Null Set

by S. L. Huang

  “Mathematics will never know what hit it. If our only limitation is time—”

  “Ah, but that’s not the useful part.”

  Were they the same people who had been talking in my head before? The same ones who’d been watching me as if I was their prize livestock? Their pet mathematician? I couldn’t remember.

  “Well, Sonya, she thinks maybe you were one once,” said Arthur. “She tells me—more’n once before, she’s told me I don’t get it. She says what you can do, that it isn’t … I think the word ‘impossible’ might’ve come up.”

  “I’ll take that,” I said, trying for normalcy and belly flopping.

  “Anyhow. Just now, when she called, she explained—” Arthur cleared his throat. “Said one day something reminded her of a child prodigy she’d heard of. Ten, fifteen years ago. Kid was writing papers at eleven years old. Like a Mozart or someone.”

  Or Gauss, for a more relevant example. “Well, that’s not me,” I said. Relief bubbled through me, an almost hysterical reversal of emotion. “I wasn’t a child prodigy. She got it wrong.”

  “Russell,” Arthur said. “How do you know?”

  I gazed up and up, from the height of a child, as a man’s silhouette filled the doorway.

  “Introduce me to your tutors?”

  A sudden ringing filled my head, like someone had bashed a gong, a vibrating clang. “No—no. It doesn’t make sense. It’s—it’s stupid. I might not know who I am, but I’m not that.” Child prodigies were people you read about in the news or in biographies: improbable savants who would shine so brightly they’d blind the world before they hit puberty. Reconciling that idea with the violent, practical brutality of my own life—it didn’t compute.

  Halliday was wrong.

  Talent? It’s only logic, sang a child. Other people are dumb.

  “She said it was a Bahraini girl,” Arthur continued, inexorable. “Had the math world all a-buzz. Sonya read the papers with everyone else, couldn’t wait to see what the gal did when she grew up. Then the girl drops off the face of things. Sonya said she forgot about it altogether, maybe mentioned it once in a while with colleagues, idle curiosity. And she says the next time this got brought up in passing, after she met you—she said she knew, all of a sudden.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “Yeah, gut feeling. That’s never wrong.”

  Arthur ignored my sarcasm. “She went and did some research. The girl, seems she dropped off the planet when she was still just a kid. Disappeared. Sonya poked more and … well, party line is the girl went off to some boarding school and then died a few years later, but Sonya didn’t believe it. She always figured … well, she figured you were keeping your silence for a reason, ’s why she never mentioned it to us. And Checker…” Arthur hesitated.

  How’s that fancy school of yours?

  Fine.

  “Just now Checker, as soon as he heard, he looked it all up, and he says Sonya’s onto something, that those records, they’re all fishy. Faked files, not a lot, just fishy enough that—he thinks she could be right.”

  “She’s not,” I said.

  “Russell, if she is … it’s not just about knowing your name. If she’s right, then … then you got a mother and sister, still alive.”

  All you do is study!

  Because I’m smarter than you are.

  “She’s not right,” I said again, louder.

  “We could look them up,” suggested Arthur, very softly. “See for sure—”

  “No.”

  “You could have family out there. Can’t ignore that.”

  The same man again, in a suit and a broad-brimmed hat, his face still in shadow, briefcase in hand—tall, so tall, like the giants in stories, his voice low and gravelly—“Is this your daughter?”

  “Watch me,” I spat out, loudly enough to drown out the voices in my head. “I’m very good at ignoring things.”

  “Russell—”

  “LA’s going to go nuclear.”

  I hadn’t meant to say it. Hadn’t decided yet whether I should share.

  “Say what?” Arthur asked.

  “It’s Rio.” The words tumbled out, misshapen and desperate. “Like you said. He’s trying to stop the brain entrainment. He … he’s setting up the city to implode.”

  I updated him on what I’d learned since we’d last seen each other. I left out the part about killing Miguel and his friends.

  Left out how I’d shot Vance, too.

  “Well,” Arthur said, when I’d run out of words. “What are we gonna do about it?”

  I didn’t think I’d ever been so grateful to him.

  The alcohol was metabolizing out of my system, but I was starting to get my focus back. There was a next step here—brainstorming with Arthur and Checker and Pilar, and solving this. We’d done it before. We could do it again.

  My fingers touched skin, pale and soft, and so fragile. Human frailty. I would make him hurt for this, take vengeance for them as no one had done for me.

  How to start? Mathematics gave me so many options.

  I came back to myself. My hands were over my face, and my breath hitched raggedly against them.

  “Hey. Hey, Russell. You okay?”

  “I think I’m losing my mind,” I whispered. I couldn’t solve anything if my brain went out from under me. I needed my brain. Without it …

  Oh, Jesus. Without it, I was going to lose.

  This couldn’t be what defeated me. For fuck’s sake, I should be able to handle a few scary memories. I was going to pieces over nothing more than the shadow of a nightmare.

  A man screamed, a wild, unearthly sound—

  I jerked.

  My hands pressed against my eyes, my fingers a crisscrossing spiderweb trying to keep my brain inside my skull, keep me sane. Useless.

  “Tell me,” Arthur said gently.

  “They’re pushing me out,” I mumbled. “The memories. Like I’m going to wake up one morning and be someone else, someone who is—” My jaw clenched so hard it locked; I pried it back open. “I’m not that person. Whoever she is. I can feel her. She’s—she’s not me, Arthur. I know it sounds crazy, but I swear it’s true. And I keep—I keep losing track.…” My grip on reality was slipping; I would dissolve into the abyss and be nothing but scattered atoms, emptiness.…

  I didn’t want to go. Didn’t want to die.

  Arthur moved closer to me and wrapped an arm around my shoulders, pulling my head against his shoulder the way a father might with his child.

  I thought about what Checker had said, that Arthur had an obsession with fixing people. I decided I didn’t care. Fuck, our current conflict notwithstanding, I considered myself Rio’s friend and had for years, and he’d never pretended his concern for my welfare extended an inch beyond religious obligation. People had all sorts of reasons for helping each other. It didn’t change anything.

  In fact, it made me feel better about the logic of it all to think Arthur might have a fixation with hard-luck cases as one of his axioms. His concern for me made a lot more sense that way.

  I leaned my forehead against his shoulder. The fabric of the button-down he wore was slightly rough, like canvas, and smelled of clean sweat and old leather.

  “You have twenty-three seconds,” said a voice, and I jumped—

  Arthur felt me flinch.

  “I don’t like to say it,” he said softly, “But maybe … if you got no other options … this Simon guy, he might be able to help you.”

  My stomach twisted like I wanted to be sick.

  “I don’t know,” Arthur admitted. “God knows I understand why you don’t want to talk to him. But this … might be he’s the one you need.” He sounded despondent, as if it were his fault I had no other option. “He says he won’t do anything you don’t want him to, right?”

  “And you believe him?”

  I felt Arthur shrug slightly. “He could’ve already, and he didn’t. Guess that’s a point in his favor.”

  I pulled uprig
ht and sat back against the wall. “It doesn’t matter. Even if he got a signed agreement from me every other fucking second—it doesn’t matter.” The fear loomed, a black, ugly cloud, and I struggled to confine it to words, to articulate it so Arthur could understand. “I’d be letting him into my brain. Letting him. There’s no way I can know what the fallout from that could be—there’s no way I could ever, possibly, in a million years, understand it well enough to say I’m okay with it. And what if he does something accidentally? Or that he thinks is the right thing, and…” The words felt disconnected, floundering, islands of meaning with no continuity between them.

  “I get that,” said Arthur, and Jesus, it sounded like he did.

  “Too many variables,” I murmured.

  “Thing is … what if it’s the only way?”

  The impending nightmare settled on me like a thousand dusty cobwebs, stifling. Doing nothing, continuing on, descending into madness until I lost myself—it wasn’t an option, was it? Especially if I wanted to be functional to do what I really needed to, to save the city I’d signed up for protecting only to lead it toward its downfall.

  Or even if I only wanted to save myself.

  Then why did part of me still want to cling to that suicidal dive instead of submitting to Simon?

  “Sometimes a thing’s needed,” Arthur said. “Like what we got going right now in LA, nudging people’s brain waves. A little help isn’t always a bad thing. Not even for you.”

  I tensed away from him. I didn’t want to think about Simon helping me as being in any way parallel to the brain entrainment. One was a benign crime-fighting measure; the other was the most personal violation.

  What I was doing wasn’t the same. Not the same thing at all.

  But what Arthur had said … sometimes a thing was necessary.

  I hated it when he had a point.

  “I can be there, if you want,” Arthur continued. “Make sure nothing goes wrong, or happens on accident. If this guy’s aboveboard, he isn’t going to be throwing anything my way, right?”

  Rio was the more logical choice, given his immunity, but I didn’t want to see him right now. I twitched my head in something like a nod.

  “You got a number for Simon?” Arthur asked gently.

  I didn’t, but I was more than certain Rio would send him to meet me, even if he was currently trying to screw me over in every other way.

  “We’re gonna get you taken care of, Russell,” Arthur said. “And then we’re gonna go and fix the rest of it.”

  I let him help me up.

  I should have known it would never be that easy.

  twenty-two

  ARTHUR GOT a call as he was helping me back to his car.

  “Hello? Justin, hey, did you get her—” He listened for a long minute. “Easy, kid. Uh—I’ll be there as soon as I can, but it might be a few minutes, I got someone else with an emergency right now. Can you call—”

  “Go,” I said. “It’s okay.” I was a fucking adult. I appreciated Arthur trying to support me, but I’d feel worse than stupid if he tried to treat me like spun glass above kids who actually needed him.

  If Katrina and Justin had gotten stuck in a bad place, I could only hope that Checker’s optimism was true, and that what we had done would make it easier for them to get out of it. I could feel good about that, at least.

  Arthur covered the phone with a hand to turn to me. “I’m not okay with you going to this guy alone anyway, Russell. Just in case, you know? Even if you feel like you gotta do this, you should have someone with you.”

  “I’ll call Checker, then,” I said wearily. “Go take care of your kids.”

  He nodded reluctantly and spoke back into the phone to tell Justin he’d be there in half an hour, which I thought was ridiculously optimistic for the time of day no matter where he was going, but whatever. Then he insisted on calling Checker himself and waiting with me while I texted Rio. He probably suspected I would have chickened out otherwise.

  He might have been right.

  Checker told me to come back to his place—Simon already knew where it was, after all, and there was no point in burning the safe house Checker and Pilar had been staying at. I drove to Van Nuys alone like I was driving to the gallows. As I walked inside, I couldn’t help swiveling my head, taking in the trees and grass, the slight scent of smoke from someone’s barbecue … the layers of mathematical data edging every stone and corner, shimmering with measurements and reflection coefficients, curvatures and spatial relations.

  I couldn’t help feeling like I’d never see it again. Like this was the end.

  My lungs twisted tight in my chest. I walked up to Checker’s door and knocked.

  He was the one who opened it. I was grateful for that, and that he didn’t say anything really, just let me come inside. Simon was already there, sitting on the edge of the couch.

  “So how does this work?” I said.

  “It’s nothing … invasive. You don’t have to worry.” Simon gestured, and I forced myself to sink down across from him. He half raised his hands as if he were about to lean forward and touch me, but thought better of it. “I’m just going to talk to you, and have you talk back. That’s all, I promise. You’ll be aware through all of it.”

  Cassandra? Talk to me. Talk to me!

  I tried to shake the apparitions away. “I want to know what you’re doing,” I said to Simon. “Every step of the way. I want to know when you’re influencing me.”

  “I … I can do that. It will be a little less effective, but I can, if you want me to.”

  “I don’t care if it’s less effective,” I said. “Tell me.”

  “All right.”

  “Are you going to bring her memory back?” Checker asked.

  The sun stabbing through clouds onto the cobblestones, the scent of roasted nuts and blood—I clenched my teeth, working to anchor myself.

  “No.” Simon was studying me worriedly. He also looked faintly annoyed Checker was there and talking, but I didn’t give a fuck. “Cas, believe it or not, the amnesia is protecting you. You had some—uh—some trauma—”

  “That you can’t tell me about, I get it,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “I could reverse your memory loss, but it might—it would kill you.”

  “Peachy,” I said. “So this is just about shoring up whatever Dawna did to me.”

  He shifted a little. “Essentially. I’m afraid that will mean reinforcing your—um—your mental blocks.”

  “You mean making sure I can’t remember anything.”

  “I’m sorry.” He looked it, too, his face drawn and strained. “I wish I could do more.”

  I took a breath. Tried to be mature about it. If I was honest with myself, I wanted nothing more than to keep my prior self safely behind thick black walls, forever. If Simon had said we were going to let her out, I wasn’t sure I could have gone through with it. Whatever Pithica had done to me—whatever anyone had done to me, back in the distant past—I was better off not remembering.

  The status quo was much preferable. Well, the status quo without going mad and dying.

  “Are you ready?” Simon asked.

  “Fuck you,” I said. “Of course not.”

  His jaw worked a little. “I, I won’t start until you feel—”

  “Simon, I swear to God, if you don’t get this over with—”

  “Right, all right, I just wanted to make sure.” His breath hitched. It occurred to me that this seemed to be as unhappy a process for him as it was for me, and took some vindictive pleasure in it. “Try to relax,” he said.

  “Fat chance of that,” I muttered.

  Simon leaned forward.

  Simon leaned forward—

  My vision doubled, two versions of the man in front of me staring earnestly into my eyes. I recognized the second version from my dream, the nightmare in which every fear had coalesced. But this time I noticed he looked younger—

  “No,” I said. “No—”

/>   No—

  “I have to.” Tears flooded his cheeks, his expression stretched with pain. “I have to—we have to—”

  He reached for me, and resistance folded in my brain with a dying whimper, even as I fought to cling to it, fought to live … I didn’t want to go. Didn’t want to die.

  “I’m sorry,” Simon wept, “I’m so sorry.…”

  And I ceased to want anything at all.

  I jerked back and up, stumbling to stand, stumbling away.

  “Cas?” Checker’s voice.

  I’m sorry, Vala.

  “Cassandra!” Simon leapt to his feet as well.

  “You…” My hand had come up of its own accord, my finger pointed, trembling. “You!”

  “Cassandra—Cas—don’t—”

  “Don’t what? Don’t try to remember? Why, because I’ll know what you did?”

  “Cas!” Checker’s voice again, high with alarm. “Cas, what is it?”

  “Admit it!” I screamed the words, spat them in Simon’s face. “It wasn’t a dream, was it? You—it was real!”

  He won’t be remaking you, Rio had said.

  Rio had lied.

  “This was never about protecting me, was it?” I was hyperventilating. Oh, God. “You telling me to block it all out—not to try—”

  “It was to protect you!” interrupted Simon. “It is. Cassandra, I was not lying, I swear. This will kill you—”

  “This will kill you,” pleaded Simon, somewhere dark and close and far away. “You must let me—it is the only way—”

  The world seesawed.

  “Cas!” Someone grabbed my arm. I shoved him off violently before I realized it had been Checker; he flailed as his chair tilted but managed to catch himself against the wall before he fell. “Cas!”

  “Pithica didn’t take my memory,” I said. “It was you. It was you.”

  Simon’s face was stricken. He didn’t reply.

  The room fell into a silence so complete it was as if all the air had been sucked out of it.

  Checker broke it. “He did what?” he whispered.

  “He’s the one,” I said. “He erased me. Admit it. Admit it!”

  “It was— I had to, we had to.” Simon’s eyes darted desperately between Checker and me. “I can explain—you were dying—”