by SL Huang
Checker, not sure whether Pithica was still after him, politely declined the offer (although he did admit to accepting their college-aged daughter’s number on the sly, which might have made her parents less inclined to trust him, had they known), and then sold his car to a chop shop for some quick capital and set himself up with a fake ID and some temp work in small-town Arizona while he waited for us to contact him. It turned out he was a remarkably street-savvy guy.
“What were you going to do if you never heard anything?” I asked, curious.
“Cry my eyes out that Cas Russell apparently met an ignominious and gruesome death at the hands of her very stupid plan,” he answered.
I laughed and then told him about Rio’s deal. Despite what we had done, we would be safe enough from Pithica in the future. Checker said he’d be on a bus back to LA as soon as he could find a line that was running. “And now that it’s safe for me to use a credit card again, I’m going to fill a suitcase with laptops to bring back with me.”
“Leave it to you to black-market circuit boards during this time of crisis,” I said.
“Cas Russell, what do you think of me? I need to repair the Hole. A suitcase full of laptops is barely a start.”
I didn’t mention that by meeting up with some old clients at some old haunts, I’d taken five jobs in getting people black market electronics in the past three days. Disaster was good for business.
The official explanation for the EMP hit the airwaves during the week after the event, and was some hand-waving about a solar storm. I wondered what Pithica had done to pull that off. It kind of impressed me that they had done it, considering the dire straits they had to be in after what we’d pulled. But they were about helping humanity to the very end, and apparently that included cleaning up their own mess to some degree, which to them meant at least making sure nobody started bandying around the word “terrorists” or could point to a nuclear attack as an excuse to start a war with someone. The country ran fundraisers and Red Cross drives to help the poor Angelenos struck by such a freaky natural disaster, but world politics as a whole suffered no more than it had from the last bad hurricane.
Arthur was severely concussed enough that he stayed with me for a few days in my apartment in the Valley. Since the concussion was my fault, I didn’t mind waking him up in the middle of the night to ask him how many fingers and who was president. In return, he tried to nag me about taking it easy until my chest wound healed completely—something about adrenaline not being a substitute for proper convalescence—but I mostly ignored him. When he felt well enough, he took advantage of the massive chaos in the city to go in and report at a police station that he’d woken up in an alley with short-term amnesia and realized he was the victim of a crime. He filled out a police report on what had happened to his office while claiming not to remember any of it and was supported in all ways by his obvious recent head wound. The LAPD, swamped with a devastated and fracturing city, quickly filed the case away under unsolved gang-related violence.
By then a horrifically tortured man had shown up in a hospital and been identified as the sole survivor of the office massacre on Wilshire. Considering that he couldn’t stop gibbering madly about an Asian devil, and that no bodies had ever been recovered from the Griffith Park shooting despite the wildly conflicting witness reports of the violence there, Arthur’s and my composites got shuffled off the “most wanted” boards. I wondered if the surviving Pithica man had any inkling that he probably owed his life to Rio magnanimously getting the police off my trail.
As for Rio himself, I tracked him down a little over a week after the EMP disaster. We met in an empty subway station—the trains still weren’t up and running, and the station was deserted, though someone had stopped by with copious amounts of spray paint and already graffitied over every surface. Gotta love LA.
Instead of coming down from street level, Rio walked casually into the station on the track, emerging out of the yawning darkness of the tunnel with his duster swirling around him and wearing a broad-brimmed felt hat that only enhanced the cowboy image.
“Are you auditioning for the Old West?” I asked, hopping down off the platform to join him on the rails.
“The American frontier would suit me, I think,” he said. “What did you wish to see me about?”
“The police aren’t after me anymore,” I said. “Thanks for not killing that guy.”
He lifted one shoulder fractionally. When I didn’t say anything else, he asked, “Is that all?”
“No.” I’d been doing a lot of thinking since our final battle with Dawna. The memories of her attack still shifted and blurred, fuzzier with each passing day, the pieces I was able to jigsaw together making less and less sense. And every frustrating contradiction led me not to Pithica, not to Dawna—but to Rio.
Rio was keeping something from me.
And I was going to find out what. I just didn’t know how to ask him.
“Are you going to keep your deal with Dawna?” I asked finally.
“Yes,” he said.
“She neutralized us, you know.” Arthur and I had tested it late one night, and neither of us would be looking into Pithica ever again. We couldn’t. We couldn’t even try. “She told us not to come after them again, and we can’t. I doubt they’re even keeping an eye on me anymore. They know I’m not a threat to them.” I crossed my arms, hugging my jacket to me against the underground chill. “Could you talk me out of it? Destroy their influence?” He’d done it before, after all.
“Probably,” said Rio.
“Will you?”
“No.”
“Why not?” I exploded. The possibility had been the one thing that might have made his deal make sense, if he had figured somehow that I could do more damage to Pithica in the future than he could, and therefore had a life worth trading for Dawna’s—again. “Why did you even make that deal, then?”
“You know why I do what I do, Cas,” he said calmly. “Are we done here?”
“No. I don’t care how mysterious the ‘mysterious ways’ are—this isn’t adding up. There’s something you’re not telling me!”
He raised his eyebrows. “I have many things I don’t tell you. Would you like to know what I had for breakfast this morning?”
“Sarcasm. Nice.” I swallowed. “You aren’t my friend. You’re telling the truth when you say that.”
“I know,” he said.
“So? None of this makes any sense. You traded my safety for Dawna’s back there, and that wasn’t the first time. Back when she had Arthur and me—you were trying to take down Pithica, and you had the perfect opportunity.” Looking back, it made me want to scream in frustration that he hadn’t taken it, even given what it would have meant. Paradoxically, I remembered how certain I had been that he wouldn’t make that choice, and it made me doubt my own sanity. “You should have killed me, secured Dawna’s trust, and then destroyed them from the inside out. Tell me I’m not acceptable collateral damage for that kind of coup! It would have been perfect.”
I waited. He was silent.
“But you didn’t,” I said. “You broke us out instead.” An anomaly, Dawna Polk had called me. It suddenly bothered me intensely that she seemed to understand Rio’s relationship with me better than I did.
It was a long moment before Rio spoke. “I had other considerations. You were not aware of them.”
“So make me aware of them.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
He was silent.
I stared at him, completely flummoxed. Irresistible force, meet immovable object. “This goes back even further,” I said. “I should have seen it right away. Back at the beginning, you told me not to get involved. Why?”
“Because I didn’t want you involved.”
“Why not?”
Again he said nothing. The expression on his face was the definition of blandness.
“Someone who didn’t know better might think you’ve been trying to protect me
,” I said. “Which I know isn’t true. So I’d like some answers here. I think,” I added, drawing myself up to my full not-very-imposing height, “I have a right to know.”
Amusement touched Rio’s features. “You might disagree with that.”
I blinked. “What?”
“Cas,” said Rio, “I’m not going to answer your questions. I advise you to stop asking them.”
“Why should I? For crying out loud, I’m not asking you to tell me something that isn’t my business! You know something, and it has to do with me, and I’m not going to—”
Rio tipped his hat to me and walked away, back down the darkened subway tracks. I was left ranting at the empty air.
I took a frustrated breath. “This doesn’t make sense, Rio!” I shouted after him. “I don’t like things that don’t make sense!”
My own words echoing back at me were my only response. Rio was gone.
I sighed and climbed back up to the platform. I had one more meeting today, and I was hoping it would be far more satisfactory than this one had been.
Steve met me at an empty construction site. He looked quite a bit the worse for the wear: several days’ worth of five o’clock shadow darkened his square jaw, and the purple shadows under his eyes were so deep they made his face look hollow. He had lost at least two kilos, and every twitch of his movement was that of a hunted man. A man with nothing left in the world.
I liked that look on him.
“We got your message,” I said. I had told Checker I would handle it. “So much for your security, huh?”
He scrubbed both hands over his face. “They knew everything. They—when they came—”
According to his frantic email, when Pithica had knocked LA to its knees, the first thing they had done was figure out where the alerts had come from. Then they had proceeded to destroy Steve’s organization with no quarter—at least, the cell here in LA. Apparently they had already been perfectly aware of every detail Steve and his colleagues had tried so desperately to keep hidden, and up until that point they just hadn’t cared. Steve’s group had been no more than a gnat gnawing on Pithica’s big toe.
“Tell me, Steve,” I said. “What bothers you more? That despite killing everyone you came in contact with, your little band of merry men was still leakier than a Swiss cheese umbrella? Or that for all your grandstanding against Pithica, you guys never achieved the annoyance level of an advertising jingle?”
“Please.” His hands were working at his sides, fingers kneading against each palm. “I’m begging you. I need help.”
“With what? Threatening people?”
“They killed everyone,” he mumbled numbly. “Everyone who might have still been working on your plan. Gone. They were trying to stop you.”
“They failed,” I said. “We won.”
“I can’t trust anyone.” He scrubbed his hands over his face again. “I was on the road when it happened, and I still—I barely got away.”
I wasn’t exactly going to cheer for that.
“They knew too much, too fast,” he said dazedly. “I can’t help but think—everything we did, I look back, and I don’t know anymore. Other than what we did with you, what we were told to do—the orders we received—how can I know?”
“You think Pithica might have been giving all your orders to begin with?” I clarified, once I had sorted through his disjointedness. Well, wasn’t that a delicious twist of irony.
“Or we’ve been playing enough into their hands for it not to matter. We were a cell system; we had some autonomy, but we…we clearly were not having the effect we hoped for…”
“They’re pretty good at the whole butterfly-and-hurricane deal, from what I understand,” I said. “They probably pushed a button in Istanbul and made you hop.”
“That does not make me feel better.”
“It wasn’t meant to.”
He shoved his restless hands into his pockets. “I suppose none of it matters now. But—we did help you, did we not? We gave you what you needed, and we suffered for it.” He had the gall to straighten up then, and he looked down his nose at me. I was immediately annoyed. “Will you return the favor?”
“Whoa there,” I said. “We offered you an opportunity to be a small part of the biggest advancement your stated mission has ever had. I don’t owe you anything.”
“Perhaps not, but—perhaps I can still be of service to you. I know a great deal of intelligence about Pithica—”
“Let me stop you right there,” I interrupted. “I’m not interested.” My heart hammered a little faster. The truth was, I couldn’t have said yes if I’d wanted to. I took a quick breath, trying to dispel the feel of Dawna’s greasy fingers on my brain. Damn Rio for not helping me.
Not that I wanted to make a deal with Steve anyway. That was too Faustian, even for me.
“Please,” he begged, with all the grace of an untamed boar. “What can I offer you? I need help. I have to get away—they’re coming after me—”
I highly doubted that. Pithica’s move against his group had been to try to stop Checker’s and my plan from completing. They had swept in and brought the hammer down where they thought it might provide a stopgap. I doubted they were losing any sleep about the collateral damage, but I would have been very surprised if they were still putting any resources into chasing after stragglers. Especially now that they had nothing left to stop. Revenge wasn’t Pithica’s style.
I didn’t tell Steve that, though. I was enjoying the hunted-animal look on him. “You only have one thing I want,” I said.
“What? Anything,” he promised abjectly.
“An answer.” My mouth was suddenly dry, and I had to force the words out. “Anton Lechowicz. And his daughter.”
He looked confused for a moment, which made a hot spurt of anger rise in my chest. He didn’t deserve to forget them. But then he blinked, and looked at me, and faltered. I wondered what my face looked like. “We couldn’t risk Pithica finding us,” he tried to explain, the words thready.
I’d known, or suspected it strongly enough that it was the same thing, but I still felt dizzy, as if every bit of equilibrium had deserted me. “You killed two people I liked,” I said. My voice sounded like it came from very far away.
“I—I’m sorry,” Steve faltered. “It was one of our routine measures; we weren’t trying to—and I only signed off on it; I wasn’t the one who—” He stopped abruptly, confusion and guilt flaring in his eyes, as if only just hearing what he had said, that he was trying to excuse being the one who gave the order by virtue of having kept his hands clean. His mouth worked silently. Then he gathered himself, lifted his chin, and did that nose-looking-down thing he seemed so fond of. “I am not going to apologize,” he said, firming his voice. “We thought it had to be done.”
“So does this,” I said.
I didn’t move as fast as I could have. I wanted to see his eyes widen in startled realization in the split-second before he died.
The body slid to the ground with a quiet thump, and I took what felt like the first clean breath since this had all started. Pithica might not go in for revenge, but I sure as hell did.
Chapter 38
The odd jobs I’d been able to hustle as LA recovered dried up as we hit the second week out from the disaster—people weren’t desperate enough anymore to hire me for necessities, and were still too occupied with rebuilding their lives and routines to worry about trivialities. Arthur had gone back to his own place, leaving me alone with too many thoughts—about Dawna and Pithica, about what she had been able to do to me, about Rio and whatever he hadn’t told me. When I slept it was fitful and at odd hours, and the rest of the time I drank. A lot.
A week and a half after our final confrontation with Pithica, I got an email from Checker saying he’d been keeping tabs, and as far as he could tell, over seventy percent of Pithica’s revenue sources had moved their money out of the organization’s reach. Dawna and her people would need a long time to rebuild those resou
rces. We had knocked them down but good.
I spent a lot of time staring out at the streets wondering when I would see crime start to spike. And then I drank some more.
I woke sober one evening, vivid dreams chasing a blurry reality, scenes so real my brain wobbled for a few seconds before settling on which world was the correct one. Nightmares had plagued me for as long as I could remember, but they had been worse these past couple of weeks.
Since Dawna.
I lay on the blankets and tried to latch onto the shreds of the dream, an intense feeling of déjà vu overpowering me. Places, faces—they wavered just out of reach, the itch of forgotten memory overwhelming my brain and twisting my stomach until I tasted bile at the back of my throat. Whatever had crawled through my subconscious last night, I had seen it before.
Or dreamt it before.
Dawna’s face intruded in my mind’s eye, backlit by forms and figures I didn’t want to see, scenes half-forgotten, visions and memories and a world only half real—
Pain in my knuckles slammed the images away. I’d put my fist through the drywall next to the mattress.
I wiped blood and plaster dust off the back of my hand with my shirt and dragged myself out of bed to find more alcohol. The bottles from the night before—or whenever I had last been awake—were empty, expanding in a glass forest across table and floor and attesting to my usual company.
Halberd.
I picked up a bottle with a stylized drawing of an axe on the label.
Halberd. Why had I just thought that?
The word pinged me like a fragment of another forgotten dream, a half-buried shred of awareness.
Halberd and Pithica, the memo had said, the one Anton had given me a lifetime ago. But no, something else—the word poked at me, itching, an irritating nub that wouldn’t go away, echoing against the edges of my mind.
An echo in Dawna’s voice? Her image swam in my memory, standing tall above me, blurred in a thousand pixelated layers. Her hands on my face, reaching into my brain—I could hear her voice, but the words overlapped in a jumbled mass.