Plastic Smile (Russell's Attic Book 4)

by Huang, SL

  The morning after I finished spreading our cellular fix, I went to see Pilar at her apartment. The windows were dark, the blinds drawn, but Arthur had said she was taking some personal time, and I knew she was home. I knocked lightly.

  “Pilar? It’s Cas.”

  I thought for a minute she wasn’t going to answer, but then the bolt slid back and she pulled the door open. She was in pajamas, her right wrist in a cast. I winced.

  “Hi,” I said.

  Her eyes darted behind me.

  “It’s just me,” I assured her quickly.

  Her lips pressed together, her face closing in.

  “He’s never going to hurt you again,” I said. “I promise.”

  “I don’t know if you can promise that,” Pilar said. Her voice was low.

  “I swear to you. He’s not.” I hesitated. “Can I come in for a minute?”

  She turned and walked back into the living room of her apartment, leaving the door open. I followed.

  She sat on her couch. I sat across from her, on the edge of a bright rainbow-colored bucket chair.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Cas,” Pilar said finally. “We’re friends, we are, and I’ve been worried sick about you, and I’m really glad you’re okay, and Checker’s been keeping me updated and I’m really glad everything else turned out okay, but—fuck you.” She started to cry.

  I shifted on the edge of the bucket chair.

  “And fuck him, too,” she added.

  Pilar didn’t usually cuss. The words sounded wrong in her mouth, like she was searching for something that fit the situation and couldn’t find it.

  “I promise—” I started again.

  “You can’t promise that,” she said. “You can’t, and you know you can’t!”

  “Yes, I can,” I said. “I’m absolutely sure. He’s not going to come after you again. Ever.”

  Confusion warred on her face. She sniffed. “Wait, do you mean—what do you mean by that? Did you…”

  “No! Jesus, of course not. But I told him that if he hurts you again, I—I told him he can’t.”

  “You told him. Right.” Pilar hunched into herself. “No. This isn’t okay.”

  “It is now,” I said. “I’m sorry for what happened, but—”

  “No. No, you don’t get to—you don’t get to rescue me by—” her mouth twisted on the word like it was a curse—“by telling a man who, a man like him, by just telling him not to, and then tell me it’s all okay, because it isn’t okay. This isn’t okay.”

  I took a breath. “What are you going to do?”

  Pilar was too smart. She squinted at me, her brow furrowing. “Is that what you came over for? To make sure I wouldn’t—what, go out for revenge?”

  That’s not fair, I wanted to say. I had wanted to see if she was all right. I had. But I’d also wanted to make sure—fuck, I was the one who’d taught Pilar to shoot. Bought her a gun. She wasn’t nearly as good as Rio, but if they crossed paths again, which they very well might—and if I wasn’t there, or I was…not myself, or worse—it would only take one shot, and thanks to me, Rio wouldn’t fire first.

  Not that I wanted him to kill Pilar, either. Fuck.

  Pilar laughed, sudden and hoarse, with no humor in it. “I can’t believe it. Two people like you, worried about little ol’ me. That’s like the punchline of a joke.” She wiped at her eyes with her sleeve. She’d stopped crying. “Are you going to take my gun back?”

  “What? No, that’s ridiculous. You need it. And besides, you could just buy another one.”

  “I guess that’s true, huh?” She sat back on the couch and stared up at the ceiling. “I can’t believe this is a conversation I’m having. I’m listening to the words I’m saying here and I can’t believe it.”

  “Look,” I said. “I got Rio’s word on this. I’m asking you for yours. That’s all.”

  “My word. That I won’t—what, kill him?”

  “Yeah.”

  She laughed again. It didn’t sound like she found anything funnier than the first time.

  I waited.

  Pilar finally sat forward again and made eye contact with me. “I don’t even know if I could, you know? I’ve never—you know I’ve never. You don’t need to worry about me, as long as he’s not trying to hurt any of us again. But Cas, I…I need to understand this. You owe me that, at least.”

  “Understand what?” I said.

  “This. Him. You. Why you’re—if I’m going to see him again I need to understand why I shouldn’t call the police.”

  Her calling the police hadn’t even occurred to me. I swallowed. “He does more good than harm.”

  “That’s not a reason. You know that’s not a reason. The world can’t work that way.”

  I thought of Pithica. I thought of what we had done, with Simon.

  She was right. I did know better.

  “Make me understand,” Pilar said. “What he almost—and you, you say all you did was talk to him, after he—and you say it’s okay, and that’s outrageous, and I know what he was doing to Los Angeles because I was there, and I need you to make me understand.”

  “I trust him,” I said. The words dropped in the room, soft and yet too loud.

  “Why?”

  He’ll protect you.

  Protection isn’t living. Don’t pretend it is.

  I gripped the edge of the bucket chair. She’d been surging back again, just as I’d known she would.

  “I don’t know,” I said aloud, to Pilar.

  “You don’t know?”

  “You’re perfectly well aware of what’s been going on with me,” I said. “I know I know Rio from before, and I know I trust him, and I know I owe him. And that’s enough.”

  “Not for me, it isn’t!” Pilar cried. “I thought you had a reason! I knew he was tangled up in all this, with Simon and everything, but I thought you had a history—”

  “We do have a history.”

  “One you can remember!”

  She glared at me.

  Aren’t you supposed to help?

  I take a somewhat different view of what it means to help.

  Yours, or your God’s?

  “Pilar,” I said quietly. “Please. This is the one thing in my whole fucking life I’m sure of. Please.”

  “You’re asking me to trust you on something that—you’re asking me to trust you.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “When you don’t even know what you’re asking me to trust.”

  “Yes.” I paused, and then added again, “Please.”

  Pilar took a deep breath and blew it out. “Okay,” she said. “I can’t make any guarantees for the future. But, for now…okay.”

  “That works,” I said.

  “What about my family?” she asked.

  I opened my mouth to tell her Rio would never, but I hadn’t thought he’d go after Pilar, either. “I’ll make sure,” I amended.

  “Make sure. Or I can’t agree to anything.”

  “I give you my word.” I stood up and stopped. “When are you coming back to the office?”

  She gave me a small smile. “When I’m ready.”

  Chapter 37

  I apologized to Checker, too—both for what we’d done and for Rio. He got emotional and threw an action figure at me, after which he demanded for us please to get drunk together and watch at least fourteen episodes of Stargate.

  I wasn’t sure he’d forgiven me—he never said he did—and our interaction felt rawer around the edges, but I fell asleep on his couch that night and the next day we went to work in the Hole running his statistical programs. Pilar came over, too, a little later in the day. She was quieter than usual, but otherwise acted like everything was normal.

  The feelers I’d put out had seemed to indicate everyone was still licking their wounds, but the data hit harder and revealed more. We’d been expecting the crime statistics to rebound to their previous level or higher, but thanks to the massive deadlines
s of Rio’s and my last stand combined with Simon’s overwhelming effect, we only saw a slight and gradual elevation in criminal activity. It also seemed like most of the people who had gone straight thanks to the brain entrainment were staying that way—at least for now. I suspected once the leaders of the various criminal organizations got back on their feet, recruitment would start up again.

  “It wasn’t a complete failure,” Checker said, his chin propped on one hand as he studied the line graphs.

  “I’m not sure those words mean what you think they do,” I said. “Either ‘not’ or ‘complete’ or ‘failure.’”

  “I’m talking about strictly looking at the numbers.” He pointed. “From a purely utilitarian standpoint, you axed the crime rate. And I think you were right that most of the people this targeted were the ones who were getting swept up in peer pressure and indoctrination.”

  “Most,” I bit out.

  “All of them, really,” Pilar said. “We just didn’t consider peer pressure and indoctrination could be used consensually, for positive stuff.”

  “It’s like computerized doctors, or self-driving cars,” Checker said. “They make fewer mistakes than humans do, but they’re different mistakes. What you did helped people make fewer mistakes, but the ones who did made different ones.”

  “Stop trying to make me feel better,” I said.

  “Don’t be so selfish.” Pilar spoke more sharply than I was used to hearing from her. “We’re trying to feel better, too. Did you know the past month was the first time this whole school year my brother stopped getting beat up? He was smiling, his grades skyrocketed, he tried out for the debate team…yesterday he came home with a cut lip again and wouldn’t talk about it. I don’t know, Cas. Even after everything, I think maybe we were doing a good thing.” She sniffed. “Until, you know…everything else.”

  “Tell that to kids like Katrina,” I said. Justin had stopped by to see Arthur. Katrina was using again, and she’d dropped off the grid. Arthur was devastated.

  “Not to sound callous, but there are lots of kids like Katrina,” Checker said. “And as fucked up as it sounds, speaking strictly numerically, it looks like you helped more of them than you hurt. And you never know; this might stick—I don’t have enough data to give an accurate prediction. Don’t get me wrong, I still think it was a horrible idea from the beginning, but come on. There’s no denying it took out a good chunk of Los Angeles’s worst criminal element, so only castigate yourself where you deserve it.”

  There were enough legitimate reasons. He was too tactful to say it.

  “I guess it’s an argument for the more traditional methods of fighting crime,” Checker added. “Low-impact superheroics, and all. Saving people one at a time.”

  “That would be good,” Pilar said. “You save one person a night, that’s three hundred-sixty-five a year, right?”

  “Three hundred and sixty-five?” I tried to keep from yelling. “That’s nothing!”

  They didn’t get it. Didn’t get how big the human population was. What Pithica had been doing had been worldwide—a nudge here and a tuck there that had been changing people’s lives globally, millions upon millions.

  The upper limit of human perception was a ratio of one to seven. If two objects differed by more than a factor of seven, people ceased to be able to compare them effectively: one was “small” and one was “big,” and that was it. Similarly, most humans were bad at distinguishing any large orders of magnitude.

  But I wasn’t.

  A few hundred people was a handful. An order of magnitude not even comparable to what we’d stripped from the world when we’d fought Pithica. And the change we had wrought here in LA was barely a feather’s weight more.

  “You guys aren’t seeing scale,” I said tiredly. “You’re trying to convince me we made a positive overall difference, but compared to the global population, what we did here is…it’s nonexistent. Our actions were mathematically trivial.”

  The world, as a whole, was just as it had been.

  Disintegrating. Collapsing. Because of what we’d done to Pithica.

  “Maybe this is as it should be, then,” Checker said. “Humanity muddles along, and everyone makes the best of it they can in a chaos of messy, non-optimal Nash equilibria.”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean?” Checker asked.

  “No. I refuse to accept that,” I said. “I refuse to accept that the only two options are either a society spiraling into black holes of entropy or one in which people are murdered and brainwashed to meet the requirements of some self-appointed master puppeteers. There’s a continuum. There has to be. To say it’s one or the other is—it’s a false choice. Just because this didn’t work isn’t proof nothing else will.”

  “Cas,” Pilar said softly, “we tried this, and it went bad. Don’t you think that’s a sign?”

  “I don’t believe in signs,” I answered.

  I didn’t say the other thing I was thinking—that I refused to accept we weren’t powerful enough. Because Checker was right, in what he always said half-jokingly: between me, and Rio, and—God help me—Simon, we had a terrifying level of both human and superhuman resources.

  I just had to puzzle out a way to use them.

  And from what Simon had said—or, well, cagily hinted at—maybe there were more like me. Like us. Pithica had psychics other than Dawna, and Simon was proof more existed outside their influence. If there were other people like me out there…

  Well. I’d probably have to either kill them or recruit them.

  Dawna had an army. Maybe it was time I found one, too.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The morning my week’s grace period with Simon expired, I sat with Arthur on a bench off one of LA’s more deserted hiking trails. The old stone seat had been placed where the trail curved up against the lip of a spectacular bluff, and the day was unusually clear for Los Angeles. We could see all the way to San Pedro and the ocean, with the city spread out below us in between.

  I drew my knees up in front of me, staring off into the indigo line where the sky met the sea, where my eyeline grazed the curvature of the earth in a graceful tangent.

  Silent idleness without the blur of alcohol wasn’t usually kind to me. But I wanted this, today, and so far my brain had let me have it.

  Perhaps the dread kept everything else at bay—the yawning shadow of the unknown, whispering this might be the end.

  My end.

  “I don’t get scared,” I said to the endless blue. “Not easily. Even when I should.”

  Arthur waited, listening.

  “This scares me,” I said. “A lot. More than…more than anything I can remember.” Which was only about five years’ worth of fears. But still.

  “You know being scared is okay, right?” Arthur said. “Ain’t no weakness.”

  “That depends on your definition of weakness.”

  “Guess that’s so.”

  We sat in silence for a few minutes.

  “Scares us, too,” Arthur said.

  I frowned. “What does?”

  “That we gonna lose you,” he said. “That this Simon fellow ain’t on the level. That…that he gonna hurt you.”

  I mulled that over for a while. I was even less used to people being afraid for me than I was familiar with being afraid myself.

  “Checker called him,” Arthur added.

  “He did?” Now that I officially had Simon’s contact information, I’d made sure everyone else had it, too. Just in case I…unexpectedly worsened again. “What for?”

  Arthur chuckled. “To threaten him.”

  “Checker threatened somebody?” My feet thumped down off the bench in shock. “Electronically?”

  “Nope. Physically. Think he meant it, too.”

  “That’s not a—it doesn’t even—” I’d never seen Checker hit anyone, ever, and he flat-out refused to learn to fire a gun. It wasn’t that he was a pacifist; he was just—not violent. “I don’t need peopl
e trying to protect me like they know what’s best,” I grumped. That was what had started this whole thing in the first place, wasn’t it?

  “Course you don’t,” Arthur said.

  Checker had threatened somebody. For me.

  “It’s a nice thought, I suppose,” I said.

  Arthur chuckled again. “If he overstepped, you let him know. But he meant well.” He sobered. “Speaking of…you want me there? Say the word. We are supposed to be watching each other’s brain meats, you know.”

  “Thanks, but that’s okay,” I said. “Rio’s coming. He…” Rio had called me the day before from wherever he was convalescing, sounding perfectly normal. The gist of the conversation was that he was staying in LA for a while.

  Because of me.

  He’d offered to sit in with Simon and me, and I’d said yes, under no uncertain terms. But I had the sneaking suspicion at least half the reason he was staying was to make sure I went in the first place, and kept going. Simon had implied this would be a lengthy process.

  Possibly an infinite one, if I kept falling back toward remembering every time I stopped seeing him.

  Infinity doesn’t exist, sang Valarmathi. There’s always an end.

  “When you meeting them?” Arthur asked.

  I checked my watch. “Twenty minutes ago.”

  He grinned, and we sat for a while longer, soaking in the sky.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Two hours later, I knocked on a door in Northridge. Rio opened it almost immediately, in a new tan duster identical to his old one except lacking the bullet holes. He was still favoring his right side slightly, but I doubted it was visible to those whose senses didn’t drop out the even functions of symmetry on a regular basis.

  “Cas,” he said. “Come in.”

  Simon looked up from where he sat in an upholstered chair. He’d been reading a book while he waited, relaxed.

  The fear and loathing swelled in my throat, clawing at me remarkably like panic. I tried to swallow it back. Wistful regret flickered across Simon’s face as he read my expression, but for once he didn’t say anything.

  Rio walked over like nothing was awkward at all and pulled up a chair himself. I tried to mirror him. If nothing else, I still trusted Rio.

  And I sat straight, with more bravado than I felt, even if a telepath could see right through it.