Zero Sum Game

Chapter 36

Remember…

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

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

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

Where am I?…what am I?

Sense returned in slow intervals.

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

So was Rio.

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

What had Dawna done to me?

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

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

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

“The very same. You hurt?”

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

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

“What happened?” I mumbled.

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

I didn’t know either.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Made a deal,” said Arthur.

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

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

“He what?” I cried.

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

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

“He saved our lives, Russell.”

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

To save Arthur and me. No—to save me.

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

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

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

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

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

“So they all just left?” I asked.

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

Remember.

“I don’t know.”

“Psychic attack or something?”

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

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

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

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

“That’s stupid,” I said.

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

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

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

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

Dawna had done something to me. Right.

What had she…?

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

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

“Where to?” asked Arthur.

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

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

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

“Sirens,” said Arthur.

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

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

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

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

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

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