Critical Point

by S. L. Huang

  Tabitha started shivering in the front seat. Pilar leaned forward and flicked the heat on. I kept half an eye on Willow Grace, but she hadn’t moved, her hands folded over her purse in her lap and her lovely face in an inscrutable mask.

  “Tabitha, sweetie—we should call your dad. He’s probably worried sick,” Pilar said.

  “I’m not sure my phone will still work.” She pulled it out of a wet pocket. She was wearing a utility belt around her black clothes, with what looked like lockpicks, a flashlight, and a penknife, among other tools. I wasn’t sure whether to be impressed or even more pissed off.

  “I left mine tethered to the computer,” Pilar said. “Oh, Cas—there was no outside network connection, but the wireless card was functional, so I tethered and got Checker in. Hopefully he was able to pull stuff right until the minute it kaboomed.”

  Hopefully. I supposed the outcome could have been worse—given the number of times we’d been blindsided tonight, Pilar’s data pull was the best we could have hoped for.

  Though Willow Grace knew more. I glanced at her in the rearview mirror, but she was staring ahead, focused on nothing.

  “My phone’ll be dead too,” I said. “Willow Grace?”

  “Beg pardon?” Her eyes riveted to me in the mirror.

  “Your phone. Let the kid make a call.”

  “It’s out of battery.”

  “You’re lying.” It was a guess, but I wanted to push her.

  It worked. The car got as tense as if a live viper had been dropped into it.

  Then Willow Grace let out a grim breath. “Yes, I’m lying. I have sensitive information on my phone. Confidential messages from sources, contact information for highly secured people. I’m sure you understand.”

  All right, that did make sense, I had to admit grudgingly. And at least she’d been up front about it once I asked. Despite having set out to needle her, I couldn’t decide if that made me trust her more or less.

  After all, I wouldn’t have expected Rio to lend a kid his phone just to call her father.

  “It’s okay,” Pilar said to her quickly, interrupting my frowning thoughts. “Tabitha honey, look in the glove box. There should be a new phone in there.” When I glanced back at her in surprise, she added quickly, “Arthur does that too, for emergencies. I’m not turning into you.”

  She said it jokingly, so I wasn’t sure why it stung.

  nine

  I MULLED over what we knew while I drove, and kept a sidelong eye on Willow Grace in the rearview mirror.

  She knew more about Teplova’s situation than she’d said so far, that much was clear. She might have guesses about how the doctor had been tracked and targeted, and she’d definitely recognized D.J.’s name. Plus the “dog” and its master …

  I remembered her pressing a finger to the ground, declaring a strange powder to be the first half of a binary explosive.

  “Hey. Willow Grace.”

  “You can call me Willow.”

  “Okay. Willow,” I said. “Let’s start here. How did you know about the binary?”

  “I’ve reported in a lot of war zones. I’d seen this before.”

  “Where?”

  “The Middle East.”

  Something flashed on the back of my eyelids: bright lights of a city street, crowds and cars, a woman shouting happily.

  “That’s the stupid, easy answer,” I growled. The Yaris swerved. I wrenched it back on track. “Give me a real one.”

  Pilar’s hand touched my shoulder. “Cas? You okay?”

  Shit. My fucking brain and its fucking broken memories.

  That question hadn’t even been connected to Teplova or Pithica or men whose faces I half-recognized before they shredded me in panic.

  Fuck, I needed Simon, or Rio, or at least to get somewhere where I wasn’t at risk of slamming us all into a tree if Willow Grace gave me the wrong answer. The ticking clock on Arthur’s disappearance felt like it timed itself with my heartbeat. What use was I to him if I was this broken?

  I drove faster, accelerating and decelerating in compressed lurches that weren’t technically good for Pilar’s car. She winced a few times in the back seat, but didn’t say anything. I tossed the phone over my shoulder at her and directed her to text Checker everything we’d learned tonight—then at least the drive time wouldn’t be entirely wasted.

  Fortunately, we’d hit a late enough hour that the roads were actually functioning as throughways instead of creeping clogged pipelines, but it still took the better part of an hour to get Tabitha home. Her bus journey out must have been absurd. But instead of sympathy, all I could feel was resentment at how she was delaying us in finding her father. If her address hadn’t been on the way back into the city, I probably just would have dragged her along with us, but her family wasn’t that far from Checker’s place and almost directly between the wellness center and where I’d left Simon and Rio.

  Small favors.

  I pulled up a few doors down from the house, ordered Pilar and Willow to stay in the car, and came around to hustle Tabitha out of the front seat. Her phone conversation with her father had been brief—she’d started out trying to argue with him the same way she had with us, but had quickly hunched subdued in her seat and listened before mumbling about a dozen apologies. I gathered he’d been concerned.

  That hadn’t stopped her from wrapping her arms around herself once she’d hung up and slouching with her chin thrust out. The part of me that wasn’t mad at her wanted to tell her she could go home and be a kid and not worry, but I wasn’t a good enough liar.

  Tabitha’s home was a cozy two-story bungalow with just enough land to contain its footprint and a wild but well-cared-for garden overtaking the tiny front yard. A porchlight beckoned at us, welcoming. And a paved walkway led to a ramp built over the front steps, just like at Checker’s place.

  It was always possible Diego and his kids knew another person who used a wheelchair, or that this was an artifact left over from when Arthur had still entertained guests here, but the far more likely conclusion was that Checker was a regular visitor. In other words, it hadn’t only been Arthur hiding huge chunks of his life from me.

  My resentment resurging, I stomped up the ramp to the porch and thumped on the door.

  Someone pulled it open almost immediately. I found myself facing a very handsome, very built Hispanic guy who looked to be in his forties, silver just starting at his temples. He was one of those guys who was so fit, it dented my eyes to look at him, and his gray T-shirt was tight enough to show it off. His face, however, was creased with worry, and the minute he saw Tabitha, he sucked in a hard breath of relief.

  “Oh, thank God.” He grabbed her in a massive hug, which, whatever her feelings about being brought home, she returned just as tightly.

  I shifted my weight and wondered if I should just go.

  The man—presumably Tabitha’s father and Arthur’s ex-husband—finally remembered I was there as he released his daughter. “Thank you for bringing her home. Miss…?”

  “Russell,” I said.

  He glanced between me and Tabitha, taking in our wet clothes and his daughter’s burglary garb. “What happened? Where were you?”

  “She works with Dad,” said Tabitha.

  I didn’t know what reaction I was expecting to a dodge like that, but it wasn’t the one I got. Tabitha’s father looked at me with raw fear in his eyes.

  Christ, did everyone think I was a monster?

  “Arthur’s missing,” I said too loudly. “I think Checker told you? Tabitha asked me to look into it, which I am, but then”—I shot her a severe glare—“she decided haring off on her own would be a great idea, and she almost got us—in real trouble.”

  At least I managed to cut myself off before I said “killed.” Sometimes I’m capable of tact.

  “I couldn’t just do nothing!” said Tabitha.

  The fear in her father’s eyes hadn’t gone away, despite my commendable circumspection. “Thank you, Miss Rus
sell,” he said. “I’ll see that she doesn’t bother you again.”

  “Good.” Tabitha’s face went so low and sad at my response that I felt compelled to add, “Because Arthur. Would have my hide. If anything happened to her.” Crap on a cracker, if meeting Arthur’s family was destined to be this uncomfortable, maybe he had spared me.

  Diego took his daughter by the shoulders. “Sweetheart. Go inside, okay?”

  Tabitha ducked behind him and into the house. Given his reaction, I half-expected Diego to shut the door in my face at that point, but instead, he came out and closed it behind him.

  “How bad?”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “How much danger are we in?” The question almost had a deadness to it, resignation despite his intensity. “How much danger is my daughter in right now?”

  “I—” The truth was, I hadn’t been thinking about it from that angle at all. “I don’t know, exactly.”

  “But you know not-exactly?”

  At least one person was already dead, and his daughter had almost been turned into the scrapings on the bottom of a barbecue tonight. One of the prime suspects in all that was a guy from Checker’s past who seemed intent on blowing up anyone with a connection to Arthur. And then there was the man on the lawn and whoever had been targeting Teplova, who sparked just enough familiarity for me to extrapolate that they were all very bad news … the lurking threat of Pithica and conspiracies could very well pivot to fall right on Tabitha and her family, without me being able to do a damned thing to prevent it.

  Diego was probably right to be worried.

  Apparently I’d taken too long to respond, because Diego scoffed and muttered something disgusted-sounding in Spanish that I was quite sure I was not supposed to understand.

  “I can get you somewhere safe,” I offered. I cringed at the thought of burying their whole family in one of my tiny, dirty apartments, but safe trumped comfortable. “It’s a good idea, just in case—”

  “Run from our lives? Again?” Diego wasn’t looking at me. “I have a job. The children have school, and work.”

  “So miss a few days. Call it a vacation.”

  “A vacation,” Diego echoed. His voice was shot through with bitterness. “I’ve come to dread when the next of these calls will come from Arthur, you know. Always the same—he’s angered someone by fighting for some higher good, and so we must pay the price, we must run, hide, check into a hotel, miss important appointments, huddle in fear. No. There must be a limit.”

  I thought of the various bad guys Arthur and I had fought over the last couple of years. How many of them had he worried might be a danger to his family?

  Shit. It wasn’t like I could drag Diego out of his house by force.

  “All right,” I said. “In that case, I can send someone to stay with you. Protect you. If you want.” Oh, Christ, there was really only one person I could assign to that. Arthur was going to murder me. Not to mention it was terrible resource management—but what choice did I have? “I’ll send someone,” I repeated. “And I can base here too, to have an extra gun around.”

  He winced but seemed to accept that. “We have a guest room. Thank you.”

  “No problem.”

  He squinted back at me. “What did you say your name was?”

  I told him.

  “Oh,” he said. “You’re the gal Charles mentioned, aren’t you? The math genius.”

  “I—wait, who?”

  The slightest wry smile touched Diego’s mouth, and for the first time, he seemed to relax a bit and take in my presence properly, like I was a human he was talking with on his doorstep instead of a disease come to threaten his family. “Eh. I know he doesn’t go by Charles anymore, but forgive me; I’m an old dog.”

  “You mean Checker? You call him Charles?” I had vaguely been aware Checker was an Internet-handle-turned-nickname, but I hadn’t even known his real name. I wondered what he had told Diego about me. “I, uh. Yeah. Math genius is probably me.”

  “It’s good to meet you. Thank you again for bringing Tabitha back.” He sounded more sincere this time. “I’ll get you my card so you can call.”

  Diego stepped back into the house, leaving me on the porch, and he returned a moment later with a business card from a gym. He handed it to me with a civil nod and then moved to go back inside.

  “Hey,” I said.

  He turned.

  “You didn’t ask how the search is going.”

  I wasn’t sure why I said it. I wasn’t trying to attack him, and Christ knew I had a hell of a lot better things to do than stand here on a porch guilt-tripping Arthur’s ex-husband. But dammit, this felt wrong.

  Diego stood still for a few seconds. Then he said, “How is it going?”

  “We’re making headway. We were onto something at the place we found Tabitha. And someone from Checker’s past might be mixed up in all this, and—” I cleared my throat. He didn’t need to know about psychics or creatures or children becoming weapons. “We’ll figure it out.”

  Diego’s head came up. “This has to do with Charles? Is he all right?”

  “Oh, uh—yeah, no one’s given him trouble yet.” A thought occurred to me—Diego had clearly known Checker for a lot longer than I’d assumed. “Hey, would you know anything about a demolition expert named D.J.?”

  Diego inhaled deeply. “That poor boy.”

  “Who? D.J.?”

  He shook his head. “Him too. But I was talking about Charles.”

  Considering what I knew of D.J., and that he might have just tried to blow us to smithereens, I wasn’t inclined to feel the least bit of sympathy for him. Or patience. “Do you know anything Checker wouldn’t, then?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t know much at all, and mostly from Charles.” He said something unhappy-sounding in Spanish. “They were friends once. They ran on the same crew.”

  “Wait, friends?”

  “Once. Close enough that Charles tried to find him, after moving in with us. I don’t think they ever had luck.”

  People and their fucking secrets. I was going to kill Checker and Arthur both. Telling me everything I needed to know, my ass.

  “Thanks,” I said stiffly. I held up his card. “I’ll be in touch soon. Keep your phone on.”

  He called after me as I stepped down onto the walkway. “Miss Russell. Have the police been contacted? About Arthur?”

  I stopped and turned. “Oh. I’m—not sure. I don’t think so.”

  Diego was backlit by the house light in the open door, so I couldn’t see his expression. “If you do speak to them, have a care,” he said. “Some of Arthur’s old colleagues may not be inclined to give you help.” One of his hands was gripping the doorframe very tightly.

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.

  ten

  I TROMPED down the ramp off the porch until I was out of sight of the front door. I’d taken Pilar’s burner phone with me, and I stopped there on the sidewalk to call Rio.

  He picked up immediately. “Hello.”

  “It’s Cas—the old phone drowned.”

  “Cas. Are you well?”

  “Yeah. Did Simon tell you what we ran into?”

  “Briefly. I would appreciate more detail.” That was fair. He probably hadn’t gotten much detail from Simon precisely because I hadn’t given Simon any.

  I took a breath, pressed my eyes shut for a second, and recounted everything that had happened at the wellness center. To my surprise and relief, I was able to do it without my consciousness juddering off the rails. Rio listened quietly until I wound down.

  “Have you seen this kind of thing before?” I asked. “Either a binary explosive this destructive, or the … whatever those things did to Pilar and me?”

  “No, in either instance. This is new technology, and troubling.”

  I hadn’t realized how disconcerting it would be to hear Rio confirm that. He made it a point to have a vast level of global intelligence.

/>   “This Willow Grace says she’s seen the binary explosive before,” I said. “You think she’s lying?”

  “Impossible to say. She may truly have seen this somewhere, or she may have been able to recognize the likelihood without having seen the specific chemical capable of this level of annihilation.”

  New bombs. And we still hadn’t figured out how D.J. might factor in. For some reason, I didn’t mention that to Rio—I wanted to talk to Checker again first.

  “Do you…” I wasn’t sure what I wanted to ask. “When you were … years ago. Did you ever run into Willow Grace? Or Teplova?”

  “I have not met this reporter, though I am familiar with her work. She has been a highly regarded force in more than one volatile situation. As for the doctor, I know of no one by that name, though it’s more than likely she would have chosen to change identities.”

  Right. I should have taken her photograph with me or something.

  “It sounds like they were trying to fight Pithica too,” I said.

  “Perhaps. I shall look into it.”

  Was I imagining the slight emphasis on the pronoun?

  My hand tightened on the phone. “Don’t tell me to stop, Rio. Don’t you fucking tell me to stop.”

  “I would hardly dare,” Rio said dryly. “However, it is only logical to point out that driving yourself into an altered state would hardly be the best use of the people available to you. I can pursue this angle.”

  “But I remember them, Rio. There could be something—some information, something we can use—”

  “Has your sense of familiarity granted you any actionable intel?”

  “No, but if I keep trying—”

  “Destroying yourself in such an attempt would be of no help to your friend.” He said it flatly. Factually.

  “You’ve fought Pithica before we ever did. You could fill in a lot more for me,” I tried, knowing already what his answer would be. “We’ll be better off if we can pool that. Just tell me what you suspect, and I swear I’ll tell you if I start going off-kilter or something. Rio, please, it’s for Arthur…”