Authors: SL Huang
They left us in the cell for days. I couldn’t help but wonder what Dawna still wanted with us; after all, we’d only been her bait to entrap Rio. Maybe she’d kill us when she got around to it, or maybe she did want to recruit us for real, but was prioritizing Rio.
I thought a lot about what she’d said about Pithica working for the greater good. I still didn’t know what to believe, but it didn’t much matter to me right now. She had Rio, and that decided me; I’d be damned if I would let my doubts about whether Pithica was all right as an organization keep me from backing him up and getting us out of here.
Unfortunately, every idea I thought of to break out came up short computationally. With the guard at the end of the cellblock, anything I tried would have to be fast enough to avoid being shot, and in order to neutralize the guard first I’d need something both of sufficient mass and small enough to throw. Every option I thought of I had already considered, calculated, and discarded during our first round in here. Too bad I hadn’t known about Arthur’s secret mobile phone before, I thought sarcastically. A phone would have made a perfect projectile.
Whatever. Eventually there would come some change, some break. Dawna would bring me to talk to her again, or one of the guards would have a bout of laziness, or something else would happen, and when the window of opportunity hit, I would be ready.
Three days after Rio’s abortive rescue attempt, Dawna Polk came to see us. She stood in front of our cell and spoke to me as courteously as she always did. I’d slammed my walls of mathematical white noise back up, although at this point I wasn’t sure they were doing any good; she never seemed bothered.
This time was no exception. Her mind appeared to be concentrated wholly on whatever she was here about; she barely made eye contact. “Ms. Russell,” she said, very formally and with no hint of irony, “I want to apologize for what is about to happen here.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked. “Are you finally going to kill us?”
“I’m not a sadist,” said Dawna quietly, avoiding the question. “I want you to know I sincerely regret doing this to you.”
Arthur edged forward. I ignored him; we hadn’t exchanged three words in as many days. “What’s going on?” he asked. He had taken hold of the bars and gripped them like he planned to dent them. “You promised not to hurt her. You promised.”
Huh. Brainwashed-Arthur’s primary motive might be getting Rio offed, but he was still concerned about my welfare, such as it was. Who knew.
Dawna nodded to the PI. “I did say that. I’m afraid it cannot be helped. My apologies to you, as well.”
“You can’t—you swore to me—” Tresting’s eyes darted around like a cornered animal’s. “Take me instead,” he offered suddenly. I blinked at him in shock. I hadn’t realized he was
that
concerned. Or was this his “all life is valuable” schtick? Whatever the reason, Tresting was hyperventilating, tension cording his body. “Whatever you’re planning, whatever you need someone for, take me instead,” he implored Dawna. “I did this, my doing, I—leave her out of it. Please.”
“Unfortunately, that is not possible.” She turned back to me. “You, Ms. Russell, are the anomaly, so it is you we must use for our test. I do apologize, once again.”
The anomaly. She was talking about Rio—and my relationship with him was her anomaly. “You think you have him,” I whispered, suddenly cold. “You think you found a way.”
She inclined her head. “For which I must thank you. His belief in God was the key to our understanding. No one else might have known such a thing about him.”
“I never mentioned that,” I croaked.
She smiled pityingly. “Oh, Ms. Russell, you know who I am. You didn’t need to.” Of course. “Mr. Sonrio has indeed agreed to work for us,” she continued. “I did expect it would come to that, considering the vast overlap in our mutual goals, but it was you who put us on the right track, so again, thank you, Ms. Russell. I believe we shall be able to satisfy his…needs, and the good he will do with us will save so many lives.”
Tresting made a strangled sound. “Wait. You wanted him to
work for you?”
I wanted to laugh in his face, even though I had never felt less amused. “What, she didn’t tell you? She doesn’t want to keep Rio from going around killing people, she wants to harness him for herself. Why did you think they wanted him alive?”
“I thought—” His face froze in horror. Oh, the irony. He’d been expecting Dawna to stop Rio, not recruit him. Well, wasn’t this funny, in a way that made me want to scream.
Dawna ignored him. “I hope you will be comforted, in the end,” she continued to me, “to think of the good your friend will be doing with us, and the part you have played in it. But I hope you understand—we do have to be sure.”
“You mean you still can’t read him,” I translated. “You’re trying to make sure you control him, but you can’t read him. And I’m the only person he’s had a predictable response to.”
“‘Control’ is such an ugly word,” said Dawna. “Instead let us say, we must be certain he is truly on our side. I
am
sorry.”
“And if he isn’t on your side?” I challenged her.
“Oh, I doubt that will be the case, Ms. Russell. But if he is not, then…well. In that case it would be time to cut our losses. So if it helps, you can also be comforted by your friend being spared by your sacrifice.”
“You twisted woman!” Tresting cried, finding his voice. “
Twisted
—I can’t—I believed you!”
Dawna smiled at him. “Rest assured, Mr. Tresting, if I have time or inclination, I am sure I can bring you around to our point of view again quite easily. We are doing what’s best, after all.”
“I will never trust another word you say,” declared Tresting hotly.
A thread of frustration entered Dawna’s voice. “Oh, of course you will. For goodness sake, you would come back to us in a heartbeat as soon as I—” She stopped and put a hand to her temple. “I am so sorry, Mr. Tresting. It’s been a trying few days. I assure you, this must be done, but we can discuss it afterwards. Would you prefer to be in another room?”
“No,” growled Arthur.
“As you wish,” said Dawna. She nodded to both of us, her composure back in place. “I shall return shortly.”
Arthur rounded on me. “Oh, God,” he cried frenziedly. “Oh, God. What she gonna do?”
I had thought it obvious. “She’s going to have Rio kill me,” I said.
Arthur froze.
“Well, there might be some torture first or something, but only if Dawna has the stomach to ask for it.”
He threw up.
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.