Zero Sum Game

by SL Huang

  “Forgive me if I do not quite believe you,” said Rio.

  “Oh, you misunderstand,” said Dawna. “I will not be sorry for your death. Neither are you, I think—we both know it is far less than you deserve. But you have proven a most fascinating subject of research. And I do regard it as something of a personal failure that our recruitment efforts have failed in your case.”

  “Quite spectacularly so,” agreed Rio.

  “I am glad I have been able to speak with you one more time,” said Dawna. “You are indeed fascinating, and in a world filled with the mundane. This may be a victory in a moral sense, but in a scientific one, in the spirit of curiosity, I regret that this is our last conversation.”

  Rio opened his mouth to respond, but with no fanfare, Dawna lifted her hand and fired the Taser. Rio jerked, every muscle stiffening, and collapsed.

  At that moment, Arthur’s gun hand twitched.

  Not far. Not far enough for it to make a difference for anybody else. Not far enough even for anyone to say he wasn’t aimed at me anymore.

  But he knew me by now. He had seen what I could do. And the movement was just far enough for me.

  I spun in, slipping to the side and snapping my elbow forward to smash into Arthur’s temple. He crumpled. My left hand had his Beretta; it came up and on line in the smallest fraction of a second, the mathematics flowing through me in a torrent, every motion a thousand interacting vectors in space as the sights snapped into alignment and I squeezed my finger against the trigger—

  “Oh my God!” shrieked Dawna. “I know what you are!”

  Every muscle screeched to a grinding halt. My finger stopped half a millimeter from firing.

  Dawna was gazing at me, fearless and searching, Rio prone and forgotten at her feet. I had thought she had seen through me before, felt transparent and naked in front of her, but that was nothing compared to what I saw in her eyes now; she stripped me to the atoms, tearing every last shred of my person from its moorings to be scrutinized and catalogued—she saw the parts of me I didn’t know existed, read me like she had a detailed manual of my soul, tore me apart and undid me until I had no sense of self anymore.

  Until this instant, I realized, I had only had an inkling of what her powers could do—with the full weight of her focus drilling into me, driving into the core of my being, I didn’t have the slightest chance against her. Probability zero. She had won.

  “I see now,” she whispered, stepping toward me, ignoring the gun I still had pointed at her. “It all makes sense. I should have looked more closely before. But why would I have thought…” She drew closer, less than a meter from me now, and narrowed her eyes slightly. I could see her mind racing behind them, putting together the clues, discovering—finding all the right questions and slotting in the answers just as quickly.

  Knowing me. Knowing me.

  “You told me everything,” she breathed, more to herself than to me. “Of course you told me everything. Except what you didn’t know yourself. Hidden. So cunningly hidden, even from you.”

  “What are you talking about?” I whispered.

  “Drop the gun,” she said.

  I dropped the gun.

  She reached out a hand, almost touching my face but not quite. “It’s brilliant work,” she said. “Seamless. It had to be one of us. So much makes sense now. Your relationship with Sonrio. Why you’re more resistant to me. All your…abilities.”

  “Tell me what the hell you’re talking about,” I demanded, but my voice was a croak, with no strength in it.

  Dawna ignored me. “I know where you’re from,” she said, almost wonderingly. “I wonder what would happen if you knew. If you remembered.”

  Remembered what?

  Dawna smiled, a predatory showing of teeth. “Let us start with an easy one. Sonrio. The degree to which you trust him is frankly insane. Where did you meet him?” She spoke as if she already knew the answer.

  “He saved me,” I said through stiff lips. Everything was starting to go off-balance, the world canting like it wanted to make me seasick, the numbers that always surrounded me bleeding together in a nonsensical, blurred mass.

  “Saved you?” said Dawna. “From what?”

  “From…” Flashes collided in my vision, as if I were in two places at once. Red tiles, and people in white coats.

  The room tilted, inverting, stretching and eliding, wrong. My senses whirled, bleeding together and at the same time painfully acute, my consciousness freezing and spiking and stiffening into numbness—

  The roar of a helicopter exploded outside the windows. I felt barely aware of it even as it shook me apart, the thunder of it engulfing us, the beam of a searchlight blanching everything into stark whiteness. Dawna looked up. The muffled boom of a megaphone clogged the air, someone shouting unintelligibly, and out of the corner of my eye I saw more troops materialize at the door—why were they here, hadn’t she sent them all after Checker, had they found him?—but they were angry, their report grim, and Dawna whipped back toward me, her face filled with fury, and I thought, He did it, Checker did it!

  And then Dawna was on me, grabbing my collar and shouting, her face inches from mine. “Millions will die because of you! Is that what you wanted? Is it?”

  Behind her, Rio rose from the floor like a phoenix, his duster flying behind him, moving so fast that the rest of the world seemed to crystallize into slow motion. Dawna’s troops tried to bring their weapons up, but they were too late.

  Dawna had just enough time to shout one word, her eyes blazing, her face filling my vision:

  “Remember.”

  The world fractured.

  My senses fragmented like shattered glass, scattering, my brain erupting with too many thoughts—I saw Rio, in another time and place, staring down at me—the wet green of a jungle morphed into steel and chrome and rows of windows showing a white winter sky—another man, a young man with handsome dark features, called to me insistently and earnestly—I raced through the darkness, the bark of automatic weapons fire thundering around me, traps at every corner, and I was avoiding them all, and it was exhilarating, I was winning, but somehow it wasn’t enough; I was failing—

  Rio’s face swam above me again against a clear, cold night; I smelled grass and peat and too many thoughts, too many memories, I was screaming and holding my head and someone else was dragging me and shouting, too late, too late, and I could see the stars—

  And then I was back in the room at the LA Air Force Base, curled on the floor, the helicopter thrumming right outside the windows, Dawna’s troops surrounding me, but Rio had Dawna and they were all frozen, a deadly tableau, and I thought I have to help him but I was drowning—

  Help her.

  Rio sat in the corner and watched while I threw up so violently my body spasmed and seized—

  I had failed—I had failed, and I was going to die, but worse than that was the knowledge that I had lost, was lost; I curled on the bed letting the pain overtake me; it throbbed through my head, larger than existence, robbing me of identity—

  I was scribbling madly, paper spread out all around me like in Rio’s house in Twentynine Palms, except this was white paper, and I had to fill it, fill it quickly, the math outpouring with overwhelming urgency because something—

  I was running again—it was dark—

  And then I was laughing; I was with other people, young people, teenagers, and we were laughing—

  I dove into the water—

  The light was too bright—

  I felt the impact in my chest crack a rib, fell to the concrete—

  The wind rushed by—

  I leapt—

  I screamed—

  I slept—

  Remember—

  Chapter 36

  Remember…

  Remember what? The thought slipped through my grasp, insubstantial as smoke.

  Someone was talking, saying words, too many words, too many questions—shut them out shut them out shut them out—


  My breath wheezed in and out with too much force, my hands flexing and grasping against the floor. I clutched tighter into myself, curled up on my side.

  Where am I?…what am I?

  Sense returned in slow intervals.

  It was night, and the room was still. The math shimmered around me, a comforting background hum. Dawna Polk and her troops and her helicopter were all gone.

  So was Rio.

  Arthur’s face swam into focus above me. His expression was wrinkled with concern, though his eyes still weren’t quite focusing properly. Concussion. That’s right.

  What had Dawna done to me?

  I tried to cast my mind back, to put it together, but my memories of the past few minutes had jumbled into confusion, strange images that slid around until they gave me motion sickness, and the harder I tried to pin anything down, the more the images tumbled apart and dwindled away. I grabbed futilely for the connections, the shreds of recollection, vertigo shooting through me as I lost my bearings—

  “Russell?” Someone was talking to me. I couldn’t remember who. “Russell? Hey, Russell, you all right?”

  “Arthur,” I mumbled, his name coming back to me again even as some other thought slid away.

  “The very same. You hurt?”

  It took me a while to muddle out what he was asking. I had to concentrate, figure it out. “No.” Was that the right answer?

  I heard him take a quiet breath, a sigh that sounded like relief.

  “What happened?” I mumbled.

  “Checker did it,” said Arthur. “Sounds like whatever you two was on about, it worked. Knocked Pithica off their game something good, from their reaction here.” His voice faltered, as if he didn’t know whether we’d done right or not.

  I didn’t know either.

  I tried to sort through my disjointed memories of the fight. “Dawna got away,” I dredged up finally.

  Arthur chuckled dryly. “Think it’d be more accurate to say we got away, sweetheart. Ain’t like we had the upper hand here.”

  “Rio,” I remembered. Sudden fright spiked through me. Where was he? I sat up so quickly that my brain crashed and melted inside my head, the room spasming. I would have fallen over again if Arthur hadn’t caught me.

  “Whoa, whoa there. I gotcha. Just breathe.”

  “Rio,” I repeated urgently. “Where is—what did they—?”

  “Hey, sweetheart. Relax. It’s okay. They didn’t get him. He—saved us.” His voice sounded queer on the last words, as if they didn’t fit into his mouth correctly.

  “How?” I blinked urgently, trying to clear my fuzzy vision. The room was as intact as it had been before Dawna had arrived. No additional bodies. But no Rio.

  “Made a deal,” said Arthur.

  “What kind of a deal?” Why wasn’t he here? What had he given Dawna?

  “Hey. Hey, relax. It’s okay.” Arthur was still holding my shoulders so I didn’t fall over, and his grip was strong and comforting. “He offered them immunity.”

  “He what?” I cried.

  “Said he promised not to come after them. To stop working against them. Long as Dawna agreed to let us go and not come after us, either.” He swallowed. “Well. You and ‘anybody you’re working with,’ I believe were his exact words.”

  “I don’t understand. Why would he do that?” My breathing hitched raggedly, despairingly. None of this made any sense.

  “He saved our lives, Russell.”

  “But…” But that wasn’t what Rio did. He might rearrange his goals to save more innocent people, sure, but not at the expense of fighting a greater evil. He was the only person in the world with the ability to fight Pithica effectively, and he had just given them a free pass. Forever.

  To save Arthur and me. No—to save me.

  “You up to moving?” said Arthur. “We should probably hoof it before the authorities get here.”

  Right. I attempted an upward direction and didn’t even make it off the ground. Arthur helped me shift so I could lean up against the wall. “I need a minute,” I admitted.

  He settled next to me. “A minute it is. Could use one myself.”

  I took a better look at him and winced guiltily—even in the dim light, the side effects of the recent TKO were obvious. “Sorry about that.”

  “Well, I was threatening to kill you, so I think we’re good.”

  “So they all just left?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Your friend made her dismiss the army, and then he insisted on walking her out—said something about not giving them a chance to bomb the building. He made her stop whatever mojo she’d been doing to you first, though.” He cleared his throat. “You sure you’re okay? What she hit you with?”

  Remember.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Psychic attack or something?”

  “Or something.” Red tiles, and people in white coats. A jungle and a submarine and a Dragunov sniper rifle on a mountaintop against the setting sun, a thin black girl and an Asian boy and a windswept rooftop under a starry sky. I blinked. I couldn’t recall what I had just been thinking about.

  “Gotta tell you…” Arthur’s voice had turned grave and reluctant. “He let her do something else to us, before they went. Part of the deal. Wasn’t real with it myself at the time, but I think…I think he let her tell us not to come after her either, her or Pithica.”

  I vaguely remembered Dawna’s face, hovering over me between the flashes of color and light and chaos. Her telling us never to come after Pithica again meant we never would. “Why would he do that?” I whispered. “Why would he let her?”

  “I don’t know,” said Arthur. “Like I said, wasn’t real lucid my own self. But I’m betting it’s an enforced détente, of sorts. They don’t come after us, we don’t come after them.”

  “That’s stupid,” I said.

  Arthur chuckled. “Well, I’ll take it over being dead.”

  I supposed I would, too, though I didn’t have to like it.

  The world was starting to stabilize around me. I braced a hand against the wall to stagger upright. Arthur clambered up as well and helped me. He wasn’t moving altogether steadily himself, but we leaned on each other.

  I shook myself, trying to remember why I felt so drained.

  Dawna had done something to me. Right.

  What had she…?

  The memory of her attack collapsed in on itself further and further until it became a multicolored tangle, fading away and melting together as if I were recalling it from a distance of decades.

  Arthur and I helped each other down the stairs and back out the broken door. My vandalism seemed an age ago. The cool night air kissed us; it anchored me, braced me in the world. The base was silent now, the activity at the far end gone. I wondered if that was Pithica’s work.

  “Where to?” asked Arthur.

  “I’ve got a bolt hole in the Valley,” I said.

  “The Valley,” Arthur mused. “Long haul from here, shape we’re in.”

  “I’m feeling better,” I said, and I was. I straightened a bit, let Arthur lean more of his weight on me. I thought back again to Dawna’s psychic attack—or whatever it had been—but the more I tried to reach for it, the more the memory slipped. I remembered her saying something to me…and then a blur…and then I had woken up to Arthur’s face—

  “Sirens,” said Arthur.

  I forced myself back to the present. He was right; the high wail rose and fell in the near distance, coming closer. I did a quick Doppler calculation—less than a kilometer away.

  “Might not be coming for us,” Arthur said.

  “Let’s not find out,” I answered. “Think you can cling to the back of a motorcycle?”

  “I’m game to try.” He leaned heavily on my shoulder and we started a semi-coordinated hobble across the pavement.

  As we limped away, my brain itched uncomfortably, as if I were forgetting something important. My mind reached, searched, trying to recall…

 
Eh, I’d remember it eventually, whatever it was.

  Chapter 37

  It took forty-eight hours for most vital services to get restored in Southern California, and almost two weeks for Los Angeles to approach something akin to normal. Twenty-nine people died and hundreds were injured during the rioting; the number of people who died from the EMP knocking out medical devices was several times that. Whatever numbers game Pithica thought they were playing, they had a lot to do to make up for this one.

  And they wouldn’t be able to. At least not for a good while. We’d made sure of that.

  I still wasn’t sure whether we should be proud of what we’d done or not. I tried not to think about it too hard, and to remind myself every so often of what Pithica had done to people like Reginald and Leena Kingsley. And to Courtney Polk, the client I hadn’t been able to rescue in the end.

  I also tried to remind myself of how much I liked winning. I’m not going to lie; that helped.

  We didn’t manage to contact Checker for several days, since Arthur refused to let me steal a working satellite phone from the aid workers rebuilding the infrastructure. It turned out that Dawna, never having met Checker, had completely misjudged what he would do and probably never would have found him anyway. After Rio had dropped him off at his car, Checker had driven non-stop; as soon as he had hit a town where the lights were still on, he had gone, not to break into an electronics store in the middle of the night, but instead to a well-groomed residential neighborhood…where he had knocked on a reasonably pleasant-looking door, asked if they knew what was happening in Southern California, and told them that he needed emergency access to a computer with a network connection. Then he had offered all the cash we’d sent him off with up in payment for the use of said computer. The very nice, middle-class family who lived in the house had been impressed by his earnestness (and the offer of so much money), had felt he was reasonably nonthreatening, and had invited him to set up in the living room with one of the parents’ work laptops. I gathered that they’d even made him pancakes and bacon for breakfast and offered for him to stay in their spare room until LA was sorted out.