by S. L. Huang
“Do not do this, Cas.”
“Which? Save LA, or die?”
“Either.”
“That free will you’re so fond of, right?” I said. “My choices. My decision.”
Rio didn’t usually have much expression, but he tensed as if he didn’t want to go forward with what he said next. “Cas, three militia groups arrive tomorrow.”
Of course they did. “You can’t let me fucking have this, can you?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Well, then I’ll fight them, too. And if it doesn’t work, you’ll be stuck with the cleanup.” I started to push past him, but he caught my shoulder very gently.
“Cas.”
I didn’t look up. “This is the only thing I give a damn about right now, Rio. I’m going to keep at it until I can’t anymore. That’s it.”
“So be it,” he said, and let go.
* * *
“THIS IS what life should feel like,” he said, but I needed blood, so we went out and found knives and guns and a crusade. Then we traded riddles until the sun set and I beat him at chess.
Maybe this is your chance to be normal.
I didn’t know you were so good at making jokes.
“Cas. Cas, are you with me?”
I struggled to dig back into reality. “Yeah. What’s going on?”
We were in Checker’s Hole. Now that Pourdry was out of the picture, Checker had moved back home, apparently finally taking my word for it that he didn’t need to worry about Rio.
I wasn’t sure how many days it had been. My sense of time kept eliding the hours, leaving blank chasms and collapsing spans of consciousness. Not more than two weeks had passed, probably—I’d looked at a calendar a few days before and been surprised to find it had only been ten days since I’d thrown out Simon.
Without discussing it, most nights I’d been staying on Checker’s couch. I’d punched him twice when he’d woken me from nightmares. For some reason, he kept doing it.
“Do you want to hear the latest on McCabe’s show?” Checker asked. The various leaders of the militia groups kept popping up as radio guests, under pseudonyms. Three men and two women were the most common ones. We hadn’t yet been able to figure out who they were or where they were camping out in Los Angeles, if they were even basing inside the city limits at all.
The mainstream news shows had started dropping line items on the situation, though they acted like they were reporting on conspiracy theorists rather than reporting on a conspiracy. Small favors.
“Summarize it for me,” I said. “Anything new?”
“They’re convinced it’s the water system,” Checker said. “The way they’re talking … I worry about an attack on the DWP.”
LA was in the middle of a desert. If someone knocked out the Department of Water and Power in a misguided attempt at justice, it would cripple the city. I thought back to when an EMP had fried every circuit in Los Angeles—that had been my fault, too, and a lot of people had died.
If I go back there, I’m going to kill them all.
It was my voice. Or her voice. Valarmathi’s.
“Are they still threatening the government?” I asked, with an effort.
“Honestly, I think the only thing that’s stopping them from marching on City Hall with guns is the brain entrainment,” Checker said. “My stats programs are still all over the place, though. There aren’t enough priors for them to have predictability. And there are some really odd things happening, like the drug numbers.”
“What do you mean, the drug numbers?”
“I’m seeing evidence the various cartels have been hit hard, as you’d expect. But then there’s other data suggesting recreational drug use is up. I mean, a lot of this is drawn from correlative factors, and who knows, those correlations might have been made obsolete for some reason, so I’m not sure if there’s a useful conclusion to be drawn. And I don’t know; if we somehow manage to have higher recreational drug use without the negative impacts of the drug trade, is that necessarily a bad thing, or just neutral? My libertarian soul is inclined to say the latter.”
“Bottom line?”
He flung out his hands. “I don’t know? There’s not really enough firm statistical data to draw solid conclusions on the overall domino effect of secondary and tertiary impacts. We’ll have to wait and see.”
“But the primary effects are still good? The gangs and big criminal organizations are feeling the impact still?”
“Oh, hell, yeah. Did you know Los Angeles has been heretofore known as the gang capital of America? Almost fifteen hundred active criminal gangs with hundreds of thousands of members. I didn’t know that till I started trying to run data on this. That’s staggering.”
“Only if you’re bad at estimation,” I said. It was about in line with what I would have expected. “Have those numbers changed nontrivially now?”
“The jury’s still out until I can get some more solid correlations, but from what I’ve seen so far, I suspect the answer’s going to be ‘yes,’ ‘absolutely,’ and ‘to great effect.’”
So all I had to do was keep them from falling for Rio’s instigation and firing the first shot, at least until that sort of provocation wasn’t worth it to Rio anymore. In other words, until I went insane or died.
I hadn’t told Checker and Arthur that part of my plan.
“This isn’t working,” Simon said. He was crying. He opened the door and left.
I turned to Rio. “Who was that?”
“Cas?” Checker said. “Are you okay?”
“What? Yeah.”
“Did you hear what I just said?” I didn’t know how he made the question as patient as he did.
“No. Go again.”
“Going back to McCabe’s show for a minute, he had someone new come on this last time. Anonymous, again, but from what he was saying I think it was one of the people from Yamamoto’s group.”
“And?” I asked.
“What you’d expect. A lot of threats. A lot of rhetoric. There’s either a movement to join the militia groups and attack the powers that be, or a movement to wage war on them until they leave the city. I wasn’t quite clear on which.”
Either would be bad, and I was sure Rio was masterfully inflaming them in both directions.
I probably shouldn’t have burned my welcome in Yamamoto’s group. Then I might know what was going on.
“Is Rio still trying to get you to…” Checker trailed off.
“To let Simon fuck with me? Yes.”
He opened his mouth, then shut it again and turned back to his monitor.
“Go ahead,” I said, without acrimony. “You want to say I should consider it, don’t you?”
“I…” Checker looked down at his lap. “No. Yes. I don’t know. I get why you won’t. Just…”
He didn’t want to see me die.
“Are you?” Checker asked. “Considering it, at all?”
“No,” I said. “If I’m going to die, I’d rather die as me. Whoever I am now, at least. I’d rather have at least that.”
He nodded, and sniffed a little. “Yeah. Okay.”
He didn’t try to tell me it was possible Simon might not destroy me, this time. Rio had tried to convince me of that, and I’d walked away.
“If you change your mind,” Checker said, carefully, “Arthur suggested…”
“Yeah?” I wasn’t going to change my mind, but any idea might have aspects we could use.
Checker appeared to be trying to figure out how to phrase things. “Well. Rio. He, um. It’s pretty important to him, that you … not die. I mean, it’s pretty important to all of us, but—”
“You’re thinking I might be able to trade,” I said. “Myself for Los Angeles.”
Checker closed his eyes. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
“It’s okay,” I said. I even might have considered it, if I thought it would work. If I was dying anyway, what did it matter how? What did it matter if I got remade entirel
y, if Rio gave up fighting us in exchange?
“You can’t always get your way,” a friend tried to tell me.
“Yes, I can. That’s the problem.”
“Cas?”
I shut my eyes for a moment and breathed through my nose, trying to remember the question. “Rio doesn’t work like that,” I said finally. “He wouldn’t make the trade.”
“He did once,” Checker said. “With Dawna. For your sake.”
He had a point. I’d never understood that, either. Rio’s willingness to trade my safety for the cessation of his violent crusade against Pithica had flown against everything I thought I understood about him—a proof by contradiction that I still couldn’t grasp.
Still, I was pretty sure he’d see this as a different case. After all, not going to Simon was my choice; it wasn’t like someone else was preventing me or threatening me.
“It’s only a thought,” Checker said. “I still want to find … maybe there are other things we can explore. I didn’t know how you’d feel about this, but I was doing research on—well, on conventional medicine.”
“What’s conventional about this?” I said.
“Nothing. But you know, nobody understands the brain very well, at least nobody who’s not one of our resident telepaths. There could be a chance some sort of psychiatric medicine would help you. Though I don’t know how the hell we’d even guess at the dosage, or which meds—”
“I don’t take drugs while I’m working.”
“Cas.”
I sighed. “I’ve … probably already tried most of them.”
“What?”
Did you take your medicine? A thousand voices overlapped over a thousand days.
I pressed my fingers against the desktop, not looking at him, trying to ignore the mental noise. “I’ve kind of experimented with pharmaceuticals. A lot. There were a few times between jobs…” I shrugged. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. Scientific.”
“And what happened?”
“I discovered nothing really worked better than recreational depressants. Alcohol’s a lot more readily available, and usually made things workable, before.”
“God. Cas.”
“Stop feeling sorry for me.”
He cleared his throat. “Can you … um. Can you try any of that now?”
I gave him a half smile. “I don’t think it was ever doing anything more than masking some of the crazy. Work does the same thing, and I’d rather do that, for whatever time…” I didn’t finish, because I didn’t want to upset him.
That didn’t work out for me, either.
twenty-five
RIO AND I had started having dinner every night. It didn’t bother me—in fact, I liked seeing him. I supposed impending death gave me a greater appreciation for everyone I considered a friend.
Even a friend who wasn’t really a friend at all, and was also working against me in two different directions.
“I regret my earlier deception to you,” he told me, at an outside table of a noodle shop. “Simon had informed me anything that might reignite your memory would only accelerate the undesirable effects.”
The sound of thunder, the scent of ink and newsprint.
“He was right,” I admitted to Rio.
“It is why he removed himself from your life after causing you to forget him. I do believe his intent now is to help you remain, not to alter you further.”
Now that I had some memory of it, most of my nightmares featured Simon reaching out, wiping me clean. Scraping out every piece of who I’d been while Valarmathi screamed.
“You don’t understand what he did to me,” I said.
“You are correct. I don’t.” He paused. “He did not prevaricate, however, when he says you would not have survived. I do not know if there might have been some untried way to save your mind, but there was … extreme trauma.”
“So he, what, lobotomized me?” I laughed harshly. “Nothing excuses him, Rio.”
“I did not say it did.”
Silence fell between us for a moment.
“Will you tell me anything more about who she was?” I asked. “And … what happened to us? My sanity’s going anyway; what harm can it do?”
“I will not accelerate the process, Cas.”
I hadn’t figured he would, really. I twirled noodles around my plastic fork.
“Why don’t you want to go?” Simon begged me, somewhere in the past.
“Because I believe in them.”
I squeezed my eyes closed for a moment, tried to get a grip on myself. “Maybe she’ll come back,” I said. “Maybe she’s taking me back over, taking back what’s rightfully hers.”
Rio paused, very carefully. “I do not think that a likely scenario, Cas.”
Extreme trauma. Right.
“Hypothetically,” I said to Rio, “what would you say if I tried to trade my mind for your war on Los Angeles?”
“You know I could not do so. Cas, you have brainwashed an entire city.”
“I wouldn’t put it that way.”
He smiled. “As for your personal decisions, they are yours to make. Regardless of whether I would convince you to make different ones.”
Independent variables. His ethical code wouldn’t bargain for my consent nor absolve me in exchange for it, and all for the same reasons he would have me stop what I was doing to Los Angeles. Free will, choice, et cetera, and what I was doing was sinful.
I hadn’t expected another answer.
“Cas,” Rio said. His face had gone serious again. “In that vein. I believe it only fair to inform you. The fact that you have imposed a deadline means I, too, must accelerate.”
I blinked. “What?”
“You will not be able to combat me much longer,” Rio said calmly. “Nor will you have the capacity to reverse whatever you have done to people’s minds here.”
“Yeah, I’m counting on that,” I said.
“Which means I must convince you to do so before you are no longer capable.”
“What? Wait, what are you going to do?”
He took a sip of his drink and didn’t answer.
I never had a choice, laughed Valarmathi.
I shook her off. “Rio!”
“Reverse this, Cas. Or a great many people will have their blood on your hands.”
“This isn’t funny!”
“No,” he said. “It is not.”
“Do you know how much good this is doing?” I argued. “And what’s going to happen if we stop? Especially with how much you’ve been provoking people; I was looking at the stats just today. You’re talking about human lives, Rio. A lot of human lives!”
Rio didn’t move, his eyes fixed on mine.
Then he said, glacially slowly, “‘We’?”
I stopped breathing.
“Your friends aided you in this, Cas?”
For some reason it had never occurred to me—every time I’d talked to Rio about what I’d done, it had always been with the arrogance of my own solution. And as far as he knew, I had a long history of working alone.
Oh, fuck.
“You promised you wouldn’t threaten them.” The paper noodle cup from my dinner had crumpled in my fist, the leftover broth trickling over my fingers. “You promised, Rio—”
“And I shall not break that promise,” he said.
My fist unclenched. “Good. Thank you.”
“Do not thank me, Cas.”
Oh, Jesus. His other threat. The deadline. “Goddammit. Please. Don’t do this.” I swallowed. “What do you expect me to do, fight you?”
“It would not make a difference if you did,” he answered serenely. “Things are already in motion. Though I can stop it, if you acquiesce.”
“You bastard,” I said.
He inclined his head. “Quite.”
“How long do I have?”
“Forty-six hours, before events are irreversible.”
“Fuck you.” I stood up and started back toward my car. I had for
ty-six hours to find out what Rio was planning and save Los Angeles.
Cold blistered the bare soles of my feet, and a megaphone blared with unintelligible syllables, garbling after me with urgency, urgency.
Go go go only you people will die—
I choked on it. Ducked away as I hurried into the night.
“Consider quickly, Cas,” Rio called after me. “I may move faster.”
* * *
I GOT back to Checker’s place to find him just getting off the phone, shaking and pale. “Cas! That was Arthur—he—he just—”
“What’s going on? Is he all right?”
“He is, but— Cas, Rio was just in his apartment.”
“What?” For a moment I couldn’t make a single thought connect into words. “He wouldn’t hurt him. Or you. He told me—”
“He didn’t hurt him,” Checker said. “He just— He came and took his computer. And Arthur said he kept telling him there was nothing on there, not related to what we were doing, and Rio said something like it being too bad he had promised you not to compel him to give details—”
I almost choked in relief. “See, I told you he wouldn’t—”
“What are you on? He broke in and stole Arthur’s computer! And now he’s probably coming here, or to Arthur’s office, or—”
“Go back to one of my places, if you’re worried about it,” I said.
“Because there are any you’re sure he doesn’t know about?” Checker cried. “Besides, if he promised not to do anything to me, then he’s just going to come here and raid everything I own whether I’m here or not. My security isn’t going to be good enough to—”
“Then stay here, and I’ll hang here with you. Listen, we have to start working on—”
“Cas, shut up a minute! He’s going after your friends, do you hear me? You have to stop him before—”
“He’s not going to hurt any of you!”
Checker’s phone chimed. He stared at it, and the blood drained from his face. “Cas, Arthur’s driving to the office—he says Pilar’s there, says he can’t reach her—”
“Rio wouldn’t—”
“Get the fuck over there!” Checker screamed in my face. “Now! Go now!”
