by S. L. Huang
Right. He’d probably paid for their plane tickets.
I hung up and slammed my palm against the steering wheel. Well, at least I had Pourdry’s address. I debated whether to wait the twenty-four hours I’d promised Vance or if I should just drive there now and get some fucking satisfaction.
My phone jangled. “What!” I barked into it.
“Cassu-san!” howled Yamamoto. “You remember our meeting? Someone is trying to tear us down. We must be on the right track! They are trying to divide us!”
“I’ve heard,” I said. Hopefully he didn’t catch the black irony.
“So you know, you do not believe anything you hear? Is bad, is very bad. I tell people, do not listen! But they are blinded by anger. The violence, it is happening already, and once it does is the retaliation—Cassu-san, I tell you, if some of our friends at that meeting make the move, there will be no coming back. It is grave.”
“Hey, ironically, the ‘problems’ here are probably stopping them,” I couldn’t resist pointing out. We’d see how long my brain entrainment could counter Rio’s machinations. It would give me time to hit on a better plan.
“Cassu-san, for shame. We do not need some CIA power to stop us from acting like animals. I am calling everyone, telling them—no one is to raise a hand against anyone else in our little group of friends. We work together, yes? Until we find out the true culprit, no violence! Or that person is no longer welcome. We work together or it will not work. You understand, yes?”
Shit. “I have a … personal matter with Jacob Pourdry,” I said. “It doesn’t have to do with this.”
“No violence, Cassu-san! Your personal matter, it can wait. Until we find and stop these shenanigans! Now I must call the rest. You are big help, Cassu-san, I hope you stay our friend.” He hung up.
My good night had suddenly been fucked over. Not only was Rio screwing the entire city of Los Angeles unless I gave in to him, but I’d finally gotten intel on Pourdry only to be told I couldn’t use it without being thrown out of Yamamoto’s coalition. And if I burned my welcome there, I’d lose any insight into what they might be planning, and thus possibly end up shooting myself in the back of the head.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
twenty
I GOT back to the apartment I was using as my base to discover I had a bigger problem.
The brain entrainment was set and done—anything I might do to defend it would be a response to actions other people hadn’t taken yet. My hands were tied on Pourdry. And I’d tried texting Arthur to see if he had any other vigilante jobs lined up, but he was still caught up with whatever problems had taken him away earlier.
Which meant that once again I had nothing to do.
Murmurs fragmented through my consciousness, swelling back up. People I knew and yet didn’t, faces who were only just in shadow.
“This plan will take years to bring to fruition.”
“How many of them have years? This is a large investment.”
“Oh, some of them will die. We’ve accounted for it.”
“Fuck you,” I muttered to the voices. They sneered in response.
The data sharpened around me, razor edges snagging and stabbing at my senses. I tried to stay still, to sit on the thin mattress and freeze myself in time and space, but of course it didn’t work. Gravity, fucking gravity, drawing infinite arrows downward, and an equal infinity of normal forces pushing back—and no, not down, but toward the center of this ball called Earth, every crushing beat of physics bouncing down the radius and back.
“Is sensory overload a problem?” Clinical fingers pressed against my skin.
“Yes, it will be. But not the most dangerous one.”
I tried to force the bleed-throughs away, slam a lid on their grasping tentacles. I had so much to concentrate on, to be alert for. I had to focus. Stay on top of myself.
I couldn’t afford distractions.
My breath buzzed in and out, counting the moles of oxygen, nitrogen, argon. Every molecule was a barb against the tissue of my lungs. And this time accompanied by other breaths taken other places, running through a forest, crouched against a concrete wall, lying on a wooden floor that smelled of citrus and lilac.…
Jesus Christ.
I only lasted one pathetic minute before I was groping for the whiskey bottle I knew was close to hand. The alcohol was so cheap it scoured my throat raw, but at least it dulled my senses.
Not enough, of course. It had ceased to be enough ever since my mind had decided it needed to throw echoes of another person’s life across my reality. Ever since Simon’s presence had pushed me into scraping at those mental walls, ever since Checker’s prodding had nudged at the cracks in them, ever since Dawna Polk had broken down any protection from my past I’d once had.
Fortunately, I had other things in this apartment as well.
Part of me wished mixing pills and alcohol was more dangerous for me. It might have helped to feel a touch of recklessness. But, I reminded myself, I didn’t want to take too much anyway—after all, within a few hours I might have to be able to function well enough to fight again. God help me, but an ugly, selfish bit in the back of my self-pity hoped enough would go wrong in LA that I’d have to be.
At least the cocktail finally knocked me into fitful unconsciousness. My last thought before blacking out was that maybe I was sauced enough not to dream, but I knew it was only a false hope. Especially as my subconscious had more and more to choose from.
Of course, of all my myriad problems, the one that invaded my dreams that night had to be Simon.
Some part of me pushed against his image, even asleep, but he’d been stalking my unconscious mind for years and apparently wasn’t about to stop. Only now his face was clearer, and instead of disorganized glimpses of memory, my nightmares had become the future, a future in which he helped me.…
We sat by a window, the surf crashing in the distance outside.
“You have to,” he said. “You have to let me.”
“No,” I answered. The intonation wasn’t my own. “No, I don’t want to—”
“This is the only way.” His face was close. Uncomfortably close. His voice hitched.
He was crying, for some reason.
“You’re wrong,” I said. “It can’t be the only way. It can’t.” I sounded like I was pleading, and hated my dream-self for giving him the satisfaction. Why would I do such a thing?
“I’m so sorry,” Simon whispered, and reached for me.
No—
I screamed. The scream went on forever, echoing through time, consuming me from the inside out. I blacked out and dissolved, every sense of self crushing to nothing. I tried to hang on, to cling, to stay, but it was no use.
I broke into pieces.
Melted away.
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.
Someone rapped loudly on my door.
My hand had shot up with the reassuring grip of my Colt against my palm before I’d fully registered the sound. I got up quietly, twitching to the side just in case. “Who’s there?”
“Miss Russell? It’s Sonya Halliday.”
“Who?”
“Professor Sonya Halliday. Arthur’s friend.”
> I marched over and yanked open the door. “I know who you are. What the hell are you doing here?”
Sonya Halliday was a tall, African American woman whose uniform of choice included sharp skirts and rimless spectacles, and she was, to my everlasting annoyance, a mathematician. A real one, unlike me. If Arthur had told me he was childhood friends with a math professor back when we first met, I probably would have walked out of his life and never looked back. Of course, I had a sneaking suspicion that he might not have put up with me in the first place if I hadn’t reminded him of her.
Unfortunately, being a computational theorist meant Halliday had cottoned on to how not-normal my abilities were, but I’d studiously avoided all her prior attempts at calling me to talk about research.
“I always so enjoy your eloquence,” Halliday said now, with disturbing calm. “You humiliated three of my colleagues and signed my name to it. Did you really forget?” Completely ignoring the fact that I was holding a gun, she thrust a piece of paper in my face.
Right. My ill-advised little mathematical commenting spree right before this job had started. This job that had obligated me to the whole world, that had worked but made me a target, that had succeeded but caused Rio to try to smash an entire metropolitan area if I didn’t reverse it.
And Arthur’s friend wanted to talk to me about math. It was all too absurd.
“I was right,” I said. “They were wrong. Take the credit for it; I don’t care. Now go away.”
“I don’t want credit. I want you to sit down and go through the proof with me. I’ve asked you before to collaborate—”
“And I said no.” I tried to shut the door in her face, but she showed an astonishing lack of self-preservation and pushed into the gap. “Get out or I’ll hurt you.”
She just pushed in further. “You more than said no! You spat on the idea—and now you upend all of mathematics and sign my name to it? Do you realize what you’ve done? Two of the authors of that paper are Fields Medal winners, and they’re claiming it’s still correct. Half the math world doesn’t even fully understand what you were trying to say, including me, which I will freely admit because modern algebra isn’t even my field—”
“And what do you want me to do? Go beat them into submission?”
“I want you to either walk me through it, or, preferably, sign your own name to it and tell these idiots who you really are!”
The sentence rang in the musty air of my decrepit living room. Like something dangerous.
Something deadly.
Who you really are.
“What did you say?” My lips barely formed the words. I tried to move away from her, but my body had gone thick and slow, as if my blood had turned to clay.
“I don’t care how young you were; you still have credibility in this field,” Halliday went on, oblivious. “Your proofs—people remember. You can pass things through me if you want, or if you decide to keep staying out of it all that’s your decision even though I think it’s a tragic waste—but don’t you dare try to make me the L’Hôpital to your Bernoulli.”
I barely heard the last of her words as memory forcefully unraveled itself.
“Think of the wealth and fame we could claim.” The man spoke from behind me, about me, but I ignored him. My pen flew over the paper, unspooling pseudocode. “The technological possibilities alone. We could be rich.”
“We could,” answered a woman. “But this will be better.”
My hip hit the table and I almost fell. I’d stumbled back, into the room. The planes of reality slid and closed inward, the edges of my vision darkening.
“Miss Russell?” Halliday stepped over hastily and reached out, but her hand hovered by my elbow as if she were afraid to touch me. “Miss Russell, are you all right?”
“I see you’ve managed to keep them alive. Are they still human?”
“More than human,” the same woman answered. “Superhuman, if you will.”
“I, uh—” Halliday’s grip was on my arm now, helping me fall into a chair. She fumbled out a mobile phone. “I’ll call Arthur. Or—do you need an ambulance? Are you ill?”
“No.” I lashed out a hand. Her mobile clattered against the opposite wall in the sharp angles of gravity and elastic collisions.
“I didn’t mean to— I never brought this up because I thought it might be a sensitive, I mean, I didn’t know why you— I haven’t told anyone.”
She was so earnest.
“Are you in some kind of danger?” Halliday asked.
“You don’t know what it is anymore, to be in danger,” someone taunted me.
Every neuron, every cell, every enzyme and protein receptor and biochemical nuance—they sparked in a million interactions, and I could feel every one. Everything. I controlled it all.
“Precious. Not all.”
A spasm bubbled up from my diaphragm, a hiccupping laugh, strangling me until I couldn’t breathe.
“Miss Russell?”
The hysterical laughter wouldn’t stop, shaking me from skull to knees. I hung on to the edge of the table so I wouldn’t slide off the world.
“All this time…” I panted. “You knew. All. This. Time…”
Halliday straightened with a slight frown. “It would be more accurate to say I only suspected, but the pool of people with your caliber of mathematical ability is a vanishingly small group. I didn’t think you were seriously trying to hide it from me.” She’d started to sound like someone who’d opened the door to a washroom and found a house of mirrors instead. “Are you telling me—does no one else know?”
For some reason, that struck me as even funnier. “No one knows,” I gasped out between the hyperventilating giggles. “No one at all. Null set. Empty. Until … until you.”
Not many other people would have gotten what I meant by that, but Halliday’s eyes widened. “Are you saying— Wait a minute. Are you saying you lost your—your own identity? You have some sort of amnesia?”
“The null set’s not right,” I babbled on. “There’s Rio, and fucking Simon, and you and apparently everyone else with a cursory understanding of anything above calculus, so really it’s everyone, the set of all sets, except they can’t be members of their own fucking selves—”
I wasn’t even making sense anymore. A living Russell’s paradox. Someone who had less access to her own history than a complete stranger.
twenty-one
“I’M SORRY,” Halliday kept trying to say. “If I’d known … I didn’t know you’d lost your memory—”
“Neither did I.” I shoved back from the table and almost fell. My hysterical laughter had cut off as abruptly as it had come, hamstringing me into a blackening morass in its wake. “I have to go.”
“You don’t want me to tell you—?”
“No. 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.
The jumbled chunks collapsed against my reality, faster and faster, strobing my senses with faces and colors and remnants of excitement or despair. I pushed past Halliday and out of the room, then out of the building. Onto the street, where the over-bright sun stabbed me in the eyes. Passing pedestrians shied away from me.
We have to run.
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—police? Hired security? I ducked between buildings and cut into a park. 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 b
uildings. 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.
She has to believe me. It was Simon’s voice. She has to believe until we’re done—
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, something babbled inside of me. “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.
The last voice I recognized as mine. It dizzied me, like looking into a mirror of a mirror of a mirror.
“Halliday—she’s got to be wrong,” I said to Arthur. The sentence gnarled hoarse in my throat. “She could still be wrong. Checker couldn’t find—he didn’t find anything, he would have found something, found that, if—if what she said—”
“Can’t find what’s been erased, but Sonya, she’s 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.
