Critical Point

by S. L. Huang

  “Oscar learned Teplova’s techniques,” I said. “He was becoming your surgeon. You’re planning to make…”

  Oh God.

  Fifer had an arm around Tabitha’s throat now. “Yeah. You see now, don’t you? I’m going to take this cute little girl and make her into a monster. She’s so adorable, isn’t she? And I’m going to cut her open and make her seem so vicious, her own family will scream at the sight. That is, if they don’t try to kill her first.” Her face bent back into a grin. “Or maybe you’ll be the one to kill her. That would endear you to Daddy, now, wouldn’t it?”

  Fifer had already started experimenting on humans. She’d started with Coach, but he’d only been the first.

  She wanted to make a lot more people into creatures everyone would hate and fear and tear apart. And she wanted to start with Tabitha.

  Probably the only reason Tabitha hadn’t already been sliced and diced was Oscar’s death. But Fifer had all the files of Dr. Teplova’s data, all the math of her techniques. As soon as she could find a new doctor to bribe, blackmail, or threaten into doing the surgeries …

  “This was going to be step two,” Fifer sneered at me. “But I had to move it all up, because of you.”

  “Yeah,” I said slowly. “I’m irritating that way.” The game pieces were rearranging themselves in my head. “You know, I could still force you to kill us all. Right here.”

  “You won’t. You wouldn’t sacrifice the girl. Besides, you always think you can win.”

  Not always. But I did now, considering Simon’s magic.

  Fifer glanced down at her bomb, which was counting down through four minutes.

  “I’ve decided,” she declared. “I’m not going to kill you—yet. I’m just going to leave, and you’re going to let me, because you still think you can save her later. I bet you’d even let me carve her up, thinking there’s still time. We have a compromise!” She started dragging Tabitha backward, toward the other end of the basement. I’d blinked away enough dust and grime now that I could see the stone steps at the other end.

  “You’re wrong.” If she took Tabitha out of here, we’d never find her again. Or, if we found her, we’d be just as likely to kill her. I wasn’t going to let her become Coach—Coach who I hadn’t been able to rescue, who’d been so permanently warped … who’d died by my own hand.

  Fifer was wrong. I didn’t think I could save Tabitha later. I didn’t think so at all.

  “This ends here, today,” I said. “I’ll shoot you first.”

  “You’re bluffing,” Fifer spat past Tabitha’s shoulder, not stopping.

  “Maybe,” I called back, pivoting to keep her in my sights. “But you want a compromise? I’ve got one.”

  That piqued her interest. She paused.

  When I had her attention, I lowered the Glock and then slowly crouched to place it on the floor before straightening, hands raised. Her bomb readout flashed 3:19. If I could run it out … force her to stop it … change one variable …

  “I’ll give you a trade,” I said. “Take me in her place.”

  “Cas!” gasped Pilar from behind me. I ignored her.

  “Take me,” I said again. “I’m a much better monster. I’m very hard to kill.”

  “I could take you anyway,” Fifer said. “I could take you both.”

  “No, you couldn’t.”

  Fifer paused, then broke into her biggest grin yet, her beautiful face in a beautiful grin. “I would get more mileage out of you. But what if you’re just trying to get close to me to kill me?”

  “Oh, I am,” I said. “But there’s always the chance I’ll fail.”

  If I did fail …

  It should have scared me, to think about being twisted into a creature who would drive everyone away from me, who would inspire only panic or hatred, fleeing or bullets. The connections I’d been chasing so hard, all burned like flash paper as if they’d never been. Trapped alone in a skin no human should ever have, one that would drive me into a violent unreality. Would it be Arthur who killed me, eventually?

  But today I wasn’t scared. I was only sad.

  Fifer seemed to read my mind. “You’re already a monster,” she said. “Poor widdle beastie. Trying so hard to be human, when all anybody else sees is your scales and teeth.”

  “Do you want me?” I said. “I’m making you my offer. You can take me. Let Pilar and Tabitha go.”

  Her eyes glittered.

  I was too good at math not to know that I might be handing her the winning cards—not just over me, but over all of us. Without the danger I represented, would she really allow Pilar and Tabitha to walk out of here? The best I could hope for was that it would alter some inputs. Give the two of them the slimmest of chances.

  That was okay with me today.

  Hands still in the air, I took a step forward. Then another. I didn’t need to look again at the bomb to know we were at less than two minutes. “If you’re all about chaos, I promise I can cause it.”

  “You won’t have a choice,” she said. “Frankenstein’s creation, King Kong … we tell the story over and over, how the creature that is feared and shunned will turn and shit on humanity. It’s inevitable.”

  “You’ll make the trade, then.”

  Fifer twisted with the hand clenched on the dead man’s switch to dig around in the messenger bag holding her bomb. She came up with something and tossed it at me. It clattered to the smooth hardwood floor of the wine cellar and rolled to a stop at my feet, against the debris from the ceiling.

  A syringe.

  “It’s a sedative,” Fifer said. “You’ll wake up, though you’re not going to want to at that point. My own personal monster!” She giggled again and also dug out a pair of handcuffs, which she flung my way with a finger. “Punch the drugs into a muscle. Then cuff yourself up.”

  I crouched, keeping tabs on Pilar out of the corner of my eye. She still had her CZ aimed at Fifer in a one-handed grip, the other hand braced against the wall. Shit, she better not be so busted up that she wouldn’t be able to get Tabitha out.

  Probabilities bayed at me, pessimistic, but I didn’t allow myself to consider them. Instead, I picked up the syringe and stuck the needle into my upper arm, through my clothes. Pushed the plunger.

  The sedative felt cold going in.

  If it was a sedative. If she hadn’t just poisoned me.

  I still wasn’t afraid.

  Willow Grace’s eyes narrowed greedily as she watched me. “Go on now. Cuffs, and then come stand in front of me. Can’t have cute little Pilar shooting me, and we’re all out of time.”

  She waved the dead man’s switch at me. Fifty-four seconds.

  I reached out to retrieve the cuffs and slid the metal over my wrists. Click, click click, click. The sedative was already affecting my movements, making my fingers heavy.

  “Now, come block your friend’s line of fire,” Willow Grace instructed. “Easy now. Not too close.”

  I stumped forward between Pilar and Willow Grace. The latter pulled Tabitha a few steps to the side and cuffed her to one of the wine racks, then drew a stubby little revolver with her free hand and trained it on me. The bomb was counting down past twenty seconds; Fifer stepped away from Arthur’s daughter, moved toward the stairs, and manipulated something one-handed on the device that made the LED clock click off.

  Good, I thought. One threat down.

  Though it wasn’t like Fifer couldn’t toss another device down once she got us out of the basement. Pilar might only have seconds. It was all I could give. It would have to be enough.

  “This is a good compromise,” Fifer said, back in her taunting singsong, her hand steady with the revolver aimed right between my eyes. “Now keep coming. Nice and slow. Try anything and I’ll shoot you.”

  I believed her. I muzzily added reaction time and movements, subtracted, and concluded that I could not jump her. She was keeping me too far away, and had arranged us so I was exactly in Pilar’s line of fire—I could drop to the
ground, but the data showed Willow Grace’s reaction time as faster than Pilar’s. She’d be able to shoot Pilar before Pilar could shoot her.

  I still wasn’t afraid. I knew all the data and I wasn’t afraid.

  Fifer groped a foot behind her for the steps, never taking her eyes off me. I drew in line with Tabitha, whose face strained toward me, her chest heaving. If she keeps hyperventilating into that gag, she’ll faint, I thought.

  Eh. It wouldn’t make much difference.

  Fifer started creeping up the stairs backward, determined not to let me close enough to disarm her. She’d been more careful than she needed to be—the drugs were making my vision weave, as if the world were a painting being washed away by a rainstorm.

  “Come on now,” she said. “Just a little more.”

  Then she’d have me, unconscious, and have Pilar and Tabitha injured and bound in a basement, where she’d probably try to kill them or lock them up to experiment on.

  This hadn’t been a very good plan. Why had I thought it was a good plan?

  I stumbled as I hit the bottom of the steps, but caught myself. I didn’t want to know what Fifer would do if I collapsed before she got me upstairs. I rocked on my feet, determined to stay upright, and found the first step.

  Overbalanced a little. Rocked again, farther than the first time.

  Pilar’s gun went off.

  The report echoed off the basement walls and flattened my senses, and the drugs made me clumsily slow. Fifer was snapping back and falling before I managed to hurl myself to the side, at Tabitha, because if Willow Grace managed to get her gun up—I couldn’t see where she’d been hit—

  She did try. Pilar shot her again, just as I crashed into Tabitha in a tangle of elbows and brought the whole wine rack smashing to the ground. Glass shattered everywhere, shards peppering my skin among the cold splash of liquid. I tried to focus my wobbly vision back over at Willow Grace, but by then, she’d stopped moving.

  I pushed myself to sitting and attempted to check over Tabitha. She was soaked in red, but the cloying scent of fermentation filled my nostrils, and I was pretty sure that was all wine. I’d been trying to wedge myself against her to make sure she didn’t get more than bruises from the fall—the breaking bottles had probably nicked her with the same tiny cuts they had me, but she was squirming against her bonds like an eel now, so she was probably okay.

  I slid the broken spar of the wine rack out of her handcuffs and helped her sit up, in the direction that faced away from Willow Grace’s corpse. My fingers were thick sausages, but I managed to tug the gag out of her mouth.

  She spat out the cloth and coughed a little, then took a deep breath, her eyes fixed on me in something unnervingly like worship.

  “Don’t you dare say ‘cool,’” I said.

  She blinked at me a few times. Then she said, “Wow.”

  Maybe Arthur had a point, keeping me away from her.

  “Pilar,” I slurred, my eyes tracking over to find her. “Find the damn handcuff key and get over here.”

  Pilar was standing over by Willow Grace, staring down at her. At what was left of her. Now she turned toward us, her gun dangling from her hand at her side. “Cas.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Good shot. Now come and … undo the…” My tongue had gone thick too. “I think I’m gonna pass out in a sec.”

  “Cas, I—your ear.”

  “M’what?”

  “I nicked your ear. I shot you.”

  I pushed my cuffed hands against the side of my head. They came away bloody. I couldn’t feel it.

  “That wasn’t … I didn’t know if I could make that shot,” Pilar said. “I took it anyway.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I took it anyway, with you standing there.” Pilar still hadn’t taken a step toward us. “I might have shot you. Easily. Cas, I—I wasn’t good enough to do it and I knew it and I knew there was a good chance I’d kill you, but I still wasn’t scared.”

  “P’lar,” I said. I meant to tell her to have her fucking crisis later, but instead, I passed out.

  forty

  I HALF-WOKE getting dragged out of the mansion by a limping, staggering Pilar, my arm slung over her shoulders, and Tabitha bending awkwardly to try to support me from the other side. Both of them were huffing hard, and I had the distinct feeling they’d dropped me several times already, but I wasn’t in any position to complain.

  When I woke up all the way, I was slumped in the front seat of the car we’d taken to the mansion. The day had cycled through until the sun was low in the sky, and Pilar was driving, with a phone to her ear. It would have been uncharacteristically unsafe of her if traffic had been moving the least bit, but it wasn’t. At all.

  Or maybe she just wasn’t afraid of crashing.

  “He’s sure?” she was saying. “He’s absolutely sure?… Yeah. Yeah, she’s—gone. I’m bringing Cas and Tabitha back, but the roads are clogged … well, thank you very much for that, then. When is it coming back on?… Okay. No, I can’t, and Cas is out of it … Oh, yeah, I’m pretty sure she’s fine, just drugged … I don’t know. I was going to refer that question to, um. All of you.”

  I must have moved, then, because her eyes tracked to me. “Oh, she’s awake. Cas, Checker wants to know if there’s a plan for the, um. Crime scene.” She glanced toward the back seat, and I craned my head around to see a sleeping Tabitha.

  Checker was alive, then. Which meant they were probably all alive. My mind wandered around the information. That’s good, I thought. Good.

  I’d lost the thread of what was happening. Pilar had asked something. Right. I managed to circle back to it and pondered Checker’s question. Fifer had made sure Willow Grace’s mansion wouldn’t be stumbled into by anyone, so we had a little breathing room … I could come do a cleanup job tomorrow. Maybe Rio or D.J. would help.

  In a perfect world, Pilar and Tabitha could report this whole thing to the authorities truthfully—mostly—and trust they’d be cleared, but I didn’t think any of us had faith in this being a perfect world. The two of them might be mostly law-abiding, but they’d follow my lead.

  That was to say, they’d follow my lead or I’d make them.

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of it,” I said, and I was almost sure I saw Pilar’s shoulders relax slightly.

  Almost sure. Maybe not. She seemed pretty calm.

  “Their side went okay, then?” I dredged myself up to ask. I had the distinct feeling I should have been a lot more concerned about that. LED counters danced through my memory. Even if I’d given them the ten extra minutes, that hadn’t been a lot of time for D.J. to finish.

  But Checker at least was alive. That was good.

  “Yes. They got it done. With a little collateral damage.” Pilar glanced wryly around at the jammed streets. The power was out, I suddenly realized, the traffic lights swinging dark. That would kneecap LA for hours.

  “Checker knocked out the power? And D.J. got all the bombs?”

  “Yup. They got Diego out and dismantled all Fifer’s devices, and everyone’s okay. He says.”

  So they’d gone through with pulling Diego just in case, simultaneously with disarming the police station. Smart.

  “Good,” I mumbled. “Yeah. That’s good.” There would be a few more loose ends tomorrow, in addition to making sure nothing from the Malibu mansion would connect back to Pilar or Tabitha. Sikorsky was still a loose end, for one, and also double-checking Arthur’s family was permanently safe from any vengeance Fifer might have tried to reach out with from beyond the grave. And we should probably call someone in about possible explosives set to blow on the Barberry Canyon bridge.

  But that could all wait. I leaned against the coolness of the window and let myself drift back to sleep.

  * * *

  THE POWER didn’t come back until after nightfall, just as we managed to creep back into the city. Traffic was snarled into such a Gordian knot that even having the lights and gas stations back did
n’t improve our top speed much for the last leg in to Checker’s house in Van Nuys.

  Checker had taken Diego and Elisa to the same safe house Arthur and the other kids were at. And, after hearing that Fifer was no longer a threat, Checker, Juwon, and Dr. Washington hatched a plan to hack through the crowded streets and get Arthur and the twins down to San Fernando Memorial. Visiting hours were over, but they’d managed to sneak the three of them in to see Simon anyway.

  Checker reported with concern that even after Simon’s treatment, they were in much worse states than Pilar had been, after that many hours crushed under the adrenaline of their own panic responses. But Dr. Washington was monitoring them back at the safe house, and she hoped they’d be able to sleep it off.

  My own first order of business once we got back was to deal with Sikorsky. I told Pilar to escort a sleepy Tabitha into the Hole so I could go and take care of the cop still zip-tied to Checker’s bed.

  “You have what I need?” I asked Checker as we got Tabitha bundled inside. I hefted a briefcase I’d had Pilar stop for on the way. I’d also picked up a new Colt for myself at the same storage unit.

  He tossed me a flash drive. “Just finished.”

  “Whazgoinon?” Tabitha murmured.

  “Criminal activity,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”

  Pilar shot me a look that would have melted iron and said, “Nothing’s going on, sweetie. Sleep, okay?”

  I got everything else I needed, left them to it, and headed into the house.

  Sikorsky started growling at me through the sock gag as soon as I hit the light. He flailed against his bonds, his face going red and then darkening almost to purple. The stench in the room suggested he hadn’t had a very comfortable day.

  I hopped up to crouch on the desk with my briefcase, took aim with the 1911 I’d just retrieved, and shot seven times in rapid succession. The shell casings pinged off Checker’s bookshelves.

  Sikorsky squealed against the socks, but I was already done. The zip ties and ropes popped free, and his flailing suddenly let his limbs go wild. He whipped up and spat out the gag.