Plastic Smile (Russell's Attic Book 4)

by Huang, SL

  “What are you going to do when you figure this out?” I asked.

  “I shall find whoever is responsible, and allow God to be the judge of their souls.”

  Rio continued sipping his tea, and I sat back, my appetite entirely lost.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Rio’s oblivious threats and Yamamoto’s efforts to start a multi-family mob war against me notwithstanding, I couldn’t help but feel decently celebratory when I stood in Checker’s Hole a few days later and admired screens full of crime statistics. The line graphs tripped and tumbled over cliffs into statistically significant abysses. Violent crime. Property crime. Organized crime.

  “It’s only been about a week,” Checker said. “But this…okay, Cas, I have to admit. I still don’t like it, but it’s staggering. I think it’s been having a knock-on effect, too—I mean, obviously not all crime is caused by what you’re preventing, but this has caused such a shake-up everyone’s chasing their tails. Hopefully we won’t see them re-acclimate.”

  “Yeah. Good,” I said.

  And hopefully we wouldn’t end up dead if anyone found out this had been us.

  “Job well done?” Checker asked.

  “Well, Arthur’s strong-arming me into a cleanup mode,” I answered. Thank Christ. I needed the work more than ever right now. “Chasing the bad guys while they’re chasing their tails, as you said. Have you found anything on Lauren Vance?”

  “Oh, yeah, I was going to update you on that. As far as I can ascertain, she’s both Pourdry’s very genteel attack dog and one of the more public faces of his operation. Assuming you can hang around here a while longer, I’ll have a summary on the server for you and Arthur by this evening.” There’d been no sign Pourdry was after Checker, but he’d still asked me to come back to the Hole with him to collect some additional laptops and do some work that required more processing power. “Where is Arthur, anyway?”

  “I thought he was off on some PI thing today,” I said. “He’s not?”

  Checker half-smiled. “I am incredibly flattered you think with all the work we’ve been doing for you, we would still have time to have a case on.”

  “Well, Pilar said he had some emergency with, um, a couple of kids I saw hanging around the office. Katrina and—Jason, maybe? Justin? I don’t remember. They’re not a case?”

  “Oh, that must be some of Arthur’s lost kids,” Checker said. “Huh, hopefully all this’ll be a help to some of them. Arthur would be ecstatic.”

  “What do you mean, Arthur’s lost kids?”

  “Well, what do you think we are?”

  I looked at him blankly.

  “Come on, you didn’t realize this?” Checker said. “Arthur’s got a weakness for troubled kids. Almost an obsession. He’s not happy unless he’s trying to fix someone.” He frowned. “That sounds bad. I don’t mean it that way. Heck, Arthur saved me, him and—” He coughed.

  “We’re not kids,” I said. I wasn’t sure how I felt about being someone’s project. On the other hand, it wasn’t like I hadn’t known I was one; I just hadn’t known he had others.

  “Yeah, well, it’s all relative, isn’t it?” said Checker brightly. “Arthur does a lot of good for people. He’s pretty swell at it.”

  We built you. You’re something better, now.

  My mood soured. “I’m goddamn sick of people trying to fix me.”

  Checker turned from his computers, the movement slow and deliberate as he gave me his full attention. “We’re not talking about Arthur anymore, are we?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Do you…want to talk about it?” asked Checker.

  Do you want to see what you can do?

  “No,” I said. “Unless it’s to tear you a new one for fucking not telling me you had decided to blunder face-first into my business and kidnap the person I told you to stop looking into.”

  “You know what we did made perfect sense.” Checker sighed. “So can you stay? If you can, I’ll get Pilar over here and we’ll finish this double-time.”

  I didn’t have anything to do anyway, at least until Arthur was done with his thing or I had some intel on Vance to chase down. The lack of a focus to occupy me was in itself a problem. “I can stay, as long as you have some tequila in your kitchen,” I told Checker.

  “Yeah, uh. Knock yourself out.” His face twisted up a little. “Cas, seriously. With so much going on, we haven’t talked about—they said you aren’t—is it true you aren’t okay?”

  “They” meant Simon and Rio. “We’ve known I’m not okay for months,” I said. “Nothing’s changed.”

  “Your vitals are not improving. The current course is unsustainable.”

  I flexed my fingers against my palms, skin singing. “What will it take for you not to inform them?”

  “Cas…”

  “What?”

  I could tell Checker was steeling himself to say something I would hate by the way his hands clenched and his whole posture tightened. “The, um. The thing you told me about last year. The math thing. About not being able to do, um, proofs and stuff—if this guy really is a ‘good’ psychic, maybe he can help you with—”

  “What, and you’d trust him?” The dig about the mathematics stabbed. The reminder that I wasn’t whole, that grasping after anything beyond raw computation would leave me only with a phantom wisp of forgotten wonder…Checker was the only one who knew what I’d lost, and I regretted having told him about it at all.

  At least he hadn’t told anyone else.

  “Simon seems to think whatever’s a problem here is all down to Dawna Polk a few years ago,” I said. “Whatever messed up my brain initially did it long before then. And may I remind you that Simon keeps telling me not to try to remember things, so he’s clearly not interested in fixing my memory or anything else, only whatever she knocked apart, and why he’s even interested in that is highly suspicious bordering on disturbing.”

  “Is it so strange to you that you might have had a friend before you lost your memory?” Checker asked.

  “So he’s a friend of mine now instead of a dangerous enemy you helped abduct and hold prisoner for weeks? You wouldn’t want him in your head either, admit it!”

  Checker shifted uncomfortably. “Well, no, but—I’m just saying. Not to underrate Pilar and Arthur and me or anything, but this guy’s thing about not influencing people without asking—to be perfectly fair, I’m not sure we could have held onto him if he hadn’t been sticking to it. Which makes me think…I don’t know. Maybe at least ask some questions? Find out more about, if you’re in trouble from what Dawna did or—”

  “Sounds like he did influence you,” I said cruelly, and Checker flushed, though I wasn’t sure whether it was from annoyance at me or real fear that what I said might be true. “I’m going to go drink. Come get me when you’re done here.”

  I stomped out of the Hole and through the back door into his house, where I found the tequila and slouched on the couch with a bottle. I’d self-medicated earlier in the morning as well, but the buzz that took the edge off my senses had already started to fade.

  Did you take your medicine? someone taunted.

  “I had to do it. They were killing you.”

  “How were they killing me if I’d never been so alive?”

  Goddamn it.

  Checker was right about one thing—if only one thing. I deserved some answers from Rio and Simon. I’d told Rio I wouldn’t look into my past, and still didn’t want to—but we weren’t talking about my past anymore; this was my present. The two of them were fucking up my life without offering the slightest explanation.

  What with the brain entrainment and Yamamoto’s meeting and finding out Rio was going to try to stop me and working on finding Pourdry, the fury I’d felt about the whole thing had been piled over by other priorities. Now it came flooding back, burning in my gut until the edges of my mood charred and curled. I drank more, but it didn’t help.

  “There’s no limit to this type of power.”<
br />
  “That doesn’t scare you?”

  “Why would it? I’m the one in control.”

  I jumped off the edge of the world, and the land flew by below me, sea and sky and space and stars, and I laughed and laughed and laughed.

  This time, instead of drowning me, the shards of unreality stoked my anger until I wanted to hit something.

  Kill something.

  For more than a moment, I considered destroying Checker’s house. I was still angry at him, and fuck, smashing things would be cathartic. But then I had a better idea.

  I texted Rio. I’d been planning to avoid him, but we wouldn’t be talking about Los Angeles, and besides, I was feeling reckless.

  Then I texted Checker: I invited Rio and Simon over to your house. Happy now?

  My phone buzzed with a reply immediately. Then another. Then another.

  The general gist of the next seven text messages was, FUCK U, CAS.

  I gave the phone a bitter smile and put it down. Then I sat, drank tequila, and waited.

  Chapter 17

  Checker and Pilar insisted on being in the room when Rio and Simon showed up. I had expected that to be the last thing they’d want, and I had the bizarre impression they were doing some weird imitation of wanting to be there in case they needed to protect me.

  Which was, of course, absurd. I tried to ban them, but Checker and I got in a shouting match in which he pointed out I’d invited a dangerous killer and a possibly dangerous telepath to his house without asking him first, and therefore he was fucking going to be in the room.

  I thought about leaving just to be spiteful, but at that moment Checker’s security system pinged at Rio and Simon’s arrival. I yanked open the door furious at the world.

  Rio, of course, was perfectly equanimous, standing relaxed in his long tan duster. Simon hunched half behind him, hugging himself as if he wanted to disappear.

  “Hello, Cas,” said Rio.

  Simon nodded to me, but kept his mouth shut this time.

  I ushered them inside. Rio’s gaze crawled over Checker and Pilar, who had retreated to the far side of Checker’s living room, against the wall. As far away as they could get without actually leaving the room.

  “Ignore them,” I said.

  We sat down.

  “Cas,” Rio said. “May I take this as a sign you are reconsidering your decision?”

  “No,” I said. “You may take it as a sign that I want some answers.”

  “I am given to understand it would be dangerous to you to satisfy such curiosity.” Rio flicked a glance toward Simon.

  “You mean telling me why I’m crazy will make me crazier? Yeah, he’s implied as much. But I’m calling bullshit. This isn’t buried in the past anymore, Rio, and you can tell me something. First of all,” I said, turning to Simon, “who are you, really?”

  Simon and Rio exchanged a glance.

  “Hey. Hey.” I snapped my fingers at them. “I’m over here.”

  “Cas,” Rio said. “As I have told you, this man is on your side.”

  “I’ll determine that, thank you very much,” I said.

  They looked at each other again, as though surprised I wasn’t just going to take Rio’s word for it. Rio shrugged slightly and said, “She is her own person. It seemed important.”

  “Over. Here,” I repeated.

  “Cassandra,” Simon said, “the more you can keep blocked, the better it will be. Whatever we tell you will start breaking down those barriers. Even my presence here, it’s not—it’s not good for you, but I don’t see the alternative.”

  “Well, if you don’t give me some answers, I’m just going to have to remember as much as I possibly can,” I said.

  Simon paled. It was disturbing. Not that I wanted to remember—I definitely didn’t; I hadn’t from the beginning—but I also hadn’t expected my threat to have so much of an effect.

  Someone hit me. “You see? That is what it means, to have effect.”

  I hit them back. “I understand now,” I told the corpse.

  I tried to keep my face blank.

  “Can you tell one of us instead?” Checker ventured the question from the side of the room. “If Cas would trust us to be, um. An advocate? For her?”

  I knew Checker was only trying to help, but I wasn’t fond of that idea, either. “Rio,” I said. I pointed at Simon. “I need to know who this guy is. To me. Broad strokes aren’t going to kill me, and I need to know.”

  Rio glanced at Simon, whose mouth was pressed in a tight line. “You and he knew each other,” Rio said. “A long time ago.”

  “Less broad than that,” I said impatiently, when he didn’t add anything else. “I’m not going to let you do anything if no one tells me what the hell is going on.”

  “This has to do with what Cas can do, doesn’t it?” Pilar said.

  I whipped around to face her. She tried to back up but ran into the wall. “I’m sorry! It’s just, it makes sense. You guys and Dawna, you all have these, like, superhuman powers, and we know some of them involve memory, and—that can’t be a coincidence.”

  “We’re not the same,” I ground out.

  “How do you know?” Checker asked.

  Show each other what you can do.

  Good girl.

  “You’re talking coincidence,” I sneered at Pilar, over the noise in my brain. “Well, isn’t it a hell of a coincidence that I would happen to run into Pithica years later if they had something to do with—”

  My brain screeched to a halt. Pithica…they hadn’t known what I could do, at first. They had only been interested in me because I knew Rio.

  Because Rio had been trying to take them down. Had been tangling with them for a long, long time. Since before I had met him.

  Or maybe exactly since I had met him.

  Call me Rio.

  Fuck.

  “Rio,” I said. “How did we meet?”

  “I can’t tell you that, Cas.”

  He saved me.

  Had saved me from where? From somewhere I had known people like Dawna and Simon, from people who had mind-wiped me to keep me from remembering them?

  From people who had broken my ability to do real mathematics and left my computational prowess in its place—a poor substitute for a human mathematician, but an excellent bonus for a living weapon?

  Pithica had originally been a government project, or at least linked to a project codename. We knew that much.

  Halberd and Pithica, something echoed and chanted in my head. Halberd and Pithica…

  Halberd was—what? Another project? A missing piece of my life? I opened my mouth to ask, but the question strangled me. Dawna’s prohibition against learning more about Pithica meant no matter what guesses I had, I wouldn’t get any of them confirmed. “Goddammit!”

  “Cas?” Checker said, his voice shot through with worry.

  “I think Pilar’s right,” I said. “I think I was—associated with Pithica, or something like them, and I think—I think they did this.”

  “It makes sense.” Pilar was babbling a little. “I mean, considering your amnesia—how many bad guys could there possibly be with real-life psychic powers? It would be totally weird if there were a bunch of unconnected sets of people walking around with the ability to muck with people’s brains, wouldn’t it?”

  “Pilar,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Good job. Now shut up.”

  “Okay. Right. Okay. Sorry.”

  I turned back to Simon. “Somehow, in the past, you and I were both connected to Pithica.” Maybe we’d decided to turn renegade and fight them, and that’s how we’d hooked up with Rio. I was feeling it out, but it made sense. “We got out, but before we did, they fucked me in the head. Of course, you’re not going to confirm or deny this.” If I thought he would, I probably wouldn’t even have been able to say it, thanks to Dawna. Pithica had fucked me twice now.

  We appreciate your loyalty.

  “Will you let me help you now?”
asked Simon.

  I almost laughed. “Help me? By doing what, screwing around with my brain on top of whatever fun mutilation someone else already did? Yeah, that seems like a good idea. And you and I might have worked together against Pithica, but that means nothing. I’ve worked with a lot of people who were scum of the earth. For all I know we were allies of convenience.”

  Simon sucked in a breath as if I’d stabbed him and wrapped his arms around himself again. “It wasn’t convenience.”

  I raised my eyebrows at Rio to see if he’d confirm that, but he gave me a half shrug, as if to say, what do I know about human relationships.

  Well, true.

  “Please,” Simon said. “This isn’t going to go away. I’m not going to—to damage you, I promise. I can help you repair—”

  “I wonder if the person who scraped all my memories out said that to me beforehand, too,” I said maliciously, just to see him wince. “Isn’t Pithica all about making the world a better place? They were probably making me a shiny new person, just like you want to.”

  “Cassandra—”

  “Stop calling me that,” I said.

  “Cas,” he amended. “This is serious. The symptoms you’re having are going to keep getting worse. Please, you have to let me help.”

  “No. I don’t.”

  There are limits here, babbled one of the voices. Limits such as death.

  “You don’t understand,” Simon pleaded. “You could die.”

  “I understand perfectly,” I said. Such as death. “What you’re not understanding is that I am fucking done with people reshuffling my neurons. Pithica, Dawna Polk, you, anyone else.” What is death, except utter unending unconsciousness? “I’ll find another solution.”

  “I don’t know that there is one.” Simon had started to sound panicked. “Cas, I know what happened to you; I know your mind; I can—this isn’t something you can snap yourself out of!”

  “She’s right,” I said, jabbing a thumb at Pilar. “I have superpowers too. I’m as good as you or Dawna Polk. I can fix LA, and I can fix my own goddamn brain. I’ll figure it out.”

  The room stopped dead, as if the whole world had jarred out of step and left our little tableau frozen.

  I can fix LA, I had said.