Plastic Smile (Russell's Attic Book 4)

by Huang, SL

  He didn’t get to feel guilty for me, to deny that my own self-destructive decisions had at least been mine to make. Not his.

  He winced. “I’ve upset you. I can’t seem to stop doing that.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Good read there. You know, for a psychic, you have terrible people skills.”

  He wasn’t looking at me. I wondered if that was out of consideration for trying to read less of what I was thinking, and hated him for it. I liked being able to categorize him as a one-hundred-percent dick.

  “Will you tell me what happened?” he asked, staring out into the night.

  “I passed out,” I said. “My friends brought me back. With math. We didn’t need you after all.”

  “How do you feel now?” he asked.

  “Well, you know. Fewer voices, but I can tell they’re coming back.”

  He jerked. “Cassandra, please consider—”

  “I have a different proposal for you,” I said over him. “You’ve got your lines. I want to trade with you for crossing them just this once.”

  “Cas,” he gasped, and I suspected he already saw what I was about to say. But I kept talking anyway.

  “I’m fucked. What Checker and the others did to bring me back this time—it wasn’t a permanent or practical solution. They can’t be around with my math every time I go crazy and collapse. It’s also not something that will work until I’m knocked out entirely, which leaves a whole lot of messy gray area fucking me up in between blackouts. And you were right—it’s getting worse.”

  He’d hunched over his knees and dropped his face into his hands. It made me perversely satisfied to see.

  “I’m perfectly happy to slide right off the deep end before I let you anywhere near me,” I continued, and for the second time I was happy Simon was a human lie detector, because he would know I wasn’t bluffing. “I don’t trust you or your obsession with me. I’ll look for a solution on my own. But since you’re so very consumed with wanting to get your fingers in my brain, I’m willing to make a trade.”

  “Cas,” he whispered against his hands. Shredded. Hopeless. “I just…I only want to help you.”

  “Said the spider to the fly.”

  Yes, I did realize he could do anything he wanted to me anyway, and it was his oh-so-righteous moralism that was preventing him, the very moralism I was arguing against…

  “You’re thinking at me. Stop it,” I said.

  “I’m not trying to.”

  “Try harder.”

  He dropped his hands, but kept his eyes on the distant mountains. “You’re saying you’ll let me help you. But only if I fix Los Angeles.”

  “Look at you, drawing conclusions all by yourself,” I said.

  “You’re threatening to kill yourself if I don’t do what you want. That’s…you’re emotionally blackmailing me.”

  “You have a tremendous talent for making this all about you,” I said. For Christ’s sake, I wasn’t suicidal—that was the whole problem with saying yes to him. “I’ve already found a partial solution. I’ll keep looking for a better one until I can’t anymore. It’s you who’s so convinced there isn’t one.”

  “Cas, the level of damage you’re fighting—”

  “You’re part of the reason I’m so ‘damaged’ in the first place. What were you doing that time? Oh, yeah, trying to help me. I remember. Except, wait, I don’t.”

  “Cas, I understand why you’re angry.”

  “Oh, goody. Fortunately, I do, too, so you don’t have to explain it to me.”

  “I’m not—God. Cas. I’m not trying to be condescending.”

  “Well, you suck at it. Are you sure you’re really a psychic?”

  We sat in the desert together. I stared at the freeway, my eyes unfocused, the headlights zipping through my vision in vectors of light. Simon stared the other way, into the darkness.

  “You know,” he said, and his voice broke. “You’re so…you’re so different. But every once in a while, you say something, and there’s an echo…”

  “I’m not her,” I said harshly. “Don’t ever think I am.”

  His breath hitched. I wasn’t looking, but I thought he might be crying. “This is the only way you’ll let me help?” he said, the words washed with pleading and failure.

  By bargaining with him to break the first principle of his ethical system.

  “Yes,” I said. “Take it or leave it.”

  “What about Rio?” he asked. “He…he can kill me. He might, for this.”

  “Then I’ll help you disappear.”

  “What we need to do, Cas—it’s not an instantaneous thing. I’m going to have to keep…seeing you. Making sure.”

  Do you realize how complicated the human brain is? Of course it’s taking months to get her stable!

  How many more months?

  I closed my eyes. “Then I’ll disappear with you, if necessary.”

  The cars whizzed by. A light breeze blew against my skin.

  “You’re letting me save you only if I do what you want,” Simon said. “That’s obscene, Cas, you know that?”

  I knew it.

  “Hey, you made me this way,” I said. “You’ve only yourself to blame.”

  He took a shuddering breath.

  “Will you do it?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “God forgive me.”

  I’d won. He’d agreed.

  I’d won.

  If I’d believed in a god, I would have been asking forgiveness, too.

  Chapter 34

  I arrived at the radio station with Simon just after seven. The sun had risen as we drove back into the city, the morning cool and breezy before rush hour and heat. I kept an eye out for Rio, just in case he’d guessed this part of our plan, but caught no sign of him. Likely he was surveilling the people he’d set against each other, expecting us to try to talk to them directly.

  Simon and I barely spoke on the way back. I’d explained what I needed from him, and he had nodded. That had been the extent of our communication.

  McCabe met us as jovially as he had in the middle of the night, only clean-shaven now and in fresh clothes. He introduced himself to Simon, ignoring me, and ushered him into a back room to “interview” him. I clearly wasn’t invited.

  I slumped onto a chair in the hallway. I had to trust Simon would do what I asked. As long as he radiated friendliness and confidence at McCabe, I had no doubt we’d be fine. And then we’d get on the radio and calm Los Angeles, I would reverse the brain entrainment, and Simon would go in with a melon baller and scrape out my brain.

  Arthur sat down next to me. “I guess you convinced him.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You okay?”

  Somehow it crushed me, that Arthur was killing himself over what we’d done and still had energy to ask about me. He knew what this was costing me.

  I stood abruptly. “I gotta hit the head.”

  When I came back, McCabe was showing Simon around the glass-walled on-air booth, pointing to a seat and headphones and giving instructions. Mama Lorenzo’s security still lurked, fading into the background despite their weaponry, and some of the radio station’s staff had arrived, moving around their jobs while taking quick glances at all the security.

  “Are they vetted?” I asked Arthur, readjusting the sling on the PS90 I was still toting myself.

  “Well as we could on short notice,” he answered. “It’s a skeleton crew; he canceled most of ’em. Only the ones we need.”

  “And where’s their boss?” I asked, waving at the nearest of Mama Lorenzo’s guards.

  “She’s around; I—oh, there.” Arthur gestured to the side of the studio, where Mama Lorenzo had just appeared. She’d washed up and changed, too—I wondered if she’d gone to a safe house or her men had brought her clothes and toiletries. Arthur probably would have insisted on the latter, just to make sure she wasn’t targeted and followed back here.

  Mama Lorenzo swept over and started talking to Simon. I
couldn’t hear what they said from here, but she was clearly grilling him. His face was tight, but he responded to all of her questions quietly and evenly.

  Apparently satisfied, she nodded to him and McCabe and then came out to greet us.

  “You are a resourceful woman, Miss Russell, finding a man with his leverage.”

  I shrugged uncomfortably. “That’s what they tell me.”

  “We shall talk more when this is over,” she said. “Your discretion is understandable, but there is one name I will have.”

  The name of the person who’d killed Malcolm.

  “I don’t—I’m not sure I know it,” I floundered. “I mean, I know who it’s not, but—”

  “If not, then you suspect,” Mama Lorenzo said. “You know how it ties to the situation as a whole. I will have that information.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Right. After this is over.” I’d think of something.

  Mama Lorenzo gave me a nod so sharp it was almost a salute and stepped over to station herself watching the booth.

  I checked my watch. It was twelve minutes to eight.

  I sidled up to watch the on-air booth, too, on the other side from Mama Lorenzo. Simon finished talking to McCabe and came out while the host made the rest of his preparations, which apparently involved him consulting notecards and talking to himself a lot under his breath with very grand gestures.

  Simon came and stood next to me. We watched McCabe’s lips reform the same word over and over as he adjusted his intonation, and then yell at a staff member who came up to talk to him.

  “Please don’t do this,” Simon said suddenly. “Don’t make me.”

  I caught the edges of emotion, empathized with his agony at crossing the moral lines he’d told himself he never would, not since he’d destroyed me. I rode it out. I was getting better at teasing out the foreignness of him pressing at me. “You’re really bad at control,” I said, instead of answering him.

  “No,” he said, “I’m not. Have you ever felt an ordinary person walk into a room in a bad mood? This is the same thing, only…I can’t turn off the strength of it. Not unless I consciously influence you not to feel it.”

  “No wonder you’re such a fucked-up person.”

  “Yes,” he said, without irony.

  One of the assistants came for Simon, led him into the glass-walled booth, and handed him one of the pairs of headphones. He looked back at me, and I caught a blast of anguish and guilt.

  It’s the right thing, I told myself firmly. Or, if not the right thing, the only thing.

  Someone shouted out radio lingo, and a bell went off. A red light lit up above me. Across from me, Mama Lorenzo straightened, listening.

  “Good morning, my fellow Americans,” McCabe began into his microphone. The words played radio-loud from an intercom over our heads. “I’m here today with a very special report on the situation we’ve been following in Los Angeles. As you know…”

  He went on for a few minutes, editorializing about the effects, about the mainstream news, about the conviction of the militia leaders who wanted to defend us. “And I’m very pleased to tell you, nation—you are going to hear it here first. Now I can’t reveal everything yet, but I am in the midst of a very delicate operation to bring Los Angeles back to its citizens, and you will be the first to know the truth of exactly what’s been going on. The truth, ladies and gentlemen—my fellow Americans. The truth.”

  He glanced over at Simon, who was breathing shallowly, his eyes unfocused. McCabe frowned up at me, through the glass, and I gestured sharply at him to continue.

  Simon would do his fucking job. He had to.

  “Now, nation, a part of our current situation I know you are very concerned about—as am I—are the shootings breaking out in answer to the oppression being levied against us here. As we all know, as our Founding Fathers declared, ‘rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God,’ but God is with the man who can expose corruption and lance the boil on the face of this country without spilling the blood of his innocent countrymen. And that’s why I’m going to take a very unusual step, nation, and on today’s show, I’m going to counsel everyone listening to have patience and wait. Because tomorrow morning, when you listen to my program, I will reveal it all, and the perpetrators will be forced out of the shadows to face justice for what they have done.

  “But today, we must ensure those perpetrators do not start the race and class wars they so desperately want. They will be exposed, nation, I promise you. I promise you as a man, and as an American.”

  I was impressed. McCabe was doing a good job of building his show up around the mood of Simon’s message. He’d drop Simon into a perfectly-primed audience and let him talk. And afterward, everyone would put down their weapons, convinced they were doing so because they trusted Reuben McCabe.

  “And now that brings me to our very special guest for the hour. As you all know, nation, in this unique situation we’ve had a lot of people who are rightfully, and righteously, apprehensive about giving us their legal government names. So I’ll let our guest make his own introductions, and then he’ll talk to you about our situation in this greatest of cities in this greatest of nations. Listen to him, my fellow Americans, and I promise you by this time tomorrow, all will be revealed by yours truly. Now please welcome our honored guest to the one place where you will always get the unvarnished reality of our country.”

  He turned toward Simon and held out a hand, an invitation for him to begin talking.

  Simon’s mouth hung open slightly. He wet his lips and leaned in toward the mic. Wet his lips again.

  Hesitated.

  Alarm bells sounded in the back of my head.

  “Our guest,” McCabe vamped, “is himself a fierce advocate of the truth, as I know you, McCabe listeners, would expect nothing less.”

  Simon shut his mouth, took off the headphones, and stood up. Ignoring McCabe’s frantic gestures, he turned and pushed his way out through the glass door of the booth.

  Directly into me.

  “What the hell are you doing!” I hissed, trying to muscle him back inside.

  “I can’t do it.” His face was wrinkled with tension and flushing red. “I can’t. It’s exactly what I swore I’d never—I can’t be this person, Cas. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I hope you’ll still let me—”

  “Fuck you.” I wanted to rail at him about all the lives he was wasting, all the people he was killing, and had a sudden, visceral flashback to Dawna shouting those same words at me years before. “You’re not going to destroy this city,” I said. “I’m not going to let you.”

  “Cas, what are you—”

  I didn’t know what I was going to do. But I shoved past him and stormed into the booth myself, to the mic he had vacated. The PS90 banged my hip as I took over Simon’s seat and jammed the headphones onto my ears.

  McCabe, who had been elocuting about patriotism to fill the time, looked up without pausing his diatribe. He made an angry motion at me.

  I made one right back.

  “Well, it looks like our guest has returned,” he segued smoothly, while giving me a fierce frown that I interpreted to mean, I sure hope you know what you’re doing. “Now we’re going to get that real truth I promised you, folks, right now, about exactly what is happening in this town.” He spat nails on the last word, and jerked his chin at me.

  “Hi,” I said, leaning into the mic. My voice echoed with me through the sound system.

  I didn’t know what to say to stop this. I didn’t know what anyone could say, except Simon. But I’d been willing to give myself up to save the city, and that worked in more ways than one.

  “The conspiracies are real.” My consonants hit the microphone like popping hailstones. “There’s technology all over Los Angeles emitting frequencies for the express purpose of screwing with your brains. I know because I put it there.”

  I paused for a moment. McCabe was staring at me, open-mouthed. Behind him, through the glass, Mama Lorenzo had snapped to
ward me in fury. Meanwhile, to the side, Simon shook his head frantically, slashing one hand across his throat repeatedly.

  I fleetingly wondered if he was right, dismissed that as overflow psychic influence from him, and continued.

  “I’m not with the government. I’m working alone. There’s no need to storm the military or the police or the CIA. Or each other—whoever you think’s been attacking you, you’ve been misled. It’s my responsibility and no one else’s. Now, I’d go and disable it all for you, but I doubt you’d trust me, so instead I’m going to go to 697 Norman Street out in Pottersfield right now, in person, and I’m going to give anyone who comes there the information you’ll need to start putting a stop to it. Then, if you want a bad guy, you can come after me right there.”

  I pulled off the headphones and dove to the floor just as Mama Lorenzo fired her .32 through the glass.

  The panes making up the wall of the booth shattered and rained to the floor. Arthur drew at the same time every single one of the security guards raised their weapons. McCabe yelled and burrowed under his desk, his headset cord taking chunks of equipment crashing down with him.

  I aimed at the ceiling and pulled the trigger on my own PS90, targeting every single fluorescent light illuminating the place. They all burst and blinked out to darkness at once. The studio room had been built nestled inside layers of soundproofed walls, and had no windows—it went almost pitch black.

  I moved before anyone could react. Shouts and flurried movement followed me as I grabbed Arthur’s elbow and flew through the side door of the studio. Someone fired after us as the sliver of light appeared, but only once.

  We fled out the back, into a parking lot.

  “Wait!” someone cried behind us.

  My feet stumbled of their own accord. I never stumbled.

  Fucking Simon. I didn’t know how he’d beaten everyone else out.