Null Set

by S. L. Huang

  “I was someone else, wasn’t I?” My throat closed. “I was a— I was somebody, and you destroyed her. You killed her, and she didn’t want to, she didn’t want to go.…”

  Simon was breathing raggedly. “You have to understand—”

  “I can feel her.” Suddenly everything made sense, too much sense, stampeding through my head like it wanted to take me over. “She wants to come back. You killed her and she didn’t want to die, and now she wants to come back.”

  “Not her, Cassandra, you. You! We were saving your life!”

  “No! You weren’t!” Certainty surged in me, the certainty of voice and memory and knowledge creeping through into my own goddamn brain. “You killed her, and you wiped her brain, and you made me on top of it. Don’t tell me I’m not fucking remembering it right, because I am.”

  “You what?” Checker was leaning forward in his chair as if he were about to physically throttle Simon. I’d never heard him sound so dangerous. “You overwrote her like a fucking hard drive? You utter piece of shit—”

  “Stop!” I thrust out a hand, my other one cradling my forehead as if it could keep my brain from fracturing.

  Waves crashing—

  Glass breaking—

  Wood splintering—

  “Thank you.” Simon ran a hand through his hair and gestured limply at Checker. “He doesn’t understand. I’m trying to explain; we had to. You were—it was killing you, and I had to do it, I had to save you—”

  “Shut up.” I took a step forward, putting Checker behind me. “I didn’t tell Checker to stay out of this because he’s wrong. He’s not. But this is between you and me.”

  The certainty in Simon’s face faltered.

  “You erased my memories.”

  “To save your life! It was the hardest thing I ever did!”

  “You?” My mouth twisted, going crooked and ugly. “The hardest thing you ever did? Please, try to convince me this is about you. I’m just rabid to hear it. Go on, try.”

  “That’s not what I…” His dark skin went paler, the color draining from behind it and leaving it brown parchment. “Don’t you get it? You were going to die!”

  “Oh, I get it. You did what you thought was best.” I was biting out the words, each a sarcasm-coated pill. My voice had started trembling around the edges. “You went into my head and you took the most important parts of me and you want me to thank you.”

  “Did she even get a say in it?” said Checker from behind me.

  “I told you, stay out of this,” I snapped at him without turning around. I stayed focused on Simon. “Whether or not you asked to blank out everything I was—” I stopped. Simon’s features had gone tense and taut as if some too-large emotion were trying to burst through; he folded his lips together deliberately and looked away from me. “Fuck you. You didn’t ask me, did you.”

  “I did!” he insisted. He sniffed. “I did—I tried to convince you. It was the only way! You said, you kept saying that you—it would mean forgetting me, never seeing me again, forgetting us, and you said you couldn’t bear that. We were in love, Cassandra, do you understand?” He was blinking furiously against tears; they spilled over and slid down his cheeks and over his jaw, dripping onto his collar. “You wanted to keep on going together until you destroyed yourself and died, and I couldn’t watch you do that! Even though it meant losing you. Even though it meant going into your thoughts when I had told myself I would never—when I had promised—and even when I knew it meant I would never be able to see you again, that seeing me might remind you—” His voice broke. “I gave up everything I had told myself I stood for, I broke every rule I had, I gave up you—because I had to save you. Even if it meant I lost everything!”

  I slugged him.

  The punch was so fast he never saw it coming; his head snapped halfway around and yanked his body after it. He staggered and fell against Checker’s couch.

  “You lost everything?” I cried. “You?”

  He cowered away from me. “I’m trying to explain!”

  “And I don’t like your explanation.” I crossed my arms, keeping my fists trapped in my armpits. I wanted to do a lot more than sock him one.

  We were in love, he’d said, as if he’d expected the words to break me. As if he had some claim on me.

  Instead, it only cemented my revulsion.

  He’s a challenge, giggled the ghost in my head. I like challenges much more than I like men.

  I scrabbled to cling to my fury, clawing to keep myself in the present. “You keep bleating that you did this for my own good,” I said to Simon. “You know who else says that? Dawna Polk.”

  He drew into himself, hunching down and leaning on the arm of Checker’s couch like it was holding him up.

  “You took everything I was. Everything.” He had been the one to take the math from me. Not Pithica or Halberd or whoever else lurked behind me. Simon.

  I didn’t know how I was certain, but I was. My fractured memory knew.

  “You took everything, because you thought it was right. And you stand here, and you whine about how painful it was for you, and you tell me the only reason I wasn’t fully on board with it was that I was so in love I needed a few more minutes of your magnificence—that’s the only reason my former self would have for not having her personality erased, is that it? I’m sure she had no other objection at all.” My voice rose, cracking over the space between us. “You’re a raging egotist, you know that? And whoever I used to be, you murdered her.”

  “Vala would have understood,” he mumbled. His shoulders shook. “We were in love. I did it for her.”

  “God save us all from your brand of love,” I said.

  Of everything I’d said, that was what defeated him. He hugged his arms around his chest, shrinking into himself.

  “Get out,” I said. “I never want to lay eyes on you again.”

  He half turned back to me, like he wanted to argue. But then he looked at my face, and whatever his psychic ability saw there, it made him curl back and close himself away and stumble for the door without another word.

  I sank down on the couch and dropped my head into my hands. Faces crossed and blurred, irising in and out of darkness—a tired older woman, Simon, a girl who looked like me but wasn’t, Simon, a scarred woman in a white coat, Simon …

  Valarmathi. Be polite.

  I don’t like being touched, but then, you don’t like touching people.

  It works, right? Ignore everyone else.

  Valarmathi might get her wish and come back to life. Or maybe she’d kill us both in trying. I wasn’t sure she even existed anymore—but then, I wasn’t sure I did, either.

  “Hey,” Checker said. He’d come over next to me.

  I didn’t answer.

  He moved a hand as if he were going to reach out, and then thought better of it. “Do you want to talk—”

  “No.”

  “Okay.”

  I squeezed my hands against my face until it hurt, as if I could hold myself together. I thought about the shattered bits of memory and emotion that belonged to a dead woman, the pieces of feeling that I now knew echoed from someone who hadn’t wanted to leave. And the life that had taken her place, my own half-life, bereft of any real meaning … even the proofs I’d tried lay impotent, dangling threads of elegance I knew had to mean something, but didn’t.

  Simon had no idea what he had taken from me.

  Even worse, I only existed because of his clumsy attempts at playing God. Valarmathi and Cas Russell were completely different people. Did that mean I owed every part of who I was to Simon?

  The question festered in me, turning me inside out and making me question every part of who I was, and I hated it, because nobody except me should have had the slightest claim on myself.

  “Do you want to be alone?” asked Checker.

  Even if he left I wouldn’t be alone. Valarmathi lurked in the shadows, mocking, making me wonder if I wasn’t a creature born entirely of Simon’s o
wn making. I thought about Rio and his belief in a deity who had brought all of creation into being, a God responsible for who we all were at our cores. Some being who had made us. How could he believe in something so violating?

  Checker moved his chair a little closer to me and sat back, his hands relaxed in his lap.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  We sat that way for a long time.

  twenty-three

  I STAYED at Checker’s place that night. I didn’t even ask—he ordered in food and brought some sheets and blankets out to the living room to stack beside me on the couch. I didn’t say anything, but I was grateful.

  Arthur came and joined us late in the evening. I got the sense he already knew what had happened—Checker had asked me quietly if it was okay if Arthur knew, and now I belatedly connected that when I’d seen him on a tablet he must have been sending an email version.

  That had been considerate of him. I didn’t want to relive it, even by hearing someone else relay things.

  “How are you feeling, Russell?” Arthur asked, sitting down next to me.

  “Losing it,” I said baldly. There was no use putting up a front anymore.

  Valarmathi snickered.

  “He erased me,” I whispered. “He…”

  Arthur put a hand on my back, gently supportive.

  “And Rio knew.” He had to have.

  A girl my age tugged at me, laughing. Somehow I knew she’d be dead by morning, that I’d wake and trip over her corpse.

  I dug my hands into my thighs hard enough to hurt. “I’m living in someone else’s body. I don’t even know if I’m a real person.”

  “Hey,” Arthur said sharply. “Stop that talk now. Doesn’t matter what they did to you, you got the same worth and value as anyone else.”

  “Even the woman whose life I stole?”

  “Wasn’t your doing,” Arthur said.

  “Sure. After all, I didn’t exist when they killed her, did I?”

  “Cas…” Checker said, but he didn’t seem to know what to say after that.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said. After all, nothing had changed, had it? I was still going to go insane and die, unless I let Simon violate me, again. He and Rio hadn’t lied about that; my own mind was bone-certain.

  And Rio was still going to tear Los Angeles apart at the seams if I didn’t do something to stop it.

  Checker and Arthur didn’t say anything. Somehow it was comforting, that they offered only weighty silence instead of platitudes.

  “I don’t want to die,” I said.

  Arthur’s hand squeezed my shoulder, hard.

  “I’m—I’m not trying to be the false-hope guy,” Checker said, “but maybe there’s still a third option. Something we haven’t thought of.”

  “Yeah,” I said unconvincingly.

  “Your vitals are not improving,” a clinical voice informed me. “The current course is unsustainable.”

  I flexed my fingers against my palms, skin singing. “What will it take for you not to inform them?”

  My lungs contorted in on themselves, and my breathing wobbled like I’d forgotten how. “If there is a third option, it’s got a deadline,” I got out. “And I don’t think it’s a very long one.”

  Arthur squeezed my shoulder again.

  We sat in silence. My body felt like it was vibrating along every seam, my skin too tight, the air too shallow, my brain squeezing and popping against my skull until it wanted to fracture in oozing cracks.

  After a minute, Arthur said, “If it’s a psychic you need, maybe more of ’em are out there. We met two already.”

  “One not connected to Pithica?” I said hoarsely. “Good luck.”

  “It’s worth a try,” Checker put in, reaching for his tablet, but I could tell he was lying. There was no way we’d find another telepath to help me.

  “Maybe we should talk to Rio,” Arthur said. “He knows this world, seems to me.”

  In all my life, I never would have expected a solution like that to be coming from Arthur. “I’ll give it a shot,” I said. In spite of everything, I still trusted Rio. He wouldn’t have supported Simon’s decision to … delete me. The only reason he even talked to Simon seemed to be in an effort to keep me from dying, and it wasn’t like he was wrong about that.

  I was viciously glad to remember how he’d beaten up Simon in the warehouse. Rio was still on my side. In this, at least.

  Simon’s voice shouted, dictating, insisting—

  “No,” said Rio, with a ringing flatness that cut off every possible argument.

  I wrenched myself away from the abyss so ruthlessly it felt like something tore.

  “Russell?” Arthur said softly.

  “I shouldn’t exist at all. He should have let her die.”

  “I—um, not in any way excusing what happened to you, but—selfishly, I’m kind of glad you do,” Checker said, shrugging a little. “Exist, that is.”

  “Same,” said Arthur.

  I sucked in a breath. “Are you sure about that? I’m pretty sure I’m more trouble than I’m worth.”

  “You have saved both of our lives.” Checker gave me a lopsided smile. “So, you know. I wouldn’t write you off so quickly.”

  “Eh…” Arthur said, and despite everything, half a laugh bubbled up my throat.

  They sat with me, both of them, until I fell asleep on Checker’s couch. I woke up in darkness, covered in a blanket, and knew what I had to do.

  * * *

  JACOB POURDRY awoke with my gun in his face. Even in the dead of night, tousled with sleep, he had the look of an animated Prince Charming—slick and handsome with conniving eyes and a con man’s grin.

  “You got past my security,” he said. He didn’t seem concerned.

  “Hey, Vance told me you were smart,” I said. “I woke you up because I wanted you to know. I’m about to kill you.”

  “I could use someone like you.” He gave me a lazy half smile. “How much will it take?”

  “No one’s ever told you no, have they?” I said.

  “Not yet.” He sat up. “How much?”

  I shot him in the knee.

  The inhuman squeal that ripped out of him as he went down was extremely satisfying. I raised my Colt back up and pointed it at his left eye.

  “Please!” He cringed behind his hands, the confidence finally gone. With his skin pale and tight with pain and the bed spattered with blood, he suddenly looked so young. Like a boy who’d only wanted to play a game. “Whatever you want, just tell me, whatever—”

  “I wanted you not to traffic in kids,” I said. “I’m going to kill you now. I’m telling you so you have a few seconds of abject self-loathing to contemplate the fact that you lost.”

  He tried to plead through the sobbing.

  “Bye,” I said, and shot him.

  I was Los Angeles’s avenging angel.

  I pulled out my phone and called Yamamoto. “I just shot Jacob Pourdry,” I said. “You call everyone else and tell them. Anyone makes a move, they join him. You know how good I am, Taku. I am not fucking around, and I am not going to let this city devolve into a war. If I have to clean up Los Angeles by wiping all of you from the face of the planet, I will fucking do it.”

  “Cassu-san—”

  I hung up on him.

  Vengeance! someone cackled, and I wasn’t sure whose voice it was.

  I thought back through everybody who had been at Yamamoto’s little meeting. Maybe I should pay them all a visit myself, just so they knew I could.

  * * *

  MALCOLM WAS the only one who got the drop on me. In the ensuing fight he threw me through a plate-glass door. The shattering panes burst around me along crack patterns that rained data, forking and fracturing, useless numerical constants spraying the night with conclusions about strength and impact. I let it all shower down around me as if in slow motion and regretted nothing.

  “You got one minute, then I let the dogs loose,” Malcolm called from inside th
e estate house I’d tracked him to. A sawed-off was dead-steady in his hands. “Now get out.”

  * * *

  RIO MET me at the same diner we’d eaten at before. He raised an eyebrow at the blood and dirt streaking my clothes and skin.

  “Your move,” I said.

  The words reverberated through when my lips had said them a dozen, a hundred other times, over gameboards or in smoky gambling dens or holding a knife to someone’s throat over a thousand-foot drop.

  I hitched a bit as I turned to go.

  “Cas,” Rio said.

  I forced my feet to move. Started walking away.

  “Cas,” Rio called again. “I have spoken with Simon.”

  I froze.

  twenty-four

  “I WOULD kill him for his sins, if you did not need him,” Rio informed me.

  I closed my eyes. “I’m not going to let him help me. It’s off the table.”

  “All right.”

  I remembered what Arthur had suggested and reluctantly turned back to face him. “Do you … do you know of anyone else?”

  “Another with his abilities, you mean?” Rio asked. “Yes. But all would be even less advisable to invite into your life.”

  So there were others.

  “Simon attempts to sin no more. It does not excuse him, but the Lord is forgiving. More so than I.”

  “And I,” I said.

  “Understood.” He stepped closer to me, and his voice went quieter. “Cas. Stop this.”

  I blew out a breath that was almost a laugh, and didn’t dignify that with a response.

  “You must know. This is not the way.”

  “I don’t know anything, Rio,” I said. “I don’t even know who I am. And hey, I’m dying.” My lips twisted into a devil’s grin. “Once I’m gone, the secret of what I’ve done to LA dies with me, no matter how many innocent people you kill. I just have to wait you out.”

  “Cas.” Rio said my name with as much anguish as I supposed someone like him was capable of.

  “There won’t be any point once I’m dead or insane,” I said. “You’ll just be helping more people get hurt, and I know you won’t want that, so you’ll stop. LA will go on and be better, and so maybe all this is okay.”