Critical Point

by S. L. Huang

They came out of the night like a swarm of wasps, quadcopters descending toward the compound with a buzzing whine. Pilar sucked in a quick, tight breath beside me. In one instant, I located everything in the room that might possibly qualify as either a weapon or protection.

  But the drones weren’t interested in us. I squinted through the windows. I’d been starting to feel a flashback to the last bad guy who had attacked me with missiles out of the sky, but these seemed to be ordinary electronics.

  And they were—crop dusting?

  The quadcopters crisscrossed the wellness center’s campus, powder drifting down from their payloads.

  My mind went to all the worst places first—if this were a chemical or biological weapon of some kind, we were dead already. But Willow Grace cracked the French door next to us and touched a finger to the powder drifting down onto the patio.

  She stood back up, staring at her fingertip. “It’s a binary explosive. Someone’s about to destroy this place.”

  Oh. Crap. The quick search algorithm in my head mapped the shortest route off campus, and I started back the way we had come.

  Willow Grace threw out a hand, blocking me. “No! Not that way!”

  “Why not?” I riveted on her. “Wait. You know. The creature, the man—you know—”

  “I don’t—I mean, I—” Her studied composure whipped in its moorings. “Not now! Please. I heard the gunshots—did you kill them? Tell me!”

  “Not the man,” I said. “Is he still—”

  “What about the dog? Did you kill the dog!”

  “Yes—”

  “Where?” Willow Grace had begun to sound panicked. “We can’t see it again, even dead. Where did you kill the dog?”

  I pointed.

  “This way, then,” she said, and slipped through the door ahead of us to veer right, down another drive past the golf course, keeping the main building between us and the … dog. Thing.

  We ran, pounding through the silent hillocks of the golf course. The grass was overgrown here, and the flags and sand traps overlooked us idly like the scattered remnants of a very rich dystopia. The powder from the drones overhead drifted down and coated our clothes and skin within seconds.

  I kept all my senses alert for a man who had fear for a face or another animal racing at us out of the darkness, but the night was only loud with our breathing and pounding feet and the buzz of the drones above us. My mind whizzed through the other probabilities and urgencies. Setting aside for a moment just how much Willow Grace knew that she hadn’t shared yet, the binary explosive meant—what? I didn’t know much about them beyond the basics: two chemicals that were harmless when separate, but would detonate with great prejudice once they met. So the initial powder, the one already caking us, would be inert by itself. Another wave of drones would have to come and spray their payload around all at once … and then the entire place would go up like another Independence Day display. Without knowing what the chemical compositions were, I couldn’t make a reliable estimation of destructive power, but I was guessing big and flamey.

  Assume the same type of drones for the second payload, though, and we’d make it past the fence and out before anything could go off. We were already probably far enough away from the buildings, which was where the drones were concentrating themselves—

  “There’s a person!” gasped Pilar, pointing.

  I swiveled, every nerve ending instantly wiring with adrenaline.

  But it wasn’t the man from the lawn. Instead, a much smaller, black-clad silhouette was bobbing in and out of the screen of cypress trees a few hundred yards down from us.

  A silhouette I recognized. And this time not from my nightmares.

  Oh, fuck.

  I grabbed the other women to stop them. “Keep an eye on her,” I commanded Pilar, pointing at Willow Grace. I wasn’t sure whether I meant Pilar should protect her or keep her under guard, but Willow Grace was right about one thing—any more answers on that had to wait.

  “Now run,” I said.

  They took off into the night, and I sprinted in the opposite direction, back across the lawn toward where Arthur’s daughter was sneaking into the wellness center.

  eight

  I BINNED all caution and shouted her name, but she was too far away, and the buzzing of the drones had built up into an unbearable white noise. Tabitha kept glancing at them, but was slipping around the buildings on the periphery, pausing to push at windows and doors as though looking for a way in.

  Oh, shit. If she turned the farthest corner of the building she was at, she’d be in view of the back lawn.

  I didn’t know what the damned “dog” was, or why none of us could seem to look at it without going into a screaming panic, but I wasn’t about to test it on Tabitha—or myself. I thought about yelling again, but I was afraid she’d spook and run in the other direction from me, which was exactly what could not happen.

  I juked so I was coming up straight behind her and grabbed her in a bear hug. “Tabitha! Tabitha, it’s Cas Russell. Your dad’s friend. Stop struggling!” I shifted my face in time for her skull not to break my nose.

  She froze. “Ms. Russell?”

  “Yes. Come with me fast and don’t ask questions.”

  I grabbed her by the wrist and dragged her back toward the main building. And that was when I registered the increased hum, climbing behind the drones already in the air.

  The second wave. The ones that would set off the binary.

  I ran approximations in my head as comprehensively as I could—possible concussive blast, fire danger, shrapnel, not to mention if we got directly splashed by the second payload ourselves, considering our skin and clothes were dusted with the first chemical …

  Too much variance. If we ran, we might make it, or we might be toast. Literally. We were way too far within the territory the drones had covered to be sure we could clear any blast radius.

  The rising hum of the second wave gave me an inside time limit. We’d be able to get into the buildings, but that wouldn’t help; there wouldn’t be buildings anymore in a minute. The large, glassy pools would offer protection from a blast through the air, but their surfaces were coated in the powder too, and a concussion through water would be even worse.

  Unless I could get the primary agent of the binary off the water.

  The thought process took less than a second. I cast around—the pools hadn’t been well-maintained in the past few months, and some cleaning supplies were heaped by one of the pieces of lawn furniture in a sad little pile. I grabbed at Tabitha again and ran.

  I scooped up a pool cleaner from the pile and ran past the first basin to a glassy, perfectly round reflecting pool beyond it, my brain running off estimates of surface tension and molecular density. The water was fifteen feet in diameter. In this hot climate, the basin must have been kept filled exactly to the brim by some sort of automatic mechanism; it met the brick bordering it in a smooth mirror with a fine dusting of the explosive powder over its face.

  Fifteen feet across meant a hundred and seventy-seven square feet of surface. I needed enough detergent molecules to displace the water on each square inch of that. I tore open the box of cleaner and socked it forward, transferring the inertia to propel a cloud of powder exactly into the center of the pool.

  The cleaner hit the water with a small plop and ripple, and the effect was instant and dramatic. The surface tension chased itself to the sides like it was sucked there by a magnet, and within the space of a heartbeat, the binary explosive powder was only a dense ring around the edge.

  The second wave of drones was trundling in above us, fast—a neat, orderly array of death.

  “Relax,” I ordered Tabitha. “I’m going to throw you.”

  “You’re—I’m—what?”

  I grabbed her under the knees and shoulders. She flailed a little. I shouted, “Relax!” again and heaved.

  Tabitha hit the water in the center of the shallow pool in a belly flop that both prevented her from breaking her neck
and caused a nice tidal wave splashing almost all of the powder out onto the brick. I followed immediately, with a running leap that I flipped into landing on my back. The wave equation and vertical oscillations rippled out in my head without seeing them, carrying any of the deadly powder that remained out of the pool and onto dry land.

  I twisted and found the slippery bottom with my boots to push upright.

  “What’s going on?” Tabitha had also found her feet, and her wet face was wide and scared.

  “Get ready to hold your breath,” I said.

  I stood in the slick pool, water lapping at my chest, and watched the drones. Closer and closer, an army above us, until they blanketed the campus, a phalanx that would let loose as soon as it stopped in position. Distance to its nearest likely position divided by airspeed gave us five, four, three—

  “Duck,” I said to Tabitha, and tackled her under the surface.

  Even with almost all the powder off the pool, the concussion hit the water like someone had cannonballed in next to us.

  I pressed my hands and feet against the slimy, sloping bottom, keeping myself down with Tabitha flattened under me. A flash of red and gold rippled across the surface along with the blast, and the algae-coated cement vibrated against my palms as the earth shook.

  Then everything was blackness and cold.

  I kept us under until Tabitha squirmed against me, which I took as a communication she was desperate for air. I let her up, and we broke the surface into a hellscape.

  Tabitha immediately took a heaving breath that burst into a cough. The air was clogged with smoke and ash. I looked out over the lawn to find everything from the patio furniture to the buildings had been—disintegrated. Smoking piles of rubble marked where structures had collapsed, small fires here and there. In a few places, the crumbled remains had big enough chunks left to form a mound with the odd timber poking out, but mostly it was just … gone. The grass had been seared off, leaving nothing but charred soil.

  A haze of ashy dust, combined with the gray-black darkness—now much more complete without the outside floodlights—made the whole scene recede into unreality. I realized too late that even so, I could see clear across the lawn, and I lurched back, the water sloshing with my movement. But the corpse of whatever animal had attacked us had been burned off the face of the planet along with everything else, and there was no sign of its human companion. Even the other pools had been blasted so hard on the surface that they were now only half-full of lapping water.

  Holy shit.

  Tabitha was still hacking. We needed to move. We might be in a remote area, but police had to be on their way—this had not been a small display.

  I looked around again as I slopped out of the pool onto soot and rubble and gave Tabitha a hand up. This, I thought, had been somebody showing off.

  * * *

  TABITHA DIDN’T get her breath back until we were beyond where the line of trees had been. The cypresses had been spared the worst of the blast, so they were still in the shape of trees—but mostly not upright ones. Many of them had been splintered along the base of their trunks by the concussion, and the perimeter looked like a forest graveyard left by haphazard loggers. We finally found the back side of the iron fence, and I boosted Tabitha over before climbing the bars myself.

  Fatigue made the effort less agile than when I’d entered.

  Stay alert, I ordered myself, but the directive was hard to follow, even with my stamina. How many villains were out here tonight? Which of them might be watching for escapees from this dramatic showcase? Too many shadows, hemming us in …

  But though every rustle and whisper made my senses jangle, we got out to the street without any more surprises.

  My phone definitely wasn’t functional after its dunking, and I had no idea where Pilar had gone off to, but I decided the most likely rendezvous point was her car. I turned to lead Arthur’s daughter back in that direction.

  But Tabitha had used the pause to breathe and cough, and now trotted up next to me. “Wow,” she gasped now. “Wow. That was—that was awesome.”

  I stopped so fast she tripped trying to match me and spun to face her. “What?”

  “I just mean—what you did! That was so, like—wow!” She goggled at me. “What just happened?”

  The whole bloody night felt like it crashed down on me in that one instant. After everything—the dog and Teplova and the ghosts from my past and fucking D.J. and explosives, and Tabitha thought it was awesome?

  “You interfered with my work to find your dad, that’s what happened.” I nearly snarled the words in her face.

  Her expression crumpled. “I didn’t mean—wait, he wasn’t, Dad wasn’t in that—”

  “No. I don’t think so.” I started walking again, fast, and she hastened to keep up.

  “You don’t think—”

  “No.” The wellness center was definitely tangled up with Arthur’s kidnapping, but rather than being one of the abductors, Teplova seemed to be a victim here as much as we were. I thought it most likely we had a common enemy. Or several common enemies.

  Besides, except for Dr. Teplova, the center had been deserted for a long time, which was something else I’d have to quiz Willow Grace about. Someone holding Arthur there, in one of the other buildings … it was possible, but I didn’t rate it as likely.

  I ignored the possibility that I just wasn’t letting myself consider it. As I’d told Pilar, what would be the point in such thinking anyway? It wouldn’t help me find Arthur any faster.

  I scanned the night for where we’d left the Yaris.

  Pilar was, indeed, at her car. She had her CZ out, and there was no sign of Willow Grace.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “We got out okay. What happened in there? Tabitha, what—what are you—are you guys all right?”

  “I meant, where’s Willow Grace?” I said.

  “Oh! She’s in the car. Back seat.” She gestured at the car and cast a self-conscious look at Tabitha before tucking her gun away. “You can take over now,” she added to me.

  I located Willow Grace’s profile in the back seat, still and placid, an idealized sculpture of a woman. Good. She had more answers to all this, and I was going to make sure she told me.

  A sneaking apprehension wormed its way through my mind. If those answers intersected with my own history … Simon had warned me over and over that learning too much about my past would cause my brain to destabilize and derail itself. I’d felt firsthand what it was like for the shell of its old owner to come gabbling back—Valarmathi, she whom Simon had known and loved and saved by destroying her.

  She was dead, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t drag me down with her.

  Tough. You’ll figure it out. It’s Arthur.

  If my mental health was the price to pay for rescuing him, well, that’s what I had Simon for. He could fucking earn his keep.

  “Tabitha, sweetie.” Pilar took the girl’s hands in hers, drawing my attention back to them. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’d like to know that too,” I said. I turned to face her, arms crossed.

  “I—I wanted to help find Dad,” Tabitha answered.

  “You almost got us killed.” If there was one extra shit complication I hadn’t needed tonight … “You know how you can help? By staying the fuck out of the way.”

  “Cas! Shush.” Pilar sounded scandalized.

  “No,” I said. “How the hell do you think ‘hey, Arthur, we rescued you but got your daughter killed’ will go down?”

  Emotion surged, and something in me wanted to say a lot more than that, to yell at this too-reckless teenager until I lost my voice, because even the thought of giving news like that to Arthur wrecked me like I’d been run over by a semitruck. I wanted to be angry at him, not validate every decision he’d made.

  Especially if my own old enemies were already responsible for everything that had happened here, screaming forward to hurt Arthur and his family.

&nb
sp; Enemies I hadn’t had any hand in making. Ones I had no intel on, or control.

  “You didn’t get me killed!” Tabitha protested. “You saved me. Unless that was—you with the—?” She made a boom gesture with her hands.

  “No! No, no, no,” Pilar said. “That wasn’t us.”

  “But it might’ve been, and you wouldn’t have known,” I snapped. “You work at cross-purposes on the same job, you’re going to get someone killed. And if you don’t know basic shit like that, you have no business breaking into places.”

  Tabitha’s face fell as if I’d just told her she’d failed a test.

  “Sweetie, how are you even here?” Pilar said.

  “I went to Dad’s office.” She sounded like she was on the verge of tears. “Have you seen it? It’s a mess. And I searched around a little, but it seemed kinda hopeless, so then I went on the computer—I have the passwords because I do homework there sometimes—and I looked at his calendar. And he had written on next Sunday to ‘meet with Tabitha’s doctor,’ and that didn’t make any sense because I don’t have any doctor’s appointments ever except physicals. So I looked at his Internet history, and he did a search for this place.” She pushed her hands at the smoky ruin beyond the fence like she was a mime. “I figured it was code, like, he’d put our names so it wouldn’t look suspicious, but he knew it wasn’t really about us.”

  Code to stop Checker from knowing, in case he happened to see Arthur’s calendar. Right. A mundane errand related to his kids wouldn’t look suspicious.

  Fuck, this was a mess.

  “No, I meant—” Pilar licked her lips. “How did you get here? Does Diego know you snuck out? Did you drive?”

  Tabitha toed the ground and shook her head. “I took the bus and then walked.”

  “Well, you’re coming back with us.” I grabbed her by the wet fabric of her black turtleneck. Jesus, the bus would have taken her forever; we were in the middle of nowhere. “In the front. Pilar, get in the back with Willow Grace.”

  I drove us out at exactly the speed limit, away from civilization first and then circling around to head back toward the city by another route to avoid any emergency response vehicles. The streets out here weren’t gridded logically, but they tended to follow the mountains in mathematically intuitive ways.