Zero Sum Game

by SL Huang

  Arthur froze.

  “Well, there might be some torture first or something, but only if Dawna has the stomach to ask for it.”

  He threw up.

  Chapter 26

  “This is my fault,” Arthur kept mumbling, doubled over and retching. “I—she convinced me, oh, Lord—I listened—why did I listen? Oh, God, I trusted her—”

  “At least we know that once our lovely Dawna Polk seduces someone, she can shove him back the other way if she wants to,” I said. “Congratulations, it looks like you’ve been un-brainwashed. Though if you ever sell out Rio again, I will fucking kill you.”

  His expression was stricken. I wasn’t even sure he heard me.

  I sighed. “Besides, shouldn’t I be the one who gets to freak out here? All you’re doing is having a guilt complex meltdown. I think the impending death thing trumps that.”

  “How can you be—you’re cracking jokes?” He sounded broken.

  “What would you like me to do?” I asked. “Panic?”

  To be honest, I wasn’t sure why I wasn’t panicking. If Dawna had gotten to Rio, well, then he would kill me. But as soon as I had realized the implication of her words, it was as if she’d explained she wanted to set pi equal to three on pain of death and expected me to take it seriously.

  I trusted Rio. I trusted him completely. So Dawna telling me he would kill me was like insisting in perfect seriousness that black was white, or one equaled two, or the theorems in Euclidean geometry didn’t follow from the axioms. And given her skills, she could probably get me to believe any one of those before she would ever convince me Rio would kill me. The idea didn’t compute. And as if the very thought had caused an unending error message in my brain, I didn’t feel any reaction to it at all.

  The door at the end of the cellblock opened again, and Dawna reentered, this time with Rio behind her. He still wore the same black fatigues and had his hands cuffed in front of him, but he walked normally and to my relief appeared uninjured. Behind them crowded in six of Dawna’s troops, all with their weapons trained on Rio. Dawna wasn’t taking chances: if Rio refused to kill me, she had already said she would finally write him off, and I fully believed she would have her troops drop him with neither delay nor remorse.

  Arthur sidestepped in front of me.

  What the hell? “What are you doing?” I demanded.

  “I gave us up to her,” he said, his face a rictus of desperate guilt. “I did. I thought—don’t matter. Russell, this is my doing, and they ain’t killing you without doing me first.”

  I rolled my eyes and swung an arm into his solar plexus.

  He literally flew off his feet and collapsed against the barred partition on the other side of the cell, wheezing mightily but nicely out of my way. “Being stupidly heroic is just going to get you killed,” I told him, and then proceeded to ignore him. I needed to concentrate.

  We had arrived at a moment in flux, a moment for my window of escape to open and for me to smash our way out of here. The variables were fluctuating, and Rio had arrived to back me up. I would find a way out, and I would find it now.

  The six troops stayed alert and trained on Rio, and Dawna was watching him closely too, not looking toward Arthur or me. Rio wasn’t quicker than a bullet, not with six M4s already aimed at him, but if he had a sufficient distraction…

  “Hello, Cas,” he said.

  “Hi, Rio,” I answered. Muzzle velocity, the troopers’ reaction times…all too fast, still too fast. Dammit.

  “Cas, you know what I have to do, don’t you?”

  Rio could take six men, but not if he started out handcuffed and in all their sights. And trapped on the other side of the bars, no matter how we played it I would need a few seconds’ delta before I would be able to escape and help him. If he attacked Dawna or her troops, we would all die. I looked, and did the math, and looked again, but no matter how I jigsawed every equation, I found no window, no opening.

  Impossible. How had this happened? I always had options. Always. I did every equation again, reset my reference frames and did them once more. Nothing. We had no way forward except one.

  Rio had to shoot me.

  Fuck.

  “Cas?” said Rio.

  “Yes,” I said. The word came out choked. “I know.”

  “It would be my preference not to harm you,” Rio said quietly.

  “It’s okay,” I whispered. I kept searching desperately, but the values surrounding us were steadying, reaching a new equilibrium in which everything came up checkmate. Mathematically, we had no other choice.

  Oh, Jesus, I wished we did.

  Dawna pulled out a revolver and handed it to Rio—.38 Special, it looked like. Rio took it between cuffed hands and opened the cylinder. “One round,” he observed.

  Dawna said nothing. We all knew he would not need more.

  He snapped the cylinder closed again, drew the hammer back, and lifted the gun. Even cuffed, his hands folded sure and firm around the grip, and the barrel stayed rock-steady as it leveled its deadly blackness with my heart. My eyes tracked it, measured, the numbers snapping into place.

  I didn’t have time to prepare myself. I took a deep breath, looked into the tiny yawning bore of the gun, shifted minutely, and met Rio’s eyes. He gave me a slight nod, a barely visible movement of his head.

  And fired.

  The explosion of the gunshot was deafening, louder than any gunshot I’d ever heard. Everything seesawed, vibrating and melting. I was staring at the ceiling. I was on the floor. How had I gotten on the floor?

  Someone was shouting, and a dark, frantic face swam above me. And then something welled up inside me, a burning swell, taking all other sensation with it—pain—

  “I am pledged to your cause,” said Rio’s voice, remote and irrelevant. Someone answered him, but I couldn’t hear what she said, and it didn’t seem important.

  The pain surged, unimaginable, overwhelming—it rose up and enveloped me, smothering; I drowned in its red clouds until it was all I could see, all I could feel—

  A hand slapped at my face. I barely felt it. The air wobbled, waving in long, slow frequencies that collided and blurred. Someone was hitting me. I tried to tell him to stop, but my mouth didn’t work.

  “Russell, come on, girl! Stay with me!”

  Not going anywhere. The thought amused me for some reason, but things weren’t working well enough for me to laugh.

  Somewhere, either close by or far away, or possibly both, I heard movement. A voice gave directions, and people started breaking up, moving around. Dawna dismissing her troops, a final thread of lucidity in me knew. The shadows moved and mutated as they shifted away.

  And then everything exploded in a cacophony of noise.

  It was thunderous, terrible, threatening to pull me under. Gunfire shattered the air, each blast erupting through my whole head, and too much light, and people shouting and screaming and crashing and breaking, and a woman’s scream, and my head felt like it burst apart and the world fractured and spun, tearing me apart with inertial force…

  The ground fell away. Someone was lifting me. I tried to fight back but I couldn’t, and then the pain blazed up and shattered me again, redoubling, whiting out everything else.

  I wasn’t aware of much more after that; I blinked in and out of consciousness. I caught vague sensations of being carried, of rapid movement, of jerking to a stop and several voices shouting. Every new slice of awareness layered on another spasm of agony, until my thoughts stuttered incoherently like a badly tuned radio, the screeching overwhelming any other sound until I only wanted to turn it off—

  The floor vibrated now. The air, too—so loud it shook me apart, and I wondered if this was what death felt like until the word helicopter floated through the strands of pain. Then time skipped again and the vibration of a different vehicle rumbled through me, a car, and two men were arguing, shouting: You shot her! and She aimed for me and I don’t expect you to understand. And part of my brain h
eard Rio’s voice and thought, Good, he got it!, even though if he hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been alive to think those words.

  The next time I wavered to semi-consciousness I was lying still, on something soft, and I could tell I was very, very drugged. I struggled for a moment against the layers of mental wool before giving up; the warmth of unconsciousness hovered right below me, beckoning me back.

  Arthur’s face swam into view. I had just enough awareness to think, Huh, weird, before the world melted away again.

  Chapter 27

  My senses stayed foggy for a long time. I kept seeing Arthur’s face during my intermittent spurts of consciousness, which my brain still thought was strange, but eventually it adapted. Rio was around, too. I became vaguely aware of Arthur making a fuss about letting Rio near me, which didn’t make any sense. Rio and I went way back. Arthur must not know that.

  He also must have forgotten how Rio had saved all of our lives. And had kept his hand steady, which had saved me. If he weren’t such a good shot, shooting exactly where I aimed…the thought struck me as funny. I started to giggle, but it hurt too much.

  Odd that Arthur would forget all that; he’d been there.

  Occasionally I registered the presence of a third person, a middle-aged black woman who must have been a doctor. I tried to push her away the first time I figured out she was there, but I didn’t think the signals even made it out of my brain.

  Time seemed slippery, too much of an effort to hold onto. Half the time I thought I was awake but then realized reality wasn’t Hausdorff, and what kind of topology was I in anyway if Twinkies were allowed? And the totient function was a rainbow, a beautiful rainbow and the greatest mathematical discovery of all time, but if you put a Möbius strip in the fourth dimension could a rabbit still hop down the side?

  I became more lucid slowly; maybe they were weaning me off the drugs, but I stopped thinking I was the next Erdős every time penguins waddled through my dreams on a four-colored map. I slept or floated, the world still foggy but solid now, which was a vast improvement over it being wibbly.

  The disorientation cleared enough once for me to see Rio’s face as he changed my dressing. His movements were swift and certain, and his lips moved in the whispered litany of a prayer.

  “Rio,” I slurred. “You’re a good friend.”

  “I’m not your friend, Cas,” he said quietly. “You know that. Don’t ever think otherwise.”

  I did know. Friends cared about you. But friends also knew you well enough to communicate without words, and did things like save your life and then stay by your side and take care of you while you were injured. Did it matter that Rio didn’t care about me, as long as he acted like he did, and always would? Did it matter that he did it for other reasons, for his own grand religious reasons, instead of because he felt any sort of affection for me?

  Plenty of people were only generous and kind and giving because they thought it was the way of God. They were still good people. What was friendship, after all?

  I slipped back to sleep.

  The first time I woke enough to have a real conversation, Arthur was back. “Hi,” I rasped.

  He was instantly attentive. “Hey, Russell. How you feeling?”

  “Fuzzy,” I answered. “Where’s Rio?”

  His lip twitched. “Out.”

  “You still don’t like Rio?” I frowned at him, trying to string the right words together. “He saved all our lives. He saved me. Again.”

  “He shot you!” burst out Arthur.

  “Because I told him to.” How could he not get it? “I knew I could line up a nonlethal shot.”

  “A nonlethal—! Russell, do you have any idea how gunshots work?” He took a deep breath and visibly calmed himself. “That was absolutely, positively a lethal shot. Any gunshot can be lethal. You get hit in the leg it can kill you.” His voice cracked. “Russell, he shot you in the chest and you almost died, and if the bullet ain’t bounced and missed your heart—”

  “I made it bounce,” I told him thickly. “It bounced ’cause I told it to.”

  Arthur looked like he wanted to cry.

  I ended up drifting off again at that point, but the next time I opened my eyes, feeling a good deal more alert, Arthur was still beside me, almost as if he hadn’t moved. It was kind of creepy. “How you feeling?” he asked immediately. “Up to eating something?”

  “Don’t you have a job?” I said.

  “Pithica was the only case I was working on.”

  I couldn’t help thinking it strange that he kept hanging around. The last I remembered, we’d been at each others’ throats and he’d been swinging between trying to get Rio sold into slavery and having a massive guilt breakdown over getting me killed. “You don’t have to be here,” I told him. “You can go if you want.”

  “I ain’t going to leave you alone with a…with someone who shot you,” he said darkly.

  I started to sigh, but it hurt too much. They’d taken more of the drugs away, I realized. “We’ve been over this,” I said. “It was the plan.”

  “Getting yourself shot is not a plan.”

  “It allowed Rio to get us out of there,” I argued. “Any other option would have gotten one of us killed.”

  “This one almost did get you killed!”

  “But it didn’t.” He was making me tired, and my whole body ached. “You said something about food,” I reminded him, even though I wasn’t hungry. “I could get behind that.”

  Arthur hurried off to make me some soup, and I fell back to sleep.

  When I finally woke again I was starving, but Arthur wasn’t in his usual spot next to me. I could hear his voice, though; I looked over to see him on the other side of the room, leaving a quiet but intense voicemail for someone.

  I pushed myself up a few inches and looked around. I was in a spacious studio apartment, and not one I recognized; it must have been Arthur’s or Rio’s. An IV stand stood beside my bed, with a long clear tube that wound around until it ended in a catheter taped into the back of my hand. On the way it passed over a crumpled pillow and blanket on the floor—someone had been sleeping close enough to keep an eye on me. Probably Arthur. Jesus.

  The man in question hung up the phone and saw I was awake. “Hey. You’re looking better.”

  “I’m feeling better,” I said. “What’s been happening? I take it we got away clean?”

  “Your, uh, your buddy got us out—he took out the troops and took Dawna Polk hostage. Turns out she’s so valuable we managed to swing trading up to get out. I got the impression only a handful of ’em can do the mental jazz; they didn’t want to lose her.”

  “I suppose she’s one of Pithica’s higher-ups, then, huh.”

  “Yeah,” he said, sounding unsure and unhappy.

  “So you let her go?”

  “Your friend was the one calling the shots, but not much choice on that one.”

  “He’s not my friend,” I said automatically.

  Arthur made a face. “What, then? He owe you money? You owe him money? I can’t figure it out!”

  “Then ask when you can tell me why it’s any of your business.” There wasn’t a chance in hell I would tell him how Rio and I had met. That wasn’t his to know.

  The apartment door opened at that moment and Rio himself came in. He was back in his customary tan duster, and water slicked the mantle in dark patches. Apparently it was raining outside—I couldn’t hear it. It made me wonder how long I’d been out; the rainy season in Los Angeles doesn’t usually start until December or January, though sometimes it was months earlier.

  “Hello, Cas,” Rio greeted me, when he saw I was sitting up. “How are you feeling?”

  “Like I’ve been shot,” I answered.

  He nodded. “Understandable, given the circumstances.”

  Arthur threw up his hands in what I could only have described as flailing.

  “But I’m getting better,” I told Rio, ignoring Arthur. I felt more energetic, and I was awak
e, which was a change, and the numbers surrounding me weren’t quite as sluggish as they had been, and I knew the answer to how fast I was metabolizing the drugs, so things were looking up.

  “Thanks be to God,” said Rio. He came over and checked the IV bags hanging above my head.

  I thought the thanks were due to Rio, myself—oh, all right, Arthur too—but I was sensitive enough to Rio’s beliefs that I didn’t say it out loud. Instead I said, “I heard you made a daring rescue.” Arthur mumbled something about getting me food and retreated to the kitchen area at the far side of the room.

  “It was not hard once you provided the opportunity,” answered Rio.

  “Dawna Polk’s that important, huh?”

  “The people with her skills are the core of Pithica. They are rare and precious to the organization. It is their greatest resource weakness.”

  I mulled over that tidbit of information. In hindsight, this meant I might not have needed Rio’s help at all. I could have taken Dawna a hostage in her library without blinking. Heck, I could have taken her hostage back at the town where they had first captured us. Why hadn’t I at least tried? All I could remember thinking was that they had Arthur and therefore I had no other options…

  “I could have gotten us out,” I blurted.

  “No,” said Rio.

  “I could have. I had plenty of opportunities around Dawna—”

  “Do not fault yourself, Cas. She can make herself safe from anybody.”

  Oh. Right. I never would have considered attacking Dawna as an option because she had made sure I didn’t think of it. I wondered if I’d had other escape options, too. It was hard to think back; I’d been so certain at the time.

  Rio pulled up the chair that Arthur usually occupied. “You said before that she talked to you. Will you tell me what about?”

  Well. At least she hadn’t mind-zapped me during that part. I kind of wished she had—it would make my doubts easier to swallow. “She talked about Pithica,” I admitted softly. “How it’s all because they want to make people’s lives better. How they want to make the world all peaceful and wonderful for everyone.”