I growled, in answer to Halliday’s question. “It’s reality. It’s not going to change.”

  “Reality often has shades of gray, as well. Yet another thing I am still learning.” She attempted a smile. “At least mathematics has no such ambiguities, no?”

  Fuck her and her math.

  “You might not have me for these little tête-à-têtes much longer.” I said it just to be cruel.

  Her head came up sharply. “You are ill?”

  “They tell me I am,” I said. If she wanted
to know that badly, I would fucking explain. “They tell me I’m going crazy. All because I can’t remember my past, and apparently that’s not an acceptable state of normality.” Not strictly the root of my madness, but Halliday wasn’t going to call me on it. “Deal the cards.”

  Halliday stared at me, stricken. “What did you say?”

  “There’s nothing to be done about it. I just don’t know who I used to be.” I reached out and yanked the deck from her frozen hands to riffle the cards into a new permutation myself. “And in these days of existential crises and life coaches and everyone finding themselves, I’m told that’s a cardinal sin. I try to inform people I sprang fully-formed from the head of Pythagoras, but they insist I’m supposed to have a past.”

  “You don’t . . know who you are?” Halliday repeated slowly. So much for her claim of being a good listener. “You mean you have some sort of amnesia? You don’t remember?”

  “See, you are a genius.” I tossed the shuffled deck back in front of her. “Deal the fucking cards.”

  Halliday blinked at me several times in rapid succession.

  “Am I a museum exhibit now?” I said.

  “I…I didn’t know,” Halliday said. “You truly don’t know?”

  “Even Checker took it better than this.” I was already regretting telling her. “Can we stop this lovely heart to heart? I know I’m a dreadful fascination, but there’s really nothing more to talk about, because the answer to any of your morbidly fascinated questions will be that I do not know.”

  Halliday kept staring at me. “I think…I think I do.”

  Chapter 21

  I opened my mouth, but no words formed. The planes of reality slid and closed inward, the edges of my vision darkening. What…?

  “I didn’t…this felt like a sensitive…I didn’t want to bring it up,” Halliday said slowly. “I’m sorry. If I’d known, I—I didn’t know about your memory—”

  “Neither did I,” I said. I shoved back from the table and almost fell as the ground tilted and the over-bright sun stabbed me in the eyes. “I have to go.”

  “You don’t want me to tell you what I—?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t.”

  You’re not entitled to know.

  Really? What does this entitle me to?

  Blood, blood and bone—

  Only he has that information.

  I staggered across the green. A group of university students playing Frisbee stared and shied away from me. A small dog barked.

  We have to run away.

  Run away—run—

  I need to be here. I’m not leaving. Not leaving, not leaving, not leaving…

  I ran for a long time, the pavement pounding through the soles of my boots. Ran and ran and ran, as if I could escape my cracking memories.

  Run. Run or die.

  Die.

  Where are you?

  Someone shouted at me. A uniform—campus police? Hired security? I ducked between buildings and cut onto the university campus. Run, run, run, he couldn’t stop me.

  They’ll find us, wherever we go.

  They won’t find you if you don’t exist.

  The path dead-ended against a bricked-up archway between two buildings. I smacked my palms against it, pressed my forehead against the roughness. Turned and leaned into the corner. Cold sweat shrink-wrapped my skin, but not from the running.

  Ask yourself what you really want.

  Smoke choking the area, a building collapsing in flames—

  My legs crumpled and I pressed myself into the shadows of the corner, my body forming three directional cosines, three coordinate planes trapping me in this quadrant of reality. Whispers smothered me, flashes of fire and jungle and rain, and people who didn’t seem real but were. I struggled against them, building my coordinate system into cylindrical and then spherical and then a four-dimensional parameter space.

  Footsteps scuffed against the pavement. Here or in my head?

  A shadow above me. Arthur.

  He sat down next to me, back against the wall, arms loosely across his knees. “Hey.”

  His voice knifed me. I hunched away.

  “Sonya called me.”

  I forced my mouth to form words. “I figured.” You’ll lose everything. “How did you find me?”

  “I’m a PI, darling,” he said. “You…wanna talk about it?”

  “No.”

  I’m telling you they lied.

  And I don’t believe you.

  “She’s got to be wrong,” I said. The sentence gnarled hoarse in my throat. “She can’t—how could she know? Checker couldn’t find—he couldn’t find anything.”

  “Can’t find what got erased, but Sonya, she been in her field for decades. She remembered.”

  “You’re saying I met her before? Do you know how coincidental that would be? The odds—”

  “Of two mathematicians knowing each other? Hear tell it’s a smaller world than you’re making out.”

  “But I’m not a mathematician.” I couldn’t call myself one, not except as convenient shorthand, but even if I granted myself the description, I’d never been in the field as a researcher. Never frequented universities or conferences. Never shaken hands with the people making the discoveries.

  Mathematics will never know what hit it. If our only limitation is time—

  Ah, but that’s not the useful part.

  “Well, Sonya, she thinks maybe you was,” said Arthur. “She tells me—more’n once before, she told me I don’t get it. She says what you can do, that it ain’t…I think the word ‘impossible’ might’ve come up.”

  “I’ll take that,” I said, trying for normalcy and belly flopping.

  “Anyhow. Just now, when she called, she said—” Arthur cleared his throat. “Said one day something reminded her of a child prodigy she heard of. Ten, fifteen years ago. Kid was writing papers at eleven years old. Like a Mozart or someone.”

  Or Gauss, for a more relevant example. “Well, that’s not me,” I said. Relief bubbled through me, an almost hysterical reversal of emotion. “I wasn’t a child prodigy. She got it wrong.”

  “Russell,” Arthur said. “How do you know?”

  Introduce me to your tutors?

  A sudden ringing filled my head, like someone had bashed a gong, a vibrating clang. “No—no. It doesn’t make sense.” Talent? It’s only logic. Other people are dumb. “It’s—it’s stupid. I might not know who I am, but I’m not that.” Child prodigies were people you read about in the news or in biographies: improbable savants who would shine so brightly they’d blind the world before they hit puberty. Reconciling that idea with the violent, practical brutality of my own life—it didn’t compute.

  Halliday was wrong.

  “One by one,” a woman said. “That’s the only way any change ever comes.”

  “She said it was a Bahraini girl,” Arthur continued, inexorable. “Had the math world all a-buzz. Sonya read the papers with everyone else, couldn’t wait to see what the gal did when she grew up. Then the girl drops off the face of things. Sonya said she forgot about it altogether, maybe mentioned it once in a while with colleagues, idle curiosity. And she says the next time this got brought up in passing, after she met you—she said she knew, all of a sudden.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “Yeah, gut feeling. That’s never wrong.”

  Arthur ignored my sarcasm. “She went and did some research. The girl, seems she dropped off the planet when she was still just a kid. Disappeared. Sonya poked more and…well, party line is the girl went off to some boarding school and then died a few years later, but Sonya don’t believe it. She always figured…well, she figured you was keeping your silence for a reason, ’s why she ain’t mentioned it to us. And Checker…” Arthur hesitated.

  How’s that fancy school of yours?

  Fine.

  “Just now Checker, as soon as he heard, he looked it all up, and he says Sonya’s onto something, that those records, they’re all fishy. Faked files, n
ot a lot, just fishy enough that—he thinks she could be right.”

  “She’s not,” I said.

  “Russell, if she is…ain’t just about knowing your name. If she’s right, then…then you got a mother and sister, still alive.”

  All you do is study!

  Because I’m smarter than you are.

  “She’s not right,” I said again, louder.

  “We could look them up,” suggested Arthur, very softly. “See for sure—”

  “No.”

  “You could have family out there. Can’t ignore that.”

  A man in a suit and brimmed hat, face in shadow, briefcase in hand—tall, so tall, like the giants in stories, his voice low and gravelly—“Is this your daughter?”

  “Watch me,” I spat out, loudly enough to drown out the voices in my head. “I’m very good at ignoring things.”

  “Russell—”

  “LA’s going to go nuclear.”

  I hadn’t meant to say it. Hadn’t decided yet whether I should share.

  “Say what?” Arthur asked.

  “It’s Rio.” The words tumbled out, misshapen and desperate. “Like you said. He’s trying to stop the brain entrainment. He…he’s setting up the city to implode.”

  I updated him on what I’d learned since we’d last seen each other. I left out the part about killing Miguel and his friends.

  Left out how I’d shot Vance, too.

  “Well,” Arthur said, when I’d run out of words. “What we gonna do about it?”

  I didn’t think I’d ever been so grateful to him.

  The alcohol was metabolizing out of my system, but I was starting to get my focus back. There was a next step here—brainstorming with Arthur and Checker and Pilar, and solving this. We’d done it before. We could do it again.

  My fingers touched skin, pale and soft, and so fragile. Human frailty. I would make him hurt for this, take vengeance for them as no one had done for me.

  How to start? Mathematics gave me so many options.

  I came back to myself. My hands were over my face, and my breath hitched raggedly against them.

  “Hey. Hey, Russell. You okay?”

  “I think I’m losing my mind,” I whispered. I couldn’t solve anything if my brain went out from under me. I needed my brain. Without it…