Null Set

by S. L. Huang

  “You think this, uh, you think this is Pithica?” I said. “I thought your deal with Dawna was that you had to leave them alone.”

  “It is not Pithica. The methods do not match closely enough. But the aim is the same, and the sin is just as grave.”

  Shit.

  “Cas, it seems you know something about this. I would be grateful for the intelligence.”

  Double shit.

  “Right,” I said, way too fast. I’d have to work on avoiding Rio for a while—I wasn’t a good enough liar for this. “Okay. Um. You might run into some people.” Grateful I had something to tell him as a cover, I related Yamamoto’s meeting the night before, keeping it as vague as I dared.

  “And nobody seemed to know the provenance?” Rio asked.

  “Nope,” I said.

  “Perhaps I should speak to Mr. Yamamoto.”

  “Knock yourself out. I can give him your number. He probably knows who you are, though.” Not many people who did were willing to talk to Rio by choice, and he knew it.

  Rio nodded. “If you would attempt the connection, it would be appreciated. Otherwise, may I depend on you to pass on any information that might be of help in combating this?”

  “You want us to work together?” I blurted. Oh, brother.

  “If you like. I would not refuse the help, but it is your decision. I would ask for any data you happen across regardless, if you do not mind the imposition.”

  Rio wanted to work with me, against me. Only he didn’t know it.

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll, uh, relay your interest. Um, as for anything else, let me—let me think about it. I’ve got some … things going on right now.”

  There was no way Rio didn’t know something was up with me, but he let it pass. Maybe he thought it was just my mounting madness. “Of course, Cas.”

  “What are you going to do when you figure this out?” I asked.

  “I shall find whoever is responsible, and allow God to be the judge of their souls.”

  Rio continued sipping his tea, and I sat back, my appetite entirely lost.

  * * *

  RIO’S OBLIVIOUS threats and Yamamoto’s efforts to start a multi-family mob war against me notwithstanding, I couldn’t help but celebrate a little when I stood in Checker’s Hole a few days later and admired screens full of crime statistics. The line graphs tripped and tumbled over cliffs into statistically significant abysses. Violent crime. Property crime. Organized crime.

  “It’s only been about a week,” Checker said, sounding disturbed. “But this … okay, Cas, I have to admit. I still don’t like it, but it’s staggering. I think it’s been having a knock-on effect, too—I mean, obviously not all crime is caused by what you’re preventing, but this has caused such a shake-up everyone’s chasing their tails. Hopefully we won’t see them reacclimate.…”

  “Yeah. Good,” I said.

  And hopefully we wouldn’t end up dead if anyone found out this had been us.

  “I’ve still got my doubts,” Checker said. “But … wow. Job well done?”

  “Well, Arthur’s strong-arming me into cleanup mode,” I answered. Thank Christ. My worries about more breakdowns in the field notwithstanding, I needed to keep my mind occupied with work more than ever. Like always, it sharpened me, dulling the lapses in lucidity.

  “We’re chasing the bad guys while they’re chasing their tails, as you said,” I continued to Checker. “Hey, have you found anything on Lauren Vance?”

  “Oh, yeah, I was going to update you on that. As far as I can ascertain, she’s both Pourdry’s very genteel attack dog and one of the more public faces of his operation. Assuming you can hang around here a while longer, I’ll have a summary on the server for you and Arthur by this evening.” There’d been no sign Pourdry was after Checker, but he’d still asked me to come back to the Hole with him to collect some additional laptops and do some work that required more processing power. “Where is Arthur, anyway?”

  “I thought he was off on some PI thing today,” I said. “He’s not?”

  Checker half smiled. “I am incredibly flattered you think that with all the work we’ve been doing for you, we would still have time to have a case on.”

  “Well, Pilar said he had some emergency with, um, a couple of kids I saw hanging around the office. Katrina and … Jason, maybe? Justin? They’re not a case?” I did hope Katrina was okay. She’d been a hoot.

  “Oh, that must be some of Arthur’s lost kids,” Checker said. “Huh, hopefully all this’ll be a help to some of them. Arthur would be ecstatic.”

  “What do you mean, Arthur’s lost kids?”

  “Cas, what do you think we are?”

  I looked at him blankly.

  “Come on, you didn’t realize this?” Checker said. “Arthur’s got a weakness for troubled kids. Almost an obsession. He’s not happy unless he’s trying to fix someone.” He frowned. “That sounds bad. I don’t mean it that way. Heck, Arthur saved me, him and—” He coughed.

  “We’re not kids,” I said. I wasn’t sure how I felt about being someone’s project. On the other hand, it wasn’t like I hadn’t known I was one; I just hadn’t known he had others.

  “Yeah, well, it’s all relative, isn’t it?” said Checker brightly. “Arthur does a lot of good for people. He’s pretty swell at it.”

  We built you. You’re something better, now. The prideful croon came with an oily stain of violation, fingers reaching forward into my present and future. I didn’t know who had said it. Maybe a hundred people. Maybe nobody.

  My mood soured. “I’m goddamn sick of people trying to fix me.”

  Checker turned from his computers, the movement slow and deliberate as he gave me his full attention. “We’re not talking about Arthur anymore, are we?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Do you … want to talk about it?” asked Checker.

  Do you want to see what you can do? one of the ghosts whispered.

  “No,” I said to both of them. I tried to focus on Checker. “No, I don’t. Unless it’s to tear you a new one for fucking not telling me you had decided to blunder face-first into my business and kidnap the person I told you to stop looking into—”

  “You know what we did made perfect sense.” Checker sighed. “So can you stay? If you can, I’ll get Pilar over here and we’ll finish this double time.”

  Dread closed in on me as I realized something else: now that I was done here, I didn’t have anything to do anyway, at least until Arthur had finished his thing or I had some intel on Vance to chase down. It was exactly what I’d been stalling against. The lull from work, the lack of focus that historically had never gone well for me.

  Buck up, Cas, I ordered myself. I had to face it eventually. At least riding it out here would be better than doing it locked up alone in one of my apartments. “I can stay, as long as you have some tequila in your kitchen,” I told Checker.

  “Yeah, uh. Knock yourself out.” His face twisted up a little. “Cas, seriously. With so much going on, we haven’t talked about— They said you aren’t— Is it true you aren’t okay?”

  “They” meant Simon and Rio. “We’ve known I’m not okay for a while now,” I said.

  “Cas…”

  “What?”

  I could tell Checker was steeling himself to say something I would hate by the way his hands clenched and his whole posture tightened. “The, um. Not just your memory stuff, but the, uh, the math thing—about you not being able to do, um, proofs and stuff anymore. If this guy really is a ‘good’ psychic, maybe he can help you with—”

  “What, and you’d trust him?” The dig about the mathematics stabbed. The reminder that I wasn’t whole, that grasping after anything beyond raw computation would leave me only with a phantom wisp of forgotten wonder … I could solve any problem known to humankind, but the unknown ones were forever closed to me, my brain stunted and seared off. It was the only part of my whole messed-up brainspace I’d give anything to fix, and Checker knew i
t. He was the only one I’d ever talked to about it, and I regretted having told him at all.

  Fuck my memory; if I could get the math back …

  Would such a thing be worth considering? Was there even a chance?

  No. I couldn’t let myself think along those lines. My broken mathematical intuition might be the only impairment I wasn’t in denial about, but nothing Simon had said suggested he had any interest in helping me with it. Letting myself hope for that was like staring into the sun—it would burn me to the core before I saw anything.

  Black resentment bristled in me at Checker even bringing it up.

  “Simon seems to think the problem here is all down to what Dawna Polk did a year ago,” I reminded him acidly. “Whatever messed up my brain initially, whether it was her or Pithica or someone like them, it happened long before then. And you seem to be forgetting that Simon keeps telling me not to try to remember things, so he’s clearly not interested in fixing my memory or—or anything else, only whatever she knocked apart, and why he’s even interested in that is highly suspicious bordering on disturbing—”

  “Is it so strange to you that you might have had a friend before you lost your memory?” Checker asked.

  “So he’s a friend of mine now instead of a dangerous enemy you helped abduct and hold prisoner for weeks? You wouldn’t want him in your head either, admit it!”

  Checker shifted uncomfortably. “Well, no, but—I’m just saying. Not to underrate Pilar and Arthur and me or anything, but this guy’s thing about not influencing people without asking—to be perfectly fair, I’m not sure we could have held on to him if he hadn’t been sticking to it. Which makes me think … I don’t know. Maybe at least ask some questions? Find out more about if you’re in trouble from what Dawna did or—”

  “Sounds like he did influence you,” I said cruelly, and Checker flushed, though I wasn’t sure whether it was from annoyance at me or real fear that what I said might be true. “I’m going to go drink. Come get me when you’re done here.”

  I stomped out of the Hole and through the back door into his house, where I found the tequila and slouched on the couch with a bottle. I’d self-medicated earlier in the morning as well, but the buzz that took the edge off my senses had already started to fade. Blurred scenes I didn’t want anything to do with pried through the cracks, invading my consciousness.

  Did you take your medicine? someone taunted.

  “I had to do it. They were killing you,” begged someone else.

  My mouth bent in shapes it had never made, ugly and malicious. “How were they killing me if I’d never been so alive?”

  Goddamn it.

  Checker was right about one thing—if only one thing. I deserved some answers from Rio and Simon. I’d told Rio I wouldn’t look into my past, and still didn’t want to—but we weren’t talking about my past anymore; this was my present. The two of them were fucking up my life without offering the slightest explanation.

  My mood folded in further. What with the brain entrainment and Yamamoto’s meeting and finding out Rio was going to try to stop me and working on finding Pourdry, the fury I’d felt about the whole thing had been piled over by other priorities. Now it came flooding back, burning in my gut until the edges of my mood charred and curled. I drank more, but it didn’t help.

  “There’s no limit to this type of power.”

  “That doesn’t scare you?”

  “Why would it?” I stretched my fingertips to the sky, my skin crackling with possibility, probability. “I’m the one in control.”

  I jumped off the edge of the world, and the land flew by below me, sea and sky and space and stars, and I laughed and laughed and laughed.

  My hands had contorted into claws. I swiped for the tequila bottle, my fist tightening enough that I could feel the pressure building against the atomic bonds of the glass, stretching and stretching until they were on the verge of pulling apart and shattering.

  This time, instead of drowning me, the shards of unreality fissuring my consciousness stoked my anger until I wanted to hit something.

  Kill something.

  For more than a moment, I considered destroying Checker’s house. I was still angry at him, and fuck, smashing things would be cathartic. But then I had a better idea.

  I texted Rio. I’d been planning to avoid him, but we wouldn’t be talking about Los Angeles. Besides, I was feeling reckless.

  Then I texted Checker: I told Rio and Simon to come over to your house. Happy now?

  My phone buzzed with a reply immediately. Then another.

  The general gist of the next seven text messages was FUCK U, CAS.

  I gave the phone a bitter smile and put it down. Then I sat, drank tequila, and waited.

  seventeen

  CHECKER AND Pilar insisted on being in the room when Rio and Simon showed up. I had expected that to be the last thing they’d want, and I had the bizarre impression they were doing some weird imitation of wanting to protect me.

  Which was, of course, absurd. I tried to ban them, but Checker and I got in a shouting match in which he pointed out I’d invited a dangerous killer and a possibly dangerous telepath to his house without asking him first, and therefore he was fucking going to be in the room.

  I thought about leaving just to be spiteful, but at that moment Checker’s security system pinged at Rio and Simon’s arrival. I yanked open the door.

  Rio, of course, was perfectly equanimous, standing relaxed in his long tan duster. Simon hunched half behind him, hugging himself as if he wanted to disappear.

  “Hello, Cas,” said Rio.

  Simon nodded to me, but kept his mouth shut this time.

  I ushered them inside. Rio’s gaze crawled over Checker and Pilar, who had retreated to the far side of Checker’s living room, against the wall. As far away as they could get without actually leaving the room.

  “Ignore them,” I said.

  We sat down.

  “Cas,” Rio said. “May I take this as a sign you are reconsidering your decision?”

  “No,” I said. “You may take it as a sign that I want some answers.”

  “I am given to understand it would be dangerous to you to satisfy such curiosity.” Rio flicked a glance toward Simon.

  “You mean telling me why I’m crazy will make me crazier? Yeah, he’s implied as much. But I’m calling bullshit. This isn’t buried in the past anymore, Rio, and you can tell me something. First of all,” I said, turning to Simon, “who are you, really?”

  Simon and Rio exchanged a glance.

  “Hey. Hey.” I snapped my fingers at them. “I’m over here.”

  “Cas,” Rio said. “As I have told you, this man is on your side.”

  “I’ll determine that, thank you very much.”

  They looked at each other again, as though surprised I wasn’t just going to take Rio’s word for it. Rio shrugged slightly and said, “She is her own person. It seemed important.”

  “Over. Here,” I repeated.

  “Cassandra,” Simon said, “the more you can keep blocked, the better it will be. Whatever we tell you will start breaking down those barriers. Even my presence here, it’s not—it’s not good for you, but I don’t see the alternative.”

  “Well, if you don’t give me some answers, I’m just going to have to remember as much as I possibly can,” I said.

  Simon paled. It was disturbing. Not that I wanted to remember—I definitely didn’t; I hadn’t from the beginning—but I also hadn’t expected my threat to have so much of an effect.

  Someone hit me. “You see? That is what it means, to have an effect.”

  I hit them back. “I understand now,” I told the corpse.

  I tried to keep my face blank despite the interruption.

  “Can you tell one of us instead?” Checker ventured the question from the side of the room. “If Cas would trust us to be, um. An advocate? For her?”

  I knew Checker was only trying to help, but I wasn’t fond of that idea, e
ither. “Rio,” I said. I pointed at Simon. “I need to know who this guy is. To me. Broad strokes aren’t going to kill me, and I need to know.”

  Rio glanced at Simon, whose mouth was pressed in a tight line. “You and he knew each other,” Rio said. “A long time ago.”

  “Less broad,” I said impatiently, when he didn’t add anything else. “I’m not going to let you do anything if no one tells me what the hell is going on.”

  “This has to do with what Cas can do, doesn’t it?” Pilar said.

  I whipped around to face her. She tried to back up but ran into the wall. “I’m sorry! It’s just, it makes sense. You guys and Dawna, you all have these, like, superhuman powers, and we know some of them involve memory, and—that can’t be a coincidence.”

  “We’re not the same,” I ground out.

  “How do you know?” Checker asked.

  Show each other what you can do.

  Good girl.

  The flash of faces and feelings dazed me. Was it only my imagination, or were they hitting me harder? Becoming more real?

  I tried to reorient, concentrate on logic. “You’re talking coincidence,” I sneered at Pilar. “Well, isn’t it a hell of a coincidence that I would happen to run into Pithica years later if they had something to do with—”

  My thoughts screeched to a halt. Pithica … they hadn’t known what I could do, at first. They had only been interested in me because I knew Rio.

  Because Rio had been trying to take them down. Had been tangling with them for a long, long time. Since before I had met him.

  Or maybe exactly since I had met him.

  Call me Rio.

  Fuck.

  “Rio,” I said. “How did we meet?”

  “I can’t tell you that, Cas.”

  He saved me.…

  Had saved me from where? From somewhere I had known people like Dawna and Simon, from people who had mind-wiped me to keep me from remembering them?

  From people who had broken my ability to do real mathematics and left my computational prowess in its place—a poor substitute for a human mathematician, but an excellent bonus for a living weapon?