Critical Point

by S. L. Huang

  “Are we done?” she asked.

  I didn’t hear Simon’s assent, but he must have told her yes mentally with a twitch or a glance. Pilar stood.

  “I’m ready,” she said. She was a lot more relaxed than she’d been a few minutes ago. Her eyes were clear.

  “So you are,” I said.

  Be careful, I thought I heard from Simon, but it was mixed with so much regret and fatalism that I couldn’t be sure of the meaning.

  We’d walk straight through the dogs, and if Fifer threw anything else at us, well, we’d handle that too. Including her. PCP fucks you up, Checker had said, and he was right—even odds Fifer was going to be going into this standoff hopped up and reckless.

  Thanks to Simon, we’d be able to be just as reckless. Hopefully, it would be enough.

  thirty-seven

  I LEFT the second phone with Simon anyway, even though he wouldn’t be able to talk to us over it. Instead, I told him to call the number Juwon was at, the moment he could be any help over a phone line.

  The pressure and guilt he felt at his inability to do more—it brushed faintly against me, and a few moments ago it might have mirrored my own powerlessness. But now, the concern that had been chewing at me about Arthur and the twins, about Checker and D.J. and Diego and Elisa—it had all simply dropped away. Everyone else would either be fine or they wouldn’t. It no longer weighed on me.

  Our only job was Tabitha, and we would succeed.

  I had become used to Pilar grabbing the dash or the door every other minute whenever I was driving. This time, she calmly finished some crackers and apple juice she’d picked up from a hospital vending machine and then sat with her hands in her lap. She did wear her seat belt, but I supposed that was logic or habit rather than fear. Personally, I didn’t think my driving differed markedly without being afraid, but I also wasn’t worried about getting stopped by the cops. If flashing lights appeared on our tail, we would deal with them. That was all.

  We wound our way out to Malibu, and I parked just down the street from the real Willow Grace’s luxury home, the streets curvy and shaded enough here to give us good cover. Checker had been sending us regular updates via text:

  AT STA

  WG GONE

  WAITING

  STILL NO

  WAITNG

  NOT BACK

  NOT HERE

  NOPE

  NADA

  “It would help us out if we wait until Checker and D.J. see her back at the station, wouldn’t it?” Pilar said. Her voice was steady.

  “Probably.” If they had eyes on her, it would be a good bet on the house being clear. “On the other hand, we don’t know if she’s actually going after Diego and Elisa right now. She might have been casing the place so she could go back after she deals with us.”

  “She might be at the place she told you to go for Tabitha too,” Pilar added. I’d filled her in on the way over. “If she thinks we’re going to fall for her trap.”

  “Or she might be here.” I shrugged. None of the possibilities seemed particularly prohibitive. “Go now?”

  “Why not?”

  We got out of the car. I pulled Sikorsky’s gun. A Glock in nine-millimeter was the worst of all possible worlds as far as I was concerned, but if something needed a bullet put in it, it would do.

  Pilar’s legs buckled a little when she stood. “I’m okay,” she said.

  Her muscles must still be a little fried. I thought of Arthur and Matti and Roy. Simon had been deep enough in my head that I was sure he’d picked up on their condition, but until he could whisper over a phone, there wasn’t much he’d be able to do. Juwon would have to take care of them.

  I wasn’t worried.

  We crested the hill on the edge of the property. Willow Grace’s house was a sweeping indulgence in extravagance, complete with a high wall of gleaming white stone that swooped around its perimeter. She would have a security system, of course, but I wasn’t worried about that either.

  Willow Grace did have a security system—or rather, her bomb-making doppelgänger did, not only cameras but tripwires and laser mounts that led back to real wires and kabooms. I evaded or disabled them all, giving Pilar a heads-up behind me.

  It all felt markedly easy. I wouldn’t have thought I was usually nervous while busting into places like this, but maybe I was. Maybe it kept me on my toes. This was all so—boring.

  We snuck through groves of orange trees and past an honest-to-God infinity pool. And came face-to-face with one of the dogs.

  At least, I assumed it was. To my senses, it just looked like … a dog.

  Granted, a very large dog, who was not at all happy to see us, its fur spiking up across its back in an aggressive crest as it bared very sharp-looking teeth. But otherwise, just a dog. Not a particularly ugly or vicious-looking dog either.

  Its golden eyes gleamed in the darkness. It growled at us. We stared back at it.

  “I kinda don’t want to kill them,” Pilar said in a whisper. “Now that they’re just … dogs. I like dogs.”

  I wasn’t so fond of them, but there was also no reason to waste the ammunition if the thing wasn’t going to attack us.

  We stared at it for another few seconds. It started to dip its head, and then its torn ears flattened against its head and it crouched with a whine.

  “Oh, poor thing,” Pilar said. “It probably never sees anyone who isn’t scared to death of it. Do you, champ?” She lowered her gun, stepped forward, and reached out to scratch the dog behind its ears.

  It twitched and whined again, but didn’t snap at her hand. Almost as if it didn’t dare.

  “No, you’re not keeping him,” I said.

  We ran into two more of the animals on the way to the main house. They reacted in much the same way, starting with a growl and then slinking back into the trees and bushes when we didn’t seem afraid.

  “We could start a TV show,” Pilar said. “A new kind of dog whispering.”

  I was sure Simon would love that idea.

  The mansion was large enough to have balconies and wings. It expanded above us like a ship at full sail, pale and stately against the sky. We climbed onto a bleached wooden deck and approached a side door, where I found and cut the wire for the alarm and then found and cut the wire for the booby trap.

  We went inside.

  The rooms were large, empty, and slovenly in the manner of someone who wasn’t living in her own space. Greasy pizza boxes and old Chinese food cartons tipped against one another on the first coffee table we passed, with past food spills staining the carpet uncleaned. Clothes and electronics paraphernalia draped the wide-open spaces haphazardly or collected in corners. Fifer must be a fan of cheap beer—cans showed up crumpled on every surface, old half-full ones leaving rings on mahogany tables or the grand piano.

  One small, empty room that didn’t seem to have much defined purpose now had blood-crusted ropes thrown against the wall and dark stains soaking the hardwood. Someone had tried to clean them, but not very well. Real quiet. Wooden floors, smelled like bleach, Arthur had said.

  I shut the door and didn’t share my suspicions with Pilar.

  The other oddity was a solarium—it looked like it was about to become a full-on operating theater, with an operating table, equipment, and tools all sort of stacked and jumbled together in a way that probably wasn’t sanitary. None of it seemed to have been put to use here yet, though.

  Pilar and I finished canvassing the front half of the ground floor and stepped up a shallow flight of stairs toward the back. My phone vibrated in my pocket.

  It was Checker. I picked up one-handed, still stepping forward cautiously gun-first and keeping my voice low. “Hello?”

  “She’s there! Fifer’s there, where you are, I mean she probably is—she’s not here at least—Cas, we got it wrong. D.J. was wrong about what she would do—” I could tell he was typing as he talked; his voice had the distracted quality it did when he was at a computer, and the clack of keys was aud
ible in the background. “She hit us already. She wasn’t casing the station, she set it and left, she’s done here. And we found her device but—but that’s not important. What’s important is that if she’s not here, there’s a good chance she went back to the house; she could be waiting for you—”

  “Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “Right. Okay.” A moment of dead air as Checker waited for me to hang up and I didn’t. “Cas? I called you in time, right? Is everything okay?”

  “So far,” I said. He thought he’d catch us early enough to deliver a warning. Oh, well. I stepped through the next doorway, more of my attention on my front sight than the conversation. “Stop panicking. We’re fine. And it sounds like you found the bomb where you are, so you’re good too. Just get D.J. on it.”

  “We did! We snuck him in and—he’s working on it now and he says not to alert the bomb squad because they’ll blow it, but he says she did a good job for once and he’s not sure if he can do it in time, and Elisa and I, we have to get Diego out of here, everyone out if we can, because we don’t know if he’ll even be able to—and Elisa won’t leave either—”

  “You have a plan?” I said.

  “Break him out,” Checker said.

  “Okay. Good.”

  He sucked in a breath. “Diego’s going to kill me. He … but better that than dead. Cas. If you have a sec … this got complicated, and what I’m about to do, there’s a chance it will—the power grid is—I have to be here at the station, and D.J. says there’s a chance what we’re about to do is going to set it off.”

  “Okay,” I said again. “How much of a chance?”

  “I don’t know. But if, if Elisa and Diego and I, if we don’t—just in case, can you take a message? For Arthur.” He paused. “Tell him they forgave him.”

  “Did they?”

  “No. Just tell him. And him and the twins and Juwon and Tabitha, tell them—tell them I love them, please.” His voice wobbled.

  “Sure.”

  “Cas, it’s—it’s been a good time, hasn’t it? We’ve had a good run.”

  I didn’t know why I asked the question, then. I shouldn’t have even been taking attention from our walkthrough to keep talking to him, especially not with the new intelligence that Fifer was probably somewhere on the premises. But the doubt had been lurking, chewing at the back of my mind, and maybe I knew I wouldn’t have had the courage to voice it if I hadn’t been dead to all my fear. “Hey, Checker. Honest answer. Would we still be friends if you didn’t think I could be saved?”

  He made a choking sound. “What? You can’t ask me that.”

  “Why not?”

  “You just can’t. And when you figure out the reason, you’ll know why.”

  The way he was talking, I wondered if that would be the last thing Checker would ever say to me.

  “I gotta go, Cas. Take care, okay? Don’t go in if it’s—get Tabitha, find her, but stay safe. Please.”

  “I have to go too,” I said. “See you on the other side.”

  “I hope so,” he said, and hung up.

  “That was Checker?” Pilar said.

  “Yeah. They got fucked.”

  She digested this. “They have a plan?”

  I shrugged. “I think so.”

  “Good.” She pointed. “Cas, what’s that?”

  I followed her gaze. A bookshelf had been shifted to the side on runners, and behind it, a metal door as thick as a vault’s stood open.

  I tracked back where we’d been in my head. We were somewhere around the middle of the sprawling floor plan, I reckoned. It could be a large safe, but the opening looked more like a darkened hallway, and I thought safe room was more likely.

  “For disasters or home invasions,” I said. “And it looks like someone’s inviting us in.”

  I stepped carefully into the darkened entrance, snapping up an LED flashlight under my gun hand to flash around. The white light showed only smooth, bare walls.

  “It goes deeper,” I said. “Fancy safe room.” Some rich people had panic rooms they could live in for days or weeks, especially in case of natural disaster. Since in California that usually meant earthquake, this one would be sure to be reinforced in every dimension—my brain ran the calculations disinterestedly, seismic amplitudes spiking at resonant frequencies, shear forces that would have to be rebuffed by solidity and minimum thicknesses.

  Pilar had out a keychain flashlight of her own, and she angled to cover behind us as we stepped down the short corridor. After a few meters, it opened up into a bunkroom. Aside from the bunks, the side of the room was stacked in neat organization with containers of emergency rations, bags of water, clothes and blankets, gas masks, medicines, sanitation supplies, and everything else a rich person might plausibly need in case of apocalypse.

  Or, almost everything. If I’d been designing a safe room, I’d have a lot more gasoline and ammunition in it. But people like the real Willow Grace probably didn’t buy into guns being more important than food.

  “I don’t like this,” Pilar murmured. “Cas, if this is a safe room meant to keep people from getting in, doesn’t that also mean it would be hard to get ou—”

  The lights came on in a blaze of brilliance. At the same time, the door behind us clanged shut with the resounding finality of reinforced steel.

  “—out,” Pilar finished in a resigned tone.

  Well, shit.

  A loud, obnoxious ticking rose in the silence following her statement.

  “Cas—”

  I didn’t bother to answer, hurrying through the one door left, which led to a second reinforced room built against the short hallway. This one had originally been for surveillance and communication, with large monitors tiling one wall. Emergency communications gear had been wired into a desktop, but now it had all been pried open and scattered, a sprawling tangle of electrical and fiberoptic spaghetti. And the monitors—half the screens were dark, presumably the feeds I had cut on our way into the mansion, but the other half …

  The other half showed black-and-white surveillance footage from somewhere that wasn’t the mansion. On one screen was Checker, in a dark room frantically clattering at a keyboard, a flashlight rolling on the desktop beside him. On a second, a prison cell, Diego sitting on the cot, leaning against the wall in exhaustion. Other screens flashed on the lobby or hallways of the police station, and I caught Elisa’s form walking and talking with a detective who seemed to be listening more rationally than Sikorsky had. And a final one showed a close-up of a complicated device somewhere in a basement, wires and lights cheerfully spelling out fourteen minutes left, and D.J.’s face bending close with a deranged grin.

  Counters in the corners of all the monitors showed the same number.

  “Give me your phone; I’ll call them,” Pilar said.

  “No. Wait.” I turned, widening my survey of the room. Against every wall was stacked one more addition: metal canisters wired together in disturbingly familiar ways, and an LED timer of our own flashing down through 26:04.

  “No cell signals,” I said to Pilar. “It could set something off.”

  She glanced around at the reinforced walls. “Probably no bars anyway.”

  “We can’t help them. We have to trust D.J.” I turned my back on the monitors. “But I can disarm this.”

  I started following the wires back the same way I had been throughout our whole walk into the mansion, using the same if-A-then-B logical trees. This was fine. I could do it. Disarm Fifer’s last-ditch attempt at entrapping us, ignore the psychological warfare she had thrown in with the feeds of our friends, and then figure out how to break out of the safe room and keep hunting for Tabitha.

  I cut the first wire.

  “Cas!” shouted Pilar.

  I spun back around. The countdowns on the monitors had suddenly accelerated. Twelve minutes. Eleven. D.J. flailed in black-and-white silence on his monitor, clearly cursing a blue streak while his LED numbers plummeted. I whipped back to the wires I
still held—backtracked to where they connected—I thought I knew what was going on here—

  I slashed the flat of my knife down both wire ends to strip them and in one twist sealed them back together. On the monitors, the countdown threatening Checker, D.J., Diego, and Elisa slowed again.

  “We can’t—without…” said Pilar. “How bad of a boom will this make? Is there anywhere in here we could protect ourselves?” She looked around the room, then toward me hopefully.

  I used my knife to pry up one corner of one of the canisters, very carefully. The explosive was some sort of white powder—I didn’t know how I might identify it, but I was guessing something on the level of military-grade explosives. TNT, RDX, maybe PETN … maybe a combination … I charted out the mass and explosive yields, the thermodynamic work that would become flame and death, the Friedlander waveform that would make the air into a bludgeon, refracting and diffracting around the surfaces in the room and through our fragile human bodies.

  My best estimates were that there would be nothing left of anything in the safe room once this went off. On the plus side, the walls were reinforced enough that the explosion would likely stay contained in here. Probably why Fifer had planned it this way.

  “We wouldn’t even be smears on the wall,” I answered Pilar.

  She made a face. “Gotcha.”

  I focused back on the wiring. Translated again to the logic of conditional statements. If this worked the way I thought it might …

  I followed a different wire back, pulled out my knife, and cut it, ignoring Pilar’s yelp of, “Wait, Cas, what—”

  Our timer jumped down by five minutes, and the one on D.J.’s bomb simultaneously jumped up by five. He exclaimed in surprise and then mimed kissing the thing.

  “Fifer does like her games,” I said.

  “We can give them more time,” breathed Pilar. “If we’re going to die anyway … not that, I mean, I don’t want to, but … what can we do?”