by SL Huang
I curled over Martinez’s limp form, pushing us as far under the row of seats as I could. The concert hall’s house lights had come on, but for some reason it felt darker than before. Maybe because I couldn’t open my eyes…
That was stupid. Of course I could open my eyes. Of course I could.
I just needed to sleep for a moment first…
Chapter 34
Clack, clack, clack.
I woke up still on the floor, but it was a different floor, and I couldn’t move.
Clack, clack, clack.
I strained at pulling my eyelids up and managed a foggy strip of light.
Clack, clack, clack.
I pushed as hard as I could, willing my muscles to contract, to twitch, but nothing happened.
“It’s a neuromuscular blocker,” said a voice above me. “It paralyzes you. And besides that, you’re trussed up like a Christmas turkey.”
I managed to focus my eyes a bit. My wrists were on the floor in front of me, in irons. They looked like my arms, my hands, but felt completely divorced from my body, like someone else’s limbs.
In the background were two large booted feet and an intricately carved walking stick.
Clack, clack, clack, went the meditation balls.
A stack of papers hit the ground in front of the feet: the documents and credit cards I’d had Tegan mock up.
“Seems you were planning to double-cross me,” said the Lancer’s voice. “I’m not into that.”
Yeah.
“I would have killed you right off—I usually kill people who double-cross me. But you still have information I want.” Clack, clack, clack.
Halliday’s proof. Right.
“I’ll take great pleasure in breaking you.” He giggled like a hyena. “But I confess you’re not my top priority right now. You’ll have to wait. I just wanted to say hi.”
Oh. Oh, shit.
Martinez. He had Martinez, too. Of course he did—we hadn’t gotten out; he’d taken us both.
That hadn’t been part of the plan. She was supposed to get away before he caught me.
She was supposed to get away.
This was my fault. I had to protect her. I pushed my neurons to move a finger with no success. The helplessness sandbagged me. I had to be able to do—to do something—
I managed to make a sound in my throat, something like a sick rhinoceros.
“Oh? You have something to say?”
Don’t hurt her. Oh, God.
“Mathematics should be shared, don’t you agree?” the Lancer said carelessly. “Oh, I forgot. You’re only in this for the money. Playing both ends against the middle. You don’t care.” The meditation balls stopped, and he was suddenly a lot closer, half-crouching, half-sitting so his face was near mine. “People like you are the scum of humanity. You don’t care about the field, about what humanity can discover. You’re only in it for your payday. Perelman would weep.”
I would have liked to point out that he’d been planning on using Halliday’s proof for his own ends as well, and that he was almost certainly going to steal the fame and million-dollar prize from Martinez by convincing the world—and maybe even himself—that it was his own work. He was a delusional hypocrite.
But then, he wasn’t entirely wrong about me.
He stood back up. I pushed my vocal cords until I thought I would choke myself, straining to the breaking point, and managed a few unintelligible sounds.
“What was that?” said the Lancer. I couldn’t tell if he was mocking me or not.
“Weak…heart,” I got out. “Martinez…” The consonants slurred; I wasn’t sure if they were understandable.
“Does she,” said the Lancer, after an interminable pause. “How do you know?”
“Sh’told me,” I managed.
He crouched down again. “I think you’re lying. But it will be easy enough to check.”
Right. Computer skills. He’d get her medical records.
Hell, Martinez wasn’t young; with any luck she really would have a heart condition. But at least I’d bought her some time…time for my plan to work.
Time for Arthur to come for us.
Faith…
The Lancer pushed himself up and tapped his walking stick against one boot. “In the meantime, if you are telling the truth, then she thinks you’re chummy enough to share your health with each other. What, did you tell her you were going to protect her?” He snorted. “There’s no one you haven’t betrayed, is there?”
He wasn’t wrong about that, either.
“But I doubt our dear doctor is wise to that. She seems such a trusting sort. If you want so much for me to spare her ‘weak heart,’ if you two are such good friends, I know an excellent solution.”
He snorted with laughter again and called to someone in another language. Rough hands manhandled me, hoisting me up under my arms, dragging me. It hurt, more than it should have—oddly unspecific blobs of pain floating through my fried nervous system. It took a few minutes, but I got around to figuring that someone had kicked me in the face and ribs while I was out.
By the time I’d worked out that conclusion I was being shoved into a very solid-feeling chair. Chains clanked as they fastened me down.
“We’ll wait for the drugs to wear off a touch,” said the Lancer, from somewhere behind me. “After all, we want a show.”
I strove to move again, heaved like I was trying to pull a muscle, and managed to twitch my wrist on the arm of the chair. Metal bit into my skin, cold and unyielding.
The Lancer had started up with his meditation balls again; the sound traced out where he paced behind me. I wasn’t keeping good track of time at the moment, but it wasn’t very long before his men brought in Martinez.
She was walking under her own power, and aside from also being cuffed up, she didn’t look any the worse for the wear. Apparently the Lancer had only felt the need to take out his anger on the person who had personally fucked him over. Thank God.
Martinez plopped herself down in a chair across from me, and the goons chained her in, just as they had done to me. She managed to sit in the manacles primly, somehow, as if she were about to take tea and cakes.
My muscles were responding now, a little bit, though twitching my fingers still felt like I was pushing through glue.
The clack, clack, clack approached my shoulder, and I felt the Lancer lean on the chair behind me. “Last chance,” he said. “You really don’t want us to touch her?”
I knew what was coming. I could take it, I hoped. As long as it bought us time.
Arthur will be coming. He will.
“You give her a heart attack, you’ll never get your proof.” My tongue was still thick and languid in my mouth, but the words had enough shape to make sense.
“Can I tell you a secret?” He leaned close, his breath hot on my ear. “I doubt you’ll be a very good incentive. But I don’t really care.” He pushed off and walked away.
Yeah. I’d pissed him off. Big time.
And it wasn’t going to work out so well for me.
“Is she all right?” came Martinez’s grandmotherly voice.
“How nice that you care,” said the Lancer. He’d retreated to a spot between us, leaning on his cane, the meditation balls going in his other hand. “Dr. Martinez, you’ve told me you won’t part with certain information on a proof that—” he brayed his hyena laugh—“that I know you have. But I think we can change your mind.” He gestured at me. “We’re going to start by torturing your friend here, who so conveniently made herself available. If that doesn’t work, we’ll go out and find another one of your friends, or we’ll find your family, any family you have—children, grandchildren, newborn babies…do you want that?”
Martinez was silent.
“I said, do you want that?”
“I assumed the question was rhetorical,” she said. “Of course I don’t want that. It would be a most inhuman state. And if I did want it, I would have been spurred to do it myself, in al
l likelihood, so even if you suspected violent psychopathy on my part, there is evidence to the contrary.”
The Lancer stepped forward and spat on her. The globule smacked against her wrinkled cheek and slid down to dribble on her collar. Martinez twitched away from it in a gentle shudder, like she couldn’t believe the rudeness of kids nowadays. “If you don’t want it, then you’ll tell us what you know,” the Lancer sneered.
“You’re assuming that wanting one thing—or, in this case, wanting one thing to happen—precludes wanting, or not wanting, another thing more. In my hierarchy there is no contest. This power makes me unto a deity, and it has been struggle enough whether to share it with the world, but to share it with only those who would use it for evil—there is no decision. I will not be the one to create an evil god.”
“Poetic,” the Lancer said. “In that case, is there anything you wish to say to your friend? She’s about to be quite uncomfortable.”
Something snicked off to my left, sharply, and an arc of sparks flew at the edge of my peripheral vision.
Oh, shit.
Martinez looked past me. “I’m sorry for the actions of these men,” she said. “But not for my actions. They are only rational.”
The ironic part of it was, her logic made sense. In a wretched, soon-to-be-extremely-painful-for-me sort of way.
The snick sparked again, louder, right by my ear this time. Bits of heat tingled against my exposed skin where the sparks fell.
“Last chance,” said the Lancer.
I didn’t hear what Martinez said back, because the pain hit.
Chapter 35
I’d been shot before. I’d been beat up before. In my various disreputable past jobs, I’d been blown up by airborne missiles, almost drowned, and fallen off the side of a mountain.
I’d never been tortured with a fifteen-thousand-volt electric charge before.
It wasn’t only the pain, although that was unimaginable, an almost out-of-body nerve-shredding bonfire that refused to localize to where they’d thrust the leads against me. But more—each charge ripped through my flesh like it wanted to flay me, rending me apart and tearing me like paper…the world twisted into sick, impossible shapes, stretching until it snapped, and my brain flash-fried and crumbled until it was dust.
It took me some time to realize they had stopped, the searing burn pulsing through me even after they’d dropped the leads from my skin. My surroundings kept stuttering and hitching, like someone had taken handfuls of frames out of an animation. I was aware of the Lancer talking to Martinez, every third word piling up on the one before like he was a bad collage.
After a few minutes, the Lancer and his men cleared out, leaving us chained to our chairs. They probably wanted me to beg Martinez to tell, or something. They hadn’t readministered the paralytic, but it didn’t make a difference: my muscles popped and spasmed against each other, defying my attempts to marshal them. Even if I’d been able to move under my own power, however, the mathematics of our situation were dismal; the chains wrapped my arms and legs with a depressing level of redundancy. The Lancer had wanted to make sure I didn’t escape again, and he’d done a good job with the overkill.
“I can’t tell him, you know,” Martinez said after a few minutes. “It would be—it would be quite bad. I don’t know what he would be able to do.”
What he was able to do without it was frightening enough. The Lancer was going to go out and find anyone else in Martinez’s life to hurt—friends, family, other mathematicians, Martinez herself once he knew what would be liable to kill her—until she capitulated. And capitulate she would, once our captor reached the variable named Sonya Halliday. Martinez had given up everything for Halliday, and she’d give up the proof as well, I felt sure. Their friendship was her zeroth axiom.
It was a race, then. “Is okay,” I slurred. “I have a plan.”
She raised her eyebrows. Her huge glasses were missing, I noticed, making her bones seem even finer and smaller than before. “I hope your plan does not involve being unchained, because if so, you are unlikely to be able to enact it.”
“Doesn’t,” I said.
“Intriguing.” She stared into space, considering as if this were a riddle: Two prisoners, A and B, are chained in a room until A gives up information. B tells A not to worry, that she has a plan to escape. What is it?
I was tired. So tired. “Gotta wait,” I said. “That’s the plan. Wait…”
Her brow furrowed, her lips pursing, trying to figure out the meaning in the punchline.
“People are coming to get us.” I wasn’t sure I said the words or only thought them. I was loopy. Why did everything hurt so much? “Hold out, Professor…they’re coming. You have to hold out…” Who was I talking to? “They’ll be here.”
“How do you know?”
“Faith,” I mumbled. Faith…
I remembered my earlier resolution, that I didn’t need my past to decide who I wanted to be now. I could be the type of person who trusted, couldn’t I? Why couldn’t I decide to be that? The type of person who trusted, and who protected an old woman from being hurt for as long as I needed to…
“I don’t believe in faith,” Martinez said, very primly. “It’s the antithesis of evidence-based science.”
She was right. But maybe I didn’t need to believe in general—I only needed to believe in certain people. I could manage that.
Certain people. Arthur. Checker. Myself.
Myself most of all. I had to believe I had it in me, somewhere, to do the right thing when it came down to the wire. Otherwise, why keep existing at all? I had nothing else of value—was nothing else.
“Professor,” I said. “Act like this bothers you. Okay? We need to make them draw it out…”
“I don’t understand what you mean. Of course it bothers me. They’re evil men, to be hurting you like that.”
“They have to keep going,” I tried to explain. “To keep going, on—on me, and not anyone else. Tell them you’ll give them something if they stop, beg them, and then take it back. Convince them they’re getting to you—”
There was a sound at the side of the room. The Lancer and his men, trooping back in. I wondered if they’d had cameras on us. Too late to worry about it now.
“Have you decided to share with the class yet, Dr. Martinez?” The Lancer leaned on his walking stick, pinning Martinez with his intense stare like she was a butterfly on a card. “Or shall we continue?”
Martinez looked at him and then back at me. I would have crossed my fingers, if I’d been able to move them right.
Her eyes had gone large, and they focused on mine. It was the first time she’d made eye contact with me. It jolted me—I didn’t know what she meant by it.
“Please,” she said to the Lancer, very slowly and softly. “Please stop this.”
I let out a quiet breath. Good girl. Convince them.
“It’s in your hands,” the Lancer said. “Tell me what I want to know, and we’ll stop.”
“I—I can’t—”
The Lancer nodded to his friends behind me.
I might have screamed then. I wasn’t sure.
♦ ♦ ♦
A face swam in front of me. I called someone’s name, but it wasn’t the right one.
The face resolved into the sallow features of the Lancer. His hand whipped out and smacked against something. Me. He’d smacked my cheek.
I couldn’t feel it.
My whole body was seizing, a thousand million tiny internal catastrophes as the nerves and muscles couldn’t figure out what to do anymore so twisted and screamed and died.
I tried to find Martinez, but my eyes wouldn’t focus that far away from me. I gave up.
Someone tilted a cup of water against my mouth until I choked on it. I tried to swallow, but the muscles barely obeyed. Nothing was working at all the way it was supposed to. My senses had collapsed in on themselves as if they’d inverted, every x and y switching until I didn’t know which way was up a
nymore.
Someone smacked me again, the crack of it ever so loud. I felt it that time. It stung. It might have split my skin.
I pondered that.
The Lancer was saying something to Martinez. Something about watching me die. Whether she really wanted to be responsible for that.
I thought you didn’t want to kill me, I tried to say. I still had something he wanted. Didn’t I?
As if he’d heard me, his breath came hot on my ear again. “I’d prefer you didn’t die, if you’d be so kind. But Dr. Martinez appears to be surprisingly sympathetic to your condition, and let’s just say…what you know is expendable, if it gets me what she knows.”
Expendable. I wasn’t the only one who knew Halliday’s proof. Professor Halliday did, for one thing, as well as Dr. Zhang and probably a handful of other people in the NSA at this point. And if the Lancer pried Martinez’s work out of her, he might not even feel the need for Halliday’s proof at all, because he’d have the bigger, better prize.
It was surprising, how fast my brain was able to make those connections.
Some vestige of adrenaline surged, and I tried to use it to evaluate myself, to see how close the Lancer was to…well, to killing me. It was a surreal place to be. My mind wandered too quickly, however, rendering no useful data.
The Lancer and his men were gone again. It had taken me a long time to realize that. Professor Martinez was trying to talk to me, but her words bounced against my eardrums as if they were nonsense syllables.
At least she was all right.
Wait, I remembered. I had to wait. What was I waiting for?
The Lancer came back in.
No, no, no, I’m not ready. I had to wait—
I tugged at my bonds weakly, involuntarily. The paralytic had worn off now, but it hardly mattered.
“Is there anything our resident double-crossing snake would like to share for posterity?” The Lancer was standing above me, jeering, leaning on his cane with both hands. “Any words of wisdom on always making the quick buck?”
A noise filtered through my consciousness, a very specific sort of shuffle-thump noise. A very specific sort of noise.
