Russell's Attic, Books 1 - 3

by SL Huang

  Martinez looked at him and then back at me. I would have crossed my fingers, if I’d been able to move them right.

  Her eyes had gone large, and they focused on mine. It was the first time she’d made eye contact with me. It jolted me—I didn’t know what she meant by it.

  “Please,” she said to the Lancer, very slowly and softly. “Please stop this.”

  I let out a quiet breath. Good girl. Convince them.

  “It’s in your hands,” the Lancer said. “Tell me what I want to know, and we’ll stop.”

  “I—I can’t—”

  The Lancer nodded to his friends behind me.

  I might have screamed then. I wasn’t sure.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  A face swam in front of me. I called someone’s name, but it wasn’t the right one.

  The face resolved into the sallow features of the Lancer. His hand whipped out and smacked against something. Me. He’d smacked my cheek.

  I couldn’t feel it.

  My whole body was seizing, a thousand million tiny internal catastrophes as the nerves and muscles couldn’t figure out what to do anymore so twisted and screamed and died.

  I tried to find Martinez, but my eyes wouldn’t focus that far away from me. I gave up.

  Someone tilted a cup of water against my mouth until I choked on it. I tried to swallow, but the muscles barely obeyed. Nothing was working at all the way it was supposed to. My senses had collapsed in on themselves as if they’d inverted, every x and y switching until I didn’t know which way was up anymore.

  Someone smacked me again, the crack of it ever so loud. I felt it that time. It stung. It might have split my skin.

  I pondered that.

  The Lancer was saying something to Martinez. Something about watching me die. Whether she really wanted to be responsible for that.

  I thought you didn’t want to kill me, I tried to say. I still had something he wanted. Didn’t I?

  As if he’d heard me, his breath came hot on my ear again. “I’d prefer you didn’t die, if you’d be so kind. But Dr. Martinez appears to be surprisingly sympathetic to your condition, and let’s just say…what you know is expendable, if it gets me what she knows.”

  Expendable. I wasn’t the only one who knew Halliday’s proof. Professor Halliday did, for one thing, as well as Dr. Zhang and probably a handful of other people in the NSA at this point. And if the Lancer pried Martinez’s work out of her, he might not even feel the need for Halliday’s proof at all, because he’d have the bigger, better prize.

  It was surprising, how fast my brain was able to make those connections.

  Some vestige of adrenaline surged, and I tried to use it to evaluate myself, to see how close the Lancer was to…well, to killing me. It was a surreal place to be. My mind wandered too quickly, however, rendering no useful data.

  The Lancer and his men were gone again. It had taken me a long time to realize that. Professor Martinez was trying to talk to me, but her words bounced against my eardrums as if they were nonsense syllables.

  At least she was all right.

  Wait, I remembered. I had to wait. What was I waiting for?

  The Lancer came back in.

  No, no, no, I’m not ready. I had to wait—

  I tugged at my bonds weakly, involuntarily. The paralytic had worn off now, but it hardly mattered.

  “Is there anything our resident double-crossing snake would like to share for posterity?” The Lancer was standing above me, jeering, leaning on his cane with both hands. “Any words of wisdom on always making the quick buck?”

  A noise filtered through my consciousness, a very specific sort of shuffle-thump noise. A very specific sort of noise.

  Holy shit.

  “Six, twenty-eight, four ninety-six,” I said. It came out in a weird, sing-song mumble. I felt drunk.

  “What did you say?” demanded the Lancer.

  There was another shuffle-thump, and a quickly quieted clatter. “Thirty,” I murmured. “A hundred and forty. Twenty-four eighty…”

  “Six thousand two hundred,” said Professor Martinez, across from me. “And forty thousand six hundred forty.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. They’re here.”

  “Who’s here?” The Lancer’s voice climbed, unnerved. “What the fuck are you on about?”

  “Natural numbers with a common abundancy.” Martinez’s voice had gone back to her prim abstraction, and it almost made me giggle to hear it. “When the ratio of the sum of the divisors to the number itself is the same for all of them. We call those numbers friends.”

  “I’ve got some, too,” I said, and at that moment the DHS agents breached the room.

  A truly terrifying few seconds followed—shouting and smoke and gunfire, and I couldn’t move, couldn’t duck, and neither could Martinez—and then the only shapes navigating through the smoke were black layers of body armor and helmets carrying MP5s and M4s at the ready.

  Someone was trying to talk to me, an officer-agent-person with a rifle in one hand and his other hand touching my neck, searching out a pulse; he shouted to someone and then moved over to Martinez. There was a lot more movement, a lot of people hurrying and shouting “clear” and running back and forth, and I was glad I didn’t have to join in, but could just sit here and be still and in pain and cough every so often.

  And then Arthur appeared next to me as if by magic, wearing a vest himself and gently unwinding the chains around my wrists. “Arthur,” I slurred. “You got my message.”

  He leaned forward briefly so his forehead touched mine. “Yeah. We got your message.”

  I tried to push myself up as soon as Arthur finished freeing me. He attempted to stop me with some nonsense about waiting for the paramedics, but when it became clear I was determined to ignore him he got an arm under me and helped me wobble upright while berating me gently for being stupid.

  I mumbled something incoherent in response. His grip around my shoulders hurt, a lot, but I didn’t care.

  One of the DHS agents was helping Martinez up. The little old professor looked around through the smoke-hazed air at all the black-clad men and women surrounding us, her eyes almost feverishly bright.

  “Oh,” she said. “Hello.”

  I had a moment to wonder what would happen now—if the NSA would insist on taking the proof from Martinez, if I’d screwed her over even worse by delivering us into the custody of the Feds—when she wobbled like a spent gyroscope and crumpled to the ground.

  The agent helping her lurched, trying to catch her, but was too slow. She shouted for help and fell immediately to first-aid, pressing her fingers to Martinez’s neck, bending forward to check for breathing. Several more agents bolted in, crowding around and hiding them from view.

  “Jesus and Mary,” said Arthur, his voice empty in my ear. “He hurt her bad?”

  “He didn’t hurt her at all,” I said.

  Chapter 36

  I refused to go get treated by the DHS paramedics, even when the agents threatened me and told me they needed a debriefing. “They captured us. They tortured me. That’s it,” I said. “Now I’m leaving, and I swear to God I will shoot anyone who tries to stop me.”

  “You need anything else from her, you can ask me,” Arthur said to someone, very firmly. I glimpsed the friendly Agent Jones in full tac gear—oddly enough, at Arthur’s words she started yelling at people and clearing a path for us. That would have to be a mystery for another day.

  I pushed at Arthur. “Go with Martinez. Make sure she’s okay.”

  “Russell, you need—”

  “I’ll be fine. Look after the professor. And tell the DHS if they try to bury either of you in a hole, I’ll destroy them.”

  “We aren’t the bad guys, Ms. Russell,” Agent Jones said beside me, an odd expression on her face, and then she was gone.

  Arthur tried to argue with me, but I insisted, and he finally gave in and helped me out to his car, where Pilar jumped out and came around to support me on t
he other side. “Cas! Oh my God. What happened? Are you okay?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Call Doc Washington,” said Arthur to Pilar. “She treated Cas before. Tell her what happened. You guys gonna be all right?”

  “Give me a gun,” I said.

  Pilar pulled out her little CZ and handed it to me. Keeping it pointed down, I noticed. Arthur must have talked to her.

  I took the safety off and tucked it in my belt. “We’ll be fine. There’s nobody after us anymore, unless the NSA decides to live up to their reputation.”

  “Think they got what they wanted,” Arthur said softly. “Ain’t think they’re interested in you. You’re not important to ’em.”

  Something in my chest eased. Not that I thought Arthur would have given me away, but still. “Thanks.”

  Pilar helped me fall into the passenger seat of Arthur’s rental and then went around to drive, taking a moment to pull the seat all the way forward and adjust the mirrors before she got started. “Where to?”

  I thought for a minute. If the NSA was still tracking us, I didn’t want to give away any of my bolt holes. “Checker’s, if he’s okay with it. Arthur’s doctor can meet us there.”

  Pilar looped on a phone headset and called Checker first—he said to get our butts over to him right now before I keeled over dead (his words, as relayed by Pilar). Then she called someone who was presumably Arthur’s doctor friend. “Hi, this is Pilar Velasquez—yes, with Arthur. Yes, everything’s okay. We need your help, though—do you remember Cas Russell?”

  There was a pause, and then Pilar snorted. “Yes, her. No, she hasn’t been shot this time. Um. I shouldn’t laugh. She doesn’t seem in immediate danger, but I think she was beat up pretty bad. Cas, what’d they do to you?”

  “Fifteen thousand volts,” I said. “It was invigorating. Electrifying, even.”

  The smile faded from Pilar’s face. “Oh my God,” she said. “Dr. W.—okay, you heard that? All right. Can you meet us at 10942 Venado Street in Van Nuys? Yes. Great. Thank you.”

  She hung up and bit her lip. Then she said, “I’m sorry I laughed. Are you in a lot of pain?”

  “Only everywhere,” I said.

  “We were all really worried about you, you know,” she said, keeping her eyes on the road. “Really worried. Checker was going out of his head. You’ve got people who really care about you.”

  I’d never quite been able to figure Pilar out. “Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

  “Because I don’t think you know,” she answered.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Arthur’s doctor friend was a no-nonsense African-American woman with the bedside manner of a know-it-all engineer. She swept in and immediately started giving me an earful over getting electrocuted. I tried to tell her I hadn’t done it on purpose, but she ran right over me.

  “At least you managed to avoid bullets this time,” she scolded. “For heavens’ sake, those things aren’t good for you.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve heard that.”

  She patched me up, and also helped me cut out the Feds’ transmitter, which I’d recovered from the desert and shoved under the skin of my thigh to ensure they’d be able to find me—well, once Arthur told them what had happened and directed them to look for the signal. Then the doctor gave me some painkillers, lost an argument with me about going to the hospital for a CT scan, and told us to make sure Arthur gave her a call. We promised.

  “Are you really okay?” asked Checker, who had been hovering to the side of his living room while she treated me.

  “Yeah, I will be,” I said. My skin still felt numb in places, and every so often a muscle would twitch without me telling it to. But my ability to evaluate my own injuries seemed to be back, and as far as I could sense, none of it was anything that wouldn’t heal up after a few painful weeks. I intended to spend as much of that time as I could drunk.

  After you get the proof from Martinez?

  I closed my eyes and pushed the thought away. I shouldn’t want it anymore, should I? This was like one of those old-style fables, the ones with the morals. I had chased the proof beyond reason, and it had led me to ruin. I should feel noble about letting it go and preach about the power of friendship over selfish desires. Or something.

  I couldn’t do it.

  I’d fucked up, badly, but volunteering to give up the chance to know Martinez’s proof was too high a penance. Too much to ask. Just the prospect felt like offering to saw off one of my own limbs. Something in me was broken, and willingly staying broken forever wasn’t something I could do, however much my guilt told me I might deserve it.

  I still needed the proof, no matter what Martinez or the NSA or the DHS had to say about it.

  But to salve my guilty conscience, I promised myself I would get it without going too far this time. I could bide my time. See what the Feds’ play was.

  A muscle in my leg twitched, then my right hand. Stupid muscles.

  God, I needed to sleep.

  I vaguely heard Checker and Pilar talking in hushed tones, but my head felt wrapped in layers of cotton. Narcotic painkillers. Right.

  An itch in my brain—something else, something I had to remember to do. I dredged through the layers of cotton wool. “Hey. Checker.”

  He moved over and touched my hand. “I’m here.”

  “The pyro dude. D.J. I don’t think he was there. I don’t think they got him.”

  He paused for a long moment. “Okay. Thanks.”

  “You want to talk about it?”

  He squeezed my hand briefly. “Maybe another time. Go to sleep now.”

  I drifted off on Checker’s couch, and for once I didn’t dream. God bless the good drugs.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  When I woke up, Checker and Pilar were absent, but Arthur was sitting across the room working on a laptop. When I made a noise and sat up, he hurried over, snagging the bottle of painkillers and a glass of water off the end table. “Here. How you feeling?”

  I waved off the pills. Not that I didn’t need them—everything ached, and my muscles felt stitched onto my bones as if I were a poor version of Pinocchio. But I wanted to be awake. “Been better,” I said. “I guess I’ve also been worse, though.” I leaned back on the couch. Sitting up was about as far as I felt I could manage for the moment. “What’s going on? What was wrong with Martinez? Is she okay now?”

  Arthur shoved his hands in his pockets and stared down at a point on the floor for a long second. “She has a brain tumor,” he said.

  I couldn’t process the words. “What?”

  “Looks like she’s had it for a while,” added Arthur. “She got…the docs say she only got a little longer now—days, maybe weeks. Unlikely she’ll wake up again.”

  “No,” I whispered. The word choked me. No. No.

  Arthur cocked his head at me in frank surprise, and I dropped my eyes. I hadn’t been worried about Martinez, not really. Even after everything.

  Guilt flamed up in my gut, and I wished I were a better person. Or one who didn’t have a conscience at all, because navigating life would be so much easier if I didn’t, and I could say fuck the world and rail at the loss of the proof that would save me, the unfairness of it, with vicious, screaming anger. I wanted to curl up in despair and drink myself into a stupor, because this was the end—the end of hope, the end of one great shining beacon of knowledge that a single woman had selfishly and unilaterally decided to hide, and it wasn’t right, and when I thought of Martinez it wasn’t grief that welled up but a white-hot fury as if she’d reached into my brain and crippled me herself. Because for all intents and purposes, she had. And fuck if I was going to mourn her, and fuck what my friends thought.

  Except…

  Arthur was the one who always made me want to be better. I’d spent a lot of time since this job started with a slow fire of resentment building, wanting to walk away from him, and then when I’d called, he’d come, no questions asked. And now here he was. Even after ever
ything I’d done.

  I remembered my loopy resolution while being tortured, the euphoric feeling that the decision was so easy, to be a better person. To trust. In the cold and sober light of day, it felt ludicrous.

  But my loopy, pain-drunk brain had been proven correct in the end, hadn’t it? I’d stuck the transmitter back in me and Arthur had mobilized hell and high water in the form of government agencies to come track me down, without even knowing Martinez had been taken, too. My trust might have been stupid, but it had also been right. He’d come for me.

  Fuck. The proof that would make me whole was gone, and in its place were these odd illogical human relationships that didn’t make any sense and that I’d been doing my level best to raze to the ground before this.

  “I’m sorry,” I blurted, before I could rethink the words. “For everything.” It wasn’t what I wanted to say, but my world was disintegrating, every hope folding into emptiness, and maybe all I could do was try to salvage what was left.

  If it was salvageable. If I hadn’t succeeded in destroying it, in my rampage to dig for something a dying woman insisted on taking beyond my reach anyway.

  Arthur took a minute to answer, using the time to pull up a chair and sit next to me. “Ain’t gonna lie,” he said quietly. “I was PO’d. It’s a two-way street, Russell, and you went off deliberate to work against us. When things went south on you, you could’ve gotten Martinez hurt bad.” He cleared his throat. “But you didn’t. And I forgive you. ’Cause that’s what friends do. Besides, I think you got all the comeuppance you need already. Just…don’t do it again.”

  I looked at my hands. I wasn’t sure I could guarantee that. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I knew I would fuck up again, sometime, someday. Probably sooner than I’d bet on. “I’ll try,” I said. The promise sounded hollow.

  He gusted out a sigh. “You got a start on it. You did call us.”

  I had, I thought.

  “It’s the first time, you know. First time you asked for help.”

  I wanted to protest that it wasn’t true, that we’d worked together plenty of times before, on a variety of cases. But he was right—it had always been out of convenience. Because he happened to be around at the time, and was competent to give me a hand.