Critical Point

by S. L. Huang

  “You ol’ softie,” D.J. said, with that same stubborn cheer. “Besides, she kills lots of people too!” He gestured to me, still rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. “You get on her about it?”

  When Checker didn’t immediately have a comeback, D.J. pivoted and raised a hand to me. “High five. Killing people!”

  I kind of suspected Checker would frown on it if I participated, so I shook my head.

  “Aw, monkeyballs.” D.J. stretched his mouth into an exaggerated clown face of a frown. “I’m so underappreciated. Well, I’ve got a plane to catch. I’ll see you goofs later.”

  He bounced to the door, then stopped, turned, and came back to Checker. “Hey. Charles.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I wouldn’t’ve blown the building. If I’d known what Baxter’d done to you.”

  “I know.”

  “Woulda capped him myself for it, if he hadn’t gone and got himself Witsecced.” D.J’s voice had gotten softer, more serious than I’d heard from him before. “Me and Ting came back for you, but by that time you’d gone fucking State.”

  “I didn’t turn State,” Checker said. “I got probation. A friend, um, called in some favors. And a really good lawyer.”

  D.J. stared for a second, then laughed. “You make friends fast, man.” He waggled his eyebrows.

  The corner of Checker’s mouth turned up. “Get your mind out of the gutter.”

  “Sure, I’ll climb back into the sewer with you.” D.J. rocked back and forth on his feet for another beat, and his tone went almost hesitant. “Uh. So. You okay now and shit?”

  “Yeah,” Checker said. “I’m okay. And shit.”

  “Cool, cool,” D.J. said, his former bounce coming back. “That’s good, man. It was good seeing ya.” He gave Checker another friendly poke and turned to leave. “Oh, and, Charles—don’t try to save me, okay? It’s bad for your health.”

  The door to the garage swung shut behind him.

  Checker turned back to the screen he’d been working at, but then he waved his hands vaguely, said something about getting a snack, and headed out of the Hole and toward his house.

  I stood in indecision for a moment and then followed.

  I found Checker snack-less on his couch, flipping channels, and sat down next to him.

  “Did you need something?” he said, eyes on the television.

  “No,” I answered. “I’m trying. Um. To do that thing.”

  He muted the TV and turned to regard me as though I might be hazardous waste. “What … thing?”

  “Where I, uh. Show interest.” I cleared my throat. “Is this awkward? This feels very awkward.”

  Checker burst out laughing. He laughed so hard and so long, I thought he would suffocate himself. I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or embarrassed.

  “Cas,” he said finally, taking off his glasses to wipe his eyes. “Only you.”

  Only me what? I thought.

  But he didn’t seem inclined to elaborate. Instead, he leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. He picked up a rubber squeeze ball from the end table and started tossing it up and catching it, over and over. “I didn’t expect this,” he said. Throw, catch. Throw, catch. “I have so much unresolved from back then, not just D.J. And after we ran across him again, I spent so long obsessing … and then he just, just walks into my life and back out again? Casual as you please?” Throw, catch. Throw, catch. “I don’t even know what to think. If I should want him caught. If he’s unredeemable. If he’s … I don’t know. I mean, he’s going around blowing up buildings—that’s, that’s wrong, right?” He started laughing again, this time a little hysterically. “I feel like someone set a magnet on my moral compass.”

  I felt very inadequate to this conversation. But I supposed sitting for a tick and listening … well, it was the least I could do. For a friend.

  Checker sniffed a little. “Even though all of you ended up okay, what he’s done—it’s logically equivalent to killing you and Tabitha and Arthur, isn’t it?”

  “By that logic, every drunk driver is morally equivalent to a murderer,” I said.

  “Some people do think drunk driving is morally equivalent to murder.”

  “Are you one of them?” I asked.

  Checker threw the ball another few times and didn’t answer me. “He was like family, you know?” he said instead. “It’s hard to make that tie mean nothing. And I think part of me—I think it doesn’t want to. As scared as I got thinking about him—I, I built him up into this monster in my head, and instead, he’s just … the same stupid kid, and I don’t know if that’s better or worse, because he’s killing people, not even people who are his enemies or something but just random people, and he’s utterly okay with it, and I don’t know if I should hate him, or if it’s horrible for me not to hate him, or if—and Diego…”

  “What about Diego?” Diego and the kids had been getting their lives mostly back to normal, as far as I had been told.

  Checker sighed, and his voice went a bit small and croaky. “He’s furious with me.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not supposed to do this sort of thing.”

  “What sort of thing?”

  “The sort of thing where I shut down the entire police force of Los Angeles to get his arrest record wiped and then am an accessory to bribing the arresting officer into not reinstating it. After having a calm discussion with you about that arresting officer and why we shouldn’t kill him. That sort of thing.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “And between that, and D.J.…” He scrubbed his fingers across his face again, knocking his glasses askew. “What kind of standing do I have to judge anybody anyhow?”

  I didn’t know what to say. “You and Diego, um. Are you two gonna be okay?”

  He blew out a breath. “He’ll forgive me eventually—I mean, it’s Diego. Doesn’t mean I don’t feel guilty as hell. In one night, I threw out everything he ever tried to teach me.”

  “Well, if you could go back, would you do it again?” I said.

  “Fuck, yes. In a heartbeat.”

  We didn’t find out till later, but it turned out Diego was so mad about what we’d done that he tried to go into the police station as an honest man and turn himself in. But Sikorsky denied the arrest, saying it had only been a pickup for questioning and Diego was confused.

  From what Checker didn’t say, I half-suspected that result made the hurt in their relationship harder to repair, but Checker still claimed to have no regrets.

  Or maybe he had regrets, he just still wouldn’t change anything. That made sense to me.

  forty-two

  FOR THE first few weeks following our rescue of Tabitha, I saw a fair bit of Pilar and Checker and not much of anyone else. I heard the filtered gossip: Diego had found a temporary rental house for the family a few neighborhoods over from their old one, Arthur had moved back to his own place to convalesce, Tabitha was begging for my phone number. I satisfied myself that they’d all ended up alive and mostly unharmed and put off the rest, spending my days on Pilar’s couch drinking whiskey and eating the catering leftovers she brought home for her fridge. Sometimes Checker came over while she was at work and insisted on watching the worst movies we could find together on her television.

  Simon called when he was well enough to talk, and I went over to the hospital for our sessions. I was slipping enough by the first one that I almost asked Checker to drive me. It turned out I should have; when Simon saw me, he chewed me out for being foolhardy enough to take the wheel of a car with Valarmathi creeping in on all corners of my senses.

  So we were back to him taking unreasonable interest in my safety and me hating on him for it. Business as usual.

  But after I sat by his hospital bed and got talked through two hours of sealing my previous life back into her box, Simon stopped me from leaving right away. “Wait,” he said. “Please. There’s something else I need to speak to you about.”

  I hoped he wasn
’t about to bring up what had happened between us. I still hadn’t sorted out my own thoughts on the matter.

  But instead, he said, “I’ve been reading through Dr. Teplova’s research.”

  I sat back down. He must’ve gotten it from Checker; I hadn’t known. “What’d you find?”

  “I think we were right that she was originally from Halberd.”

  “Okay,” I said slowly. “What does that mean for us?”

  “This is—” He scrunched his face a bit, scratching at the back of his neck. “I talked to Rio about this too. He agrees with me that it’s too much of a coincidence.”

  I frowned. I hadn’t seen Rio since the cleanup at Willow Grace’s—I’d called him asking to meet for a fuller debrief, and he’d picked up but said he was busy and would call me when he was free. I’d taken him at his word. It gnawed at me a little that he’d found the time to talk to Simon.

  I pushed the feeling aside. “What’s too big of a coincidence?”

  “You. Getting pulled into fighting something that came out of Halberd.”

  A sudden coldness crept up my spine, like I was being watched.

  “It was a lot of degrees of separation away, though,” I tried to rationalize. “We figured that Fifer found Teplova as someone to motivate her own ends, and Arthur stumbled onto her because of the way she was imitating D.J.…”

  “Who was Checker’s old friend,” Simon finished. “Cas, what are the chances of that?”

  “Do you mean literally? Because the number of variables—”

  “Cas, where did you get D.J.’s phone number?”

  “What?”

  “I’ve been going back through everything, and—Cas, I talked to D.J. about this. He had no connection to Teplova, or her friends, or anyone else from Halberd. That phone number should never have been there.”

  “And you’re claiming someone planted it to … to what, to help us? That’s kind of far-fetched.”

  “No, it isn’t. Not with people who make it their mission to, to watch, and nudge things along in the direction they want.”

  Fucking. Psychics.

  “Rio thought they were involved all the way since this started,” Simon said. “And I—I know it seems a stretch at first blush, but I agree. Because think about it. What’s Pithica’s stated goal?”

  “Well, they try to smooth out all global injustice by manipulating everyone into world peace—”

  And I cut myself off, because I heard what I’d just said.

  Manipulation. They cured the world of ills by manipulating people, as many people as they wanted or needed to get their end results.

  “This is how they operate,” Simon said softly. “This is exactly how they operate. Coincidences and tiny changes, indirect steps from far away. Anyone who suspects a bigger web, that person will just end up being told they’re paranoid. If Fifer was a threat—or, more likely, Teplova was who they viewed as the original threat, going off independent that way—Cas, they got Fifer to take care of one problem, and by embedding a person with a six-degrees connection to you, they then set you up to take her down. A few weeks later … problem solved.”

  Every organ in my body clenched, my skin tightening. They’d played me like a puppet—they’d endangered all of Arthur’s family—“Why not just fucking do it themselves?” I burst out. “They’re fucking telepaths. Wouldn’t it be easier for them just to walk in and tell Fifer to off herself?”

  “Cas,” Simon said. “This is doing it themselves.”

  “They used me,” I said hollowly.

  “What you call telepaths—we aren’t the only type of people they have,” he agreed. “They could predict how you’d respond.”

  My fingernails were digging rivulets in the heels of my hands.

  “Cas,” Simon said. “I don’t think you could have done anything different.”

  “We had a deal,” I hissed.

  “Not to attack each other. Now that they know about you … they’re good at using the tools they know about.”

  Tools. Fuck.

  Simon blew out a breath. “And, Cas, I’m—looking at what Teplova did here—I’m not certain they were wrong.”

  “What?”

  “Wrong to manipulate you without asking you, yes. But this type of technology—what Teplova was doing with it, and the potential for misuse—”

  “She wasn’t misusing it at all,” I said. “Not according to the real Willow Grace. She was just making a spectacularly good living. Nobody was misusing anything until Fifer came along, and you as much as admitted that Pithica put her there—”

  “But if not Fifer, it might have been someone else,” Simon argued. “And they—it’s possible they were able to know that would happen eventually, really know it. I’m not defending them, and maybe they shouldn’t have started that avalanche in this case, but I’m just saying—someone needed to stop Fifer. Heck, there are probably other of Teplova’s clients who need to be stopped now. And Teplova might not have been the only one who adapted what she knew.”

  I forced myself to breathe and listen to what he was saying. “You mean there might be other, um, offshoots of Halberd and Pithica. Independents, like me, who might be using their powers to take over, or—or spreading them somehow, the way Teplova did. Creating more.”

  Creating more people with bizarre, otherworldly powers, like Fifer had wielded. Some would only use it for personal gain. Others …

  Fifer had been about to build a world full of monsters, before we’d stopped her.

  I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment. For the last few months, I’d become mired on the endless treadmill of trying not to go insane. Letting Simon into my head, maintaining some sort of equilibrium, trying to stay afloat in the face of the nightmares and voices. Somewhere in the middle of it all, I’d stopped looking ahead to accomplishing anything but those things.

  I’d even gotten an office. A freakin’ office.

  Now Pithica was messing with our lives again, and we’d just seen evidence that a thousand other outfits could be springing up with similar tech, spawning more modified people who would multiply and mutate what they could do until they gained whatever power or advantage they desired. The city I’d failed was still suffering, and I’d betrayed a hell of a lot of people the past few years. I already had more to make up for than I could repay.

  With some bitterness, I recalled my conversation with Checker about redemption. But I wasn’t looking for redemption. I’d spoken truly when I’d told him I didn’t believe it was possible. I might try to be better, but even if I succeeded in some small ways, there would be no balancing of scales. No making up for who or what I’d been.

  No making me into a different person, even.

  But I’d slowly started to want my life to be about more than what someone like D.J. was after. I couldn’t do math anymore, but maybe I could do something.

  God help me, I wanted meaning.

  The last time I’d tried to be a hero, it had gone spectacularly badly. That just meant I needed another approach.

  “Simon,” I said.

  His face turned toward me, surprised. I winced. I hardly ever talked to him without sarcasm.

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  “I think we should start a research project.” I held my breath, not asking the question.

  He saw it anyway, as I’d known he would. “Yes,” he said softly. Thoughtfully. “For this, I’m in. The world isn’t equipped to handle these sorts of threats. Pithica was right about one thing. For this … people need us.”

  “Rio can’t be involved,” I said.

  He nodded. “Because he’s the one who made the deal with Daniela.”

  “No,” I said. “Because I don’t think he wants me on the front lines, and I’m going to be.”

  And if Pithica was the one who was pushing me into this …

  Well, they were going to regret it, because I was going to figure out how to come after them again too.

  * * *

  I KEP
T tabs on Arthur via nosy questions to Checker and Pilar, but I purposely delayed visiting him until they said he was on the mend. I didn’t want to risk an argument spiraling him into further injury, and I was definitely planning to argue with him. Loudly. And at length.

  About what, I wasn’t quite sure, because after everything that had happened, I wasn’t even sure he’d been wrong. But I wanted him to be.

  When Arthur opened the door, however, he dropped his crutch and grabbed me in a bone-crushing hug.

  I was pretty proud of my reaction time being fast enough for me not to reopen half his wounds trying to escape the embrace. I didn’t really hug him back, but I sort of patted him on the back a bit until he was done.

  “I’m never going to be able to thank you enough,” he said, when he let go. His face was wet. “You got her back. You kept her safe.”

  Safe was probably a relative term, but I didn’t contradict him. “You should thank Pilar,” I said instead.

  “Did already.” He retrieved his crutch and limped back into his apartment. “Come in, Russell, please.”

  I did. Sat on one of his kitchen chairs. “I’m still pissed at you.”

  He’d gone over to the fridge, probably intending to offer me food or drink, but he stopped with a hand on the door handle, leaning against it. “It’s all happy mediums, isn’t it?” He wasn’t looking at me. “I didn’t know where to draw the line. I’m sorry.”

  “No,” I said.

  “I am, Russell. Believe it. Please.”

  “I didn’t mean you aren’t sorry,” I said. “I meant I don’t want happy mediums. That doesn’t work for me.” Recklessness overtook me, the type of giddy half fear that usually prefaced me doing something like jumping off a building. “I’m either your friend or I’m not. Isn’t that how this works?”

  He still wasn’t looking at me.

  “I don’t mean you need to tell me everything in your life,” I said. “But the things that … that make you happy, or are part of … the things that are important. I want to know.” And I’d keep trying to be a better listener. I would.

  “Yeah,” Arthur said, after a minute. “Yeah. Okay. I’m in.”