Critical Point

by S. L. Huang

  “We’re not giving up on Tabitha,” I said. “Self-sacrificing shit is all well and good, but not today. If we die, she dies.”

  “But if we can’t disable the bomb without killing our friends—” Her face went slack in shock and horror. “Cas, you’re not thinking of—are you? Tell me you aren’t!”

  I almost laughed at her. “No, Pilar, Simon taking our fear away did not make me suddenly willing to kill Checker or Arthur’s other daughter.”

  “Oh,” Pilar said. “Okay. Well, good. Then … what are we going to do?”

  “We,” I answered, “are going to set off this bomb.”

  Not having any fear might not make me a murderer, but it sure did make me rash.

  thirty-eight

  I TASKED Pilar with finding me something heavy and metal, and with delicate precision started cataloguing the logic of Fifer’s bomb. The wires disappeared into the air vents in the walls, whatever system they were rigged into inaccessible to me. I wished I had enough leeway to experiment and figure out exactly what all the functions were—when I did X, what Y fell out on D.J. and Checker’s end—but gathering data might have gobbled one or both of our remaining clocks. So I had two simpler goals: set off the whole mess as early as possible and transfer all remaining time to D.J., and somehow introduce a tiny bit of delay so that some of it went before the rest.

  Pilar came back from the bunkroom with a heavy metal flashlight. “Will this do?”

  “Perfect.” I’d started counting down infallibly in my head, but I checked the two timers to make sure nothing had changed. D.J.’s clock was back above fourteen, ours at 19:28.

  If possible, I wanted to give them at least fifteen of those minutes.

  I didn’t bother to remind myself the germ of an idea in my head might not even be possible. The flashlight would tell me. I took the heavy metal cylinder from Pilar and began tapping it along the walls of the safe room.

  Sound waves echoed back at me, dully telegraphing the solidity of steel and concrete, the oscillations drawing out the perfect, invisible acoustic picture. Pristine and uncracked. No weak points.

  I kept going, letting the sound graph out an X-ray of the walls for me. I tapped across first the surveillance room, then into the bunkroom, all the while both timers ticking down in my head.

  Nothing. The place was tight as a drum.

  If I’d been capable, I might have started feeling nervous.

  “What about the ceiling?” Pilar asked.

  I looked up. Difficult. First to direct a charge up there, and then to rig ourselves somehow to catapult out. Alone I could have done it, maybe …

  I cut off that line of thought before I started questioning the balance of Pilar’s life versus Tabitha’s. “I haven’t tried the floor yet,” I said instead.

  Not that I was optimistic. An earthquake safe room would probably be built right against the ground, even if this mansion was fancy enough to support the rare beast of a Southern California basement under other rooms.

  But when I struck the floor near the back wall of the bunk room, the thunk of a new acoustic skeleton was the sweetest sound I’d ever heard.

  “Here.” I tapped more, listening for the echo through solid and then a blessedly close boundary, sounding across the patch of floor and drawing out the outline in my head. We’d have almost no margin for error. A small slice against the wall—barely big enough for one human to stand on, let alone two—was admitting to some miniscule overlap with empty space below it. Empty space, and a floor telling us it was just unreinforced enough for a shaped charge to bust through, given how everywhere else it sat firmly against unyielding earth.

  Of course, I had no idea what was underneath. It might be no more than a vent of a crawl space. If so, we were fucked.

  Oh well.

  Nine and a half minutes, said D.J.’s clock in my head. We could still give him another ten.

  “I need you to do exactly as I say,” I said to Pilar. I didn’t bother telling her the unknown variables still might kill us. Either we’d survive, or she’d die not knowing the difference. “Pull the bottom mattress off the bunks, and push the bed frames away from the wall a few feet.”

  While she did that, I scanned my eyes over the rest of the contents of the room. The casings from the broken communications equipment were passable, but some of the metal canisters the emergency rations were in would work even better. I dumped them out and banged the metal hard against the wall to deform it, angles playing out in my head and the theatrical ticking omnipresent in the background.

  “What can I do now?” asked Pilar.

  “Stand there.” I pointed, then went to the other room and very, very carefully tugged out one of the canisters of explosive material. The wiring would only let it move so far, but I yanked one of the useless radio wires from the tangle, pulled my knife, and spliced the new wire in before slicing through the old one in one move. I was smooth enough that the ominous clocks backgrounding me on every monitor kept ticking down at the exact same speed, one second at a time.

  “Your job is going to be to shoot the detonator on this,” I said to Pilar, explaining as I moved, lifting my chosen canister carefully over to sit on the exposed springs of the bunk frame. “I’m jury-rigging a shaped charge, which means directing the explosives in a way that they concentrate a bunch of metal into a projectile and punch it through. This is going to take the floor out from under us, so be prepared.”

  I finished setting the canister in my bent-up shaped metal and aimed it at Pilar’s feet, materials charting themselves with estimates and error margins through my consciousness. I didn’t know the exact explosives yield of what we were dealing with here, which made this worse than foolhardy, especially given how many variables the physics of shaped charges had … but I could make some good guesses. And, well, if it didn’t work, I wouldn’t exactly be able to regret it.

  “If we set off the one, though—won’t the bomb read that as a disconnection?” Pilar asked.

  “That’s why I’m going to set off the rest of it before it realizes what we did.” My aim was more than good enough to hit the right wire from through the doorway and across the room. Hopefully the bomb would give all our remaining time to D.J. and Checker as it went up in flaming glory, give D.J. enough time to finish disarming or Checker enough minutes to get Diego and the others out. Or both.

  Not that an extra ten minutes was a lot of time. But it was all I could control.

  I finished positioning my device at what I estimated was the optimal stand-off distance for punch through. Then I tilted the mattress up against the bed frame, giving Pilar and me a tiny bit of shielding from the main bomb. It wouldn’t do much. My timing was going to have to be exact to the millisecond—too soon and I’d destroy us, too late and I’d kill everyone at the police station when our bomb sensed we’d tampered.

  I ducked behind the mattress next to Pilar and leaned forward to tap my makeshift shaped charge right at the back. “See this? That’s the detonator. You have to target exactly there. If you hit the explosives, it probably won’t do anything.” Depending on how reckless Fifer was. Most military-grade explosives were too stable to go off when hit by small arms fire, but who knew. “Got it?”

  “Got it,” Pilar said, readying her stance. She was still a little less firm than usual, but I didn’t worry about her accuracy. The detonator might be about the width of a pencil, but if she couldn’t hit a target only few feet in front of her, we had bigger problems.

  I cast one last glance over the scene. “Back up more,” I said to Pilar. “Unless you want the front half of your left foot torn off.”

  She pressed herself farther back against the wall and reset her gun hand. I crammed myself in next to her, practically standing on her feet.

  Ten minutes and twenty-two seconds left for us.

  “On my mark.” The sequence played itself out in my mind. Detonation, the explosive punch through the floor. I would fire as we fell, and the whole safe room would go u
p in flames and concussion as we descended away from it.

  Hopefully.

  I settled the pad of my finger against the trigger. “Now.”

  Pilar fired.

  I’d forgotten about protecting our hearing. A clap of pure thunder sucked all the air from around us, over us, under us, taking me off my feet—or was it the floor disappearing from beneath me?

  The world was suspended in dust and flame and noise, the air made hard and spinning us where and how it would. Even my senses couldn’t keep up. I desperately flailed against the concussion with my gun hand, lining up with where I had been—I thought—was I already too late?—while the rest of me fell away into oblivion, and I managed to squeeze back the trigger of the Glock.

  I felt the sear trip and the grip bucked in my hand, so I was pretty sure I had fired. I didn’t have a chance for a second try. Everything was falling, flattening, darkening.

  Then the main explosion roared out at us like the fires of hell.

  thirty-nine

  I MUST have blacked out for an instant, the shock wave jellying my brain in its skull. I had the vaguest impression of the mattress disintegrating in fire before our eyes, and then blackness.

  Gravity saved us.

  Mathematically, our plunge must have lasted less than a second, but that split second lasted an eternity, a forever of being hopelessly out of control. I fell hard against Pilar, and metal and debris fell hard on me.

  I lay for a moment, stunned. My internal organs felt like they’d been put through a blender, but every time I tried to evaluate the damage, it was like my neurons shorted out on me. Gradually, I realized that it wasn’t actually all that dark in here—the lighting was a dim ambiance, but the explosion from above was still imprinted on my retinas, shrouding my surroundings with its afterimage.

  I hoped I’d set it off in time. I hoped Checker and the others weren’t dead.

  I hoped, even if I’d given them that extra time, that they could use it, and weren’t all just going to die anyway after their counter ran out.

  I put those thoughts out of my head and tried to get up. It was hard. I had to push a lot of heavy things off me, and my joints didn’t seem to want to respond. My bad ankle had turned to mush, and it almost went out completely before it decided it could support me, flaring up my leg in pain.

  Someone made a small sound like a wounded bird, then coughed.

  “Pilar?” I tracked back with my eyes. I’d been half on top of her, but she seemed to be trying to get up too now. Her skin and hair were so shrouded with a coating of dust and debris that she looked like a ghost—one who’d been put through a woodchipper. I doubted I was in any better shape.

  “I lost my gun,” she mumbled.

  Mine was still in my hand. I dredged enough numbers to extrapolate where her CZ must have fallen, and shuffled over to retrieve it for her. By the time I pressed it into her hand, she’d managed a hunched half stand.

  “Are you injured?” I said.

  “My—my knee. I’m fine.”

  She clearly wasn’t, but I let it pass.

  “I don’t think … I want to do that … again, though,” she got out. “Where are we?”

  I took a better look myself. We’d dropped out against a back wall made of brick, in the tiny piece of overlap with the destroyed safe room above. Expanding before us in the other direction now was the perfect encapsulation of a wealthy mansion: rack upon rack of smoky glass bottles, all labeled with long French and Italian names. A wine cellar.

  “Come on,” I said. “There must be a way back up to the house. If Fifer realizes what we…”

  A movement in the dimness at the other side of the cellar. My gun hand came up, slower than it should have, my eyes taking a moment to focus. Pilar straightened behind me with the help of the wall, her CZ wavering.

  Tabitha pushed out from the wine racks to one side. Literally pushed out, with Willow Grace—or rather, Fifer—behind her, shoving her in front. Tabitha’s hands were cuffed, and her eyes rolled at us, chewing at the gag that had been stuffed in her mouth.

  But she was alive. She was alive.

  Fifer stopped. She was in ripped jeans and a T-shirt now, a startling difference from the imitation of Willow Grace’s fashion sense, and it somehow made her look about fifteen years younger. Slung across her body was a canvas messenger bag, and she flipped back the flap on it aggressively, staring us down.

  I knew what she had in the bag before she opened it. Fifer only had one weapon of choice, and the dead man’s switch she was squeezing in one hand would have given it away even before I saw the wires and another goddamn LED timer, this one showing less than eight minutes left.

  If I shot her, we were all dead.

  I did remember to double-check that not pulling the trigger was a rational decision. I could still feel the pull of wanting to agree with whatever Fifer wanted, the hard-coded aesthetics pushing at my consciousness. It wasn’t like going up against an actual psychic—now that I knew, I could center myself, see her for what she was. Not to mention that Tabitha, cuffed and gagged, eclipsed any other shadow of instinct or influence. But I also had a disturbing amount of doubt about what might happen if Fifer turned on the charm and begged for forgiveness.

  Maybe it was fortunate that she didn’t seem the least bit interested in either releasing Tabitha or admitting to her mistakes.

  “You are so freaking annoying!” she sneered at me, her mouth twisting in her beautiful face.

  “I try.” I edged forward a little. “So, what’s your plan? Blow yourself up along with us?”

  “Stop,” she said. “Stop right there or the girl gets it.”

  I stopped.

  She scrunched her nose at me for a second. Then she giggled. It was disturbingly unlike her Willow Grace impersonation, her whole posture squashing up.

  “I can’t believe you got through all my traps,” she said. “Are you proud of that? And are you proud of finally figuring out I was against you the whole time? Took you long enough. I was there right under your nose. You fell for my pretty face, didn’t you?”

  “Not anymore,” I said.

  “Too bad. But you see, the thing about having a hostage is, you’re still going to do whatever I want. Dance to my little tune.” She gave Tabitha a shake.

  “The thing about having a hostage is,” I echoed, “that’s leverage you can only use once. You kill Tabitha, and we kill you.”

  “But then she’d be dead, and so will you. Which means I win.”

  She wasn’t wrong.

  “Now we have a good old-fashioned standoff,” Fifer continued. She spoke almost cheerfully, and her voice had changed markedly, lilting up to what I assumed was closer to her natural accent. “I want you all dead, and you want your lives and the girl. I don’t see a compromise, do you?”

  “Why don’t you just lock us all down here? Us and Tabitha?” Pilar suggested from behind me.

  Smart. Fifer might think she could starve us to death—or give us alcohol poisoning, whichever came first—whereas Pilar had faith I’d be able to get us out once we were left alone.

  But Fifer wasn’t having it. “Nice try. Especially now that I’ve seen this one’s freaky skills.” She jerked her chin at me. “She’s probably how you all ducked my BLEVE, isn’t she? Such a waste. Now I have to redo all that work killing all of you.”

  “Why kill us at all?” I countered. “I honestly don’t care about your little plan to muck with American politics. Let us go, and you can go do whatever the fuck idiotic thing you want.”

  Her face clouded. “I’m not doing this because I want to! But I’m not going to feel so helpless anymore. They’re all rotten, rotten to the core, all bought and paid for by the fucking special interests and the one percent. They don’t even see the rest of us, you know. They dance around in their fancy schools and fancy clubs and then do such shitty, awful things, and they won’t ever even realize how fucking horrible they are. But I can stop it. I will stop it!”

&n
bsp; “I said I don’t care,” I said. “The FBI or whoever can catch you. Just give us Tabitha and let us go.”

  “Hey,” spoke up Pilar softly. “I get it. It can be really frustrating, right? You try to vote or donate money or go to protests, and it doesn’t ever seem to mean anything. It feels like—it feels like abuse, doesn’t it, but you can’t even walk out or call anyone to stop them. But someone like you—who knows how to do what you do—you figure you can actually do something, right?”

  Fifer narrowed her eyes. “Don’t try to act like you get me.”

  “Okay,” Pilar said.

  “This country needs to get burned to the ground and restarted. It’s too far gone.”

  “Okay,” Pilar said again.

  “So you’re going to use terrorism to create mass panic, and then swoop in with all Teplova’s people in the wake of it,” I cut in. “I hate to break it to you, but I’m really not sure that’ll make anything better.”

  “I’m going to do way more than that.” Fifer gave Tabitha another little shake. “You think a few bombings were all I had planned? I’m going to make the whole world turn on one another. Parents killing their own children, lover against lover—”

  “Oh, like you and Oscar?” I said.

  “You killed him, not me!” she screamed at me. “It was your fault. I have to find a new doctor now, and all because you distracted me so I wouldn’t see him!”

  “Or you didn’t see him because you made him almost entirely invisible.” I almost added a crack about how if she needed a doctor so badly, she’d made a hell of a mistake by killing Teplova, but then I connected what she’d said.

  Find a new doctor.

  She’d killed Teplova. And D.J. had mentioned Oscar Lee being a medical school dropout. Oscar, who’d been willing to do anything for Fifer.

  We’d assumed Teplova had given Oscar and Fifer their new features, and we’d probably been correct about that part. But we’d also assumed Teplova had been the one who’d created the dogs, and been forced to operate on Coach, and that, I suddenly realized, meant it would not have made a lick of sense for Fifer to kill her.