Zero Sum Game

Chapter 26

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arthur sidestepped in front of me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hello, Cas,” he said.

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

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

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

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

Rio had to shoot me.

Fuck.

“Cas?” said Rio.

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

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

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

Oh, Jesus, I wished we did.

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

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

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

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

And fired.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then everything exploded in a cacophony of noise.

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

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

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

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

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

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