Plastic Smile (Russell's Attic Book 4)

by Huang, SL

  Pilar, I thought. The last time I’d seen Pilar…

  She’d been pointing a gun at Rio.

  The guilt clawed up my trachea, and I shied away from the memory.

  “I’m going to ask Professor Sonya to dial it back a bit, okay?” Checker said, and I wondered if he was deliberately changing the subject. “Keep talking to me, and try to tell me if things start going wonky for you. Okay? You promise?”

  “What am I, five?”

  “No, you’re a stupid and stubborn person who doesn’t like telling people when something’s wrong. But consider this for science. Tell me if you start feeling anything, okay?”

  “Whatever.” Now that the brain entrainment had done its work, it wouldn’t be affecting me anymore. Checker’s concern would be better placed looking ahead to the next time I faceplanted in a gutter.

  That didn’t stop me from feeling a twinge of anxiety as he tapped at his phone’s touchscreen and the light and sound both dimmed a little. Checker did something else on his phone, and the room lights came to life in a soft glow behind the color.

  My brain stayed silent.

  I tried to stop double-checking and dwelling on how long it would last. After all, hadn’t Simon said something about how picking at the memories made them worse? Of course, trying not to think about something only made my brain try to think about it more. I concentrated on reading the titles of the books on Checker’s shelves, making patterns out of the numbers of letters in the titles, solving for regression equations that gave his paperback collection another dimension.

  “Still okay?” asked Checker.

  “Yeah.”

  He tapped at his phone more, and the noise and light dimmed out completely, leaving us in an ordinary room with the windows and door blacked out.

  Checker studied me with concern. “How about now?”

  “Fine. No voices. I appear to be sane again.”

  “You were hearing voices?”

  “What did you think ‘going insane and dying’ meant?” I said.

  “I don’t know! You weren’t exactly talking a lot about it, you know!”

  A startled laugh almost choked me.

  “What’s going on?” Checker demanded immediately. “Are you all right? Cas?”

  “Yeah. Yeah,” I hiccupped. “It just, it feels really good to argue with you again.”

  “Oh, fuck you, Cas Russell,” Checker said, but there was no bite in it.

  I pushed myself up off the bed. The floor wobbled, but I kept my balance this time. I did keep a hand against the wall, just in case. “Okay. Back to business. How long was I out?”

  “A day and a half, I guess? Well, I don’t know how long it was before we found you, so maybe more like a couple days. By the way, Arthur wants to talk to you—he’s switched sides now on the brain entrainment, because one of the kids he mentors—”

  “Days?” The wall was suddenly holding me up. “A couple days?” That was bad, that was very, very bad—why—why was that so bad—

  Forty-six hours, Rio had said.

  Rio—Rio—

  “Give me your phone; I need a phone right now!” I snatched Checker’s mobile out of his hands before he’d fully extended it. My fingers zipped across the touchscreen.

  The line on the other end rang. And rang.

  Voicemail.

  Cold seeped up and clenched my heart. No. This couldn’t be happening.

  The generic message played out and beeped. “It’s Cas,” I said. “Call it off, okay? I’m taking it down. LA will go back to normal. So whatever you’re doing, call it off. Call me as soon as you get this.”

  “Cas?” Checker said.

  I hung up the phone and checked the date and time on the brightly lit screen. Calculated. I hadn’t been in the best mental state when I’d talked to Rio, but when he’d given his deadline I’d checked the time—

  Forty-nine hours and three minutes. I was three hours late.

  Chapter 28

  Checker and Arthur and I gathered in the Hole as our war room.

  Professor Halliday had wished me well and gone home, declining to become involved in whatever situation we’d embroiled ourselves in—her words. Pilar was noticeably absent. Other than assuring me she was all right, Checker and Arthur avoided my questions about her.

  Rio assaulting Pilar. Yet another thing I’d let get out of control. My fault.

  I had Checker set up an automated dialer for Rio, with Rio’s current phone number rather than with the permanent voice mailbox Checker had originally tried. We still hadn’t gotten through to him. I’d tried texting, too, but there had been no response.

  Irreversible in forty-six hours, he’d called his plan. Rio didn’t bluff.

  “Keep checking the news,” I said. “The minute we find out anything…”

  “I said I’m on it, Cas,” Checker answered.

  “Meantime, we gotta talk about our game plan,” Arthur said. He hadn’t said much, and he was avoiding my eyes. I’d been too afraid to ask about Katrina.

  “Well, we have to abort, clearly.” I tried to assuage my guilt by making the declaration as firm as possible, regardless of the fact that it was weeks too late. “We have to. But the minute we do…”

  The changing variables that had come with the brain entrainment might have thrown all of Checker’s statistical programs askew, but every iteration he ran now was telling us the same thing: with the mess of other tensions I had created in Los Angeles—even without whatever hammer Rio was dropping—the brain entrainment was the only thing keeping the city from boomeranging into an exponentially worse state than we’d brought it out of. Ironically, a lot of that would probably come from people’s anger over being affected by something they hadn’t understood, but they’d only be able to act on it fully once it was gone.

  And with Rio’s provocation, the city would be needing the check more than ever. The same check that was making kids lose their support networks and OD on ecstasy.

  Checker coughed. I had the intense impression he was avoiding saying “I told you so.” Usually he just would have said it; I assumed almost dying earned me a modicum of tact.

  But instead, he cleared his throat and then spoke quietly, to his keyboard. “You know, if it weren’t for…uh, practical concerns, I’d sort of like a world where peer pressure and hive minds didn’t work.”

  I jerked to look at him, shocked.

  He half-shrugged. “Obviously we have to abort. But you were also right about there being a certain—that it gave people back their individual freedom, in a way. I…there’s something that appeals to me about that world. I don’t think it’s inherently a wrong one, just a—a different one.”

  “It is wrong,” Arthur said.

  I glanced between them.

  “You don’t have to say that,” I said to Checker.

  “I know,” he answered. “Let’s figure out how to undo it.”

  Right.

  Now that I had room in my brain to think, an idea had been pushing in from the sides. I absolutely, one hundred percent, and on no uncertain terms did not want to do it.

  But it was an idea. And we had less than zero time to start walking this back.

  “Arthur,” I said.

  He looked up.

  I swallowed. The echo of Valarmathi’s voice flickered, just below the surface. Waiting.

  “You suggested something,” I said. “That I might be able to…give myself up. To save the city.”

  Arthur glanced at Checker with a frown. “Thought you gave that a go already.” The slightest thread of accusation bled through his words.

  “I did,” I said. “With Rio. He said no. But we all know someone else who can get everyone in the city to step back from shooting each other. Someone who has the power.”

  Checker got it before Arthur did. His face galvanized into shocked understanding. “What? No. No no no no no no no. That is a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad idea, Cas Russell. In fact, it’s almost exactly what Pithica was
doing, which is—”

  “We’re on the verge of a mob war that will take out large chunks of Los Angeles the instant we start removing the brain entrainment,” I said. “You really think we should do nothing?”

  “I think we should look for a third option!”

  “Sometimes there is no third option,” I said. “Sometimes there’s only one shitty solution and a shittier one.”

  “Arthur,” Checker said. “Help me out here. Using a telepath to solve this—a telepath you most emphatically do not trust, I might add—it is not a solution!”

  Arthur was looking at the floor again. “You planning on using him to kill people, Russell?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Then we ain’t Pithica,” Arthur said, still to the floor.

  I couldn’t imagine what he must be feeling. He’d supported this effort, and he held himself to a much higher standard than he did me.

  I was still too much of a coward to ask about Katrina.

  “Cas,” Checker tried again, “assuming you can do this in a way that isn’t completely and blatantly immoral, and assuming Simon agrees to help at all, what can one psychic do against a tide like we’re dealing with? What, are you going to march him around to every one of the bad guys and talk to them? Let me remind you that we haven’t even been able to find where the militia people are camped out, and considering how badly you’ve pissed most of the crime lords off, what are the chances they’re on the lookout to snipe you before you even get close—”

  “There’s a much easier way,” I said. “You’re forgetting there’s a radio show that’s a poster child for every single person who’s mad about this.”

  “You want McCabe to help?” squawked Checker.

  “He’ll want to help,” I said. “Considering it’s his cause, and all.”

  “And, what, you’re going to tell Simon to march in there and brainwash him into giving us the airtime and then brainwash everyone else into—”

  “No,” I said. It wasn’t like I knew Simon very well, regardless of how thoroughly he haunted my dreams and flashbacks. But his holier-than-thou insistence about not touching people’s brains without their consent—me excluded, apparently—had been practically shouted from the rooftops.

  I wasn’t sure I could get him to talk to anyone, even people who were intent on killing each other. Twisting around the mind of a radio host to give us airtime was definitely going to be a bridge too far.

  “No,” I said again. “Simon’s not going to give us the airtime. You forgot who owns the media company that runs the station—the Lorenzos.”

  Checker paled. “That’s an even worse idea.”

  I shrugged. “Malcolm only threw me through a door the last time he saw me. I don’t think he’d kill me if I asked for a civilized meeting.”

  Checker stared at me. “You are insane.”

  “Not yet,” I said. “But I’m sure it’ll swing back around.”

  “Not funny, Cas. Not funny!”

  One of his computers chimed.

  We all surged forward, Arthur and I coming to scan the screen over Checker’s shoulder as he scrolled. “What dropped?” Arthur said. “Am I seeing something about a shooting here?”

  Checker flipped through screens full of color-coded data. “Yeah, uh—there was a shooting a few hours ago. It’s breaking now—it looks like it was police. They killed someone. The reports are saying he was unarmed.”

  “Tell me it ain’t a white cop and a black kid,” Arthur said softly.

  “No, it’s—I mean, I don’t know. But it’s looking like…background’s still coming in, and nothing’s verified, but I think the victim was one of the militia leaders.”

  Oh. Oh, shit. The militia groups had been convinced the government was doing something to the population here.

  And now the government had shot one of them.

  No. Not the government. Rio.

  I wondered how he’d engineered it.

  “What’s the retaliation gonna be?” Arthur said.

  “Are you asking me?” Checker’s voice climbed. “Because I don’t know the answer to that, Arthur. I don’t—”

  “We have to get on this now,” I said. “If we get Simon in front of all the rest of them, maybe there won’t be a retaliation. Maybe we can stop it.”

  “You’re still talking about using a telepath to—” started Checker.

  “How can I help?” said Arthur.

  “Arthur, wait,” Checker said. “I am not okay with this. Can we at least discuss it? You’re talking about going into the heads of a huge number of people—”

  “To tell them to walk away,” I said. “To tell them to put down their weapons and not attack each other.”

  “That doesn’t make it right!” cried Checker. “There have been just conflicts—there are just conflicts in the world right now. Not everyone who picks up arms is inherently wrong. And I don’t even know if they’re wrong in this case. If I thought someone had been messing with me the way we did—”

  “The way we did,” I emphasized. “We—I—am responsible for fucking everything up in the first place. All I’m going to do is set it right. Back to the way it was.” Minus the militia member who had just been killed, and Miguel, and the other Blood Skulls members, and maybe Katrina, and who knew who else. All of whom had been victims of my catastrophic attempt to fight crime.

  “You can’t do that!” argued Checker. “You can’t say one thing was wrong and then build another wronger thing on top of it and say you’re just reverting things—you can’t play with people’s brains like it’s a science experiment and then hit control-Z if you don’t like what comes out the other side!”

  “What do you think we should do, then?” I demanded. “Seriously. Give me one other choice. You keep talking about a third option, well, find me one, otherwise stop delaying us.”

  “I don’t think we should do this! Even if we can’t find another way, this is the greater of two evils!”

  “Cities been healed thanks to one leader’s charisma plenty of times in history. Can happen again,” Arthur said. “I can live with that. Can’t live with more folk dying. I’m sorry, son—this ain’t intellectual.”

  “You can’t say that.” Checker sounded like he’d given up. Hopeless. “You can’t say that, Arthur. We make the intellectual argument because in the moment, we have to be able to see the larger picture, not the—not the emotional one.”

  “And that’s where we differ, ’cause I think the emotional’s just as valid.” Arthur turned back to me. “What do you need?”

  I braced for more protest from Checker, but he didn’t say anything more.

  “I want you for the meeting with McCabe, when we get to that point,” I said to Arthur. “In the meantime, stay here and keep trying to reach Rio. When you do—tell him I’m calling it off and not to do anything else.”

  “You think he got more planned?”

  “I’d count on it,” I said. “Also, whatever you do, don’t tell him what we’re trying to do.” If there was one thing Rio would object to even more than brain entrainment, it was using a telepath to subvert the free will of everyone in Los Angeles who heard the radio address. I was dreading what would happen when he figured out what we’d done—the best I could hope for was that it would happen after we’d already done it, not in time for him to stop us.

  I pointed at Checker. “Don’t you tell him, either.”

  Checker’s face twisted like I’d hurt him. “I’m not going to sic Rio on you, Cas.”

  “Are you going to try to stop us?” I asked.

  He sucked in a quick, sharp inhale. “I’m going to keep looking for another way.”

  “Better look fast,” I said.

  Chapter 29

  I didn’t have a way of reaching Simon except through Rio, and we still hadn’t gotten through to him. Which meant my next step was clear: prepare everything for when I did corner Simon. In other words, get a lock on that airtime we needed, which meant reaching
out to the Lorenzos. I tried very hard not to worry about what would happen if my brain went out from under me again in the middle of negotiations with the Los Angeles Mafia.

  After making me wait an excruciatingly long time in a cold garage, Malcolm granted me an audience from the other side of a shotgun. He didn’t greet me.

  “I’m not here to make trouble,” I said, raising my hands slightly. It would be ridiculous if I were—he’d directed me to come to Mama Lorenzo’s mountain residence, which had beefed up its security considerably since the time I had broken in a few years before. And since I’d told them I was here on a civilized visit, I’d had to let security take my sidearm.

  Despite my protestations of civility, Malcolm had still met me here, in one of the estate’s two enormous garages. This one was empty, with a cement floor that had a drain in the middle of it.

  That wasn’t ominous at all.

  “Good to see you, too,” I said.

  “I should kill you,” he answered.

  “Or maybe I should kill you,” I returned evenly.

  The corner of his mouth flicked up. “You flirting with me, Russell?”

  I gave him a look expressing how funny I thought that was. “We want the same things right now.”

  “Do we?”

  “Your boss has a code. She takes care of her city.”

  “So she does.” The barrel of the shotgun stayed on me, as immobile as if Malcolm were carved from granite. I probably also had a dozen snipers trained on me, security I couldn’t see.

  I tried to ignore it all. “The last thing Mama Lorenzo wants is a war breaking out on her turf. One she doesn’t control.”

  “And you really expect me to believe you’re trying to stop such a war? After what you did to Pourdry and the rest of us?”

  I took a breath. “You know what Pourdry was. The other stuff was just me trying to keep the peace.”

  “Funny way of showing it.” Malcolm squinted at me. “And yeah, of course I know what Pourdry was. I know what you are, too.”

  My heart started beating faster. Malcolm and I got along well enough that it was sometimes hard to remember—just because we were civil didn’t always make us allies.