by S. L. Huang
He hesitated, then frowned. “That seems like a pretty big coincidence, though, doesn’t it? That they’d kidnap your friend without there being some sort of, I don’t know, connection?”
“Selection bias,” I snapped. Refusing to acknowledge the possibility aloud may have been petty, but … it wasn’t like admitting it would help us find him. The self-recrimination twisted into barbs before I could stop myself. “Do you really think it’s so unlikely that your old friend D.J. would end up hooking up with some of the most dangerous people in the world all on his own? Arthur would’ve told you about investigating Teplova in the first place if this were a regular case, so I’m assuming he was tracking D.J. and then got mixed up in the rest of it. Willow says Teplova kept referencing D.J. all panicked.”
Checker’s head jerked. “Yeah, um. Probably whoever our murderer is just—hired him. I don’t know.”
“Diego said you knew him pretty well.” I felt a vindictive spark as he flinched, and tried to quash it. “Any guesses on his next move?”
“I don’t—I wish I knew.” Checker’s posture had gone so tense, it was as if he were about to make himself shatter. “It was a long time ago. And if he’s working for someone else, then—I swear, Cas, I wish I could help. If something happens to Arthur because of—or if something’s already happened to him—” His words strangled off like they had choked him. “That can’t, that can’t happen, all right?”
“Oh,” I said. “I forgot to tell you. Simon got intel that Arthur was seen alive earlier today somewhere. He’s working on the where. But alive.”
“Wha—he’s ali—you forgot? What the fuck, Cas!” Checker spun and grabbed for his keyboard, his phone-texting program summoned to the screen before I’d seen him hit a key. “Did you tell his family? Or Pilar?”
“Uh—” I’d been reaching for some sort of emotional high ground in this whole situation, some vengeful absolution—from any responsibility for it, from Arthur’s opinion of me and every assumption I’d been screaming to prove wrong. It all socked out of me, leaving me breathless and flat-footed. “No, I—”
“Forgot. Right. Fuck you.” Checker’s fingers clattered on the keyboard, the messages sending faster than I could have spoken them aloud. Heat rushed into my face and the back of my neck, my skin tingling with a thousand tiny needles, a buzzing in my ears.
This wasn’t the angriest Checker had ever been at me. But it was the first time I’d felt like this about it. It was worse than having a gun pointed at my face.
Much worse.
I would have liked to blame my forgetfulness on possible telepathic influence, or on whatever Simon was doing—there was something I was supposed to remember, and where had he gotten the intelligence about Arthur again? Fuck—but I wasn’t having any trouble remembering the actual information. I was just … the type of person who would forget to tell Arthur’s friends and family about it. Apparently.
The very type of person Arthur thought I was.
“So, you know Arthur’s family pretty well, huh?” I said, watching Checker send the texts.
“Yes. Can we do this later?”
“How well is well?”
He slapped the keyboard back and met my gaze defiantly. “They were almost my family too, if you must know. Arthur and Diego offered to adopt me.”
“What?”
“It would have been murder on their health insurance, so I said no. This was right after my accident, and I figured I’d let the state keep paying for the physical therapy. But they took me in, set me straight—saved my life, to be dramatic but truthful about it. Before them, I was pretty much the poster child for ‘messed-up teenager,’ and it’s not an overstatement to say I literally owe them everything. That’s it. Happy?” He pulled at his desktop, sliding himself over to start typing at a different screen. “I still have decades of tax records and client data to sort through, not to mention decrypting the rest of what we got. You should start with Dr. Teplova’s surgical methods; I’m betting you can—”
“Yeah, give me a workstation.” My breath was coming short now, like he’d stabbed me in a lung. Like they all had. “And then take five seconds and tell me what the hell happened, because—”
“What do you mean, what happened?”
“Everything! How many kids does he have?”
“Five.”
“And he and Diego, how come they’re not sunshine and roses anymore?”
He hunched into himself, still typing. “Not my story to tell.”
“Tell me something, or I will punch you in the face.”
His head came up. “What? No, you won’t!”
“Try me. Fucking try me.”
He squinted at me in something that wasn’t quite a glare, but whatever he saw in my eyes made him falter.
“Fine, I’ll give you the public records version,” he said. “But not because you’re threatening me—you should stop saying such shitty things to your friends, by the way—but because you’re Arthur’s friend too and you don’t deserve to be kept in the dark. I wasn’t here when it all went down—I’d gone off to be a real adult and try my hand at being a productive member of society, believe it or not; I had some harebrained idea about making sure I could make it on my own without their help. When I get back in touch, I find out hell had frozen over while I was off playing dot-com rich kid—Arthur had gotten boned and thrown off the force, and he and Diego had split up, which as far as I was concerned was one of the top twelve signs of the apocalypse. I found Arthur working nights as a security guard for minimum wage.”
“That’s when you came back?”
He made a face and turned back to his screen. “Normal life was never a good fit for me anyway. I talked Arthur into starting the business and getting some meaning back into his life, and here we are.”
“So Arthur and Diego don’t speak anymore.”
“They keep it civil, but no, not really. Arthur’s in his kids’ lives every minute he can be, though. He’s a good father.”
Yet he had chosen to hide it from me. He had never wanted me to know about the most important piece of himself.
He’d made a conscious decision to cut a carefully Cas-shaped hole around everything that mattered to him most.
“And what about you?” I said to Checker, my voice treacherously even.
He cleared his throat. “I go over for Sunday dinner almost every week. They’re still family to me, even if we never made it official.”
I almost did punch him, then. “Two years,” I said. “That’s how long I’ve known you and Arthur. Two. Years.”
“People have a right to have secrets from one another, Cas—”
“This isn’t a secret!” The sting in my chest was writhing up until I couldn’t stop it anymore and didn’t want to. “This is—this is his family, practically your family too from what you just said—how far did you have to go out of your way to avoid ever mentioning them in front of me? How far?”
“It was Arthur’s call—”
“And what, he doesn’t trust me? To know his children exist?” I cried. “Jesus, that sort of thing is public knowledge if anyone wanted to look; it’s not even like it’s something dangerous I could spill to a bad guy. So, what, he just didn’t want me to know?”
“He likes to keep his family separate from his work life—”
“And that’s all I am to him, right? Someone he can hire to bash in heads when he needs to. Nothing more.”
A tool. A fucking gun in his arsenal. One he thought should be illegal if it weren’t so regrettably useful.
I’d been reluctant to have friends because they needed things from me and would make me feel shitty if they were inconsiderate enough to die. I’d braced myself for the guilt of inevitably letting them down.
I’d never prepared for … this.
“I tried to tell him it was getting ridiculous,” Checker said tightly. “So did Pilar. He was just stubborn; you know how stubborn he can be. But I’m sorry, Cas. Is that what you w
ant me to say? I’m sorry. Though, come on, it’s not like you share anything unless you’re forced to, so can we call a fucking truce? Now, for the love of human progress, will you please sit the fuck down and get to work on finding him?”
I clamped down on my emotions like I was trying to reseal a shaken soda bottle and sat.
My fingers hit the keys with almost enough force to break them.
twelve
CHECKER—OR more likely Pilar—had already been sifting through the files from the data dump and sorting them into directories. Not a whole lot of it was decrypted yet, but the moment I opened the first file about Teplova’s surgical methods, I had to admit I saw why Checker had wanted me on them.
It was as I’d told Professor Halliday, way back when all this had started: Eva Teplova had figured out a definition for beauty as a narrow band around the optimum of the Western popular opinion distribution. In other words, she’d figured out how to aggregate which characteristics were most likely to make the largest percentage of the local population awestruck and drooling, at least according to what currently made the largest percentage of the local population awestruck and drooling.
I’d told Sonya Halliday how a mathematical formula for beauty might theoretically be achieved. But Teplova had gone beyond theory.
She had done it.
People like me, I thought darkly. But Teplova wasn’t a computational machine in the same way. She was more … applied. A different sort of genius.
Her face blinked by me again, masked, reaching for a tray of silver instruments at her elbow.
I concentrated on the screen and kept reading. The trickier part seemed to have been finding the functions for mapping a particular face into that narrow band of the distribution using current surgical technology. It looked like Teplova had half-brute forced that part of it by having the computer scan through the finite space of her possible surgical techniques, but her notes indicated she’d also invented a few new ones when she needed to fill in gaps.
That definitely wasn’t something I could have replicated. What kind of talent went into medical skill? I didn’t even know how to quantify it.
On the plus side, I could understand her methods … but that gave me less than no help with anything useful. If Dr. Teplova had indeed been one of Halberd’s manufactured prodigies, it looked like all she was doing was using it to live the capitalist American dream and make herself rich.
“There’s nothing here,” I complained aloud. Other than Checker making a run into the house to bring us coffee—he usually didn’t allow liquids around his computers, but coffee was an exception—we hadn’t spoken in hours. The silence hadn’t quite been frosty. “This is interesting, but why would you kill someone over it? So, she was making people beautiful. So what?”
Checker sat back, pushing up his glasses to rub at his eyes. “Beauty is a form of power. Maybe someone didn’t like what she was doing in a philosophical sense.”
Willow Grace had implied as much. “But then, why kill her now, half a year after she stopped doing it?”
“Maybe they couldn’t get to her before? Or maybe it’s the reverse—maybe someone wanted the power she could give them, but she’d stopped taking new clients and said no.”
“So they killed her?”
“Stranger things have happened.” Checker waved at his screens. “I’m still decrypting the databases on the clients—it’s painful going; we’re only a few inches into what we got, and I don’t think we managed to pull out close to everything. But a few of the names so far are, well, fantastically famous people. And I don’t think they got there until after they were—worked on.” He sounded disturbed.
“Then maybe we should be looking for one who was disgruntled. Someone whose life didn’t take off after the procedures. Beauty can’t be a panacea; it’s not going to magically open every door.”
“But beauty plus wealth? All of these people were rich going in; otherwise, they wouldn’t have been able to afford her. Yeah, it’s hard to deny someone like Willow Grace has ridiculous talent, but I think you’re underestimating how much looks matter in our society. And we only got a partial data haul—this beauty thing may not be all she came up with.” He pointed at my computer. “For all we know, she wasn’t only working on making people ‘beautiful,’ but she figured out how to make people look, I don’t know, trustworthy, or sincere, or like a leader you would believe in. I have CEOs on this list, Cas. And politicians. Not just movie stars and models, although they’re here too, but—”
“Wait,” I said.
He paused. “What?”
It was all coming together in my head, so suddenly and strongly that I was stunned I hadn’t seen it before.
Halberd combined genius with physical ability, Simon had said. Like what I could do: map mathematics onto my environment and effortlessly propel my body to match. Or like …
Somewhere in my memory, a Black girl touched wires together in a shower of sparks and yelled in exultation. Like—her. Or like a surgeon, a surgeon like Eva Teplova. If I took that to its logical conclusion …
I had been asking Simon about something else when we talked about Halberd—someone else—dammit, why couldn’t I remember? I had been thinking of someone, and it hadn’t been Teplova. Or her clients.
Or the dogs.
Oh, shit.
I jumped up and ran outside. The sky was just starting to lighten toward day. I pulled open the back door and banged into the house, Checker following me an instant later.
Pilar and Willow Grace looked up from laptops. Pilar’s eyes sagged with lack of sleep, and her hair stuck up at odd angles. Willow somehow still appeared pristine.
It was disconcerting as fuck.
“What is it, Cas?” Pilar asked.
I recovered myself and pointed at Willow. “The dogs. You know where they came from.”
“I don’t—”
“Don’t fuck around with me,” I said. “That dog and its master, they were part of Teplova’s research, weren’t they? Beauty, trustworthiness—and fear. She figured out the mathematical aesthetics of fear. For this culture, in this time.”
Pilar gasped. Willow Grace’s inscrutable veneer cracked a little.
“Like you,” I said. “She made that dog the same way she made you, and made those politicians—she hard-coded you all.” Not just beauty. Not just riches. If she could hard-code anything into a face … what kind of potential would that give her? What kind of power?
The image of the man from the wellness center swam before me again, his face both changed and not. It hadn’t been so different—a little older—a little harder—
Except that somehow, whatever his face was now had suffocated me with panic. Even thinking back on it, I only wanted to run or kill.
“They must have forced her,” Willow Grace said. The words were hoarse, as if she had to drag them out, and her anguish was palpable. “I suspected—it was only supposed to be theoretical. Do you understand? It fascinated her, but Eva never would have done it. I know her, and she would never—they must have made her. D.J. must have made her do it.”
If I had known the man on the lawn a long time ago, Teplova might have too. Someone she knew, from our joint past, whom she’d been forced to turn into a monster.
“What does he want?” I said. “What the hell would D.J. want that he’s doing this?”
“Power,” Checker said. It was almost a whisper. “People like Eva Teplova—people like you, Cas—think how much he could control.”
So the connection to my own history was coincidence. Or rather, not coincidence, but selected purely by virtue of D.J.’s thirst for people he could wield as weapons. It didn’t sound like he’d only been a hired gun on this one.
I didn’t feel the vindication at that I would have expected.
“You lied to us,” I said to Willow Grace.
She paled. “I’m sorry. I—Eva was my friend. I didn’t want her to be remembered as … I promise, that wasn’t who she was. She only
liked the theory. She did the research only to see if she could, not to hurt anyone; she was helping people—”
“People who were rich enough,” Pilar murmured, almost too low to hear.
“You think there’s a bright line between helping a burn victim, or rebuilding a woman’s body after cancer, and what I did,” Willow said to her shortly. “I would have languished at a minor local news station forever without Eva. Why should I have stood for that? It’s the same reason you wear makeup and dress well. I didn’t make the world this way.”
I turned away at an angle, trying not to let Willow’s face cloud my thinking. Christ, she was like a fucking Renaissance painting or something. My head had started to hurt.
“Researching whether something is solvable—I get that,” I declared to her. Calmly. I hadn’t lost my temper again—yet. “But we need to know what the hell else you’re hiding. Right now.”
Pilar glanced at me and seemed to gather herself before turning back to Willow. “I didn’t mean to offend you. We only want to find our friend. We’re not on any crusade against Dr. Teplova’s research, I promise, and we’re not here to think badly of her.”
“What she said,” Checker added. “For the record, I think it’s utter bullshit that you had to do what you did to get ahead, but I’m not going to judge you for it. Or your doctor. If you get in our way now, though—” He’d started to sound angry, but then he stumbled a little. “Just—just don’t. Okay?”
I scrubbed my hands over my face. Willow Grace might be on the same side with us against Pithica, or Halberd, or whoever … but I’d been right all along that she’d been hiding things, secrets that could help, intel we could use. What did that mean? Fuck, I wasn’t good at people. I didn’t know if I wanted to demand her help or put her beautiful face through a wall.
My brain felt full of static and contradictions. The only thing I was sure of was that we needed to find Arthur.
Checker seemed to be thinking the same thing. “Cards on the table,” he said. “You’ve gathered we have a friend missing, right? Help us find him, and we’ll keep your friend’s secrets. We’re not interested in wrecking her reputation. We don’t give a damn.”