Critical Point

by S. L. Huang

  “I am not appropriately equipped to determine what information could be of too much harm to you,” Rio answered. “But Simon’s knowledge may exceed my own in any case. I suggest you direct these questions at him. He wishes to speak to you anyway.”

  Of course he did.

  Intellectually, I could have guessed that Rio would never have any sort of emotional investment in Arthur’s rescue. He was doing it only as a favor to me, and I wasn’t ungrateful. But somehow, his complete lack of regret in not answering made my skin prickle like fleas had crawled in under it.

  Arthur deserved better. I wanted to be better. Jesus Christ, if I wasn’t the person he invited to his kids’ sports meets, at the very least I should be the one who could haul in every resource to save him from violent kidnappers, the optimum under this metric. If I couldn’t even do that …

  A brief rustling sound on the phone. I felt Simon before he spoke, his concern pushing at me even through the telephone connection.

  “Cas. Cas,” he said. “How are you feeling? Any residual effects?”

  Picturing what we’d encountered at the wellness center still made my throat tighten and my stomach fold over, but I brushed it off. “I’m fine.”

  “Are you sure?” He must have sensed my instant desire to tear his face off, because he continued rapidly, “Okay. Okay. All right. I have, um, information on your prisoner.”

  “My what?”

  “The man you left with us,” Simon reminded me. “The one who was probably responsible for destroying your office. Remember?”

  A man who’d destroyed my office …

  A voice on the phone. Australian. An indistinct face, yelling as I dropped him to the ground. The image of me locking an apartment door and leaving him.

  The whole reason we’d started to be suspicious of a Pithica connection in the first place.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “We’ll keep reminding you,” Simon offered.

  “Yeah,” I croaked. “Do that. Now what about him?”

  “His name is Oscar. And Cas, he’s seen Arthur. He’s alive, at least as of earlier today.”

  My knees felt like they lost the ability to hold me up, and I almost sat right on the sidewalk. I’d told Pilar, I’d told Tabitha, but hearing it was true …

  Relief wasn’t supposed to feel this awful.

  “Where?” I got out.

  “I—we haven’t worked that out yet. He might be willing to tell me, but I don’t think he’s fully conscious of everything he’s done. You were right—he’s had severe psychological trauma.”

  “Can’t you impress upon him that this is urgent? Or just—” I bit my lip. I knew what Simon would say to the suggestion that he go forth and rip everything we needed out of Oscar’s head.

  It wasn’t even something I would generally consider ethical, especially with a guy we were concluding was someone else’s pawn. But if Arthur died because we didn’t get there fast enough …

  Simon did me the favor of not finger-wagging at me for what he already knew I knew. “I can tell you this,” he said instead. “I don’t know for sure, but I suspect many of his psychological issues are related to the way he won’t stick in your memory.”

  “What?” I said. “How?”

  “Well, the mind is a malleable thing, Cas. What would happen to a person’s mind if nobody could ever see them?”

  Cold crept up the back of my neck. As pissed as my friends could make me, the thought of becoming a ghost … unable to make any human connection, anywhere, because no matter what I did, good or bad, tender or cruel, no one would ever, ever acknowledge I existed …

  Fuck.

  “So, it isn’t him who’s mindwiping people of his face, then?” I said. “Can you tell how…?”

  “I’m still not sure. He definitely doesn’t have any special, um, powers, if you want to use that word. He’s within all the norms for a human.”

  We’re outside the norm, whispered a voice in my head. But we’re still human.

  Not true. “Normal” has a specific mathematical meaning. So does “human.”

  “Cas?”

  “I’m here,” I barked into the phone, pushing the stray murmurings aside. “Go on.”

  Simon paused for just long enough that I knew he was trying to handle me delicately. “Cas, speaking of people’s psychological variances, you know what you’re dealing with equates to a chronic mental health condition. If you need to—”

  “Not now,” I said. I needed to finish this conversation and get back to the car. “Keep going. About Oscar. He doesn’t have powers?”

  “No,” Simon answered. “He just has—I don’t know how to describe it. A very forgettable face.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.” Either Oscar was manipulating us or someone else was; this couldn’t be something hard-coded.

  “Very forgettable,” Simon said.

  Or, wait. What if it was exactly something hard-coded … “Supernaturally forgettable?”

  His tone went neutral and careful. “I’m not sure I know what that word means.”

  “Cut the crap.”

  “I think it’s more what you would call ‘low probability,’” he said. “If I’m using such a phrase correctly.”

  I got what he meant, and it made me mad that I got it. Simon didn’t get to use the terms I would use.

  “You mean, it’s something that would never happen ever but is still technically possible,” I said. “It’s possible he was born this way.”

  “Possible, but—I’m not sure if he would have survived this long if he had been. Although there’s also the chance his face changed enough in puberty that he was able to interact more normally as a child, but still, it’s so … specific.”

  I had the spooky feeling that even if humans multiplied wildly until the universe ended, Simon was saying there was basically a zero chance someone like Oscar would’ve ever been born.

  “So you’re saying someone made him into this,” I said.

  “I think it’s likely. If so, he probably had some psychological issues before that, but they’re many times worse now.”

  Which confirmed I’d made the right decision in not being willing to use Rio to help with the questioning. Though when I went back and asked myself if I would willingly sacrifice Arthur to those principles—

  “I promise I’ll keep at it,” said Simon quickly. Even through a phone conversation he’d probably caught wind of my thoughts, the fucker. He cleared his throat. “Do you want to talk about the creature?”

  “Only if you can tell me how to fight something like that.”

  “I … without knowing how it triggers such an extreme panic response, I’m not sure. But if you find out more, I may be able to help.”

  Fat lot of good you are, I wanted to say, but it was so demonstrably untrue even I would have felt stupid. The man from the lawn oozed through my memory again—and then, startlingly, the image of him sitting on a low cement wall, drink in hand and laughing. And I was laughing with him, looking up to him with the warmth of a pupil for her favorite mentor or teacher …

  “There’s some connection,” I said hoarsely to Simon. “The doctor at the clinic, Eva Teplova, and—other things. I can feel a—there’s some connection, to Pithica, or—” I coughed, biting down on telling him more. Too risky that he would hear me start to slide—he could get it from Rio later. I needed to keep showcasing my sane side around Simon, or he’d never tell me anything. “And now this Oscar guy is tangled up in it all too. So, if this is Pithica, they’re, what? Putting a spell on him to make it so—”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” Simon said. “It’s not magic. If this is … one of us … it’s someone from Halberd, not Pithica.”

  Halberd …

  We are the halberd against the gathering storm, chanted a long-dead memory. I tried to slap it away. What did that even mean? It was gibberish. I needed to focus—

  The night around me fuzzed in and out for a moment, like reality
was a badly tuned television set.

  “Cas.” Simon’s voice cut through the static in my brain. “Cas, are you with me?”

  “Yeah.” Protectors of the species. No—its new definition. I shook my head hard. “What’s the, um. What’s the difference?”

  “Cas, I don’t know if I should—”

  “Tell me what you can,” I said. “Please.”

  Simon was silent for a moment. Whether he was startled by hearing sincerity instead of rudeness from me for once, or he could just tell how desperately I needed the information … I forced myself to let my words hang in the air and to allow him to think.

  “I’ll try to limit it to information that won’t, um, be a trigger for your memories,” he said quietly at last. “Pithica came first, and it concentrated exclusively on enhancement of the brain. In the beginning, it looked like it would be wildly successful.”

  “It was,” I said. “They’d practically taken over the world before we stopped them.”

  Simon was intensely silent.

  “Okay, I get it, things you can’t tell me lest I start going off the deep end.” I mostly managed to keep a cap on my snippiness. “Go on.”

  “With the technology behind Pithica going so well, the next step was to develop abilities that went beyond the neurological. The Holy Grail was allowing not only enhancements of the mind, but discovering ways for those to interact with enhancements to the human body.”

  The familiarity dropped through my consciousness like a block of lead.

  What did you take?

  My medicine.

  “Like me,” I said numbly. “That’s what I am.”

  The numbers sang under my skin, mathematics come alive, gloving every neuron with theory made flesh …

  “Cas?”

  I forced myself to breathe. To think. Arthur. We had to find Arthur, and I could dwell on anything else later.

  “So, you’re saying this isn’t Pithica,” I said to Simon. “They’re not violating their deal with us.”

  More importantly, that meant I wouldn’t be bringing down their retribution if I mowed down everyone who got in my way. First bit of good news we’d had about whoever was behind this.

  “That’s my, well—that’s my guess,” Simon confirmed. “From what I know, at least. I haven’t had contact with anyone from those years in a long while, but this also feels far enough removed not to be involved with Daniela’s group. And I don’t think Halberd even exists anymore, as such; their people would all be … scattered, now. But, Cas—don’t take this lightly. If whoever’s behind this is related to Halberd, that might mean they’re just as dangerous as Pithica ever would be.”

  Dangerous like me.

  At least that felt familiar. Something I could kill.

  “Have you heard Teplova’s name before?” I asked Simon. “Was she a part of—did you know her?”

  “I haven’t heard the name, but that doesn’t mean anything. She could have been before my time, or separate in some other way. I wouldn’t know everybody.”

  Besides, like Rio had said, Teplova could easily be a pseudonym. And now, like everything else at the wellness center, she was nothing more than a sprinkling of ash.

  I tried to reorient, to look forward and formulate a plan. I had to use all this somehow to track down Arthur. And meanwhile, protect his family, which would at least be a slightly better use of one of my best people than babysitting Simon’s too-virtuous ethics.

  “I need Rio,” I said to him. “If I take him, is this Oscar guy going to try to run? Or, you know, try to kill you?”

  He sighed. “He’s not going to attack me. I mean, people don’t in general, but Oscar also likes my company. I think because I can, um, see and interact with him, and him not having had that … but I can’t guarantee he won’t want his freedom. That’s not a villainous need.”

  “Then I’ll tell Rio to barricade you two in there together. Put him back on.”

  A moment later Rio’s baritone came back on the line.

  “Rio,” I said. “I need you to lock Simon and the Australian in together and come babysit Arthur’s family.”

  “I shall do so and head there at once. I can arrive within the hour.”

  It was like the words didn’t have English meanings. They balled up in my head with no sense attached to them. After everything else tonight …

  “Their location was merely intelligence, Cas,” Rio said, misinterpreting my silence. “I have promised not to harm your friends’ families, and I will not.”

  Rio fucking knew about Arthur’s family?

  Of course. He’d probably background checked all my friends.

  “Do that,” I sputtered, and hung up.

  I texted Diego a heads-up and a description of Rio and then stomped back to the car.

  eleven

  I DIDN’T think to call Checker to warn him we were descending on his place, but it turned out he’d expected it. All four of us squeezed into the garage he’d converted into his own personal computer cluster. Despite it being well past midnight, Checker was fully dressed and had clearly been hard at work on Pilar’s data pull from the wellness center. He immediately put Pilar and Willow on the files as well and sent them in to work in his living room with laptops, though we could still see them clearly on his security monitors.

  I’d tried to push Willow for answers again, but she’d recovered her previous calm and claimed only to have heard bits and pieces about Teplova’s enemies—D.J.’s name along with nebulous haunted accounts of other foes, including the dogs.

  Dogs—plural. Apparently. And we’d only killed one of them.

  I didn’t want to think about what would happen if I ran into a pack of those things.

  But Willow insisted the reason she was nosing through the doctor’s files when we’d found her was that she didn’t have much more information on the night’s events than we did. She acknowledged she’d known the clinic had been closed for the past six months, but had no more than a thousand equally likely suspicions as to why, and only said that her friend had called her tonight with a supposed life-and-death emergency … and that she’d arrived only to find death.

  Either she really didn’t know very much, or she was capable of making it sound like she didn’t.

  “Don’t worry, her background checks out completely,” Checker said. He scooted his wheelchair back and craned his neck around to watch through the window as the two women went into his house, even though they were clearly visible on the monitors. “I mean, I figured it would, because I’ve seen her on the newscasts just like everyone else, and besides, if there was anything for anybody to find, people would’ve been all over her. Like the Brian Williams thing. She’s too much of a celebrity not to keep her nose as clean as possible, especially being a woman. But yeah, aside from the plastic surgery secret, which I honestly can’t believe she’s been able to keep this long, she’s as clean as a whistle.”

  I cared less about clean backgrounds than whether a person was on our side. “I don’t think she’s working for D.J. or Halberd. But I also don’t think she’s telling us everything.”

  Checker pressed his lips together for a moment. “How sure are you?”

  “You mean, should I grab some thumbscrews and start tightening them on her fingers and toes? Jesus, I don’t know.”

  He twitched slightly at that. Checker was usually much more antitorture than I was. The fact that he didn’t hit me with a sarcastic comeback said everything about how worried he was about Arthur. So did the drawn skin of his face and the tired shadows under his eyes.

  I felt the same way myself.

  “What’s her rep as a journalist?” I asked.

  “Solid. One of the best investigative reporters out there. Rising star, on track to become the next Tom Brokaw or something—she only hit the scene this decade, but she’s reported from all over the world, battlefronts and natural disasters and disease-ridden hot zones. She’s been on sabbatical lately to write a book, and some people ha
ve made noises about hoping it meant she was going to run for political office.”

  “So, if she was investigating Pithica…”

  “I’d say I wouldn’t want to be them.”

  “She didn’t break the story,” I pointed out. “They beat her.”

  “Well, I’m going to hope she’s playing a long game on getting sources,” Checker said, moving forward to start multitasking on one of his machines as he spoke. “Maybe she’ll team up with us after this. I’m actually surprised you haven’t heard of her—I know it’s you, but she’s practically a household name.”

  And she still hadn’t been able to save her friend. Teplova had likely called her tonight for help of some kind—the bottomless sort of help a friend of power and prestige and wealth could employ. None of that had stopped the assassins.

  I wasn’t going to fail my friends the way Willow Grace had. I wouldn’t let myself.

  “All right, let’s set her aside for now.” I swallowed. “You should know—Simon thinks Teplova might have been. Uh. Like us somehow.”

  “Like us how?”

  “No. Like me and Simon.” I hesitated. “Or just … like me.”

  Checker had stopped typing and turned back to me, his face very still.

  “I don’t think this has to do with me. I mean, I don’t think that history is why Arthur ended up looking into them,” I said quickly, though I wasn’t sure of that at all. “But if whoever killed Teplova killed her because … We might be running up against some dangerous people.”

  “Does this give us something?” Checker asked softly. He was gripping the edge of the desk so hard, his knuckles had gone white. “Do you know anything about—does Simon know—”

  “No. I already asked him. All he knows is that it sounds likely this is all mixed up with people who have, you know, our same sorts of … talents, but he doesn’t know who, or why. Or where. It doesn’t give us anything that would lead to Arthur yet.”

  “What about you? Are you okay?” Checker asked after a moment.

  The question startled me. “I’m fine,” I said a little too harshly. “Just want to get him back.”