Plastic Smile (Russell's Attic Book 4)

by Huang, SL

  He tilted his head in a nod, acknowledging the fact.

  “I’m serious.” I didn’t know what else to say. Didn’t know what else to do. “If I can’t rely on you not to—”

  Someone put firm hands on my face, turned my eyes into the sun—blazing, consuming me—trust him—

  I cried out. I was sitting fallen against the wall of the alleyway, and my back and shoulders hurt as if I’d been hurled into it.

  Rio crouched next to me, his hands gentle as he helped me sit up against the wall. “Cas. Are you here?”

  “Yeah.” My skin was clammy. My throat and chest clenched. “Yeah, I’m here.”

  “Cas, your condition appears to be worsening.”

  “Rio,” I said, scrambling for my point like a pit bull with a bone, “Rio, I can’t trust you if—”

  Something blew through my mind like an express train, all noise and light and terrible force. I ducked and clamped my arms over my head and slammed my eyes shut and tried to breathe but I couldn’t, because my lungs were squeezed flat.

  Dark and pain and blood, fear and betrayal, and Rio reached out as if he would help…

  Trust him, Cassandra. You have to trust him.

  “Cas. Cas. Cas.” Rio said my name in a rhythm that was almost a chant. “Cas, return here. Cas.”

  “Stop changing the subject,” I growled. I couldn’t remember what the subject had been, but I was angry, and rattled, insecurity about—something—crawling in roots through my brain, crumbling my consciousness, and I needed to yell at Rio about something but I’d lost my bearings and that made me furious—

  Trust him.

  The world spasmed again. Neurons crisscrossed and bits of my body went rigid while others collapsed.

  “Cas,” said Rio, and he might have sounded alarmed, if Rio ever sounded alarmed.

  Rio sitting across from me in a small apartment. “That decision is yours, Cas. This life is yours now.”

  I nodded—

  “Cas, I promise you, in the future I will not harm your friends or coworkers, nor threaten them with harm. Respond to me, Cas. Speak.”

  Breathing became easier. My lungs stopped constricting. I leaned my head back against the grimy wall. The dim light burned into the back of my eyes.

  “Cas?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Cas,” said Rio again, and I wasn’t imagining it, there was urgency in his voice. No, that didn’t make sense. I had to be imagining it.

  “It’s good to know all I have to do is have some sort of seizure and you cave in,” I said. I felt like my voice should have been hoarse, but it wasn’t. Only a little short, like I still wasn’t breathing enough. “Now how about you agree not to fucking destroy Los Angeles?”

  Rio’s expression twitched. “On that, I am afraid, I shall stand by my previous imperviousness. Cas, I did not realize this was of such importance to you. I apologize.”

  “You what?” I sputtered. “You didn’t realize this was of importance? Fuck you, you expect me to believe torturing the people I work with didn’t register on your list of human interactions that would rank?”

  “That is not precisely what I meant,” said Rio, after a moment.

  We sat together at a table, at an impasse, while the light changed and the sun rose.

  I let the madness in my brain ebb and flow, leaning my head back against the wall behind me while the world passed by.

  “Cas,” Rio said. “Please reconsider allowing Simon to aid you.”

  I didn’t deign to answer him.

  “Is there nothing I can say that would convince you?”

  “If I knew of such an argument,” I said, “I would already be convinced. Because, you know. Logic.”

  Rio bowed his head. “In that case, I beg of you to fix what you have done to the city in the next forty-five hours.”

  He stood.

  “Rio,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  I swallowed. Pilar’s tear-streaked face danced in my vision again. One woman, and now I had to save all of LA.

  “Rio, I don’t…I don’t think I want to see you again.”

  “If that is your wish, Cas.”

  Graveyard dirt smelled like any other dirt. I stretched my fingers, pressing into it. It was okay: no one would remember.

  Including me.

  My eyes were shut. I pried them open to focus on the alleyway. Rio had disappeared. I hadn’t heard him leave.

  I was cold and bruised, and the uneven brick of the wall was digging into my back. I pushed myself up.

  “What do you have for me today?”

  “Target practice.” A Dragunov was pressed into my hand, its stock smooth and polished.

  “I’ll try not to have too much fun.”

  “Fuck you, too,” I muttered to Valarmathi. She laughed.

  I limped back up to Arthur’s office.

  When I pushed open the door, Arthur whipped around and drew his sidearm on me.

  “Whoa, hey! It’s just me. Alone,” I added hastily.

  Arthur slumped and lowered the gun. “He gone?”

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to keep the guilt out of my tone. “Where’s Pilar?”

  “The hospital, Russell. He broke her wrist.”

  Considering my brain was rotting me alive, I hadn’t thought I could feel worse. Apparently I was wrong.

  “Maybe I should end it now,” I said.

  Arthur’s head came up. “What are you talking about?” He asked the question with such controlled evenness that I was pretty sure he already knew.

  “Rio gave me an ultimatum,” I said. “I don’t know what he’s going to do. I don’t know if I can stop it. But if I’m not here to leverage…” I shrugged, trying for careless, but it felt like my blood had gone leaden. “I’m dying anyway. It might be nice for it to mean something.”

  “Russell,” Arthur whispered, and he sounded so broken and defeated I regretted suggesting it.

  If I was going to do it, I should have just done it without telling him. That would have been the considerate thing to do.

  “You’re not telling me not to,” I said quietly.

  A pounding came on the office door. We both jumped and pulled weapons.

  “Who’s there?” Arthur called.

  “Arthur? Arthur, you here? It’s me, it’s Justin!”

  “Oh, Lord.” Arthur holstered his Glock and strode to pull open the door. “Kid, what’s wrong?”

  “You ain’t picking up, I been calling you,” Justin babbled, falling into the room—Arthur caught him and helped him to a chair. “You gotta help us. It’s Katrina, she OD’d. Arthur, you gotta help—”

  “Mary and Joseph, you call 911?” Arthur interrupted. “Where she at?”

  Justin kept sniffling, like he was trying not to cry. “Yeah, I called, I ain’t care if she hate me for it later. She in the hospital now. They been asking ’bout her parents, I ain’t know what to say…”

  “How this happened?” demanded Arthur. “She was off the stuff—I know she been struggling this week, but you told me you was keeping her off—”

  “Something went wrong!” Justin wailed. “I ain’t know what! We was—we was going to meetings, together, and now she say they ain’t feel supportive no more. And she ain’t inventing it, neither. It all been feeling pointless, the support and shit, just gone. And we been going clubbing, just dancing and shit all night, but this week Katrina said she ain’t connecting with none of it no more, said she needed something—something else.” He sniffed and dragged a sleeve across his face. “And it ain’t just her—I swear I ain’t making up no bullshit; my friend said it was sunspots or something, ’cause Katrina, she ain’t the only one. We all feeling it. We go out and the music and the lights, they was all the same, but all flat—some clubs, they shutting down ’cause ain’t nobody coming in no more. And meantime X going through the roof. Katrina, she said she feeling so dead inside, said she needed it, and I tried to stop her, but she ain’t listen, accused me of n
ot supporting her neither…”

  A kernel of panic exploded in my core. Arthur was trying to calm Justin down, and I didn’t know if he’d made the connection yet, but he would—he would—

  Support groups who couldn’t provide support anymore. The bestial high of clubbing becoming flat and unexciting. Energetic relationships losing their connections. And drug sales skyrocketing as people chased a high they couldn’t get any other way…

  The brain entrainment countered deindividuation. It broke up people’s urges to follow each other, to feed off each others’ emotions. Deadened those urges.

  It dissolved the connections between people.

  Oh God.

  I couldn’t get enough air, but this time it was reality that strangled me.

  “I have to go,” I said to Arthur. He barely heard me, concentrating on Justin.

  I ran.

  As soon as I hit the alleyway outside Arthur’s office, my body rebelled and threw up. I coughed, leaning against the concrete wall.

  Just down the block was one of our cell hacking boxes, hidden on the lip of a roof at the end of an alley. I ran, half-stumbling, until I reached it.

  I barely made the climb. My hands slid and scrabbled, my equilibrium shot. I pulled out my knife and pried the box loose, then half-fell back to street level and smashed it under my heel, once, twice, again and again, shattering the components inside.

  My hands and feet slapped against wood and ropes and rocks with effortless probability, my course through the obstacles already predetermined…

  Not now. Not now!

  I’d been so close to considering suicide the perfect solution, to being almost at peace with running out of time, but it was all going wrong, because this wasn’t what was supposed to happen, it wasn’t supposed to hurt anyone, only give people back their freedom.

  It was supposed to help. It was supposed to solve everything.

  “I disagree with your definition of the mathematical optimum,” I said. The wall blew up, scattering tile everywhere, the color of blood.

  I picked up the fractured circuit boards and crushed them in my hands until they cut my palms. Even if I destroyed them all, it wouldn’t help, wouldn’t help at all; my program was already on everyone’s phones, all around us, unstoppable…I could work with Checker, find out a way to reprogram all our boxes to remove it, maybe—but if we did that—

  Los Angeles was poised on the edge of a gang war. Even if Rio walked everything back, I wasn’t sure it would be enough to salve the situation. If we pulled the brain entrainment now…

  We ran through the night and the world burned along with its future.

  Don’t you understand? Change the axioms, change the world.

  My cheek hit the pavement. I’d fallen in the gutter. I blinked my eyes, staring at the curb.

  Rio’s forty-six hours might have overestimated me.

  Hang the fuck on, I ordered myself. You have to hang on until you fix what you did, or you’ll be responsible for a lot more than just what Rio’s planning—

  Rio—

  I groped for my phone.

  I had to tell him it was off. Had to tell him he’d won, that I would take it all down, that he had to stop this.

  My senses fractured, stabbing too sharply, numbers everywhere, so many, too many, spiraling into infinite exactitude like a black hole sucking me past its event horizon—

  The phone was thick and clumsy in my fingers. I punched the numbers, the 5s and 8s crossing with the 3s and 9s. The wrong numbers. I tried to hit the button to clear it, to dial again.

  “We knew this was an experiment,” someone said, backlit by fluorescent light. “Experiments fail.” The curtain drew across my blurry vision, shrouding everything.

  I clawed at the curb, trying to get back upright, my fingers imprecise and useless. I had to call him off, and then I had to—to get somewhere. Checker’s place. We needed to plan, to figure out how to make everyone stand down, and then we had to undo everything—I had to get to everywhere I’d planted one of the boxes—it had taken a week to plant them; it would take a week to reprogram them—

  “A week?” Laughter. “You really think she has a week, in this state?”

  I was the only one who knew all the locations. The only one who could reverse it all.

  The call finally went through.

  “Rio,” I gasped. “You win, okay? You win. I’ll take it all down. Just stop this.”

  Three tones interrupted me. “We’re sorry; you have reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service. If you feel you have reached this recording in error…”

  I tried to focus my eyes enough to see where I’d misdialed, to call him back, but the outlines of the phone fuzzed in too many duplicates, and my hand wasn’t working right.

  My last thought before my own brain ravaged me was that Rio and Checker and McCabe and Yamamoto had all been right. Instead of saving the city, I had doomed it.

  And that was going to be my legacy.

  Chapter 27

  I woke up in the middle of an empty rave.

  At least, that was how it felt. Some sort of bass thumping through my brain, flashing patterns of light and color…and I was alone in a dark room.

  I sat up. The room was Checker’s bedroom—the colored patterns of light alternately flitted over his science fiction movie posters and action figures and bookshelves and gadgets, bringing them to ghoulish prominence before eclipsing them back into shadow. I’d been lying on top of the quilts on the made bed. The blinds on the windows were open, but between the blinds and the glass a heavy black material had been snugged against the wall, blocking all light.

  My eyes went to the door. More blacking covered the crack underneath and the edges all around the jamb.

  Between the thumping bass, someone knocked, and the door cracked open. “Cas?”

  The dim light from the hall felt very bright. Like I had a hangover. I ducked my face away. “What’s going on?”

  Checker came in and shut the door behind him, the sound muffled by the blacking. “Are you okay? How are you feeling?”

  “I’m feeling like I want to know what’s going on.” I’d been…at Arthur’s office. Rio had been fighting me. And—oh God. The brain entrainment. Katrina.

  I jumped up, and the room yawed.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, Cas! Sit down.”

  The back of my knees hit the bed and I sat, hard. My short-term memory was patchy, confused, like images out of a dream. “What happened to me?”

  “You, um—well. We’re pretty sure you were—well, you know.” He ducked his head self-consciously.

  Dying. Going insane.

  Come to that, why wasn’t I?

  I frowned. My thoughts echoed in my own head in blessed silence.

  “Checker,” I said. “What the hell did you do? What is all this?”

  “Brain entrainment,” Checker said.

  “What?”

  “Ha! Now you know how I felt. Not so sanguine when it’s you being poked at, is it?” I must have looked murderous, because Checker scooted his chair back a smidge and then raised both hands in surrender. “Sorry, sorry! Um, we didn’t know what to do. We argued about whether to get Simon or Rio, but it ended up being a moot point because none of us knew how to find either of them—I imperiled my life by calling the number you gave me for Rio, but he hasn’t gotten back to me yet. We did call Doc Washington and Pilar got the idea to tell her to get her hands on some EEG equipment, because, you know, data, and by the time Dr. W. got here we’d had the utterly fantastic brainstorm of calling Professor Sonya, too. Which is good, because Dr. W. took the EEG but didn’t have any idea what to do for you other than possibly a hospital. But we went and got all the brain entrainment math you worked out from that place of yours where we did all the programming, and we shoved it at Professor Sonya, and she looked at your brain waves and came up with this.” He waved a hand at the light show. “She says to tell you she basically used your own math on you
and you should still consider working with her.”

  I ignored the last part. So they’d used my own calculations to knock me back into a normal brain state.

  Holy shit.

  “So, uh—how are you feeling?” asked Checker.

  “Fine.” I tried to push myself up again and stopped when the wall swayed. “A little dizzy,” I amended. “And—confused.” I remembered Justin dashing into Arthur’s office, but not why I’d been there. The brain entrainment—I had to disable it, had to…why did I have to?

  “Confused how?”

  “Not telepathy-confused. Head injury-confused.” It felt like I’d had a raging concussion: my brain didn’t want to put together the events leading up to it. There was only a sense of urgency, and guilt…I had to do something…something important…

  But at least I could string together thoughts linearly again, without interference from past lives. I hadn’t realized how hard it was to think until I was alone again in my head.

  How long would it last? How long would I have? This wasn’t a cure—I knew that before I even asked the question. The foundational Arkacite research I’d spent so long immersed in had been clear and mathematically specific: the entrainment could knock me out of an altered brain state, but there would be no way for it to solve the problem that had drop-kicked me there in the first place.

  The stupid screwed-up psychology that would mow me down again. And again.

  Shit.

  I pushed away the inevitability of it, forcing myself to take advantage of my temporary clear-headedness. Trying to get my bearings. The chunks of events fit together like a puzzle missing two-thirds of its pieces.

  My tangled sense of urgency deepened.

  “What happened?” I asked Checker again.

  He frowned slightly. “We used your brain entrainment math to—”

  “I heard you the first time. I’m not that confused. I meant before this, when you found me.”

  “Uh. We didn’t, for a while. Arthur was caught up in something else—”

  Katrina, right. That accounted for the guilt.

  “—and for the first few hours we assumed you’d taken off to do your own thing, but then I tracked your phone, and after I picked up Pilar we, um, we found you…” He trailed off.