Critical Point

by S. L. Huang

  I passed him Pilar’s burner.

  “Checker’s going to give you a phone number to keep calling,” I said. “When you do, don’t give any information, but keep asking to talk to a John Doe who will answer to the name of Simon. He’ll be able to help. Until then, keep Arthur and your brothers hydrated. Okay? You’ll find food and water and blankets in crates in the warehouse I’m sending you to. There’s also several firearms and ammunition—”

  Juwon jerked.

  “You don’t have to touch them,” I said. I glanced across at Arthur. “Checker, give him Dr. Washington’s number too. This is a doctor Arthur’s used in the past. She’s very discreet. If absolutely necessary, if Arthur needs it, you can tell her where you are. Nobody else. Do you understand?”

  He’d started crying again, but silently, the tears leaking down his face like a tap had been left on. In answer to my question, his head quivered in a rapid shake that didn’t stop.

  I almost knew how he felt.

  I let Checker finish giving him the details, transferred Pilar to the car I was stealing, and checked over Arthur’s wounds as well as I could. But I was no doctor. Not like Teplova.

  Her applied skills had somehow been so many worlds away from my realm and everything I could control. How was that possible? Mathematics underpinned everything. I had followed the intricacies of how she’d made Willow beautiful, and the theory had all been so perfectly understandable, a well-fitted jigsaw puzzle of ingenious creativity. But I’d missed everything important.

  And in practice, the more I saw of her creations, the more her choices eluded me. The confluence of equations, the local and absolute extrema that served as her fulcrums, the web of reinforcing and refining with each new technique to build that theory into usefulness—I had the creeping, desperate premonition that it might be fundamentally beyond me.

  Just because I understood circuit theory didn’t mean I had the first idea of how to build a mobile phone. I’d failed to save Coach, but … I didn’t even know if I could have.

  I went over and jacked the sedan to life, then once the engine turned over I slumped in the driver’s seat waiting for Checker. The door to the van slammed with a dull finality, locking Juwon and his family inside. Checker came over and swung into the passenger side next to me, pulling apart his chair with practiced smoothness to pass into the back next to Pilar, who was curled in the fetal position against one of the doors.

  “How is she?” he asked.

  I didn’t know any better than he did.

  “Hey.” He prodded my shoulder and pointed. Juwon was backing up in fits and starts. He took a stuttering turn and then managed to creep out toward the street. “We’re following for a second, right?” Checker asked.

  I’d said we were. It was smart. I’d be able to spot any tails from back here, for sure.

  None of it seemed to matter. D.J., Willow Grace, Pithica—whoever wanted us dead, they’d been a dozen moves ahead before we’d ever realized we were playing. Willow Grace could have planted a tracker on the minivan. Juwon might have been brainwashed by Pithica. D.J. might have figured out Dr. Washington was a known acquaintance of Arthur, and already staked her out …

  What was the point? What did they want? They’d jerked us around for days, kidnapping Arthur and letting him go, only to try blowing up him and his whole family. They’d had Willow Grace embedded with us from the beginning, only for her to help us find Arthur and then kidnap Tabitha a day later. Nothing we’d done seemed to have made a damn bit of difference.

  “My house is clear. So far,” Checker said. He must have been looking at his security system on his phone. “I need to stop there. Get some equipment, and—” His words squeezed off, and his hand stuttered in the air, waving off an end to the sentence. “If you think it’s safe enough for me to work from the Hole, even better.”

  Willow Grace knew about Checker’s place. She knew about all of us.

  I followed Juwon for long enough to be sure I was the only one behind him. He was an awful driver, creeping up to lights and hesitating and swerving into any lane changes, but at least he didn’t seem inclined to speed. Rush hour was beginning to seep out of LA’s overclogged pores, which would either help him out by keeping traffic to a crawl or become a trial by fire.

  Either way, we couldn’t help him. I peeled off and headed toward Checker’s place.

  “There has to be something about Willow Grace.” Checker spoke rapidly and tightly, engrossed in his phone. “Something, some way we can—use that—we could go to her house, her work place, call everyone she knows…”

  She’d taken Tabitha over an hour ago now. An hour was enough time to hide the body of one sixteen-year-old child.

  Four minutes had been long enough for me to get Coach’s body off the street.

  “Cas! Cas, are you listening to me?”

  I pulled into his driveway and jolted to a stop. My hands felt like clay on the steering wheel.

  “Cas, snap out of it! We need to find Tabitha—”

  “Arthur was right,” I said, so hollowly it sounded like a stranger. “I don’t know if I can save her.”

  Checker twisted in the passenger seat, grabbing onto my shoulder roughly. “Stop it!” He shook me. “This is not the time to go blue screen of death on me—Cas! You are the most arrogant person I’ve ever met and—” He swiped at his face with the back of one hand and seemed to gulp back a sob. “I need you. Tabitha needs you, Arthur—I can’t do this by myself! I need you to be your cocky, smug son-of-a-bitch self right now and tell me if anyone can do this, it’s you, of course it’s you, and we’re going to get her back or literally die trying, because that’s what we do. Otherwise we might as well just call the police, and if they arrest all the rest of us, then fuck it, because we weren’t doing her any good anyway.”

  By the end of it, he was quaking, every breath heaving like he was about to shake apart at the seams.

  He’d been so strong for Juwon. I hadn’t put it together that this was probably the worst day of his life.

  Checker’s phone went off in his hand. He jumped and almost dropped it, then glanced at the screen. “It’s—it’s an unknown number…”

  It could be a ransom call. Oh, God, please let it be a ransom call. Let her be alive.

  “Answer it.”

  Checker swiped his fingers rapidly on the touchscreen, changing some settings before he wet his lips and hit the button to pick up the call on speaker. “H—hello?”

  “Charles,” breathed the person on the other end. “I got you.”

  thirty-three

  THE WORDS came through some sort of synthesizer, disguising the voice. But it was no less gloating for that.

  Checker jerked in his seat. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out.

  “You don’t remember me? After all the hijinks we got up to together, I’m hurt. I’ll never forget the time we trolled all those serious wannabe actors in North Hollywood—”

  “D.J.,” Checker whispered.

  “The one and only!” sang the disguised voice. “I have your friend’s daughter. Or would you say your sister? I don’t want her, though. I want you.”

  “Don’t hurt her. Please don’t hurt her,” said Checker.

  “I only blew her up a little,” the person said. “Oh, she’ll be fine, don’t shit your trousers. As long as you come, that is. Come meet me, right now, the same place we used to do RC racing—and I won’t even tell you to come alone. Bring your whole ridiculous little posse.”

  The line went dead.

  “I have to go,” Checker said. “I have to go, we have to go, of course we have to go—”

  “Wait.” My brain was dragging itself out of its sludge and suddenly processing very fast. Very fast, dredging up memory, running every algorithmic comparison I could find …

  “No,” Checker cried. “We have to—to figure out what we, and we have to go, he’ll kill her—”

  “Wait,” I repeated. Wrong, wrong, wrong, sang the algorithms
in my head, spitting out high-probability mismatches. “Wait. This is going to sound—I don’t even know. But I’m not sure that was D.J.”

  “You—what?”

  I’d only met D.J. briefly before …

  “Were you recording?” The way he’d adjusted things before picking up, I had a suspicion. Checker was security-conscious to a fault. He nodded and quickly tapped at the screen to play the phone conversation again, the voices coming tinnily from the speaker.

  I was sure this time.

  “The cadence is off,” I said. “The voice is disguised, but the sinusoidal features of the intonation—there’s a vanishingly low probability this is the same person.”

  “But then who…?” said Checker. “What—why—”

  “I don’t know. Do you have anyone else in your past who’d want to kill you and everyone you care about?”

  He inhaled sharply and looked away.

  I hadn’t meant the question as a dig. But we didn’t have time to dwell on it—because whoever had called us had just made a very big mistake.

  Either they didn’t know what I could do, or they’d underestimated it.

  I told you it was a gift, murmured Valarmathi.

  A fragile bubble of hope wobbled up in me. Our enemy wasn’t infallible. They’d made a mistake, and they didn’t know what I could do, and oh, fuck, maybe this gave us a chance after all. I hadn’t been able to save Coach, but like Checker had said … that didn’t mean we couldn’t make this one last desperate dive after Tabitha.

  It wasn’t about proving myself to anybody. Not anymore. It wasn’t about me at all.

  “Get on your computers,” I said. I dug in my pocket and tossed him Coach’s phone. “See what you can do with that too. I’ll get Pilar inside and then join you.”

  “Cas, he said—he said to come now; what if—”

  I pointed at the streets. “It’s rush hour. That gives us a magically expandable amount of time to prepare. Let’s not waste it.”

  * * *

  I HURRIED in getting Pilar into the house. Whoever had called us …

  They didn’t know about my abilities, or they never would have risked it. Which meant they didn’t know about my connection to Halberd. Or Teplova. Or Coach.

  Which meant … they weren’t Pithica. Dawna knew exactly who I was and what I could do.

  The screaming relief of that conclusion made me want to sit on the floor and weep. If this wasn’t Pithica, if the connection to Halberd and my past was only the coincidence of selection bias as I’d first tried to insist … Tabitha might have a chance after all.

  But what did it mean that it hadn’t been D.J.? The person had talked to Checker like they’d known him, assuming the detail about trolling actors or whatever was accurate. So D.J. still had to be involved here somewhere, didn’t he? After all, it had been Arthur’s investigation that led him to stumble into all this in the first place …

  Unless we’d had it all wrong.

  I laid Pilar on Checker’s couch and tried to make sure she wasn’t about to chew off her own limbs. “Cas,” she whispered plaintively. “Cas—I, I, I…”

  “Stay there,” I said. “Sorry.”

  Then I dashed out to the Hole and burst in the door. “Assumptions off the table. If D.J. isn’t involved here, what does that mean?”

  Checker straightened toward me, his eyes wide and owl-like. “He still has to be, right?”

  The signature matches in the explosives, the obscene real estate listing, the voice on the phone—

  “Someone is sure trying very hard to convince us of that,” I answered.

  “No, I still think he is,” Checker said. “I’m looking at this cell phone—you got this from the guy who—?”

  I nodded curtly, gesturing him on.

  “There are only a couple of contacts on here. One tracks back to Eva Teplova. And one is … it’s totally anonymous, but I’m finding it all over the dark web, and the context … Cas, it does make me think it’s D.J. I think—I think your guy had his phone number.”

  That brought me up short.

  But everything was fitting together just a little bit wrong. Like we’d built a whole system with one contradictory axiom.

  “We do know there’s some explosives expert involved here…” I thought for a second. “Call the number.”

  “Are you sure? If I keep searching it, maybe I can find—”

  “Yeah. Call it. I want to see who picks up.”

  Checker’s face cleared as he got it. “I’ll keep us muted unless you give me the word. Are you ready?”

  I leaned on the desktop over his shoulder. “Go.”

  He dialed through the computer, every keystroke like a falling hailstone.

  A phone rang on the other end. Once. Twice. Three times.

  Four times.

  A rustle as someone picked up.

  “Hello? You’ve got me!” sang a merry voice on the other end. “What can I do you for?”

  I recognized the high, singsong cadence instantly as D.J.’s, the amplitudes falling out into matching cycles and patterns. I pointed at the speakers. “That’s D.J. That’s him.”

  Checker had gone white. “What the hell is going on? I don’t understand. Why have someone impersonate him instead of just…”

  “Hello? Hello? Hello?” crowed D.J. over the speakers. “Is this a prank call? Because I fucking love pranks. They turn me on something wicked.”

  “Unmute it,” I said. “I want to talk to him.”

  Checker didn’t seem able to hit the button. I reached over and did it for him.

  “I’m up for phone sex, but you do have to pay me,” D.J. was chattering on. “Nothing’s free in life, yanno.”

  I took a deep breath. If D.J. was behind everything, he already knew what I was about to tell him. If he wasn’t …

  “I’m here with an old friend of yours,” I said, and nudged Checker in the arm.

  “Hey,” Checker said faintly, after a second.

  So much emotion was packed into that one syllable it sounded alien. But D.J. went dead quiet. And then he screamed.

  Or—I thought he was screaming. It must have been more like a squeal of excitement. “Charles! Oh my coke-addled gods. How the fuck are you?”

  “Not … great,” Checker managed. “D.J., we need to know…”

  “You need something from me? How marvelous. How absolutely spiffing. Oh hey, look, you’re on a fancy computer connection too! Go modern tech.”

  A video window filled the screen.

  D.J. looked exactly like my vague recollection of him: short and rotund, with very dark skin and long braided dreads. His appearance didn’t immediately parse as male or female, and I’d gotten the sense that was intentional.

  It might only help if he saw Checker was who he said he was. I enabled our own side of the video link, and the little inset window popped up with Checker’s and my tense, shadowed faces. We both looked like hell.

  “Well, well, well. It truly is Charles the Good,” D.J. said. “The crip look works for you. I heard he did that, by the way. What a fucker. Wait, I know you too!” He poked at the screen on his end, which made his finger go off camera and jar the whole thing.

  “Yeah,” I said. “You’ve tried to blow me up.”

  “That’s most people I meet, sweetcheeks. I tried to blow Charles up, too, back in the day. That was a laugh, wasn’t it, Charles?”

  I squinted at the screen. “I thought you two used to be friends.”

  “He didn’t mean to,” Checker said in a low voice. “But ‘laugh’ isn’t what I would call it, no. D.J., someone is … did you…”

  “What can you tell us about a whole mess of recent bombings in Los Angeles that all seem to have your signature?” I said.

  “That bomb squads are idiots?” D.J. said brightly. “I’ve only done one here lately. Okay, two. All those alphabet soup agent-faces must have a major crush on me—”

  “Then someone is going to pretty great lengths to fra
me you,” I cut in.

  “Frame me?” D.J. looked genuinely surprised. “Charles, what on earth did you get yourself into? Don’t go trying to replace me with a lesser model.”

  Checker glanced up at me, questioning, and I nodded him on. “There’s … there’s someone here in LA pretending to be you,” he said. Under the desktop, his hands were clenching each other very tightly. “They’ve been attacking everyone I know. And now they’ve kidnapped my friend’s daughter and we have to, I have to, get her back, but we don’t know who, or where, or—or why. But they called me pretending to be you, and on the bombs—if that wasn’t you either, then somehow they’re copying how you do that too.”

  “Aaaa, that little motherfucking douchenozzle!” D.J. cried. “Thinking she can impersonate me? And kidnapping? She must die. She must have her head removed posthaste so the rats can fuck her throat-parts.”

  I had absolutely no idea whether he was kidding or not. The probability fell out straight down the middle.

  But only one piece of what he’d said mattered.

  “You know who it is,” I said. “You know who’s got our friend—”

  “But should I tell you? Oh, fuck it, I’m too lazy for games. It’s fucking Fifer. Or whatever she’s calling herself now.”

  “Is that a pseudonym, then?” I asked.

  “Who knows?”

  “She knows your methods,” Checker said. “She knows … things about you. Me.”

  “Because I taught her everything!” D.J. said. “For reals, the bomb squad is being an idiot on the sig thing; her sig matches mine because she learned from the best. She was my protégé. My apprentice. The font into which I poured all my—oh, not like that, Charles, I can see your mind splashing around in the gutter, but I’m still saving myself for you.” He winked.

  As far as I could tell, Checker was not thinking about sex for probably the first time since I’d known him. “Are you saying—” The words drew out of him like a forced extraction. “Is this about—is she out to get me?”

  “Oh, yes,” D.J. said. “She’s ever so jealous of what you and I had together. She’s obsessed with you. She built a shrine to stabbing the eyes out of your photographs! Get your head outta your ass, Charles, not everything is about you.”