SL Huang
Hunting Monsters
First published on The Book Smugglers (Oct 2014), edited by Ana Grilo and Thea James
My mother taught me to shoot, but it was Auntie Rosa who bought me my first rifle. It was long and sleek and shiny, varnished wood and brass and just my size. I fell in love at first sight.
“Isn’t she a trifle young for a firearm?” said my mother.
“Too young? Ha. Seven is almost too old,” said Auntie Rosa. She reached down and ruffled my hair as I ran my fingers along the stock over and over again, marveling at the living smoothness of the wood. “Happy birthday, child. Careful not to shoot any grundwirgen.”
I spent more time with Auntie Rosa growing up than I did my mother. I loved my mother—and I was certain she loved me—but she was a reserved woman. Aloof.
I wondered sometimes how she and Auntie Rosa had become so close. Auntie Rosa was an enormous presence, tall and big-boned with a personality to match. Sometimes, when they were together, I saw my mother laugh.
Maybe it wasn’t that my mother didn’t know how to express love, but that she didn’t know how to interact with a child, other than teaching me how to hunt and fish and lay in stores for the winter. My earliest memory is my mother placing a firm hand across my lips as we crouched in the dry leaves on a hillside, her rifle slung from her shoulder, her lean frame alert and arrow-straight and her black eyes flicking down through the woods. In my memory I am very, very still, though I remember to raise tiny hands and press them against my ears as hard as I can as my mother eases her rifle up to her shoulder and tilts her head behind the sights. The roar when she pulls the trigger is devastating, the thunder and flame of Heaven and Hell, and my mother’s blade-thin silhouette is backlit by the setting sun and she looks like a god. And I love her.
Auntie Rosa’s place was a cottage like ours, but bigger and more luxurious, all soft furs and bright fabrics. She cured all her own pelts, and I would curl in the decadence of her bearskin rug while she knitted and told me stories, or sit cross-legged by the fire and clean her guns while she quizzed me on the habits of the grundwirgen and the ways a hunter must recognize and spare them. Auntie Rosa had been hunting longer even than my mother, ever since her own grandmother had taken her out on the trails from before she could walk.
“Tell me again,” she’d say to me, night after night, her voice starting to creak with age even though her spine was as straight, her eyes as bright as ever. “Tell me again, how you know one.”
“Aw, Auntie,” I would groan as I got older, snuggling down by the fire. “I’m never going to see a grundwirgen. They’re too rare. What are the chances—”
“The chances you’ll be tried for murder? Child, have some sense. You must know. There are no excuses.”
“I think if one starts up a conversation I might suspect.”
“And if you’re stalking your quarry, if you go for a clean kill, you think a grundwirgen would ever have a chance to beg for its life? Don’t be stupid.”
So I would rattle off the signs: the habits a creature would have if it was trying to be the human it once was, or if its wild nature hid a witch in disguise, or if it chanced to be an honest animal but one born with the capacity for reason. All types of thinking creatures were lumped in as grundwirgen, not only the cursed but also those who chose to roam in animal form or those who were beasts in truth but with intelligence equal to our own. Mistaking a grundwirgen for a game animal was not an excuse, not under the law; it was the same as firing upon a human.
“I’m glad they aren’t more common,” I said once. “We’d starve to death. Everyone would be too afraid of accidentally offing some spoiled rich kid who went and got himself hexed.”
Auntie Rosa sniffed. “Child, it’s a big world out there. The grundwirgen are not all alike—some are innocent, and some are brutal. Just like people.”
“Have you ever met one?” I demanded.
“Yes,” said Auntie Rosa.
“What? When?” I cried, sitting up straight as if I were a dog with a scent. But she refused to say anything more.
Auntie Rosa gave me another, larger rifle for my twelfth birthday, and a third for my fifteenth. Three days after my fifteenth birthday, the King’s Men burst into our cottage and arrested my mother for murder.
The cottage erupted into a tumult of curt shouts and tromping boots and someone screaming—I was screaming. My new rifle was in my hands, my knuckles white where I gripped the wood, but even then my mother and Auntie Rosa’s teaching kicked in, the years of safety lectures dragging me back, making me hesitate, because I’d never raised my rifle against a human form and that felt wrong—and the pause was enough time for my mother to snap, “Get her out of here” and for Auntie Rosa to bear hug me from behind, pinning my arms to my sides and dragging me into my mother’s bedroom.
I cried for so many hours after they left—heaving, messy sobs that wouldn’t stop. Auntie Rosa stayed with me through the night. I refused to let go of her, my fists clenched in the scarlet wool of her sweater so tightly they cramped that way.
Auntie Rosa offered to come stay in our cottage, but I looked around at the empty rooms and the overturned chairs and the too-enormous lack of my mother and insisted we go back to hers instead. We packed me a bag, gathered the hunting gear and perishable food, and hiked over the hill together, not speaking.
I’d asked Auntie Rosa once why she didn’t live with us, when I was old enough to understand her and my mother’s relationship. She’d smiled and said that it was better for all of us if we had our own spaces. I hadn’t agreed—still didn’t—but now I was glad for the refuge, for a sanctuary that didn’t have the memory of swarthy, booted King’s Men stomped upon it.
She gave me her room, with its bright patterned quilt and draped crimson fabric—Auntie Rosa loved red; she blanketed her house with it and wore it in brilliant scarves and hats and shawls throughout the season—while she herself insisted on sleeping under a deep red blanket by the fire, snugged on a pile of furs. I wondered again about her other room then, the locked one. It had been locked for as long as I could remember, and when I’d been nosy about it as a child, she’d told me that it was her private storage space for things too naughty for a young one to see. My imagination had run wild as I got older, but I’d never seen her enter the locked room once, not even to clean.
But this day I had neither the courage nor the energy to press her. I put my things away in her room as she directed and then lay down and buried my face in her bed, breathing in the lingering scents of pine and hickory smoke on her pillow.
Auntie Rosa went into the city the next day to petition at the courts. She refused to allow me to come. When she reappeared at sunset, hiking up the slope with her walking stick, my heart somersaulted and then plummeted. Such was my faith in Auntie Rosa that I had somehow expected to see my mother walking at her side, for Auntie Rosa to have enacted a miracle.
I ran to meet her. “Where is she? Did you see her? What’s happening?”
“Let me get inside, child.” Her voice was tired, and she looked older than she ever had before.
Inside the cottage, my hands shook as I made us some tea. Auntie Rosa’s fingers wrapped around her mug as if she hoped it could warm her soul.
I waited.
“Your mother…” Her eyes were fastened somewhere on the floor by the fire. “Your mother is on trial for killing a grundwirgen.”
“That’s impossible,” I said instantly.
Auntie Rosa didn’t answer.
“No, Auntie, that’s not possible,” I said. “She would never mix up—youknow! They should just talk to her; they’ll see!” Tears of fury prickled my eyes. To accuse my mother of murder was one thing; to malign her skill at the hunt—it was ludicrous. Insulting.
“They say she knew,” said Auntie Rosa, her eyes still on that same spot near the fire.
The air vibrated. My hand dug into the back of a chair where it was keeping me upright. “They say she knew…and she still took the shot?” The words made no sense.
Auntie Rosa finally took a sip of her tea. “Sit next to me, child. It’s time you knew about your mother’s past, before you hear it from the rest of the kingdom.”
“Your grandfather was a merchant,” Auntie Rosa began. “A wealthy one for a time, from what I understand. He traveled from the East regularly with his ships, making deals with the kingdoms here. On one such journey he was shipwrecked and lost all his goods. He’d taken payment for the cargo already, and faced debtor’s prison in a strange land, where he thought himself like as not to die in chains.”
She paused, lost in the past, her hands tight on her mug of tea, before she said softly, “He made a deal to sell your mother to a grundwirgen prince. She was ten years old.”
My breath felt too thick. “I don’t understand,” I said.
“Yes, you do.”
Images collided in my mind: my mother, a young child, forced to sail to a far-off country, sold into marriage to pay her father’s debts…sold to a man who was not a man at all. I didn’t want to understand.
Auntie Rosa sipped her tea, and continued. “The grundwirgen prince had been cursed for refusing aid to an injured traveler. That traveler was a witch, as it happened.” Her lips curved in a bitter half-smile. “She did not know enough of his nature. She should have done far worse than transform him into a beast.”
“And my mother?” I forced myself to ask, when Auntie Rosa had not spoken for a few long moments. “What happened?”
“The grundwirgen needed a woman to break the spell,” she said. “If I ever find that witch, I will kill her for making that the condition. The prince needed a woman to break the spell, one nobody would care to rescue from a monster. So he bought himself a foreign bride.”
I’d sat down at some point. I couldn’t remember when. My hand clenched the edge of the chair so hard my fingers ached. “Did my mother kill him?” I asked.
“She escaped,” said Auntie Rosa. She stared into the fire, and her voice dropped to barely a whisper. “She escaped. Isn’t that the important part?”
Auntie Rosa went into the city every day, and came back ever grimmer as more details of my mother’s case came to light. The remains of the grundwirgen prince had been found more than a generation ago, my mother the assumed perpetrator. For many years her life of quiet anonymity had kept her safe, until a chance remark about a woman from the East of about the right age had fallen upon the ears of a distant relation to the long-dead prince. My mother’s foreignness was proof enough of her identity, and no one had any doubts as to her guilt.
After a week of pleading at the courts, bullying and prodding and lobbying as I am sure only she was capable of, Auntie Rosa returned to say she had finally been granted one request: they would allow me to visit my mother in prison.
“Just me?” I said, my heart thumping faster.
She turned her face away. “They say I’m not family.”
So the next day I journeyed with her into the city. Auntie Rosa came with me as far as the King’s Men would let her, before they crossed their spears in front of her and kept her from passing on. I picked my way down the stone stairs to the dungeon without her, flanked by unspeaking guards, my booted steps echoing off the dank stone walls.
We hiked to the far end of the dungeons before the lantern light fell across one more barred cell and I saw my mother.
She sat huddled on a pallet of filthy straw, her clothing disheveled and her black hair coming loose from its neat braid. Seeing her so alone in so much darkness, so untethered from the world she owned—my world—the air wrung out of my chest, my heart turning in on itself until it hurt. I broke from the guards and ran up to the bars, gripping the cold metal as if I could melt it by force of will.
My mother flew up to meet me, her fingers closing on my arms so hard I was certain I would bruise. I didn’t care. “Mama. Mama. Are you all right?”
“You mustn’t believe what they say about me,” she said, tight and desperate, the intensity more alien on her than even the prison cell. “You mustn’t, you hear? Whatever happens, promise you believe me, at least. Promise me.”
“Mama, Auntie Rosa told me…” I didn’t know how to finish. The story of her past seemed so personal, my knowing it almost a violation. “If you were defending yourself—Mama, they have to say that’s okay. They have to.”
“They don’t have to do anything.” My mother’s forehead creased; her fingers loosened on me and she stepped back, her sharp eyes searching my face. “Rosa thinks I—?”
I didn’t know what to say.
My mother took a deep breath. Exhaled. “Tell her I didn’t do it,” she said softly. “Please. I need both of you to know—I didn’t do it.”
“I’ll tell her,” I said.
The King’s Men permitted me to visit my mother once a week. We had no word of when she might be called before the court, and the unknown pressed down on us, heavy and smothering. But I think we were all secretly glad of the wait—we all knew trials in this kingdom were swift and executions swifter.
I didn’t know whether my mother would be better off saying she’d killed the grundwirgen prince to escape, or whether she should continue to claim her innocence. I didn’t know that either would save her. Everyone who mattered had decided her guilt before she was arrested, and by law the grundwirgen prince had been her husband—you don’t escape from a husband.
I had a sudden horrible thought, in the middle of the week when I couldn’t ask my mother about it. I was determined to keep it to myself, but Auntie Rosa caught on within minutes and ordered me to spit out whatever new worry plagued me.
I fingered the rich crimson afghan draped over the armchair. “My mother never told me…” I couldn’t finish. “My father. Was he…?”
Auntie Rosa’s face went slack with surprise for a moment, and then she laughed. “Child, is that what’s eating at you? Did we never teach you sums?”
My cheeks flamed at her reaction. My mother and Auntie Rosa were not young, and Auntie Rosa had told me my mother had escaped when barely older than I was now. My father could not be the grundwirgen prince. “Who was he, then? My father?”
“Ha! Another prince, if you would believe it. But a human one. A charming cad.”
“I’m the daughter of a prince?”
“I suppose so, though don’t let that give you airs. Your father was off in the wilderness with his men, traveling to seek his fortune as young men do. He met your mother. It turned out he had a weakness for black hair and white skin, and didn’t mind kissing first and learning names later. Your mother was fine with that at the time, the saucy wench.”
I thought of my mother’s moon-pale skin that made her look so odd to the people of this country, and the curtain of jet-black hair she always braided away from her face into a long queue. The prince must have thought all his dreams realized, to find her. “But wait,” I said. “You and my mother—you’ve been—for decades, I thought.” My face burned hotter. Auntie Rosa was right that I was bad at sums; I’d never put the fact of my birth together with that before.
“Yes, we were, but I wasn’t going to get in the way of your mother having a bit of fun with a man when it came her way.” She reached over and tucked my hair away from my face affectionately. Sadly. “The world’s a large and complicated place, child. You’ll learn.” Too fast, she didn’t say, but I knew both of us were thinking it. Fifteen was too young for me to see the world judge my mother and take her away from me.
I didn’t make the connection until the following day, but when I did, I started packing immediately. I would wait to see my mother one more time, and then I would leave to find my father.
When I tried to broach the idea to Auntie Rosa, she flew into a rage.
“How can you be so senseless, child? Of all the times for insipid flights of fancy!” She tore my clothes out of my bag and flung them to the floor. “Your mother may be facing execution, do you understand that? And you would leave her? Alone?” Her voice cracked. The King’s Men still had not permitted her to see my mother.
“I’m going to save her,” I insisted.
“How? This is what the world is. They tell us what we can and can’t do, and they don’t listen, they don’t care. There is nothing you can do!” She yanked at the whole quilt, upending everything I had piled on the bed with a violence I’d never seen in her. “The one thing you can do, the only thing, isbe here.”
I started picking up my things, carefully, one by one, as if I would break if I moved too quickly. “You’re the one who told me my father was a prince,” I said. “Maybe by now he’s a king. Kings have power.” So much of my world had collapsed into confusion, but the power of a king was one thing I was still certain of. “He’ll help, I know it. We’ll save my mother.”
“He’d as like have you killed,” Auntie Rosa spat. “If not him, then whatever wife he ended up taking, worried about her children’s inheritance. Or any one of his enemies. Royal bastards stay anonymous or they die.”
I took out my three rifles in their cases from under the bed. I could sell two of them to give myself some money to travel on. I unbuckled the case my first rifle was in, the one Auntie Rosa had given me when I turned seven; it looked so small now, but was still smooth and shiny, gleaming and well-cared for. Parting with it would wrench me.
“I won’t tell you where to go,” Auntie Rosa said. “I won’t tell you where he is.”
“I’ll ask my mother,” I answered.
My mother wouldn’t tell me, either.
“Your auntie’s right,” she said. “Your father—I wish she hadn’t told you. He was a pleasant dream, and we both kept it that way.”
“He won’t want you to die,” I insisted.
She reached through the bars and grasped my hand, entwining her fingers with mine. “He didn’t want complications,” she said. “He’ll want them even less now. And that’s what you would be to him. A complication.”
“How do you know?” I said. “Maybe he’d want to meet me. Maybe he’d want to know.”
Her eyes softened. “Maybe. It’s not worth risking your life over.”
“But this is your life,” I tried to argue. “It is worth it. I want to take the risk.”
Her fingers squeezed mine. “I’m sorry.”
No matter how I tried to cajole or persuade her, it was useless. She would not tell me which kingdom my father hailed from—if she even knew herself. Short of traveling the world and asking which king had an eye for pale-skinned women, I had no way to find him.
I’d leave anyway, I decided. I’d start in the city—ask questions, stick my nose in everywhere I could. I’d find out which kingdom had the snowiest queen with the inkiest hair, and sell my rifles to find the money for passage there, and shame my father into demanding my mother’s freedom from our king.
I burst back through Auntie Rosa’s door filled with determination, only to find my bag and rifles gone from my room. “Where are they?” I railed at Auntie Rosa, who sat knitting in the armchair by the fire. “Where are my things?”
“I’ll give them back to you when you give up this foolishness,” she said.
“I’m trying to save my mother’s life!”
“You’re trying to do the one thing that would kill her. You do not understand the folly of your plans. Your mother needs to know you are safe.”
“My mother being executed will not make me safe!” I was shaking with rage. “You can’t do this. You’re doing just what that grundwirgen prince did—not letting me leave until you get your way!”
“That’s ridiculous,” snapped Auntie Rosa. “You’re my—” She clamped her mouth down on what she’d been about to say.
“You’re not my mother,” I said, as coldly as I knew how. “My mother is in prison. And I’m going to get her out.” I marched into the bedroom and slammed the door.
I lay awake that night, wrapped in furs and red blankets and staring up into the darkness. I knew where Auntie Rosa had put my things. Only one room in the house was locked, and she’d taught me to care for my rifles too well for her to have left them outside somewhere.
So where was the key? I’d been through the house so many times—she couldn’t have hidden it inside anywhere. She must keep it on her person. I slid my bare feet to the floor and slipped out of the bedroom.
The fire had burned down to embers, limning the shadows in vermillion crescents. Auntie Rosa slept beside it, her breath rising and falling deeply.
I crept forward.
My heart pounded as I stood above her, guilt flaming in my stomach, my hands cold with sweat. This was wrong, what I was doing.
But she had done me wrong, too, stopping me from taking the only chance we had. I thought of my mother, thin and alone in her cell. I didn’t have a choice.
I lifted the edge of the blanket, intending to check her pockets first, and the firelight gleamed off a silver chain.
I’d seen the chain before, so many times, but I’d never noticed it—it was just something Auntie Rosa always wore, some type of necklace under her clothes. Of course. I stretched my hand forward, holding my breath, and my fingertips grazed her collarbone as I pinched the chain and eased it out from under her night dress. A wrought-iron key dangled in the light of the coals.
I walked my fingers down to the clasp and unfastened it. The key fell into my palm, cool and heavy.
Almost unable to think, I hurried to the locked room and shoved my prize into the keyhole. It turned, and the door swung open.
The room was pitch black. A fur rug kissed the soles of my feet, but my eyes were useless. I raced for a lantern, lighting it as I dashed back into the forbidden space. As expected, I saw my bag and rifle cases immediately, stacked neatly against one wall.
I crouched to retrieve them. Should I leave now, in the night, before Auntie Rosa could awaken and try to stop me? Before my own courage could fail?
The rest of the room caught my eye, distracting me. I turned and raised the lantern.
Confused, I paused and stared. The room was filled with furs…which made it no different from the rest of the house. Why would Auntie Rosa bother to keep it locked?
The pelts were tossed across each other with little regard for aesthetic. And there was something odd about them. I lifted the light.
The rugs and blankets I was used to were the soft furs of game animals. These were all—odd. Odd creatures to hunt, still odder to skin. Three bear skins from progressively smaller beasts were the only ones that looked like they belonged, and the enormous wolf pelt beneath my feet might have been an animal Auntie Rosa had killed to protect herself or the home, but others—the white-tipped tail of a fox dangled off one pile, and one fur looked like it had come off a large domestic cat. A pure white bull skin was a hide a tanner might have been proud of, but was out of place for a hunter. There was a snakeskin, stretched out and dried, from what must have been a magnificent serpent, and something feathered…the preserved husk of an eagle, or, no, a swan.
I stepped farther into the room.
The lantern light fell on the far wall. Pegged against it was the sagging pelt of what had been some beast of unbelievable proportions, twelve feet tall and massive, with wicked claws and a gaping maw that now showed only the wood behind it.
“I would ask what you’re doing in here,” said Auntie Rosa behind me. “But I suppose that’s obvious.”
I spun around. “It was you. You killed the grundwirgen prince.” I stumbled backward, the lantern swinging wildly. My arm brushed the bearskins; I flinched away, my skin crawling. My toes curled against the wolf pelt filling the floor as if I could stop touching it. “Were these all…? They were all…?” I couldn’t finish the sentence.
“Come sit. Let’s talk.” Auntie Rosa reached for me. I jerked back, and she let her hand drop. “The world is complicated,” she pleaded.
This room was closing in on me, sickening, the air fracturing, so many murdered souls smothering me, and my mother—
“Were you going to let my mother die for you?” The words burst out of me, rising almost to a shriek.
Shock rippled across her features. “No. Never. I—” She put a hand to her face. “I thought, as long as the punishment had not been set, that there was hope, that maybe—and I could have faced the King’s Men, told them my crimes a thousand times to save her, but—but the thought of your mother hating me—that even if we all walked free, that I would lose her, I couldn’t…”
The truth dawned. “She doesn’t know you killed him,” I said.
The look on her face was my answer.
I sat at the table. Auntie Rosa sat across from me.
“Your mother knows about the rest,” Auntie Rosa said, her eyes on her hands. “She knows what kind of woman I…was.”
“And what kind of woman is that?” I asked coldly.
“I killed my first grundwirgen when I was eight years old.” She spoke simply. Factually. Her gaze strayed to the open door of the secret room, to the massive wolf pelt filling the floor and spilling against the doorway, and she gathered her red robe more tightly around herself. “He attacked my grandmother, then me. I saved myself. I couldn’t save her.”
“I thought your grandmother was killed by a wild animal.”
“She was, as far as I’m concerned.”
“No. No. You taught me—” I couldn’t reconcile it. Grundwirgen were the same as humans. Killing a grundwirgen was no different from killing a man.
“I hope I could have shot him if he had been a man,” Auntie Rosa said, as if she had read my mind. “I hope I would have.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“It is as I told you. Not all grundwirgen are evil. But those who are—” She coughed. “The ones who have been cursed into creatures, often they have been cursed for a reason. And those with the power to shapeshift at will can use that ability for crimes so despicable—the viciousness they have at their disposal in animal form, if they choose to use it—well. I was a very good hunter.”
“You went around—you hunted—” I couldn’t wrap my head around it. An assassin. My auntie was an assassin. My auntie who sat slumped across from me in her red-draped cottage, looking very tired and very sad and very old.
“Do you still do it?” I asked.
“Not for many years. Your mother changed me. Gave me something to live for, other than my hunt for justice.”
“But she still doesn’t know you killed her…” Prince? Captor? Husband?
“These things are so complicated.” Auntie Rosa folded her hands against each other in her lap, one gripping the other as if to anchor herself. “I came to rescue her, you see. I’d been seeking the grundwirgen who held her, and came to slay the beast and free the princess in the castle. But the strongest chains that trapped her were in her own mind.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“It had been seven years. He’d had her locked in his castle for seven years.” Her speech strained over the words as if she’d lived the sentence herself. “He was a master at…”
She trailed off, struggling. I didn’t help.
She found her voice again, the explanation dragging out of her one syllable at a time. “He knew what to do. How to control. He played with your mother’s emotions with kindnesses, was a perfect gentleman between bouts of temper—and even then he never physically touched her. He convinced her that he cared for her, that she should care for him. Guilted and shamed her. He told her if she left him, he’d die.” She took a shuddering breath. “She didn’t want that. In time, I think she would have forced herself to believe she loved him.”
I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to hear this.
“As far as I was concerned,” said Auntie Rosa, “what he was doing was ten times more evil than the grundwirgen who had attacked my grandmother and me. Buying a child and locking her away without any—with no human contact—” Her voice trembled. “He needed someone to love him to break the spell. He didn’t care how he got that love.”
I wasn’t sure who I hated more: my grandfather, for selling his daughter; my auntie, for being a murderer and then allowing my mother to go to prison for it; or my mother herself, for daring to have a past that was threatening to consume all of our lives. And the grundwirgen prince, of course; but there was no use hating him; he was dead.
“I was the first human she’d spoken to in seven years,” Auntie Rosa continued. “We became close, so quickly. She realized she had to leave; she knew in her soul what he was doing to her. But it was hard for her, so hard, and she…she made me promise not to kill him.”
“But you did.” The words scraped in my throat.
“I did,” she said, so low I could barely hear it. “He was a grundwirgen, but still a prince; no one was coming to stop him. He would have done the same with another girl, another time. I was older than your mother; I’d been hunting monsters for more than a decade by then. It had to be done.”
“And you never told her,” I said.
“It was the only promise to her I ever broke,” said Auntie Rosa, “and he was the last grundwirgen I ever killed.”
I stood up. “You’re a coward.”
She shuddered.
“She’s in a cell. She thinks she’s facing execution. That should be you.”
Her face tightened in apparent pain. “I never would have let it come to that.”
“You never should have let it come to this.” I went into the bedroom and shut the door, leaving her sitting at the table, alone.
I had the evidence I needed to prove my mother innocent now. All I had to do was go to the city, march the King’s Men back to Auntie Rosa’s, and tell them to break into her secret room.
That was all I had to do.
It’s what she deserves, I told myself, staring up into the predawn dimness, sleep never having come for me. She did it. She killed him. She killed all of them.
Hunting monsters, Auntie Rosa had called it.
How would I feel if I had found a room full of human trophies, and Auntie Rosa had claimed it had to be done, they were all bad people? This was the same. Grundwirgen were not animals.
It was the same.
I found Auntie Rosa already awake, wrapped in a red shawl and waiting by the door.
“Where are you going?” I demanded.
“You were right.” She stretched one arm to the wall as if to steady herself. “I was so…I was so selfish. I’ll go now. Today. They’ll have to release your mother.”
A wave of emotion slammed into me, threatening to drown me. I’d spent the entire night wrestling with whether to turn her in, and now—now—
Auntie Rosa reached out a hand, slowly, tentatively, as if she was afraid I would flinch away from her. I didn’t.
She tucked a lock of hair behind my ear. “I love you, Xiao Hong. Don’t ever forget that.” Her hand was shaking. “Please.”
It would be better, Auntie Rosa told me quietly, if I was back at my own house when she brought the King’s Men to hers. I wouldn’t be alone long. My mother would be meeting me soon enough.
I nodded, not speaking.
She helped me carry my things back over the hill, back over the well-worn path. Helped me start a fire and set the house to rights, sweep out the dust from our weeks-long absence, lay in some extra wood. She brought over food stores from her own cottage, too, breads and cheese and cured meat. I stared at it.
“I never ate them.” Her voice broke. “Child, what you must think of me…”
I put the food away.
Auntie Rosa brought her gear over, too, her packs and knives and nicest rifles.
“I don’t want those,” I said. Not after what they’d been used for.
“Your mother might. Ask her?”
I took the rifles. My mother was an unsentimental woman. Maybe practicality would stir her to keep them.
Auntie Rosa adjusted her shawl around herself. She tried to say goodbye, but the words faltered away when I didn’t respond.
She took nothing with her, only the red shawl wrapped around her head and shoulders, a bright scarlet figure bobbing down the trail with her walking stick marking the paces as she hiked toward the city. It was late in the day; she wouldn’t arrive there till long past dark.
And then she’d turn herself in to the King’s Men. They’d probably escort her back to her cottage, or arrest her and then tramp back without her to investigate. With Auntie Rosa’s confession in hand, they’d release my mother.
Unless they didn’t. I wrestled down nightmare fears that they would think my mother had been in league with her, that I would lose them both.
Lose both my mothers.
“Auntie Rosa!” I called.
She was almost out of sight. The bright red figure stopped. Turned.
I grabbed her best rifle, the one she could splinter a coin with from a thousand yards away, and raced down the trail. I thrust it into her hands.
“Run. Disappear. I’ll bring the King’s Men back tomorrow. I’ll tell them you fled when I found the room.”
She stared down at me, uncomprehending.
“Go,” I said.
“I don’t want you involved,” she pleaded. “I’m old. I don’t have much time left. I can—”
“Go,” I repeated. “For me. For my mother. Please.” I didn’t know what was right—maybe I never would—but I suddenly knew what I didn’t want, what I couldn’t bear.
She fingered the rifle. “Tell Mei I’m sorry.” The words were rough and quiet. “I’m so sorry.”
I went into the city the next day. Bringing the King’s Men back was a confused jumble I could never quite remember afterward—answering their questions, waiting outside as they shoved through Auntie Rosa’s cottage and broke down the door of her secret room. Red fabric fluttered to the floor as they tore the cottage apart, as if the little house were bleeding.
They insisted on keeping my mother until they had a trial. After a long, terrifying day before the throne, during which I had to talk, to lie, about what had happened when I found the room, the King declared my mother innocent, and they allowed me to bring her home. She didn’t speak for five days, just sat by the window and fingered the edges of the tablecloth. Red. I didn’t know if Auntie Rosa had given it to us, or if my mother had gotten it to please her.
On the fifth day she cried.
I sat down across from her, unsure what to do. My mother never cried. She reached out and held my hand as she had in her cell, the tears seeping down her white face unchecked. “You must hate me,” she whispered. “For putting you through this.”
I squeezed her hand. “I could never hate you, Mama.” It turned out I couldn’t hate people even when they were murderers. Emotion welled up in my throat. “I’m glad you’re back.”
Her breath caught. “I never wanted you to know. My past, how I was a…I was so ashamed. But now, I find—I find I’m glad she told you.”
My mother had never spoken to me with such naked emotion before.
“I miss her,” she said.
I swallowed. “I do, too.”
We sat together holding hands, gazing out the window as if hoping we would see a bright red figure bobbing up the walk.
But the sun set, and no one came.
By Degrees and Dilatory Time
First published at Strange Horizons (May 2015), edited by Julia Rios
“On the bright side,” said Zara, poking at his glasses a week before, “this means you get new eyes.”
But I don’t want new eyes, he thought.
The surgery isn’t bad, as surgeries go. The one he had when he busted his knee ten years ago, as a teen, was much worse. Or maybe it was worse because of what it had meant: that he’d never go out on the ice again.
That had been his identity, and he’d had to forge a new one from the fractured shards of cold and steel and sharpness. It had taken years, and he still wasn’t sure the new version of himself wasn’t brittle in places—the fault lines barely below the surface, just waiting for one tiny tap by a ball-peen hammer to make the whole construct shatter.
His eyes, his eyes have never been his identity. It won’t matter to lose them.
He tells himself that over and over. Through the days following his diagnosis. On the night before the procedure, as he stares at himself in the mirror one last time, and the image blurs. In the hospital just before, as his surgeon squeezes his hand with her gloved one, and the broad white lights of the OR fade out, the last visual he will ever truly see.
He’s told everyone else the same thing. It’s not the worst thing in the world, Ma. It’s not like I’m an artist. Dad, don’t worry—at least we have all the options we do these days, right? It’s not that big of a deal.
He tells himself one more time as he lies in bed following the operation, his world swallowed in darkness behind the bandages, a dull ache prickling through his face like it doesn’t know where it wants to hurt. This is just a bump in the road.
In a year it won’t even matter.
Cancer.
His doctor said it gently. It was part of a full sentence, even. “We found cancer cells.” Later he wondered if she sat there and practiced her delivery before she made calls like this, pronouncing the words with such gravity and care, like she knew how fast he was about to fall and wanted her voice alone to reassure him she could catch him.
Cancer.
The word stalled out in his brain, and his world went sharp and too-bright—the gold tiles of the kitchen, the bright blue ceramic of the fat penguin salt shaker, a drooping rose Zara had laughingly given him when they’d walked the gardens the week before. He wasn’t sure what he said back into the phone, only that his doctor must have asked him to come down to the clinic and talk to her in person, because he had. She talked to him and talked some more and kept talking, and then gave him a lot of pamphlets. Diagnosis, treatment options, recommendations. Everything in that same comforting voice, that gentle-calm-grave-understanding one.
After the operation he’s blind for three and a half weeks. His parents offered to fly in and take care of him, but the thought of being waited on was worse than the fear of being helpless, and he said no. He’s stacked food and water by his bed and run a string to the bathroom. Zara’s on speed dial, and she checks in on him twice a day on her way to and from work.
He’s too tired to be much company, but she stays longer than she has to anyway, sitting on the floor against his bed and watching TV while crunching popcorn. She translates anything visual with the snark of someone who’s turned media cynicism into an art form: “Now they’re turning down the dark alleyway! Ooo, I wonder what’s going to happen now.”
The shows she picks are the type of awfully written crime shows where they narrate almost everything they’re doing anyway—“Look, Boss.” “What is this?” “It’s the DNA results. It says the suspect is his father”—and he finds he doesn’t mind, for once. The white noise of the television and Zara’s voice wash over him and the smell of buttered popcorn fills his nostrils, and he drifts in and out of sleep without ever closing eyes that no longer exist.
Zara’s response was the best one, when he told her his diagnosis. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry we as scientists haven’t fixed this yet. That we haven’t fucking solved it. We should have a cure.”
She was so angry. At the world. At her scientific brethren. At human progress.
With anyone else he might have said, “It’s not your fault,” but he’d known her too many years not to know what she meant.
“See? This is why science is amazing,” she’d effused to him through high school, as she helped tutor him through chemistry and physics. “Look what we understand, look what we can build! How freakin’ cool is that? This is why I want to do this forever. It’ll be like diving into the greatest unexplored frontier.”
He always had to admit: when she said it, it did seem cool. He liked seeing the world through her eyes.
It’s almost a month before he goes for his implants. The sockets went in with the surgery, twined delicately into the optic nerve. Now he has to have the eyes fitted to the interface, fitted and calibrated and a lot of other words his surgeon and ophthalmologist and the biotechnician used and he’s sure he won’t fully understand until he experiences them.
He’s feeling better, mostly; at least, he has the energy to sit up for more than an hour at a time, which he counts as a victory. He’s spent the weeks listening to more audiobooks than he can count and wishing he could at least get on his computer and game. Once he had Zara sign on for him, and he just lay with the headphones on, letting his guild’s banter wash over him, but not seeing what they were laughing and shouting at hurt too much for him to do it again.
He still has mild headaches that drift behind his eye sockets and wake him in the middle of the night; he can’t tell if it’s pain or discomfort or a psychosomatic phantom. His doctor assures him he has no symptoms of rejection or infection or any of a dozen other complications that are possible but not overly likely.
Zara drives him for the final procedure. “I can’t wait to see them,” she says. “Are you excited?”
“Eh,” he says. ‘Excited’ isn’t the word he would use.
“We gotta go to the bar next week and give them a test drive.” Her words have grown wicked, slick with innuendo. “Metallic eyes are so hot. I bet the guys will be all over you. Can they give you ones that literally smolder?”
“I don’t think so,” he says.
Zara’s right, of course. There are people who do this electively. Get their eyes replaced, for aesthetics or enhancement or to do careers that require what only artificial eyes can give them. It costs a pretty penny, and he’s seen them stalking around and cocking their eyebrows as if to show off the unearthly sheen. Some of them choose inhuman colors, artistic ones, heightening the alien illusion as if to better show off their improved orbs.
He can’t for the life of him imagine why anyone would do this by choice.
His cancer was rare, they told him. Even rarer for it to be in both eyes, still rarer to be so aggressive. It felt like a great bitter joke at one point, that out of all the people in the world he had beaten every probability, but instead of a lottery jackpot he’d won cancer.
Despite all the pamphlets and flowcharts his doctor had given him, her recommendations had been very sure. Caught early. We don’t think it’s metastasized. We can get it all with surgery. Your prognosis will be excellent.
It hadn’t been a choice, not really. Not when his eyes were replaceable. They’d give him new ones, better ones. Gone the dorky glasses and astigmatism. Gone the squinting and blurriness. Gone the eyestrain when he stared at a screen for too long. His gamer friends even told him enviously how the new eyes would make his skills take off. “You could level up,” said Yoshi, breathless. “You could go pro. All the professional gamers are enhanced.”
He thought back to his youth, to coming out of a double axel and the edge slicing the ice with his body in perfect equilibrium, and flying, the scenery whirling past in an exhilarating blur. Enhancements weren’t allowed in competitive sports. Sports were about pushing the human body, training to your limit, exploring the edges of what humanity could do. Like Zara said about science, except physical.
There was no point in nailed timing and glorious extended lines if you hadn’t sharpened every edge of that move a thousand times, yourself. The summer before he’d gone to college, he’d had a second, far easier surgery, when the technology had come out to give him a different kind of new knee. Strong. Flexible. A knee he could skate on, if he wanted, but not compete.
He’d never gone back on the ice.
He’s awake when they put the eyes in. They offer him something to sedate him a little, if he wants it, but he says no.
The sensation is strange. Loud. Like they’re snapping bones in his face, even though he knows it’s just the instruments and the metal crunching against the socket. There’s no pain, but he’s still not sure he made the right decision turning down sedation.
The moment when he can see again is sudden and without fanfare. One instant it’s darkness, the next his left eye is filled with doctors poking sharp metal things into his eyeball.
They warned him it would be “disconcerting”—he almost crawls out of his skin. He manages not to do more than twitch, though he does try to blink reflexively. It doesn’t work; his eyelids are being held open. It’s like a bizarre horror movie.
His ophthalmologist grins at him over her mask. “Hey, he’s back. Can you see us, Marcus?” She waves in his face like an exaggerated cartoon.
“Yes,” he says. “Yes, I can see you.”
His eye muscles twitch—he can’t help it. The focus moves, flicking from one object to the other. Doctor. Nurse. Ceiling. Is it just his imagination, or is there some lag time?
It has to be his imagination. These eyes are better than human ones.
Then why does everything look so flat? The colors seem duller than he remembers, the light harsher. Maybe it’s just the room.
His right eye flares to life. It’s less startling this time.
Everyone assumed he’d be able to choose whatever fancy new features he wanted. “Get those superfast superspy ones,” Yoshi said, making slashing noises that came through the headphones as they joysticked through their screens together. He wasn’t sure whether the slashing noises were about the game or his hypothetical eyes. “Like that guy who does acrobatics with fighter jets. Whatshisname. I saw a documentary.”
“I don’t think you do tricks with fighter jets,” he answered. Or maybe you did. Suddenly he wasn’t sure.
Zara sent him studies on all the new developments. Research hospitals, the cutting edge, the conference in Singapore where they were talking about eyes that could wirelessly link up to your computer and smartphone and give you some sort of integrated heads-up display.
Insurance didn’t pay for that sort of thing, of course. And his doctor even explained to him that a lot of the elective enhancements people got needed to be combined with a fancier type of neurosurgery, with a lot of words about nerve and electrical integration that he didn’t care to ask her to explain. “For you we have to make sure to take everything,” she’d said. “Removing the cancer has to be the first priority. Once we do that, we’ll use the standard implantation type, which integrates with the optic nerve behind the eye.”
He nodded. Not having choices made them easy.
They give him a pair of dark glasses to go home with, and warn him he’ll be photosensitive for at least three days and to lie for as long as he wants or needs to with his eyes closed. The muscles will take time to adapt, they tell him; some discomfort is normal.
It’s less discomfort and more pain—sharp little flecks of it intermittently throughout the day, stabbing with his eye movement and over before he can do anything about them, and backgrounded by a fuzzy ache like the precursor to a migraine. He takes the doctors’ advice and lies with his eyes closed, but restlessly. This is supposed to be over. He’s supposed to be able to open his eyes now and move on with his life.
He goes back to work the following week, but takes frequent breaks to sit in a dark closet. His supervisor is understanding.
He doesn’t even try to game. The mere thought of the 3D visualizations makes his head ache.
He wonders if these feelings will ever pass completely, or if this is his new reality.
“What color are you going to get?” people kept asking him, as if that were the most important thing. Probably because it was the most obvious feature to others, the bright array of metallics that the enhancers and transhumanists showed off so proudly.
He wanted as close to his old color as possible. Dark brown, unremarkable except that it was his. His lovers had always told him he had nice eyes.
They couldn’t do brown. Only brighter colors. Something about the way light reflected in the lenses inside—brown was too dark. The physics would have allowed for a light beige, but no one wanted light beige, so it wasn’t even in the palette they gave him to choose from. To be fair, he wouldn’t have wanted light beige, either.
He wanted to say something stupid about his ethnicity at that point. But I’m Thai. Like that would be news to them. Like that made him different from everyone else with tan skin and black hair and dark complexions who would want brown eyes if they could get them. Like stating his ethnicity would change what was technologically possible.
He chose the darkest color he could, a deep, vibrant blue. In any other context, it would have been beautiful.
“I still don’t think I’m going to be up to going out this week,” he tells Zara, when she prods him to resume their relationship as perpetual drinking buddies.
He hasn’t tried a mirror yet. He doesn’t know what he looks like. But it doesn’t matter; he doesn’t want the staring, the fascinated questions from people who assume they’re making small talk. The silent judgments from people who assume he did it for enhancement.
He also doesn’t want people to know this part of him before they know his name, to see it splashed across his face without him choosing to tell them. Doesn’t want to try to meet new people when this will inevitably and painfully be a conversation starter, his new acquaintances stepping on a landmine they don’t even know is there. “I like your eyes.” “I had cancer.” “…Oh.”
He foresees some awkward silences coming up in his dating life.
He wonders if this would have been easier if he’d been in a relationship when it happened. If a boyfriend looking at him like he was just the same would have made him feel so. Or if that person looking at him ever so slightly differently would have magnified every feeling of alienation.
He’s started wearing sunglasses outside all the time, now.
He began paying attention to the transhumanist movement after his diagnosis. Zara knew about it, of course, and had her typical libertarian stance. “Hey, as long as they’re not hurting anybody.”
He read up on some of the politics online. People wanting to modify themselves. People wanting to modify their children. Other people claiming the right to hate and condemn them for it. It struck him as just as senseless as most politics.
The idea that he’d be entering this world involuntarily—the enhancers’ realm, the political imbroglio—disturbed him. That he’d have to claim a stance, take a side, defend the technological advances by virtue of their medical purpose. Be grouped with the believers by default.
He shut his laptop. He had enough to worry about—he didn’t want to deal with this, too. Not yet.
He assumed, from the beginning, that the new eyes would be better. Of course he did; that’s why people chose to get them sometimes.
But they’re not. They’re just different.
Sure, in every objective sense he can see better. No glasses, and once the photosensitivity dies down, the detail he perceives is startling, especially texture. His vision is better than perfect. But the impression of flatness has persisted. His doctors tell him that no testing has shown anything less than normal depth perception, so maybe it’s all in his head—but doesn’t all vision happen in your head anyway? If it’s in his head, doesn’t that make it real automatically?
Despite the perfect vision, he constantly feels like he’s seeing everything through a slightly dull filter, like someone fiddled with the brightness and contrast settings on his monitor. Nothing he can pinpoint, but it drags at him. Sometimes, some three o’clocks in the morning, he wants to claw out his new eyes and scream.
Sleeplessness.
The bouts of insomnia and anxiety started before his surgery. It wasn’t nerves; he trusted his doctors. Instead, he would wake from cluttered dreams and stare into the darkness.
He’d stretch his eyes wide, willing the pupils to dilate, to suck in as much as they could possibly see.
Then he’d turn on the light and let the flash burn his retinas, let the purple splotches appear and his eyes tear up, wanting to hang onto the feeling.
The first time he looks in the mirror, depression smothers him, like tentacles wrapping thickly around his heart.
He’s been mentally preparing himself for the color, for the metallic sheen. But the shape of his eyes is different. He hadn’t expected that. They look wider to him, perpetually surprised, slightly goofy. He hates it.
Maybe the effect will diminish. The skin around the implants is still red and a little puffy, as if irritated at the interlopers. He knows how it feels.
He’s never thought of himself as vain. He’s always been decent-looking, but was arrogant enough to believe it didn’t matter. That he didn’t care. That appearance isn’t what’s important.
Until now, when he looks at his face and sees a freak.
Now he realizes he is vain, has always been vain, and maybe there’s not a damn thing wrong with that.
He feels a sudden stab of guilt and empathy. He’s only been able to tell himself he’s indifferent to his looks because he’s been lucky enough to be satisfied with them. He closes his eyes, shutting away the image in the mirror.
He’d cry, but his tear ducts are gone.
“Look out!” Yoshi bellowed in his ear the week before his surgery, as a troll burst through the wall. On the screen, his avatar ran.
Life and death, he thought. Such a simple decision to make.
His had been simple, too. “You’re so strong,” his mother kept telling him. “Your father and I talk about it, how brave you are.”
Brave? Why? The doctor had told him he had cancer, and this was what needed to be done. What would they have expected him to do instead? Say no?
Life and death. It made things easy.
His avatar ran around the corner and dropped its hands to its knees, panting.
My days are like yours now, he thought at the computer-generated character. The troll swings its club, and so we duck and kick and run.
But it’s not the fighting that’s the hard part, is it?
The pain improves, the headaches lift. He’s doing dishes one day when it strikes him he’s forgotten about his eyes for the last few minutes. He hadn’t realized that until now he’s been constantly aware of them, a low-level hum of discomfort, of difference.
As the days go by, it happens more often, for longer stretches. He’s surprised sometimes when he catches his face in the mirror—his self-image is still one in which he has human eyes, and when the reality reminds him, his mood twists into depression.
But even that changes. The first time he looks in the mirror and doesn’t notice his eyes, he realizes it happened five minutes later, and it jars him.
The human mind is infinitely adaptable.
Cancer.
When other people said the word, it was this huge, ominous, grave thing. People died of cancer. People lost loved ones to it. People wrote sad books and movies about cancer, and somebody always died and it was always tragic and noble and had important messages about the meaning of life.
Having cancer was different. He didn’t feel particularly tragic. Or noble. Or enlightened.
It was just shitty.
He was fortunate to have a good prognosis. He’d slog through it and out the other side, and life would go on.
Life goes on.
His friends and colleagues get used to his eyes far faster than he does. For a while he watches for them to be still looking, still gossiping, still curious, but eventually even his paranoia has to admit that he’s yesterday’s news. The realization is somehow both relieving and depressing. After all, he still has to deal with his new eyes, and now he has to deal with them alone.
He starts seeing a therapist once a week. She’s a very pleasant person who listens to him ramble and asks him gentle questions that make him feel less stupid. He’s always more at peace after his sessions with her.
He starts forgetting to wear the sunglasses. He finally signs back on to his gaming group and his friends greet him with whooping cheers for about thirty seconds before they’re all focused on the game again. Their lack of continued concern is somehow both liberating and slightly disappointing. He files that away to talk to the therapist about.
A good part of the time now, when someone does a double-take at him on the street, he doesn’t remember why until he thinks about it.
“This is just something I have to get through,” he told his parents once.
He hadn’t thought that statement would be so full of raw truth.
A year passes.
He remembers thinking last year that in a year none of this would matter. He was both wrong and right about that: it matters, and it doesn’t. The cancer changed him, but he adjusted. Nothing is radical. Nothing is revelatory. But nothing is inconsequential, either.
It’s just…life. Like everything else.
He’s started dating again. There haven’t been as many awkward silences as he feared. It turns out he can say, “I had cancer in my eyes, but I’m okay now” and then smile and change the subject. Zara turns out to be right that his eyes probably attract more people than not, and he’s learned not to mind.
He thinks about going to a rink and trying skating. Just for fun. Who knows, after all these years it might be more pleasant than painful. Zara offers to go with him. “I’ll fall on my ass so much I’ll make you feel great. Instant moral support.” He smiles. He doesn’t have to decide anything now.
He starts struggling to find new things to talk to his therapist about, and they drop to meeting once a month, then as-needed. He keeps her card taped to the fridge.
Sometimes he sees transhumanist rallies on television, or chances across articles on the Internet. He’s still not sure how he feels about them. He’d say he’s indifferent, but as a man with a fake leg and fake eyes, he’s one of the media-dubbed “cyborgs” already.
Well, screw it. He’s indifferent. It feels satisfying, somehow, to claim his right to have no political feelings about the technology in his body.
At night he sleeps well. And in the morning, he opens his eyes and goes about his day.
Zero Sum Game
Chapter 1
I trusted one person in the entire world.
He was currently punching me in the face.
Overlapping numbers scuttled across Rio’s fist as it rocketed toward me, their values scrambling madly, the calculations doing themselves before my eyes. He wasn’t pulling his punch at all, the bastard. I saw exactly how it would hit and that the force would fracture my jaw.
Well. If I allowed it to.
Angles and forces. Vector sums. Easy. I pressed myself back against the chair I was tied to, bracing my wrists against the ropes, and tilted my head a hair less than the distance I needed to turn the punch into a love tap. Instead of letting Rio break my jaw, I let him split my lip open.
The impact snapped my head back, and blood poured into my mouth, choking me. I coughed and spat on the cement floor. Goddammit.
“Sixteen men,” said a contemptuous voice in accented English from a few paces in front of me, “against one ugly little girl. How? Who are you?”
“Nineteen,” I corrected, the word hitching as I choked on my own blood. I was already regretting going for the split lip. “Check your perimeter again. I killed nineteen of your men.” And it would have been a lot more if Rio hadn’t appeared out of nowhere and clotheslined me while I was distracted by the Colombians. Fucking son of a bitch. He was the one who’d gotten me this job; why hadn’t he told me he was undercover with the drug cartel?
The Colombian interrogating me inhaled sharply and jerked his head at one of his subordinates, who turned and loped out of the room. The remaining three drug runners stayed where they were, fingering Micro-Uzis with what they plainly thought were intimidating expressions.
Dumbasses. I worked my wrists against the rough cord behind my back—Rio had been the one to tie me up, and he had left me just enough play to squeeze out, if I had half a second. Numbers and vectors shot in all directions—from me, to the Colombian in front of me, to his three lackwit subordinates, to Rio—a sixth sense of mathematical interplay that existed somewhere between sight and feeling, masking the world with constant calculations and threatening to drown me in a sensory overload of data.
And telling me how to kill.
Forces. Movements. Response times. I could take down this idiot drug runner right now, the way he was blocking his boys’ line of fire—except that concentrating on the Colombians would give Rio the instant he needed to take me down. I was perfectly aware that he wasn’t about to break cover on my behalf.
“If you don’t tell me what I want to know, you will regret it. You see my dog?” The Colombian jerked his head at Rio. “If I let him loose on you, you will be crying for us to kill your own mother. And he will like making you scream. He—how do you say? It gives him a jolly.” He leaned forward with a sneer, bracing himself on the arms of the chair so his breath was hot against my face.
Well, now he’d officially pissed me off. I flicked my eyes up to Rio. He remained impassive, towering above me in his customary tan duster like some hardass Asian cowboy. Unbothered. The insults wouldn’t register with him.
But I didn’t care. People pissing on Rio made me want to put them in the ground, even though none of it mattered to him. Even though all of it was true.
I relaxed my head back and then snapped it forward, driving my forehead directly into the Colombian’s nose with a terrific crunch.
He made a sound like an electrocuted donkey, squealing and snorting as he flailed backward, and then he groped around his back to come up with a boxy little machine pistol. I had time to think, Oh, shit, as he brought the gun up—but before firing, he gestured furiously at Rio to get out of the way, and in that instant the mathematics realigned and clicked into place and the probabilities blossomed into a split-second window.
Before Rio had taken his third step away, before the Colombian could pull his finger back on the trigger, I had squeezed my hands free of the ropes, and I dove to the side just as the gun went off with a roar of automatic fire. I spun in a crouch and shot a foot out against the metal chair, the kick perfectly timed to lever energy from my turn—angular momentum, linear momentum, bang. Sorry, Rio. The Colombian struggled to bring his stuttering gun around to track me, but I rocketed up to crash against him, trapping his arms and carrying us both to the floor in an arc calculated exactly to bring his line of fire across the far wall.
The man’s head cracked against the floor, his weapon falling from nerveless fingers and clattering against the cement. Without looking toward the side of the room, I already knew the other three men had slumped to the ground, cut down by their boss’s gun before they could get a shot off. Rio was out cold by the door, his forehead bleeding freely, the chair fallen next to him. Served him right for punching me in the face so many times.
The door burst open. Men shouted in Spanish, bringing Uzis and AKs around to bear.
Momentum, velocities, objects in motion. I saw the deadly trails of their bullets’ spray before they pulled the triggers, spinning lines of movement and force that filled my senses, turning the room into a kaleidoscope of whirling vector diagrams.
The guns started barking, and I ran at the wall and jumped.
I hit the window at the exact angle I needed to avoid being sliced open, but the glass still jarred me when it shattered, the noise right by my ear and somehow more deafening than the gunfire. My shoulder smacked into the hard-packed ground outside and I rolled to my feet, running before I was all the way upright.
This compound had its own mini-army. The smartest move would be to make tracks out of here sooner rather than later, but I’d broken in here on a job, dammit, and if I didn’t finish it, I wouldn’t get paid.
The setting sun was sending tall shadows slicing between the buildings. I skidded up to a metal utility shed and slammed the sliding door back. My current headache of a job, also known as Courtney Polk, scrabbled back as much as she could while handcuffed to a pipe before she recognized me and glowered. I’d locked her in here temporarily when the Colombians had started closing in.
I picked up the key to the cuffs from where I’d dropped it in the dust by the door and freed her. “Time to skedaddle.”
“Get away from me,” she hissed, flinching back. I caught one of her arms and twisted, the physics of the leverage laughably easy. Polk winced.
“I am having a very bad day,” I said. “If you don’t stay quiet, I will knock you unconscious and carry you out of here. Do you understand?”
She glared at me.
I twisted a fraction of an inch more, about three degrees shy of popping her shoulder out of the socket.
“All right already!” She tried to spit the words, but her voice climbed at the end, pitched with pain.
I let her go. “Come on.”
Polk was all gangly arms and legs and looked far too thin to have much endurance, but she was in better shape than she appeared, and we made it to the perimeter in less than three minutes. I pushed her down to crouch behind the corner of a building, my eyes roving for the best way out, troop movements becoming vectors, numbers stretching and exploding against the fence. Calculations spun through my brain in infinite combinations. We were going to make it.
And then a shape rose up, skulking between two buildings, zigzagging to stalk us—a black man, tall and lean and handsome, in a leather jacket. His badge wasn’t visible, but it didn’t need to be; the way he moved told me everything I needed to know. He stood out like a cop in a compound full of drug runners.
I started to grab Polk, but it was too late. The cop whipped around and looked up, meeting my eyes from fifty feet away, and knew he was made.
He was fast. We’d scarcely locked eyes and his hand was inside his jacket in a blur.
My boot flicked out and hit a rock.
From the cop’s perspective, it must have looked like the worst kind of evil luck. He’d barely gotten his hand inside his coat when my foot-flicked missile rocketed out of nowhere and smacked him in the forehead. His head snapped back, and he listed to the side and collapsed.
God bless Newton’s Laws of Motion.
Polk recoiled. “What the hell was that!”
“That was a cop,” I snapped. Five minutes with this kid and my irritation was already at its limit.
“What? Then why did you—he could have helped us!”
I resisted the urge to smack her. “You’re a drug smuggler.”
“Not on purpose!”
“Yeah, because that makes a difference. I don’t think the authorities are going to care that the Colombians weren’t too happy with you anymore. You don’t know enough to gamble on flipping on your crew, so you’re going to a very faraway island after this. Now shut up.” The perimeter was within sprinting distance now, and rocks would work for the compound’s guards as well. I scooped up a few, my hands instantly reading their masses. Projectile motion: my height, their heights, the acceleration of gravity, and a quick correction for air resistance—and then pick the right initial velocity so that the deceleration of such a mass against a human skull would provide the correct force to drop a grown man.
One, two, three. The guards tumbled into well-armed heaps on the ground.
Polk made a choking sound and stumbled back from me a couple of steps. I rolled my eyes, grabbed her by one thin wrist, and hauled.
Less than a minute later, we were driving safely away from the compound in a stolen jeep, the rich purple of the California desert night falling around us and the lights and shouts from an increasingly agitated drug cartel dwindling in the distance. I took a few zigs and zags through the desert scrub to put off anyone trying to follow us, but I was pretty sure the Colombians were still chasing their own tails. Sure enough, soon we were speeding alone through the desert and the darkness. I kept the running lights off just in case, leaving the moonlight and mathematical extrapolation to outline the rocks and brush as we bumped along. I wasn’t worried about crashing. Cars are only forces in motion.
In the open jeep, the cuts on my face stung as the wind whipped by, and annoyance rolled through me as the adrenaline receded. This job—I’d thought it would be a cakewalk. Polk’s sister had been the one to hire me, and she had told me Rio had cold-contacted her and strongly suggested that if she didn’t pay me to get her sister out, she’d never see her again. I hadn’t talked to Rio myself in months—not until he’d used me as his personal punching bag today—but I could connect the dots: Rio had been working undercover, seen Polk, decided she deserved to be rescued, and thrown me the gig. Of course, I was grateful for the work, but I wished I had known Rio was undercover with the cartel in the first place. I cursed the bad luck that had made us run into him—the Colombians never would have caught me on their own.
In the passenger seat, Polk braced herself unhappily against the jounces of our off-road journey. “I’m not moving to a desert island,” she said suddenly, interrupting the quiet of the night.
I sighed. “I didn’t say desert. And it doesn’t even have to be an island. We can probably stash you in rural Argentina or something.”
She crossed her spindly arms, hugging herself against the night’s chill. “Whatever. I’m not going. I’m not going to let the cartel win.”
I resisted the urge to crash the jeep on purpose. Not that I had much to crash it into, out here, but I could have managed. The correct angle against one of those little scrub bushes…
“You do realize they’re not the only ones who want a piece of you, right? In case our lovely drug running friends neglected to tell you before they dumped you in a basement, the authorities are scouring California for you. Narcotics trafficking and murder, I hear. What, were all the cool kids doing it?”
She winced away, hunching into herself. “I swear I didn’t know they were using the shipments to smuggle drugs. I only called my boss when I got stopped because that’s what they told us to do. It’s not my fault.”
Yeah, yeah. Her sister had tearfully shown me a copy of the police report—driver stopped for running a light, drugs found, more gang members who’d shown up and shot the cops, taking back the truck and driver both. The report had heavily implicated Courtney in every way.
When she’d hired me, Dawna Polk had insisted her sister wouldn’t have hurt a fly. Personally, I hadn’t particularly cared if the girl was guilty or not. A job was a job.
“Look, I only want to get paid,” I said. “If your sister says you can throw your life away and go to prison, that’s A-okay with me.”
“I was just a driver,” Courtney insisted. “I never looked to see what was in the back. They can’t say I’m responsible.”
“If you think that, you’re an idiot.”
“I’d rather the police have me than you anyway!” she shot back. “At least with the cops I know I have rights! And they’re not some sort of freaky weird feng shui killers!”
She flinched back into herself, biting her lip. Probably wondering if she’d said too much. If I was going to go “feng shui” on her, too.
Crap.
I took a deep breath. “My name is Cas Russell. I do retrieval. It means I get things back for people. That’s my job.” I swallowed. “Your sister really did hire me to get you out, okay? I’m not going to hurt you.”
“You locked me up again.”
“Only so you’d stay put until I could come back for you,” I tried to assure her.
Courtney’s arms were still crossed, and she’d started worrying her lip with her teeth. “And what about all that other stuff you did?” she asked finally. “With the cartel guards, and the stones, and that cop…”
I scanned the constellations and steered the jeep eastward, aiming to intersect the highway. The stars burned into my eyes, their altitudes, azimuths, and apparent magnitudes appearing in my mind as if stenciled in the sky behind each bright, burning pinprick. A satellite puttered into view, and its timing told me its height above Earth and its orbital velocity.
“I’m really good at math,” I said. Too good. “That’s all.”
Polk snorted as if I were putting her on, but then her face knitted in a frown, and I felt her staring at me in the darkness. Oh, hell. I like it better when my clients hire me to retrieve inanimate objects. People are so annoying.
By morning, my madly circuitous route had only brought us halfway back to LA. Switching cars twice and drastically changing direction three times might not have been strictly necessary, but it made my paranoid self feel better.
The desert night had turned cold; fortunately, we were now in a junky old station wagon instead of the open jeep, though the car’s heater only managed a thin stream of lukewarm air. Polk had her bony knees hunched up in front of her and had buried her face against them. She hadn’t spoken in hours.
I was grateful. This job had had enough monkey wrenches already without needing to explain myself to an ungrateful child every other minute.
Polk sat up as we drove into the rising sun. “You said you do retrieval.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“You get things back for people.”
“That’s what ‘retrieval’ means.”
“I want to hire you.” Her youthful face was set in stubborn lines.
Great. She was lucky I wasn’t choosy about my clientele. And that I needed another job after this one. “What for?”
“I want my life back.”
“Uh, your sister’s already paying me for that,” I reminded her. “But hey, you can pay me twice if you want. I won’t complain.”
“No. I mean I don’t want to go flying off to Argentina. I want my life back.”
“Wait, you’re asking me to steal you back a clean record?” This girl didn’t know what reality was. “Kid, that’s not—”
“I’ve got money,” she interrupted. Her eyes dropped to her knees. “I got paid really well, for someone who drove a delivery truck.”
I snorted. “What are the going rates for being a drug mule these days?”
“I don’t care what you think of me,” said Polk, though red was creeping up her neck and across her cheeks. She ducked her head, letting her frizzy ponytail fall across her face. “People make mistakes, you know.”
Yeah. Cry me a river. I ignored the voice in my head telling me I should take the fucking job anyway. “Saving the unfortunate isn’t really my bag. Sorry, kid.”
“Will you at least think about it? And stop calling me ‘kid.’ I’m twenty-three.”
She looked about eighteen, wide-eyed and gullible and wet behind the ears. But then, I guess I can’t judge; people still assumed I was a teenager sometimes, and in reality I was barely older than Courtney. Of course, age can be measured in more ways than years. Sometimes I had to pull a .45 in people’s faces to remind them of that.
I remembered with a pang that my best 1911 had been lost back at the compound when I was captured. Dammit. Dawna was going to get that in her expense list.
“So? Are you thinking about it?”
“I was thinking about my favorite gun.”
“You don’t have to be so mean all the time,” Courtney mumbled into her knees. “I know I need help, okay? That’s why I asked.”
Oh, fuck. Courtney Polk was a headache and a half, and clearing the names of idiot kids who got mixed up with drug cartels wasn’t in my job description. I’d been very much looking forward to dumping her on her sister’s doorstep and driving away.
Though that small voice in the back of my head kept whispering: drive away where?
I didn’t have any gigs lined up after I finished this contract. I don’t do too well when I’m not working.
Yeah, right. Between jobs you’re a fucking mess.
I slammed the voice away again and concentrated on the money. I like money. “Just how much cash do you have?”
“You’ll do it?” Her face lit up, and her whole body straightened toward me. “Thank you! Really, thank you!”
I grumbled something not nearly as enthusiastic and revved the station wagon down the empty dawn freeway. Figuring out how to steal back someone’s reputation was not my idea of fun.
The voice in the back of my head laughed mockingly. Like you have the luxury of being choosy.
Chapter 2
I pulled the station wagon into a grungy roadside motel near Palmdale, the type with a cracked plastic sign of misaligned letters misspelling the word “vacancy.” I’d detoured again, and we’d circled around enough to be coming in from north of LA, through the dusty shithole towns of meth gang territory. Courtney’s friends, on the other hand, had been smuggling coke, which I supposed made them the classy drug dealers.
I didn’t need to rest, but I suspected Courtney did, and I wanted to think. I had no idea how the hell I was going to approach her case. The obvious plan was to find enough evidence on her old employers to give the DEA some sort of smashing takedown, let Courtney take the credit for it, and broker a deal to expunge her record. That would involve dealing with the police, though, and that sounded about as appealing as driving two-inch bamboo splinters under my fingernails.
I ushered Courtney ahead of me into the motel’s threadbare office; her jaws cracked with a yawn as she stumbled in. The clerk was stuttering into the phone. I crossed my arms, leaned against the wall, and waited.
The clerk stayed on his call for another ten minutes, and kept giving us increasingly nervous glances, as if he expected me to bawl him out for not helping us straightaway. I supposed that made sense, considering my messed-up fatigue-style clothes and my messed-up face, which had to be turning into a spectacular rainbow of color by this point. Or maybe he saw brown skin and thought I was a terrorist—I’ve been told I look kind of Middle Eastern. Goddamn racial profiling.
I tried to smile at him, but it ended up more like a scowl.
The clerk finally got off the phone and stammered his way into assigning us a room on the first floor. He dropped the key twice trying to give it to me, and then dropped the cash I gave him when he tried to pick the bills up off the counter. If he’d known I’d pulled the money from a succession of stolen cars that night, he probably would’ve been even more nervous.
I pulled Courtney back into the sunlight after me, where we found the right door and let ourselves into a stock cheap-and-dirty motel room, the type with furnishings made of stapled-together cardboard. Apparently relieved by my promise to help her, Courtney zonked out almost before her frizzy head smacked against the pillows on one of the dingy beds. I tossed the cigarette-burned bedspread over her and went to push open the door to the small washroom.
A gun barrel appeared in my face. “Howdy,” said the black cop from the compound from where he sat on the toilet tank. “I think we need to have a talk.”
Well, shit.
No matter how much math I know, and no matter how fast my body is trained to respond automatically to it, I can’t move faster than a bullet. Of course, if the cop had been within reach, I could have disarmed him before he could fire—but the bathroom was just large enough for the math to err on his side, considering he already had his gun drawn and pointed at my center of mass.
“Don’t mind me,” I said, inching forward and trying for flippancy. “I’m just going to use the—”
His hand moved slightly, and I froze.
“Good,” he said. “You stand still now, sweetheart. You move and I’ll put a bullet through your kidney.”
I knew two things about him now. First, he was smart, because not only had he tracked us here and then gotten into our bathroom before we had reached the room, but he also wasn’t underestimating me. Second, he didn’t give a rat’s ass about proper police procedure, which either meant he was a very dangerous cop or a very dirty one—or both.
I let my hands hover upward, showing I wasn’t going for a weapon. “I’m not moving.”
“Pithica,” he said. “Talk.”
“You have me confused with someone else,” I said. Mathematics erupted around me, layering over itself, possibilities rising and crumbling away as the solutions all came up a hair short of the time the handsome cop needed to pull the trigger.
“Talk,” said the cop. “Or I shoot you and break your pet out there.”
Courtney. Shit. Stall. “Okay,” I said. “What do you want to know?”
In the bathroom mirror, I saw the rising sun peek above the sill and through the almost-drawn curtains.
Specular reflection. Angles of incidence. Perfect. As long as the cop wasn’t going to fire blind, I had him. Hands still raised in the air in apparent surrender, I twitched my left wrist.
At the speed of light, the glint of sunlight came in through the window, hit the bathroom mirror, and reflected in a tight beam from the polished face of my wristwatch right into the cop’s eyes.
He moved fast, blinking and ducking his head away, but I moved faster. I dodged to the side as I dove in, my right hand swinging out to take the gun off line. My fingers wrapped around his wrist and I yanked, the numbers whirling and settling to give me the perfect fulcrum as I leveraged off my grasp on his gun hand to leap upward and give him a spinning knee to the side of the head.
The cop collapsed, out cold, his face smacking inelegantly into the grimy bathroom floor.
I checked the gun. Fully loaded with a round in the chamber, as I’d expected. I gave it points for being a nice hefty .45 with an extended magazine, and points off for being a Glock. Typical cop. I hate Glocks.
I searched him quickly and found three spare mags fully loaded with ammo and a little snub-nosed Smith & Wesson tucked in his boot. No wallet or phone—and, more importantly, no badge or ID of any kind. I was right; he was dirty.
I dragged him out into the room, yanked the sheet off one of the beds, and began tearing long strips from it. In the other bed, Courtney stirred and squinted at me sleepily. When she saw me tying a tall, unconscious man to the radiator, she came fully awake and shot bolt upright. “What’s going on?”
“He followed us here,” I explained. The guy must have regained consciousness fast enough to track our escape back at the compound, and must have been the one on the phone with the motel clerk when we checked in, making sure someone let him into our room before we got the key. This time I’d make sure he couldn’t track us. By the time he woke up and got himself loose, we’d be long gone.
“Who is he? Is he with the Colombians?”
I frowned at her from where I was securing my knots. “He’s the cop from back at the compound. Remember? As to whether he’s with the cartel, I don’t know. I think he’s dirty.”
“How do you know he’s a cop in the first place?”
“Police training makes you move a certain way.” It came to me in numbers, of course, the subtle angles and lines of stride and posture. But I didn’t feel like explaining that.
“Oh.” Courtney’s hands had tightened into fists on the threadbare bedspread, her knuckles white.
I finished my work and moved toward the door. “Come on, kid. We’ve got to hit the road.”
Courtney scrambled up and stayed behind me while I checked outside. The sun gleamed off the cars, the dusty parking lot completely still. If our police friend was dirty, it was unlikely he’d have a partner nearby, fortunately. I glanced around to see if I could spot his car, figuring it might have some nice toys in it—as well as maybe his badge and ID, which could give us some leverage—but no vehicle stood out as promising. Instead, I led Polk over to a black GMC truck so caked with dust and grime it looked gray. In my business, getting into a car and hotwiring it are such necessary skills I could literally do them with my eyes closed, and I had the engine coughing to life in fourteen seconds. We left the motel behind in a cloud of dust.
I flattened the accelerator, and the desert sped by around us, the morning sun flashing off dust and sand and rock. I drew a quick map of this part of the county in my head, calculating the best way to travel so that even if the cop woke up quickly and used the most efficient search algorithm he could—or had supernatural luck—the probabilities would drop toward zero that he’d be able to find us again.
Courtney’s subdued voice interrupted my calculations. “Was he after me?”
“Yeah,” I said. I brooded for a moment. “What do you know about something called Pithica?”
She shook her frizzy head. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“Are you sure? You never heard a whisper from your former employers? Think hard.”
Courtney winced away from my harshness. “No. I swear. Why?”
I didn’t answer.
What the hell was going on? Why was a peace officer on the take after Courtney Polk? She’d been a drug mule, for crying out loud, one the cartel had ended up locking in a basement. She hadn’t exactly been high on the food chain. And what the hell was Pithica?
I didn’t go straight into LA; instead, I continued zigzagging through the brown desert of the northern outskirts and switched cars twice in three hours. I didn’t know if our dirty cop could put out an APB on us—he might even have enough resources to have his buddies set up roadblocks. Best to err on the side of being impossible-to-find no matter what.
Once the morning hit a decent hour, I stopped at a cheap electronics store and picked up a disposable cell. I stood under the awning of the shop, watching Courtney where she sat in the car waiting, and dialed Rio.
“Pithica,” I said, as soon as he answered.
There was a long pause. Then Rio said, “Don’t get involved.”
“I’m already involved,” I said, my stomach sinking.
Another pause. “I can’t talk now.” Of course. He was still undercover. I’d assumed he was just taking down the whole gang for kicks, but now…
“When and where?” I said impatiently.
“God be with you,” said Rio, and hung up.
I should’ve known, I thought. Undercover wasn’t Rio’s style. His MO was to go in, hurt the people who needed hurting, and get out. If taking down the gang had been his only objective, a nice explosion would have lit up the California desert weeks ago and left nothing but a crater and the bodies of several eviscerated drug dealers. That was Rio’s style. And why had he referred Dawna to me to get Courtney out in the first place? Why not do it himself? He was more than capable; in fact, I was sure he could have done it without even blowing his cover.
Unless things were way more complicated than I had realized, and this wasn’t a simple drug ring.
“Who were you calling?” asked Courtney, getting out of the car and squinting at me in the glare of the Southern California sun.
“A friend,” I said. Well, sort of. “Someone I trust.” That part was true.
“Someone who can help us?”
“Maybe.” Rio was clearly working his own angle, and didn’t want help—even from me. Which hurt a little, if I wanted to be honest with myself. I’m good at what I do. Rio didn’t mean to hurt me, of course; he didn’t care about my feelings one way or another. He didn’t care about anyone’s feelings. I wondered what it said about me that he was the closest thing I did have to a friend.
Suck it up, Cas.
Rio wasn’t the only resource I had. I contemplated for a moment, then dialed another number.
“Mack’s Garage,” said a gravelly voice on the other end.
“Anton, it’s Cas Russell. I need some information.”
He grunted. “Usual rates.”
“Yeah. I need everything you can get on the word Pithica.”
“Spelling?”
“I’m not sure. There might be some ties to Colombian drug runners. And the authorities might be investigating already.”
He grunted again. “Two hours.”
“Got it.” I hung up. Anton was one of several information brokers in the city, and I’d hired him not infrequently over the past couple of years, whenever I wanted to know more than a standard Internet search would give me. If “Pithica” had a paper trail, I was betting he could find it.
“Come on,” I said to Courtney, shepherding her back to the car. “We’re going to hit rush hour as it is.”
Chapter 3
“Do you have cash, or is your money all in the bank?” I asked Courtney as we inched forward through the eternal parking lot of the 405 freeway, the heat beating down through the windshield and slowly cooking us. The temperature had catapulted up by a full thirty-four degrees Fahrenheit with the rising sun as we finally headed into the city: Los Angeles at its finest. Our current junkpot car didn’t have air conditioning, and the still air and stalled traffic meant even rolling down the windows didn’t help one whit.
Courtney fiddled with the ends of her ponytail self-consciously. “They paid me in cash. I didn’t—taxes, you know, I thought it would be better if…”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, trying not to laugh at her. “No sign at all they weren’t on the level. I can see why you thought it was a legitimate delivery service.” I dealt only in cash myself, of course, but I wasn’t exactly a yardstick for legality. “Where is it, under your mattress?”
She grimaced, red creeping across her cheekbones again. “A floorboard.”
“All right. We’ll swing by. Let’s hope the cops didn’t find it.” I had a fair amount of my own liquid capital stashed in various places throughout the city, but I preferred to use hers. She was supposed to be the paying client, after all.
“You think they searched my place?” Courtney asked, going tense and sitting up in the passenger seat.
“You’re a murder suspect,” I said. “You think?”
Her whole face had gone flushed now. “I—I just don’t—I have some things—”
“Relax, kid. Nobody’s going to care about your porn collection.”
She choked and broke out in a coughing fit.
“Unless it’s children,” I amended. “Then you’d be in big trouble. Bigger, I mean. It’s not kiddie porn, is it?”
“What—? I don’t—no, of course not!” she stammered. Her skin burned tomato red now, from her neck to the roots of her sweat-dampened hair. “Why would you—I don’t even—”
I laughed for real as traffic started creeping forward again. She was too easy.
Courtney’s place was only a few miles from Anton’s, and I decided to drop by the information broker’s first. Anton’s garage was a constant of the universe. A ramshackle mechanic’s outfit, the place had never changed in all the times I’d been there. The words “Mack’s Garage” barely showed through a decades-thick layer of motor oil and grime on a bent-up metal sign, and the junkers in the bays were the same derelict vehicles I’d seen the last time. No customers were in sight. Anton did know cars, as it happened, but he wasn’t known for being an auto mechanic.
I knocked on the door to the office and Anton opened it himself, a faded gray work coverall over his considerable bulk. Anton was a big, big man in every way—six-foot-five and beefy all over, he had a thick neck, thicker face, and steel-gray hair shaven to a strict quarter-inch, which for some reason made him seem even bigger. Considering I was already short, I tended to feel like a toy person next to him. But as much as I was sure he could open a can of whoop-ass on someone if he wanted to, I always thought he was kind of a teddy bear. A surly, taciturn teddy bear who never smiled, but a teddy bear nonetheless.
He grunted when he saw us. “Russell. Come in.”
Courtney and I followed him through the outer office and into Anton’s workshop. Computers and parts of computers sprawled across every inch of the place, some intact but many more in pieces, and bits of circuitry and machinery I couldn’t name hummed away all over the room in various states of repair, with teetering mountains of papers and files stacked on every marginally flat surface. A huge office chair sized for Anton’s bulk stood like a throne in the middle of the chaos, and perched in its depths was a twelve-year-old girl.
“Cas!” Anton’s daughter cried, leaping up to run over and throw her arms around my middle. Even for twelve, she was tiny, and with her dark complexion, I always figured her mother must have been a four-foot-ten Asian or Latina woman whom Anton could have picked up with his little finger.
“Hey, Penny. How’s it going?” I said, ruffling her dark hair.
“Good!” she chirped. “We’ve got an intelligence file for you!”
“Thanks. Hey, I’ve got a present for you.” I pulled the cop’s little Smith & Wesson out of my pocket. “Look, it’s just your size.”
“Ooo! Cas! Thank you!” Eyes shining, she took the gun, keeping it pointed down. “Daddy, look what Cas gave me! What caliber is it?”
“Thirty-eight Special, for a special little girl,” I said. “Take good care of it; it’ll last you a long time.” What can I say, I have a soft spot for kids.
“You’re giving her a gun?” squawked Courtney from behind me. “One you stole from a cop?”
“She knows how to use it,” grunted Anton.
Courtney quailed. “That’s not what I—”
“You think I don’t take care of my daughter right?” said Anton quietly, looming a bit. “That what you saying, girl?”
Courtney stared up and up at him. Then she said, “No, sir,” very meekly.
“Didn’t think so,” rumbled the big man. “Russell, I got that info for you. Not much to go on, mind.”
“I appreciate anything you can get us,” I said.
He pulled a file folder from among the machines. “Some fishy things here. Could be more we ain’t hit yet. You don’t mind, me and Penny’ll keep digging on this.”
“Sure,” I said, surprised. It was the first time he’d said something like that in all the times I’d hired him. “If you think there’s more to find, go for it. Usual rate.” I opened the file and gave it a cursory glance—the contents were puzzlingly varied; I’d have to sit down with it later.
“I bet we get more,” said Penny optimistically, hopping back up on her dad’s chair and rolling it over to a computer keyboard. “Hey, Cas! I cracked an IRS database yesterday. All by myself!”
“She’s got the talent,” murmured Anton in his quiet, gravelly way, but anyone could see he was glowing with pride.
“Nice job,” I told Penny. “Too bad you don’t pay taxes.”
“Well, Daddy does, but he told me not to change anything. I want to try some White House systems next.”
I turned to Anton in surprise. “You pay taxes?”
“I use this country’s services,” he said. “I pay the taxes them people we elected says I owe. Only fair.”
Wow. “Your call, I guess.”
He gave one of his trademark grunts. “Want to teach my girl right.”
Courtney made a squeaking sound. I decided I’d better get her out of sight before Anton felt the urge to reach out his thumb and crush her like a bug. Besides, Anton’s reference to more weirdness was amplifying the alarm bells that had been going off in the back of my head ever since the cop had cornered us at the motel.
The feeling got about a hundred times worse when we got to Courtney’s house.
“That’s—that’s my…” She trailed off, her hand shaking as she pointed. Two white men in dark suits were standing on her doorstep talking, the front door cracked open behind them. As we watched, one of them pushed open the door and went inside. The other stubbed out a cigarette and followed a minute later.
“What are they doing in my house?” whispered Courtney weakly.
We were still a block away. I pulled the car over and turned off the engine. Courtney’s place was a little guesthouse-type cottage, and most of the blinds were shut, but one of the side windows was the kind of slatted glass that didn’t close all the way. Through it, we could see more suits—and they were in the midst of tossing her living room. Thoroughly.
“Who are they?” asked Courtney. “Are they police?”
“No.” Some of them moved like they might have military backgrounds, but I wasn’t sure; we didn’t have a good view and I didn’t have the numerical profiles of every type of tactical training memorized anyway. Definitely not cops, though.
“Do you think—are they with the Colombians?”
“Possibly.” The men were the wrong ethnicity to be on the Colombian side of the cartel, but maybe they were American connections. Why would the cartel be searching Courtney’s place, though? If they were after the girl herself, they would be lying in wait, not turning the rooms inside out. “Did you steal anything from them? Money, drugs, information? Anything?”
“No!” Courtney sounded horrified. “I have money there like I told you, but it’s what they paid me. I’m not a thief!”
“Just a drug smuggler.” As someone who did dabble in what one might call “stealing,” when paid well to do it, I resented her indignation a bit. “Let’s keep our moral lines straight and clear, now.”
“I didn’t know,” repeated Courtney hopelessly.
I reached for the car door handle. Maybe these men were only burglars after her little stash of savings, but I wasn’t going to bet on it. “I’m going to get closer. Stay here and keep out of sight.”
“What if they come this way?” Courtney had gone pale, her freckles standing out across her cheekbones.
“Hide,” I said, and got out of the car.
I still hadn’t had a chance to clean up my face, and despite this not being the best part of town—unkempt, weedy lawns buttressed trash-filled gutters, and most of the houses sported cracked siding and sun-peeled paint—I got a few looks from people on the street as I strolled toward Courtney’s cottage. I ran a hand through my short hair, but it was a tangled, curly mass and I was pretty sure I only made it worse. Undercover work has never been my forte.
I meandered down the sidewalk, keeping a sidelong view of Courtney’s house. The dark-suited men became points in motion, my brain extrapolating from the little I could see and hear, assigning probabilities and translating to expected values. As I drew up to the house, the highs and lows of conversation became barely audible, but I ran some quick numbers—to decipher the words, I’d have to be so close I’d be the most obvious eavesdropper in the world. The plot of half-hearted grass between the street and the houses didn’t have any handy cover I could use to sneak closer, either.
I ran my eyes over the surrounding scenery, a three-dimensional model growing in my head. A stone wall curved out from just behind Polk’s house and ended in a tumble at a vacant lot, and it very nearly fit the curvature of a conic.
Sound waves are funny things. They can chase each other over concave surfaces, create reinforcing concentrations of acoustics at the focus of an architectural ellipse or parabola. Some rooms are famous for the ability to whisper a word on one side and have it be heard with perfect clarity on the other.
I only needed a few more sounding boards.
I wandered back down the street and kicked at a trash can as I went by so it turned slightly. Ran my hand along the neighbor’s fence, pulling the gate closed with a click. Flipped up a metal bowl set out for stray cats with my foot so it leaned against a fire hydrant. Tossed a rock casually at a bird feeder so it swung and changed orientation. I ambled down the street twice more, knocking the detritus of the street around, making small changes. Then I ran my eyes back across the house, feeding in the decibel level of normal human conversation.
Close. All I needed was an umbrella. It wasn’t raining, but plenty of cars were parked on the street, and I found what I needed after a quick survey of back windows. I jimmied my way in, retrieved the umbrella from the back seat, and left the car door cracked at an angle for good measure. Then I headed over to a tree at the edge of the next lot, one that stood exactly at the focus of my manufactured acoustic puzzle, put up the umbrella, and listened.
The voices in Courtney’s house sprang up as if they were right next to me.
“—utter rubbish, that’s what it is,” a man was saying in a British accent. “FIFA’s got no right to blame Sir Alex. They got a scandal, it’s their own damn fault.”
“You two and your pansy-ass soccer players,” put in an American voice. “You’re in fucking America, you know. Watch some real football.”
“Oh, you mean that boring little program where they prance around in all the pads and take a break every five minutes?”
“Aw, fuck off. At least we score more than once a game.”
“Gentlemen. Focus.” This voice was smooth, deep, and oozed charisma, cutting off whatever the American’s retort would have been like he’d hit a switch.
“I don’t think it’s here, Boss,” said a fourth guy in a nasally voice with an accent I couldn’t place. “I think she stashed it somewhere else. Or she—”
“‘Stashed it’?” cut in the talkative Brit. “Where? She doesn’t have a safe deposit box, they made it so she’s got no friends—”
“So she buried it in the front yard, or spackled it into a wall,” said the American. “Who knows what she was thinking?”
“The only place left to look here is if we come back with a sledgehammer and a shovel,” agreed the nasally man.
Their words fell off while they waited for the leader to make a decision. I found myself holding my breath.
“Hey, momma, it look like rain to you?”
I was jerked out of listening to see an arrogant teenage kid wearing far too many chains laughing in my face. “You expecting rain? Ha! Whatcha do to your face, or were you born that way?”
My first instinct was to knock him on the head and get him out of my way. But he was only a kid—a shrimpy Hispanic teen, probably part of a gang considering the area and the colored bandanna knotted around his bicep, and aching to prove himself. Even if he was doing so by picking on a small woman who resembled a disturbed homeless person at the moment.
“Are you trying to pick a fight with me?” I asked evenly, lounging back against the tree and letting the grip of the cop’s Glock peek out of my belt. The kid’s eyes got wide, and he stumbled back a step.
I glanced back at Courtney’s house. The men in dark suits were filing out the front door, either leaving for good or planning to return with a sledgehammer. Either way, I had missed it. I sighed and turned back to the gang member. “Hey, kid. Watch this.” I leaned down, pried up an old tennis ball from where it was embedded in the dust, and threw it hard off to the side.
A series of soft pings sounded—across the street, behind us. The kid looked around, confused. Then the tennis ball came rocketing from the other direction and bopped him lightly on the head.
“Whoa!” He stared at me. “Fuck, momma! How’d you do that?”
“Learn enough math, you might find out,” I said, keeping an eye on the suits out of the corner of my eye. Conveniently, this conversation provided a neat cover if they happened to look this way. I no longer appeared to be lurking. “Stay in school, okay?”
“Yeah, okay. Okay.” He nodded rapidly, eyes wide. Then he turned and hurried off, looking back over his shoulder at me.
Like I said, I have a soft spot for kids.
The Dark Suits had headed off at the same time, appropriately in a dark van. I glanced around the street and walked casually over to Courtney’s front door. The jamb was already splintered next to the bolt; I nudged the door open.
The living room looked like a herd of rambunctious chimpanzees had been invited to destroy it. Cushions had been torn off the furniture and rent open, their polyester filling collecting in puffy snowballs on the floor. Every chair and table had been upended. Cabinets and closets stood ajar and empty; clothing was tangled with DVD cases and broken dishes in haphazard piles amid the chaos. True to the Dark Suits’ lack of sledgehammer, however, the walls and floor were still intact.
I hesitated on the threshold, wondering what the chances were that the Dark Suits or anyone else might have left surveillance devices behind, but if so, they had probably recorded my skulking already. I picked my way through the destruction to the corner Courtney had told me about, a growing sense of urgency making me hurry. What the fuck was Courtney Polk mixed up in?
I didn’t have any tools, but breaking boards is all about the right force at the right angle. With one well-placed stomp from my boot, the floorboard splintered, and I pried back the pieces and fished out a paper bag filled with neat piles of loose bills.
My gaze skittered around the room, wondering where else Courtney might have hidden something…something small enough to spackle into a wall. But the only option I could see was breaking every floorboard and then tearing down all the sheetrock, and that would take far too long. If Courtney still insisted on claiming ignorance, maybe I could stash her somewhere and then get back with tools before the Dark Suits did.
And maybe I could get some of my questions answered another way before then. Tucking the paper bag under one arm, I headed out, pulling out the cell phone as I did so and dialing Anton.
“Mack’s Garage,” chirped a girl’s voice.
“Penny, it’s Cas. Can you put your dad on?”
“Sure!” She shouted cheerfully for her father, and in moments Anton grunted in my ear.
“Anton, it’s Cas Russell again. I need you to look up something else for me.”
Grunt.
“That client who was with me today. Courtney Polk. Check her out for me.”
“Anything else?”
“No, just—”
A deafening explosion tore through the line. I heard a girl’s scream, and Anton shouting, and then any human sound was swallowed by the chaos of more explosions, multiple ones at once—and the call went dead.
Chapter 4
Shit shit shit shit shit!
I tore back along the street, my boots pounding against the asphalt, the math blurring and every other thought evaporating as I dove toward the car. I yanked open the door and ignored Courtney’s panicked questions as I wrenched the transmission into gear and spun us out into traffic with a squeal of tires; a cacophony of horns deafened us as other drivers swerved and slammed on their brakes, but I only heard Penny’s scream, echoing endlessly, high and terrified—we had to move—faster faster faster faster faster—
LA traffic is forever fucked, but it helps to know the calculus of moving objects—and to drive like a maniac. I slued between lanes, skidding in front of other cars by a hairsbreadth, cutting it as close as the numbers told me I possibly could, and when I started hitting traffic lights, I laid on the horn and popped the wheels up over the curb to sheer down the sidewalk, horrified pedestrians hurling themselves out of my way and traumatized citizens howling expletives in my wake. Courtney made small sounds in the passenger seat, bracing herself against the dashboard and trying to hang on.
This part of town didn’t have a huge police presence, but if I’d seen blue lights behind me I wouldn’t have cared. Or stopped. Within minutes, I was careening around the last corner toward Anton’s garage.
A tidal wave of heat and light and smoke crashed over the car, overloading every sense, blasting, overwhelming. We were still a block away, but I jammed my foot down on the brake, sending Courtney tumbling against the dash.
Anton’s building was a roaring inferno, the flames towering into the sky, black smoke pouring from the blaze and rolling thick and acrid over the street. I scrabbled at the door handle and stumbled out—the heat slammed into me even at this distance, an oppressive wall of blistering air. My skin burned as it flash-dried, and every breath scalded, as if I were swallowing gulps of boiling water.
The building was melting before my eyes, collapsing in on itself, the walls and roof folding with slow grace in massive flares of sparks. My brain catalogued materials, heat, speed of propagation…this horror had used chemical help; it must have. I did a quick back-of-the-envelope timing back in my mind, holding my breath and closing stinging eyes against the smoke that clogged the air.
I ran the numbers three different ways, and only succeeded in torturing myself. Even with the most generous estimates, nobody had made it out.
Fucking math.
I stumbled back to the car. The metal of the door was already warm. I slid into the driver’s seat, wrenched the steering wheel around into a U-turn, and accelerated back the way we had come. We’d ditch this car a block or two from here in case any traffic cameras had glimpsed my vehicular stunts, then put some distance behind us before the authorities arrived.
“Did they…are they…” Courtney asked timidly.
“Dead.” My eyes and throat scratched from the smoke.
A small sob escaped her. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.” I couldn’t help wondering if it was her fault.
Or mine.
My mind buzzed. I’d contacted Anton a little over five hours ago—the traffic going into the city had held us up for a good chunk of time, but then I’d headed straight here. Five hours. Ample time to set this up, if someone had caught onto Anton’s search. If that someone happened to be motivated enough.
I tried to tell myself Anton’s work had encompassed a multitude of other projects, any of which might have generated enemies. Whoever had targeted him had overcompensated like fuck to take all of his data and information with him, but even so, a case from months or years ago might have provoked this. Some old client with a grudge. This didn’t have to be because of what I’d brought him.
Did I really believe that?
The platitudes curdled in my head.
Jesus Christ. This was supposed to be an easy job. Rescue the kid, get her out of the country, be home in time for dinner.
Nobody should have died on this one, least of all two people sitting at a computer looking things up for me.
My grip tightened on the steering wheel until my fingers hurt.
I studied Courtney out of the corner of my eye. She was hugging her knees to herself, her shoulders shaking, her ponytail falling across her and hiding her face.
She was involved in this somehow.
“What aren’t you telling me?” The words came out too harsh. I didn’t care. “Those men at your place were looking for something. What was it?”
She raised a blotchy, tear-streaked face to look at me. “I don’t—I don’t know. I swear I don’t.”
Right.
My client might be lying to me. My client, who was already on the run not only from the authorities, but from a drug cartel who wanted her dead, government men in dark suits, a dirty cop, and some unknown player willing to commit arson and murder to cover its tracks.
And, on top of everything, I’d lost my information broker. I tried not to think about Penny, the twelve-year-old kick-ass hacker who’d been taught to pay her taxes on time.
Courtney cried softly in the passenger seat the whole way to the bolt hole I drove us to. If she was playing a part, laying it on thick in the hopes I’d buy the tearful façade, she deserved some sort of acting award.
Maybe she really was just a naïve kid who had gotten in too deep, too scared or too stupid to tell me what was going on.
Still, the crying pissed me off. What right did she have to sob her eyes out for people she’d barely met and seemed to judge from moment one? “For Christ’s sake,” I growled, as I swung the car into a grimy alleyway. “You didn’t even know them.”
“How can you be so cold?” she murmured tremulously.
I slammed the car’s transmission into park. “Are you feeling guilty? Is that it?”
Tears swam in her red-rimmed eyes. “Guilty? Why would I—” Her face contorted in horror. Could someone really fake that? “This was about us? Oh, God—that was only this morning!”
Maybe I could turn her guilt to my advantage, I thought. Come at her from the side, maneuver her into revealing whatever she was hiding—
The thought was exhausting. I wasn’t any good with people, and I definitely wasn’t good at subtlety. I could threaten her, but…
Courtney rubbed the ends of her sleeves across her face, sniffling.
She was just a kid. Or near enough. Even I wasn’t willing to go there, at least not yet.
I picked up the file from Anton and the paper bag of money with stiff hands, and we got out of the car. The alleyway ended at a rusted back door; I led the way up a narrow, dark stairwell that climbed into a dilapidated second-floor loft. The furnishings were basic: mattress in the corner, some boxes with food and water in them, not much else.
I dug through one of the drawers in the kitchenette area where I remembered having thrown medical supplies and unearthed a bottle of expired sleeping pills, which I tossed at Courtney. “Here. Take those and get some rest.”
“I don’t like drugs,” she said unhappily.
I didn’t comment on the irony of that.
She swallowed the pills dry and stumbled over to the pallet in the corner. “Where are we?” she slurred, the drugs already kicking in.
“A safe place,” I said. “I have a few around the city. Keep them stocked, in case I need to lie low.”
She cocked her head at me for a long moment, smearing her sleeve across her face again, her eyes glazed. “You’re scary.”
Her frankness took me aback. “You hired me to get you out of all this, remember?”
“Yeah, I guess,” she mumbled. “I wish…” She was already starting to slump into a doze, her exhaustion combining with the pills.
“What do you wish?” Maybe, with her half-conscious state, I could get her to tell me something she otherwise wouldn’t have.
“I wish I didn’t need someone like you,” she said, and her eyes slid closed.
Yeah. Sure. I was the bad guy here.
I left my client a docile, snoozing form on the blankets, grateful for the respite. My stupid body was starting to feel the last thirty hours, but I rummaged through the drawers again and found a box of caffeine pills. I ached for a shower and a quick nap, but first I needed to see if I could put together what Anton had found—what he might have died for.
The file was thin. I pulled the lone stool in the flat up to the kitchenette counter and opened it, turning over the first few sheets of disconnected information and wondering how I would make sense of them, only to be hit in the face by a blandly unassuming document: a funding memo from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. I sat and stared at it, feeling as if someone had kicked my legs out from under me.
Pithica was a project. Possibly a highly classified government project. I closed my eyes, trying to get a grip. It could be anything, I told myself. The United States has any number of operations the population doesn’t know about; it could be anything. Anything…
I saw lab coats and red tile in my mind’s eye. Whispers of weapons and a better future. I slammed down on the vision before my imagination ran away with me.
It could be anything.
There was a reason why I stayed off the government’s radar. Why I didn’t like the police, why I willfully ignored the law, why I didn’t have a Social Security card, why—unlike Anton—I refused to pay taxes, aside from the obvious. The government scared me. Too many secrets. Too many bits of darkness I’d seen hints of over the years.
People with that much power…too big. Too dangerous.
Too real.
What was I getting into?
I forced myself to keep looking through the other documents. The Senate memo only referenced the word “Pithica” incidentally, as if the mention had slipped in by accident, and included no details on the mission of the project or who might be running it. I rifled through the rest of the pages: a report of an investigation into California dock workers’ conditions, marked with a post-it that said it had come up in cross-referencing; a transcript from a radio transmission with half the text blacked out, giving no clear reference points; another memo with the phrase “Halberd and Pithica”—Halberd must be another project, but I found no other mentions of the word…
A few other documents turned up similarly frustrating bits and pieces. The file proved Pithica existed—or had existed; the most recent document dated from more than five years ago—but nothing more. Underneath the last page was a note in Anton’s blocky handwriting: “Should be more. Dead ends. Scrubbed? Will keep digging.”
The papers had no reference to Colombian drug cartels or anything else connected to Courtney Polk, and no hint of why the LAPD—or any other local police force, for that matter—would be looking into this.
I sat back. What did I know? The dirty cop chasing after us had expected me to have information on Pithica. He had followed us from the compound, which meant the cartel was involved somehow, and he had also said that if I didn’t talk, then he’d expected Courtney to be able to answer his questions.
Why? As far as the cartel’s chain of command went, Courtney Polk had been rock bottom. What did the cop think she knew? If this was about drugs, why had the cop come after her rather than anyone higher up?
And who were the people who’d been at Courtney’s house? The suits and the way they operated had screamed government-type, which fit with what Anton’s intelligence had revealed, but at least two of them had been European. What had they wanted from Courtney?
Every piece of this mess pointed back at my skinny twenty-three-year-old and her hard luck story. Either Courtney Polk had lied to me from the first moment I met her, or a whole slew of people, from the dirty cop to the Dark Suits, were mistaken about her importance.
And I knew someone who might be able to tell me which it was. Someone who could give me an idea whether I should be protecting my new charge or pulling a gun in her face and demanding answers. Someone who, if Courtney was more than the naïve kid she seemed, might have had ulterior motives about sending me on this mad chase in the first place.
I picked up the phone.
“I said don’t get involved,” said Rio flatly by way of greeting.
“Answer me one question.” I glanced over to the corner, where my would-be client was curled up into a ball and wheezing lightly in her sleep. “Did you have some other reason for sending me after Courtney Polk?”
Heavy silence deadened the line. Then Rio said, “Who?”
* * *
This concludes the excerpt of ZERO SUM GAME available in this anthology. If you are interested in the full book or its sequels, please visit www.slhuang.com for information and links.
Chapter 1
I trusted one person in the entire world.
He was currently punching me in the face.
Overlapping numbers scuttled across Rio’s fist as it rocketed toward me, their values scrambling madly, the calculations doing themselves before my eyes. He wasn’t pulling his punch at all, the bastard. I saw exactly how it would hit and that the force would fracture my jaw.
Well. If I allowed it to.
Angles and forces. Vector sums. Easy. I pressed myself back against the chair I was tied to, bracing my wrists against the ropes, and tilted my head a hair less than the distance I needed to turn the punch into a love tap. Instead of letting Rio break my jaw, I let him split my lip open.
The impact snapped my head back, and blood poured into my mouth, choking me. I coughed and spat on the cement floor. Goddammit.
“Sixteen men,” said a contemptuous voice in accented English from a few paces in front of me, “against one ugly little girl. How? Who are you?”
“Nineteen,” I corrected, the word hitching as I choked on my own blood. I was already regretting going for the split lip. “Check your perimeter again. I killed nineteen of your men.” And it would have been a lot more if Rio hadn’t appeared out of nowhere and clotheslined me while I was distracted by the Colombians. Fucking son of a bitch. He was the one who’d gotten me this job; why hadn’t he told me he was undercover with the drug cartel?
The Colombian interrogating me inhaled sharply and jerked his head at one of his subordinates, who turned and loped out of the room. The remaining three drug runners stayed where they were, fingering Micro-Uzis with what they plainly thought were intimidating expressions.
Dumbasses. I worked my wrists against the rough cord behind my back—Rio had been the one to tie me up, and he had left me just enough play to squeeze out, if I had half a second. Numbers and vectors shot in all directions—from me, to the Colombian in front of me, to his three lackwit subordinates, to Rio—a sixth sense of mathematical interplay that existed somewhere between sight and feeling, masking the world with constant calculations and threatening to drown me in a sensory overload of data.
And telling me how to kill.
Forces. Movements. Response times. I could take down this idiot drug runner right now, the way he was blocking his boys’ line of fire—except that concentrating on the Colombians would give Rio the instant he needed to take me down. I was perfectly aware that he wasn’t about to break cover on my behalf.
“If you don’t tell me what I want to know, you will regret it. You see my dog?” The Colombian jerked his head at Rio. “If I let him loose on you, you will be crying for us to kill your own mother. And he will like making you scream. He—how do you say? It gives him a jolly.” He leaned forward with a sneer, bracing himself on the arms of the chair so his breath was hot against my face.
Well, now he’d officially pissed me off. I flicked my eyes up to Rio. He remained impassive, towering above me in his customary tan duster like some hardass Asian cowboy. Unbothered. The insults wouldn’t register with him.
But I didn’t care. People pissing on Rio made me want to put them in the ground, even though none of it mattered to him. Even though all of it was true.
I relaxed my head back and then snapped it forward, driving my forehead directly into the Colombian’s nose with a terrific crunch.
He made a sound like an electrocuted donkey, squealing and snorting as he flailed backward, and then he groped around his back to come up with a boxy little machine pistol. I had time to think, Oh, shit, as he brought the gun up—but before firing, he gestured furiously at Rio to get out of the way, and in that instant the mathematics realigned and clicked into place and the probabilities blossomed into a split-second window.
Before Rio had taken his third step away, before the Colombian could pull his finger back on the trigger, I had squeezed my hands free of the ropes, and I dove to the side just as the gun went off with a roar of automatic fire. I spun in a crouch and shot a foot out against the metal chair, the kick perfectly timed to lever energy from my turn—angular momentum, linear momentum, bang. Sorry, Rio. The Colombian struggled to bring his stuttering gun around to track me, but I rocketed up to crash against him, trapping his arms and carrying us both to the floor in an arc calculated exactly to bring his line of fire across the far wall.
The man’s head cracked against the floor, his weapon falling from nerveless fingers and clattering against the cement. Without looking toward the side of the room, I already knew the other three men had slumped to the ground, cut down by their boss’s gun before they could get a shot off. Rio was out cold by the door, his forehead bleeding freely, the chair fallen next to him. Served him right for punching me in the face so many times.
The door burst open. Men shouted in Spanish, bringing Uzis and AKs around to bear.
Momentum, velocities, objects in motion. I saw the deadly trails of their bullets’ spray before they pulled the triggers, spinning lines of movement and force that filled my senses, turning the room into a kaleidoscope of whirling vector diagrams.
The guns started barking, and I ran at the wall and jumped.
I hit the window at the exact angle I needed to avoid being sliced open, but the glass still jarred me when it shattered, the noise right by my ear and somehow more deafening than the gunfire. My shoulder smacked into the hard-packed ground outside and I rolled to my feet, running before I was all the way upright.
This compound had its own mini-army. The smartest move would be to make tracks out of here sooner rather than later, but I’d broken in here on a job, dammit, and if I didn’t finish it, I wouldn’t get paid.
The setting sun was sending tall shadows slicing between the buildings. I skidded up to a metal utility shed and slammed the sliding door back. My current headache of a job, also known as Courtney Polk, scrabbled back as much as she could while handcuffed to a pipe before she recognized me and glowered. I’d locked her in here temporarily when the Colombians had started closing in.
I picked up the key to the cuffs from where I’d dropped it in the dust by the door and freed her. “Time to skedaddle.”
“Get away from me,” she hissed, flinching back. I caught one of her arms and twisted, the physics of the leverage laughably easy. Polk winced.
“I am having a very bad day,” I said. “If you don’t stay quiet, I will knock you unconscious and carry you out of here. Do you understand?”
She glared at me.
I twisted a fraction of an inch more, about three degrees shy of popping her shoulder out of the socket.
“All right already!” She tried to spit the words, but her voice climbed at the end, pitched with pain.
I let her go. “Come on.”
Polk was all gangly arms and legs and looked far too thin to have much endurance, but she was in better shape than she appeared, and we made it to the perimeter in less than three minutes. I pushed her down to crouch behind the corner of a building, my eyes roving for the best way out, troop movements becoming vectors, numbers stretching and exploding against the fence. Calculations spun through my brain in infinite combinations. We were going to make it.
And then a shape rose up, skulking between two buildings, zigzagging to stalk us—a black man, tall and lean and handsome, in a leather jacket. His badge wasn’t visible, but it didn’t need to be; the way he moved told me everything I needed to know. He stood out like a cop in a compound full of drug runners.
I started to grab Polk, but it was too late. The cop whipped around and looked up, meeting my eyes from fifty feet away, and knew he was made.
He was fast. We’d scarcely locked eyes and his hand was inside his jacket in a blur.
My boot flicked out and hit a rock.
From the cop’s perspective, it must have looked like the worst kind of evil luck. He’d barely gotten his hand inside his coat when my foot-flicked missile rocketed out of nowhere and smacked him in the forehead. His head snapped back, and he listed to the side and collapsed.
God bless Newton’s Laws of Motion.
Polk recoiled. “What the hell was that!”
“That was a cop,” I snapped. Five minutes with this kid and my irritation was already at its limit.
“What? Then why did you—he could have helped us!”
I resisted the urge to smack her. “You’re a drug smuggler.”
“Not on purpose!”
“Yeah, because that makes a difference. I don’t think the authorities are going to care that the Colombians weren’t too happy with you anymore. You don’t know enough to gamble on flipping on your crew, so you’re going to a very faraway island after this. Now shut up.” The perimeter was within sprinting distance now, and rocks would work for the compound’s guards as well. I scooped up a few, my hands instantly reading their masses. Projectile motion: my height, their heights, the acceleration of gravity, and a quick correction for air resistance—and then pick the right initial velocity so that the deceleration of such a mass against a human skull would provide the correct force to drop a grown man.
One, two, three. The guards tumbled into well-armed heaps on the ground.
Polk made a choking sound and stumbled back from me a couple of steps. I rolled my eyes, grabbed her by one thin wrist, and hauled.
Less than a minute later, we were driving safely away from the compound in a stolen jeep, the rich purple of the California desert night falling around us and the lights and shouts from an increasingly agitated drug cartel dwindling in the distance. I took a few zigs and zags through the desert scrub to put off anyone trying to follow us, but I was pretty sure the Colombians were still chasing their own tails. Sure enough, soon we were speeding alone through the desert and the darkness. I kept the running lights off just in case, leaving the moonlight and mathematical extrapolation to outline the rocks and brush as we bumped along. I wasn’t worried about crashing. Cars are only forces in motion.
In the open jeep, the cuts on my face stung as the wind whipped by, and annoyance rolled through me as the adrenaline receded. This job—I’d thought it would be a cakewalk. Polk’s sister had been the one to hire me, and she had told me Rio had cold-contacted her and strongly suggested that if she didn’t pay me to get her sister out, she’d never see her again. I hadn’t talked to Rio myself in months—not until he’d used me as his personal punching bag today—but I could connect the dots: Rio had been working undercover, seen Polk, decided she deserved to be rescued, and thrown me the gig. Of course, I was grateful for the work, but I wished I had known Rio was undercover with the cartel in the first place. I cursed the bad luck that had made us run into him—the Colombians never would have caught me on their own.
In the passenger seat, Polk braced herself unhappily against the jounces of our off-road journey. “I’m not moving to a desert island,” she said suddenly, interrupting the quiet of the night.
I sighed. “I didn’t say desert. And it doesn’t even have to be an island. We can probably stash you in rural Argentina or something.”
She crossed her spindly arms, hugging herself against the night’s chill. “Whatever. I’m not going. I’m not going to let the cartel win.”
I resisted the urge to crash the jeep on purpose. Not that I had much to crash it into, out here, but I could have managed. The correct angle against one of those little scrub bushes…
“You do realize they’re not the only ones who want a piece of you, right? In case our lovely drug running friends neglected to tell you before they dumped you in a basement, the authorities are scouring California for you. Narcotics trafficking and murder, I hear. What, were all the cool kids doing it?”
She winced away, hunching into herself. “I swear I didn’t know they were using the shipments to smuggle drugs. I only called my boss when I got stopped because that’s what they told us to do. It’s not my fault.”
Yeah, yeah. Her sister had tearfully shown me a copy of the police report—driver stopped for running a light, drugs found, more gang members who’d shown up and shot the cops, taking back the truck and driver both. The report had heavily implicated Courtney in every way.
When she’d hired me, Dawna Polk had insisted her sister wouldn’t have hurt a fly. Personally, I hadn’t particularly cared if the girl was guilty or not. A job was a job.
“Look, I only want to get paid,” I said. “If your sister says you can throw your life away and go to prison, that’s A-okay with me.”
“I was just a driver,” Courtney insisted. “I never looked to see what was in the back. They can’t say I’m responsible.”
“If you think that, you’re an idiot.”
“I’d rather the police have me than you anyway!” she shot back. “At least with the cops I know I have rights! And they’re not some sort of freaky weird feng shui killers!”
She flinched back into herself, biting her lip. Probably wondering if she’d said too much. If I was going to go “feng shui” on her, too.
Crap.
I took a deep breath. “My name is Cas Russell. I do retrieval. It means I get things back for people. That’s my job.” I swallowed. “Your sister really did hire me to get you out, okay? I’m not going to hurt you.”
“You locked me up again.”
“Only so you’d stay put until I could come back for you,” I tried to assure her.
Courtney’s arms were still crossed, and she’d started worrying her lip with her teeth. “And what about all that other stuff you did?” she asked finally. “With the cartel guards, and the stones, and that cop…”
I scanned the constellations and steered the jeep eastward, aiming to intersect the highway. The stars burned into my eyes, their altitudes, azimuths, and apparent magnitudes appearing in my mind as if stenciled in the sky behind each bright, burning pinprick. A satellite puttered into view, and its timing told me its height above Earth and its orbital velocity.
“I’m really good at math,” I said. Too good. “That’s all.”
Polk snorted as if I were putting her on, but then her face knitted in a frown, and I felt her staring at me in the darkness. Oh, hell. I like it better when my clients hire me to retrieve inanimate objects. People are so annoying.
By morning, my madly circuitous route had only brought us halfway back to LA. Switching cars twice and drastically changing direction three times might not have been strictly necessary, but it made my paranoid self feel better.
The desert night had turned cold; fortunately, we were now in a junky old station wagon instead of the open jeep, though the car’s heater only managed a thin stream of lukewarm air. Polk had her bony knees hunched up in front of her and had buried her face against them. She hadn’t spoken in hours.
I was grateful. This job had had enough monkey wrenches already without needing to explain myself to an ungrateful child every other minute.
Polk sat up as we drove into the rising sun. “You said you do retrieval.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“You get things back for people.”
“That’s what ‘retrieval’ means.”
“I want to hire you.” Her youthful face was set in stubborn lines.
Great. She was lucky I wasn’t choosy about my clientele. And that I needed another job after this one. “What for?”
“I want my life back.”
“Uh, your sister’s already paying me for that,” I reminded her. “But hey, you can pay me twice if you want. I won’t complain.”
“No. I mean I don’t want to go flying off to Argentina. I want my life back.”
“Wait, you’re asking me to steal you back a clean record?” This girl didn’t know what reality was. “Kid, that’s not—”
“I’ve got money,” she interrupted. Her eyes dropped to her knees. “I got paid really well, for someone who drove a delivery truck.”
I snorted. “What are the going rates for being a drug mule these days?”
“I don’t care what you think of me,” said Polk, though red was creeping up her neck and across her cheeks. She ducked her head, letting her frizzy ponytail fall across her face. “People make mistakes, you know.”
Yeah. Cry me a river. I ignored the voice in my head telling me I should take the fucking job anyway. “Saving the unfortunate isn’t really my bag. Sorry, kid.”
“Will you at least think about it? And stop calling me ‘kid.’ I’m twenty-three.”
She looked about eighteen, wide-eyed and gullible and wet behind the ears. But then, I guess I can’t judge; people still assumed I was a teenager sometimes, and in reality I was barely older than Courtney. Of course, age can be measured in more ways than years. Sometimes I had to pull a .45 in people’s faces to remind them of that.
I remembered with a pang that my best 1911 had been lost back at the compound when I was captured. Dammit. Dawna was going to get that in her expense list.
“So? Are you thinking about it?”
“I was thinking about my favorite gun.”
“You don’t have to be so mean all the time,” Courtney mumbled into her knees. “I know I need help, okay? That’s why I asked.”
Oh, fuck. Courtney Polk was a headache and a half, and clearing the names of idiot kids who got mixed up with drug cartels wasn’t in my job description. I’d been very much looking forward to dumping her on her sister’s doorstep and driving away.
Though that small voice in the back of my head kept whispering: drive away where?
I didn’t have any gigs lined up after I finished this contract. I don’t do too well when I’m not working.
Yeah, right. Between jobs you’re a fucking mess.
I slammed the voice away again and concentrated on the money. I like money. “Just how much cash do you have?”
“You’ll do it?” Her face lit up, and her whole body straightened toward me. “Thank you! Really, thank you!”
I grumbled something not nearly as enthusiastic and revved the station wagon down the empty dawn freeway. Figuring out how to steal back someone’s reputation was not my idea of fun.
The voice in the back of my head laughed mockingly. Like you have the luxury of being choosy.
Chapter 2
I pulled the station wagon into a grungy roadside motel near Palmdale, the type with a cracked plastic sign of misaligned letters misspelling the word “vacancy.” I’d detoured again, and we’d circled around enough to be coming in from north of LA, through the dusty shithole towns of meth gang territory. Courtney’s friends, on the other hand, had been smuggling coke, which I supposed made them the classy drug dealers.
I didn’t need to rest, but I suspected Courtney did, and I wanted to think. I had no idea how the hell I was going to approach her case. The obvious plan was to find enough evidence on her old employers to give the DEA some sort of smashing takedown, let Courtney take the credit for it, and broker a deal to expunge her record. That would involve dealing with the police, though, and that sounded about as appealing as driving two-inch bamboo splinters under my fingernails.
I ushered Courtney ahead of me into the motel’s threadbare office; her jaws cracked with a yawn as she stumbled in. The clerk was stuttering into the phone. I crossed my arms, leaned against the wall, and waited.
The clerk stayed on his call for another ten minutes, and kept giving us increasingly nervous glances, as if he expected me to bawl him out for not helping us straightaway. I supposed that made sense, considering my messed-up fatigue-style clothes and my messed-up face, which had to be turning into a spectacular rainbow of color by this point. Or maybe he saw brown skin and thought I was a terrorist—I’ve been told I look kind of Middle Eastern. Goddamn racial profiling.
I tried to smile at him, but it ended up more like a scowl.
The clerk finally got off the phone and stammered his way into assigning us a room on the first floor. He dropped the key twice trying to give it to me, and then dropped the cash I gave him when he tried to pick the bills up off the counter. If he’d known I’d pulled the money from a succession of stolen cars that night, he probably would’ve been even more nervous.
I pulled Courtney back into the sunlight after me, where we found the right door and let ourselves into a stock cheap-and-dirty motel room, the type with furnishings made of stapled-together cardboard. Apparently relieved by my promise to help her, Courtney zonked out almost before her frizzy head smacked against the pillows on one of the dingy beds. I tossed the cigarette-burned bedspread over her and went to push open the door to the small washroom.
A gun barrel appeared in my face. “Howdy,” said the black cop from the compound from where he sat on the toilet tank. “I think we need to have a talk.”
Well, shit.
No matter how much math I know, and no matter how fast my body is trained to respond automatically to it, I can’t move faster than a bullet. Of course, if the cop had been within reach, I could have disarmed him before he could fire—but the bathroom was just large enough for the math to err on his side, considering he already had his gun drawn and pointed at my center of mass.
“Don’t mind me,” I said, inching forward and trying for flippancy. “I’m just going to use the—”
His hand moved slightly, and I froze.
“Good,” he said. “You stand still now, sweetheart. You move and I’ll put a bullet through your kidney.”
I knew two things about him now. First, he was smart, because not only had he tracked us here and then gotten into our bathroom before we had reached the room, but he also wasn’t underestimating me. Second, he didn’t give a rat’s ass about proper police procedure, which either meant he was a very dangerous cop or a very dirty one—or both.
I let my hands hover upward, showing I wasn’t going for a weapon. “I’m not moving.”
“Pithica,” he said. “Talk.”
“You have me confused with someone else,” I said. Mathematics erupted around me, layering over itself, possibilities rising and crumbling away as the solutions all came up a hair short of the time the handsome cop needed to pull the trigger.
“Talk,” said the cop. “Or I shoot you and break your pet out there.”
Courtney. Shit. Stall. “Okay,” I said. “What do you want to know?”
In the bathroom mirror, I saw the rising sun peek above the sill and through the almost-drawn curtains.
Specular reflection. Angles of incidence. Perfect. As long as the cop wasn’t going to fire blind, I had him. Hands still raised in the air in apparent surrender, I twitched my left wrist.
At the speed of light, the glint of sunlight came in through the window, hit the bathroom mirror, and reflected in a tight beam from the polished face of my wristwatch right into the cop’s eyes.
He moved fast, blinking and ducking his head away, but I moved faster. I dodged to the side as I dove in, my right hand swinging out to take the gun off line. My fingers wrapped around his wrist and I yanked, the numbers whirling and settling to give me the perfect fulcrum as I leveraged off my grasp on his gun hand to leap upward and give him a spinning knee to the side of the head.
The cop collapsed, out cold, his face smacking inelegantly into the grimy bathroom floor.
I checked the gun. Fully loaded with a round in the chamber, as I’d expected. I gave it points for being a nice hefty .45 with an extended magazine, and points off for being a Glock. Typical cop. I hate Glocks.
I searched him quickly and found three spare mags fully loaded with ammo and a little snub-nosed Smith & Wesson tucked in his boot. No wallet or phone—and, more importantly, no badge or ID of any kind. I was right; he was dirty.
I dragged him out into the room, yanked the sheet off one of the beds, and began tearing long strips from it. In the other bed, Courtney stirred and squinted at me sleepily. When she saw me tying a tall, unconscious man to the radiator, she came fully awake and shot bolt upright. “What’s going on?”
“He followed us here,” I explained. The guy must have regained consciousness fast enough to track our escape back at the compound, and must have been the one on the phone with the motel clerk when we checked in, making sure someone let him into our room before we got the key. This time I’d make sure he couldn’t track us. By the time he woke up and got himself loose, we’d be long gone.
“Who is he? Is he with the Colombians?”
I frowned at her from where I was securing my knots. “He’s the cop from back at the compound. Remember? As to whether he’s with the cartel, I don’t know. I think he’s dirty.”
“How do you know he’s a cop in the first place?”
“Police training makes you move a certain way.” It came to me in numbers, of course, the subtle angles and lines of stride and posture. But I didn’t feel like explaining that.
“Oh.” Courtney’s hands had tightened into fists on the threadbare bedspread, her knuckles white.
I finished my work and moved toward the door. “Come on, kid. We’ve got to hit the road.”
Courtney scrambled up and stayed behind me while I checked outside. The sun gleamed off the cars, the dusty parking lot completely still. If our police friend was dirty, it was unlikely he’d have a partner nearby, fortunately. I glanced around to see if I could spot his car, figuring it might have some nice toys in it—as well as maybe his badge and ID, which could give us some leverage—but no vehicle stood out as promising. Instead, I led Polk over to a black GMC truck so caked with dust and grime it looked gray. In my business, getting into a car and hotwiring it are such necessary skills I could literally do them with my eyes closed, and I had the engine coughing to life in fourteen seconds. We left the motel behind in a cloud of dust.
I flattened the accelerator, and the desert sped by around us, the morning sun flashing off dust and sand and rock. I drew a quick map of this part of the county in my head, calculating the best way to travel so that even if the cop woke up quickly and used the most efficient search algorithm he could—or had supernatural luck—the probabilities would drop toward zero that he’d be able to find us again.
Courtney’s subdued voice interrupted my calculations. “Was he after me?”
“Yeah,” I said. I brooded for a moment. “What do you know about something called Pithica?”
She shook her frizzy head. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“Are you sure? You never heard a whisper from your former employers? Think hard.”
Courtney winced away from my harshness. “No. I swear. Why?”
I didn’t answer.
What the hell was going on? Why was a peace officer on the take after Courtney Polk? She’d been a drug mule, for crying out loud, one the cartel had ended up locking in a basement. She hadn’t exactly been high on the food chain. And what the hell was Pithica?
I didn’t go straight into LA; instead, I continued zigzagging through the brown desert of the northern outskirts and switched cars twice in three hours. I didn’t know if our dirty cop could put out an APB on us—he might even have enough resources to have his buddies set up roadblocks. Best to err on the side of being impossible-to-find no matter what.
Once the morning hit a decent hour, I stopped at a cheap electronics store and picked up a disposable cell. I stood under the awning of the shop, watching Courtney where she sat in the car waiting, and dialed Rio.
“Pithica,” I said, as soon as he answered.
There was a long pause. Then Rio said, “Don’t get involved.”
“I’m already involved,” I said, my stomach sinking.
Another pause. “I can’t talk now.” Of course. He was still undercover. I’d assumed he was just taking down the whole gang for kicks, but now…
“When and where?” I said impatiently.
“God be with you,” said Rio, and hung up.
I should’ve known, I thought. Undercover wasn’t Rio’s style. His MO was to go in, hurt the people who needed hurting, and get out. If taking down the gang had been his only objective, a nice explosion would have lit up the California desert weeks ago and left nothing but a crater and the bodies of several eviscerated drug dealers. That was Rio’s style. And why had he referred Dawna to me to get Courtney out in the first place? Why not do it himself? He was more than capable; in fact, I was sure he could have done it without even blowing his cover.
Unless things were way more complicated than I had realized, and this wasn’t a simple drug ring.
“Who were you calling?” asked Courtney, getting out of the car and squinting at me in the glare of the Southern California sun.
“A friend,” I said. Well, sort of. “Someone I trust.” That part was true.
“Someone who can help us?”
“Maybe.” Rio was clearly working his own angle, and didn’t want help—even from me. Which hurt a little, if I wanted to be honest with myself. I’m good at what I do. Rio didn’t mean to hurt me, of course; he didn’t care about my feelings one way or another. He didn’t care about anyone’s feelings. I wondered what it said about me that he was the closest thing I did have to a friend.
Suck it up, Cas.
Rio wasn’t the only resource I had. I contemplated for a moment, then dialed another number.
“Mack’s Garage,” said a gravelly voice on the other end.
“Anton, it’s Cas Russell. I need some information.”
He grunted. “Usual rates.”
“Yeah. I need everything you can get on the word Pithica.”
“Spelling?”
“I’m not sure. There might be some ties to Colombian drug runners. And the authorities might be investigating already.”
He grunted again. “Two hours.”
“Got it.” I hung up. Anton was one of several information brokers in the city, and I’d hired him not infrequently over the past couple of years, whenever I wanted to know more than a standard Internet search would give me. If “Pithica” had a paper trail, I was betting he could find it.
“Come on,” I said to Courtney, shepherding her back to the car. “We’re going to hit rush hour as it is.”
Chapter 3
“Do you have cash, or is your money all in the bank?” I asked Courtney as we inched forward through the eternal parking lot of the 405 freeway, the heat beating down through the windshield and slowly cooking us. The temperature had catapulted up by a full thirty-four degrees Fahrenheit with the rising sun as we finally headed into the city: Los Angeles at its finest. Our current junkpot car didn’t have air conditioning, and the still air and stalled traffic meant even rolling down the windows didn’t help one whit.
Courtney fiddled with the ends of her ponytail self-consciously. “They paid me in cash. I didn’t—taxes, you know, I thought it would be better if…”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, trying not to laugh at her. “No sign at all they weren’t on the level. I can see why you thought it was a legitimate delivery service.” I dealt only in cash myself, of course, but I wasn’t exactly a yardstick for legality. “Where is it, under your mattress?”
She grimaced, red creeping across her cheekbones again. “A floorboard.”
“All right. We’ll swing by. Let’s hope the cops didn’t find it.” I had a fair amount of my own liquid capital stashed in various places throughout the city, but I preferred to use hers. She was supposed to be the paying client, after all.
“You think they searched my place?” Courtney asked, going tense and sitting up in the passenger seat.
“You’re a murder suspect,” I said. “You think?”
Her whole face had gone flushed now. “I—I just don’t—I have some things—”
“Relax, kid. Nobody’s going to care about your porn collection.”
She choked and broke out in a coughing fit.
“Unless it’s children,” I amended. “Then you’d be in big trouble. Bigger, I mean. It’s not kiddie porn, is it?”
“What—? I don’t—no, of course not!” she stammered. Her skin burned tomato red now, from her neck to the roots of her sweat-dampened hair. “Why would you—I don’t even—”
I laughed for real as traffic started creeping forward again. She was too easy.
Courtney’s place was only a few miles from Anton’s, and I decided to drop by the information broker’s first. Anton’s garage was a constant of the universe. A ramshackle mechanic’s outfit, the place had never changed in all the times I’d been there. The words “Mack’s Garage” barely showed through a decades-thick layer of motor oil and grime on a bent-up metal sign, and the junkers in the bays were the same derelict vehicles I’d seen the last time. No customers were in sight. Anton did know cars, as it happened, but he wasn’t known for being an auto mechanic.
I knocked on the door to the office and Anton opened it himself, a faded gray work coverall over his considerable bulk. Anton was a big, big man in every way—six-foot-five and beefy all over, he had a thick neck, thicker face, and steel-gray hair shaven to a strict quarter-inch, which for some reason made him seem even bigger. Considering I was already short, I tended to feel like a toy person next to him. But as much as I was sure he could open a can of whoop-ass on someone if he wanted to, I always thought he was kind of a teddy bear. A surly, taciturn teddy bear who never smiled, but a teddy bear nonetheless.
He grunted when he saw us. “Russell. Come in.”
Courtney and I followed him through the outer office and into Anton’s workshop. Computers and parts of computers sprawled across every inch of the place, some intact but many more in pieces, and bits of circuitry and machinery I couldn’t name hummed away all over the room in various states of repair, with teetering mountains of papers and files stacked on every marginally flat surface. A huge office chair sized for Anton’s bulk stood like a throne in the middle of the chaos, and perched in its depths was a twelve-year-old girl.
“Cas!” Anton’s daughter cried, leaping up to run over and throw her arms around my middle. Even for twelve, she was tiny, and with her dark complexion, I always figured her mother must have been a four-foot-ten Asian or Latina woman whom Anton could have picked up with his little finger.
“Hey, Penny. How’s it going?” I said, ruffling her dark hair.
“Good!” she chirped. “We’ve got an intelligence file for you!”
“Thanks. Hey, I’ve got a present for you.” I pulled the cop’s little Smith & Wesson out of my pocket. “Look, it’s just your size.”
“Ooo! Cas! Thank you!” Eyes shining, she took the gun, keeping it pointed down. “Daddy, look what Cas gave me! What caliber is it?”
“Thirty-eight Special, for a special little girl,” I said. “Take good care of it; it’ll last you a long time.” What can I say, I have a soft spot for kids.
“You’re giving her a gun?” squawked Courtney from behind me. “One you stole from a cop?”
“She knows how to use it,” grunted Anton.
Courtney quailed. “That’s not what I—”
“You think I don’t take care of my daughter right?” said Anton quietly, looming a bit. “That what you saying, girl?”
Courtney stared up and up at him. Then she said, “No, sir,” very meekly.
“Didn’t think so,” rumbled the big man. “Russell, I got that info for you. Not much to go on, mind.”
“I appreciate anything you can get us,” I said.
He pulled a file folder from among the machines. “Some fishy things here. Could be more we ain’t hit yet. You don’t mind, me and Penny’ll keep digging on this.”
“Sure,” I said, surprised. It was the first time he’d said something like that in all the times I’d hired him. “If you think there’s more to find, go for it. Usual rate.” I opened the file and gave it a cursory glance—the contents were puzzlingly varied; I’d have to sit down with it later.
“I bet we get more,” said Penny optimistically, hopping back up on her dad’s chair and rolling it over to a computer keyboard. “Hey, Cas! I cracked an IRS database yesterday. All by myself!”
“She’s got the talent,” murmured Anton in his quiet, gravelly way, but anyone could see he was glowing with pride.
“Nice job,” I told Penny. “Too bad you don’t pay taxes.”
“Well, Daddy does, but he told me not to change anything. I want to try some White House systems next.”
I turned to Anton in surprise. “You pay taxes?”
“I use this country’s services,” he said. “I pay the taxes them people we elected says I owe. Only fair.”
Wow. “Your call, I guess.”
He gave one of his trademark grunts. “Want to teach my girl right.”
Courtney made a squeaking sound. I decided I’d better get her out of sight before Anton felt the urge to reach out his thumb and crush her like a bug. Besides, Anton’s reference to more weirdness was amplifying the alarm bells that had been going off in the back of my head ever since the cop had cornered us at the motel.
The feeling got about a hundred times worse when we got to Courtney’s house.
“That’s—that’s my…” She trailed off, her hand shaking as she pointed. Two white men in dark suits were standing on her doorstep talking, the front door cracked open behind them. As we watched, one of them pushed open the door and went inside. The other stubbed out a cigarette and followed a minute later.
“What are they doing in my house?” whispered Courtney weakly.
We were still a block away. I pulled the car over and turned off the engine. Courtney’s place was a little guesthouse-type cottage, and most of the blinds were shut, but one of the side windows was the kind of slatted glass that didn’t close all the way. Through it, we could see more suits—and they were in the midst of tossing her living room. Thoroughly.
“Who are they?” asked Courtney. “Are they police?”
“No.” Some of them moved like they might have military backgrounds, but I wasn’t sure; we didn’t have a good view and I didn’t have the numerical profiles of every type of tactical training memorized anyway. Definitely not cops, though.
“Do you think—are they with the Colombians?”
“Possibly.” The men were the wrong ethnicity to be on the Colombian side of the cartel, but maybe they were American connections. Why would the cartel be searching Courtney’s place, though? If they were after the girl herself, they would be lying in wait, not turning the rooms inside out. “Did you steal anything from them? Money, drugs, information? Anything?”
“No!” Courtney sounded horrified. “I have money there like I told you, but it’s what they paid me. I’m not a thief!”
“Just a drug smuggler.” As someone who did dabble in what one might call “stealing,” when paid well to do it, I resented her indignation a bit. “Let’s keep our moral lines straight and clear, now.”
“I didn’t know,” repeated Courtney hopelessly.
I reached for the car door handle. Maybe these men were only burglars after her little stash of savings, but I wasn’t going to bet on it. “I’m going to get closer. Stay here and keep out of sight.”
“What if they come this way?” Courtney had gone pale, her freckles standing out across her cheekbones.
“Hide,” I said, and got out of the car.
I still hadn’t had a chance to clean up my face, and despite this not being the best part of town—unkempt, weedy lawns buttressed trash-filled gutters, and most of the houses sported cracked siding and sun-peeled paint—I got a few looks from people on the street as I strolled toward Courtney’s cottage. I ran a hand through my short hair, but it was a tangled, curly mass and I was pretty sure I only made it worse. Undercover work has never been my forte.
I meandered down the sidewalk, keeping a sidelong view of Courtney’s house. The dark-suited men became points in motion, my brain extrapolating from the little I could see and hear, assigning probabilities and translating to expected values. As I drew up to the house, the highs and lows of conversation became barely audible, but I ran some quick numbers—to decipher the words, I’d have to be so close I’d be the most obvious eavesdropper in the world. The plot of half-hearted grass between the street and the houses didn’t have any handy cover I could use to sneak closer, either.
I ran my eyes over the surrounding scenery, a three-dimensional model growing in my head. A stone wall curved out from just behind Polk’s house and ended in a tumble at a vacant lot, and it very nearly fit the curvature of a conic.
Sound waves are funny things. They can chase each other over concave surfaces, create reinforcing concentrations of acoustics at the focus of an architectural ellipse or parabola. Some rooms are famous for the ability to whisper a word on one side and have it be heard with perfect clarity on the other.
I only needed a few more sounding boards.
I wandered back down the street and kicked at a trash can as I went by so it turned slightly. Ran my hand along the neighbor’s fence, pulling the gate closed with a click. Flipped up a metal bowl set out for stray cats with my foot so it leaned against a fire hydrant. Tossed a rock casually at a bird feeder so it swung and changed orientation. I ambled down the street twice more, knocking the detritus of the street around, making small changes. Then I ran my eyes back across the house, feeding in the decibel level of normal human conversation.
Close. All I needed was an umbrella. It wasn’t raining, but plenty of cars were parked on the street, and I found what I needed after a quick survey of back windows. I jimmied my way in, retrieved the umbrella from the back seat, and left the car door cracked at an angle for good measure. Then I headed over to a tree at the edge of the next lot, one that stood exactly at the focus of my manufactured acoustic puzzle, put up the umbrella, and listened.
The voices in Courtney’s house sprang up as if they were right next to me.
“—utter rubbish, that’s what it is,” a man was saying in a British accent. “FIFA’s got no right to blame Sir Alex. They got a scandal, it’s their own damn fault.”
“You two and your pansy-ass soccer players,” put in an American voice. “You’re in fucking America, you know. Watch some real football.”
“Oh, you mean that boring little program where they prance around in all the pads and take a break every five minutes?”
“Aw, fuck off. At least we score more than once a game.”
“Gentlemen. Focus.” This voice was smooth, deep, and oozed charisma, cutting off whatever the American’s retort would have been like he’d hit a switch.
“I don’t think it’s here, Boss,” said a fourth guy in a nasally voice with an accent I couldn’t place. “I think she stashed it somewhere else. Or she—”
“‘Stashed it’?” cut in the talkative Brit. “Where? She doesn’t have a safe deposit box, they made it so she’s got no friends—”
“So she buried it in the front yard, or spackled it into a wall,” said the American. “Who knows what she was thinking?”
“The only place left to look here is if we come back with a sledgehammer and a shovel,” agreed the nasally man.
Their words fell off while they waited for the leader to make a decision. I found myself holding my breath.
“Hey, momma, it look like rain to you?”
I was jerked out of listening to see an arrogant teenage kid wearing far too many chains laughing in my face. “You expecting rain? Ha! Whatcha do to your face, or were you born that way?”
My first instinct was to knock him on the head and get him out of my way. But he was only a kid—a shrimpy Hispanic teen, probably part of a gang considering the area and the colored bandanna knotted around his bicep, and aching to prove himself. Even if he was doing so by picking on a small woman who resembled a disturbed homeless person at the moment.
“Are you trying to pick a fight with me?” I asked evenly, lounging back against the tree and letting the grip of the cop’s Glock peek out of my belt. The kid’s eyes got wide, and he stumbled back a step.
I glanced back at Courtney’s house. The men in dark suits were filing out the front door, either leaving for good or planning to return with a sledgehammer. Either way, I had missed it. I sighed and turned back to the gang member. “Hey, kid. Watch this.” I leaned down, pried up an old tennis ball from where it was embedded in the dust, and threw it hard off to the side.
A series of soft pings sounded—across the street, behind us. The kid looked around, confused. Then the tennis ball came rocketing from the other direction and bopped him lightly on the head.
“Whoa!” He stared at me. “Fuck, momma! How’d you do that?”
“Learn enough math, you might find out,” I said, keeping an eye on the suits out of the corner of my eye. Conveniently, this conversation provided a neat cover if they happened to look this way. I no longer appeared to be lurking. “Stay in school, okay?”
“Yeah, okay. Okay.” He nodded rapidly, eyes wide. Then he turned and hurried off, looking back over his shoulder at me.
Like I said, I have a soft spot for kids.
The Dark Suits had headed off at the same time, appropriately in a dark van. I glanced around the street and walked casually over to Courtney’s front door. The jamb was already splintered next to the bolt; I nudged the door open.
The living room looked like a herd of rambunctious chimpanzees had been invited to destroy it. Cushions had been torn off the furniture and rent open, their polyester filling collecting in puffy snowballs on the floor. Every chair and table had been upended. Cabinets and closets stood ajar and empty; clothing was tangled with DVD cases and broken dishes in haphazard piles amid the chaos. True to the Dark Suits’ lack of sledgehammer, however, the walls and floor were still intact.
I hesitated on the threshold, wondering what the chances were that the Dark Suits or anyone else might have left surveillance devices behind, but if so, they had probably recorded my skulking already. I picked my way through the destruction to the corner Courtney had told me about, a growing sense of urgency making me hurry. What the fuck was Courtney Polk mixed up in?
I didn’t have any tools, but breaking boards is all about the right force at the right angle. With one well-placed stomp from my boot, the floorboard splintered, and I pried back the pieces and fished out a paper bag filled with neat piles of loose bills.
My gaze skittered around the room, wondering where else Courtney might have hidden something…something small enough to spackle into a wall. But the only option I could see was breaking every floorboard and then tearing down all the sheetrock, and that would take far too long. If Courtney still insisted on claiming ignorance, maybe I could stash her somewhere and then get back with tools before the Dark Suits did.
And maybe I could get some of my questions answered another way before then. Tucking the paper bag under one arm, I headed out, pulling out the cell phone as I did so and dialing Anton.
“Mack’s Garage,” chirped a girl’s voice.
“Penny, it’s Cas. Can you put your dad on?”
“Sure!” She shouted cheerfully for her father, and in moments Anton grunted in my ear.
“Anton, it’s Cas Russell again. I need you to look up something else for me.”
Grunt.
“That client who was with me today. Courtney Polk. Check her out for me.”
“Anything else?”
“No, just—”
A deafening explosion tore through the line. I heard a girl’s scream, and Anton shouting, and then any human sound was swallowed by the chaos of more explosions, multiple ones at once—and the call went dead.
Chapter 4
Shit shit shit shit shit!
I tore back along the street, my boots pounding against the asphalt, the math blurring and every other thought evaporating as I dove toward the car. I yanked open the door and ignored Courtney’s panicked questions as I wrenched the transmission into gear and spun us out into traffic with a squeal of tires; a cacophony of horns deafened us as other drivers swerved and slammed on their brakes, but I only heard Penny’s scream, echoing endlessly, high and terrified—we had to move—faster faster faster faster faster—
LA traffic is forever fucked, but it helps to know the calculus of moving objects—and to drive like a maniac. I slued between lanes, skidding in front of other cars by a hairsbreadth, cutting it as close as the numbers told me I possibly could, and when I started hitting traffic lights, I laid on the horn and popped the wheels up over the curb to sheer down the sidewalk, horrified pedestrians hurling themselves out of my way and traumatized citizens howling expletives in my wake. Courtney made small sounds in the passenger seat, bracing herself against the dashboard and trying to hang on.
This part of town didn’t have a huge police presence, but if I’d seen blue lights behind me I wouldn’t have cared. Or stopped. Within minutes, I was careening around the last corner toward Anton’s garage.
A tidal wave of heat and light and smoke crashed over the car, overloading every sense, blasting, overwhelming. We were still a block away, but I jammed my foot down on the brake, sending Courtney tumbling against the dash.
Anton’s building was a roaring inferno, the flames towering into the sky, black smoke pouring from the blaze and rolling thick and acrid over the street. I scrabbled at the door handle and stumbled out—the heat slammed into me even at this distance, an oppressive wall of blistering air. My skin burned as it flash-dried, and every breath scalded, as if I were swallowing gulps of boiling water.
The building was melting before my eyes, collapsing in on itself, the walls and roof folding with slow grace in massive flares of sparks. My brain catalogued materials, heat, speed of propagation…this horror had used chemical help; it must have. I did a quick back-of-the-envelope timing back in my mind, holding my breath and closing stinging eyes against the smoke that clogged the air.
I ran the numbers three different ways, and only succeeded in torturing myself. Even with the most generous estimates, nobody had made it out.
Fucking math.
I stumbled back to the car. The metal of the door was already warm. I slid into the driver’s seat, wrenched the steering wheel around into a U-turn, and accelerated back the way we had come. We’d ditch this car a block or two from here in case any traffic cameras had glimpsed my vehicular stunts, then put some distance behind us before the authorities arrived.
“Did they…are they…” Courtney asked timidly.
“Dead.” My eyes and throat scratched from the smoke.
A small sob escaped her. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.” I couldn’t help wondering if it was her fault.
Or mine.
My mind buzzed. I’d contacted Anton a little over five hours ago—the traffic going into the city had held us up for a good chunk of time, but then I’d headed straight here. Five hours. Ample time to set this up, if someone had caught onto Anton’s search. If that someone happened to be motivated enough.
I tried to tell myself Anton’s work had encompassed a multitude of other projects, any of which might have generated enemies. Whoever had targeted him had overcompensated like fuck to take all of his data and information with him, but even so, a case from months or years ago might have provoked this. Some old client with a grudge. This didn’t have to be because of what I’d brought him.
Did I really believe that?
The platitudes curdled in my head.
Jesus Christ. This was supposed to be an easy job. Rescue the kid, get her out of the country, be home in time for dinner.
Nobody should have died on this one, least of all two people sitting at a computer looking things up for me.
My grip tightened on the steering wheel until my fingers hurt.
I studied Courtney out of the corner of my eye. She was hugging her knees to herself, her shoulders shaking, her ponytail falling across her and hiding her face.
She was involved in this somehow.
“What aren’t you telling me?” The words came out too harsh. I didn’t care. “Those men at your place were looking for something. What was it?”
She raised a blotchy, tear-streaked face to look at me. “I don’t—I don’t know. I swear I don’t.”
Right.
My client might be lying to me. My client, who was already on the run not only from the authorities, but from a drug cartel who wanted her dead, government men in dark suits, a dirty cop, and some unknown player willing to commit arson and murder to cover its tracks.
And, on top of everything, I’d lost my information broker. I tried not to think about Penny, the twelve-year-old kick-ass hacker who’d been taught to pay her taxes on time.
Courtney cried softly in the passenger seat the whole way to the bolt hole I drove us to. If she was playing a part, laying it on thick in the hopes I’d buy the tearful façade, she deserved some sort of acting award.
Maybe she really was just a naïve kid who had gotten in too deep, too scared or too stupid to tell me what was going on.
Still, the crying pissed me off. What right did she have to sob her eyes out for people she’d barely met and seemed to judge from moment one? “For Christ’s sake,” I growled, as I swung the car into a grimy alleyway. “You didn’t even know them.”
“How can you be so cold?” she murmured tremulously.
I slammed the car’s transmission into park. “Are you feeling guilty? Is that it?”
Tears swam in her red-rimmed eyes. “Guilty? Why would I—” Her face contorted in horror. Could someone really fake that? “This was about us? Oh, God—that was only this morning!”
Maybe I could turn her guilt to my advantage, I thought. Come at her from the side, maneuver her into revealing whatever she was hiding—
The thought was exhausting. I wasn’t any good with people, and I definitely wasn’t good at subtlety. I could threaten her, but…
Courtney rubbed the ends of her sleeves across her face, sniffling.
She was just a kid. Or near enough. Even I wasn’t willing to go there, at least not yet.
I picked up the file from Anton and the paper bag of money with stiff hands, and we got out of the car. The alleyway ended at a rusted back door; I led the way up a narrow, dark stairwell that climbed into a dilapidated second-floor loft. The furnishings were basic: mattress in the corner, some boxes with food and water in them, not much else.
I dug through one of the drawers in the kitchenette area where I remembered having thrown medical supplies and unearthed a bottle of expired sleeping pills, which I tossed at Courtney. “Here. Take those and get some rest.”
“I don’t like drugs,” she said unhappily.
I didn’t comment on the irony of that.
She swallowed the pills dry and stumbled over to the pallet in the corner. “Where are we?” she slurred, the drugs already kicking in.
“A safe place,” I said. “I have a few around the city. Keep them stocked, in case I need to lie low.”
She cocked her head at me for a long moment, smearing her sleeve across her face again, her eyes glazed. “You’re scary.”
Her frankness took me aback. “You hired me to get you out of all this, remember?”
“Yeah, I guess,” she mumbled. “I wish…” She was already starting to slump into a doze, her exhaustion combining with the pills.
“What do you wish?” Maybe, with her half-conscious state, I could get her to tell me something she otherwise wouldn’t have.
“I wish I didn’t need someone like you,” she said, and her eyes slid closed.
Yeah. Sure. I was the bad guy here.
I left my client a docile, snoozing form on the blankets, grateful for the respite. My stupid body was starting to feel the last thirty hours, but I rummaged through the drawers again and found a box of caffeine pills. I ached for a shower and a quick nap, but first I needed to see if I could put together what Anton had found—what he might have died for.
The file was thin. I pulled the lone stool in the flat up to the kitchenette counter and opened it, turning over the first few sheets of disconnected information and wondering how I would make sense of them, only to be hit in the face by a blandly unassuming document: a funding memo from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. I sat and stared at it, feeling as if someone had kicked my legs out from under me.
Pithica was a project. Possibly a highly classified government project. I closed my eyes, trying to get a grip. It could be anything, I told myself. The United States has any number of operations the population doesn’t know about; it could be anything. Anything…
I saw lab coats and red tile in my mind’s eye. Whispers of weapons and a better future. I slammed down on the vision before my imagination ran away with me.
It could be anything.
There was a reason why I stayed off the government’s radar. Why I didn’t like the police, why I willfully ignored the law, why I didn’t have a Social Security card, why—unlike Anton—I refused to pay taxes, aside from the obvious. The government scared me. Too many secrets. Too many bits of darkness I’d seen hints of over the years.
People with that much power…too big. Too dangerous.
Too real.
What was I getting into?
I forced myself to keep looking through the other documents. The Senate memo only referenced the word “Pithica” incidentally, as if the mention had slipped in by accident, and included no details on the mission of the project or who might be running it. I rifled through the rest of the pages: a report of an investigation into California dock workers’ conditions, marked with a post-it that said it had come up in cross-referencing; a transcript from a radio transmission with half the text blacked out, giving no clear reference points; another memo with the phrase “Halberd and Pithica”—Halberd must be another project, but I found no other mentions of the word…
A few other documents turned up similarly frustrating bits and pieces. The file proved Pithica existed—or had existed; the most recent document dated from more than five years ago—but nothing more. Underneath the last page was a note in Anton’s blocky handwriting: “Should be more. Dead ends. Scrubbed? Will keep digging.”
The papers had no reference to Colombian drug cartels or anything else connected to Courtney Polk, and no hint of why the LAPD—or any other local police force, for that matter—would be looking into this.
I sat back. What did I know? The dirty cop chasing after us had expected me to have information on Pithica. He had followed us from the compound, which meant the cartel was involved somehow, and he had also said that if I didn’t talk, then he’d expected Courtney to be able to answer his questions.
Why? As far as the cartel’s chain of command went, Courtney Polk had been rock bottom. What did the cop think she knew? If this was about drugs, why had the cop come after her rather than anyone higher up?
And who were the people who’d been at Courtney’s house? The suits and the way they operated had screamed government-type, which fit with what Anton’s intelligence had revealed, but at least two of them had been European. What had they wanted from Courtney?
Every piece of this mess pointed back at my skinny twenty-three-year-old and her hard luck story. Either Courtney Polk had lied to me from the first moment I met her, or a whole slew of people, from the dirty cop to the Dark Suits, were mistaken about her importance.
And I knew someone who might be able to tell me which it was. Someone who could give me an idea whether I should be protecting my new charge or pulling a gun in her face and demanding answers. Someone who, if Courtney was more than the naïve kid she seemed, might have had ulterior motives about sending me on this mad chase in the first place.
I picked up the phone.
“I said don’t get involved,” said Rio flatly by way of greeting.
“Answer me one question.” I glanced over to the corner, where my would-be client was curled up into a ball and wheezing lightly in her sleep. “Did you have some other reason for sending me after Courtney Polk?”
Heavy silence deadened the line. Then Rio said, “Who?”
This concludes the excerpt of ZERO SUM GAME available in this anthology. If you are interested in the full book or its sequels, please visit www.slhuang.com for information and links.
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