S Huang - Zero Sum Game

The thought of abandoning Courtney gave me a squirmier feeling than anything else. I’d never broken a contract before. My priorities probably proved Tresting’s point about me being a bad person.

I tried not to think about that either, or what Tresting had said to me. Your first solution is always to pull the trigger… That wasn’t a bad thing, I insisted to myself. It meant I survived, and would keep surviving. I needed to keep reminding myself of that, because Arthur’s words kept echoing in my head, tedious and ugly and irritating. Life is cheap to you…

I rested my head against the dark train window, exhausted. My trail was clear as far as I could tell; some sleep might finally be in order. Maybe everything would look better in the morning. Fat chance of that. More likely everything would be far more apocalyptic in the morning when I wasn’t strung out on fatigue. Too drained to bother stealing another car and driving a long distance, I switched trains to head back toward Chinatown—I had a little hole of an apartment paid up a few blocks outside of it. I fell into a doze on the way there and almost missed the stop.

It was the middle of the night when I finally reached my bolt hole, and I was almost afraid I wouldn’t remember where it was. But no, I found the ugly, rundown building and the outside door that led into the room I kept there. I studied the address and concentrated; I had an algorithm for where I hid keys that used the house number and the letter count of the street as inputs. I measured with my eyes and leveraged up the appropriate brick—ah, there it was.

I barely got inside the room before I collapsed on the thin mattress in one corner and fell asleep. At least I didn’t dream.

I woke up in the middle of the next morning. The room was still dim; heavy curtains hung over the one small window that was too grimy to see through anyway, but I could hear traffic out on the street and someone yelling in Chinese, and my watch told me it was after ten. Fuck. I’d slept for a long time.

I sat on the thin mattress and ate some cold breakfast out of a can while I tried to think. I had a lot of people after me right now. Fortunately, none of them knew who I was, and I was as prepared as a paranoid crazy person could be for needing to stay out of sight, hence places like this that I kept paid up and stocked with food and basic medical supplies. I had a box of other necessities here, too, hidden in a nook carved out of the drywall: a bundle of cash and another firearm at the very least. My bolt holes varied with what supplies I’d stashed in them, but they all had the basics.

So potentially I could do what I’d thought about last night and disappear. The easiest way out would be to lie low here indefinitely, then stuff a bunch of cash in my pockets and get the hell out of LA. Switching my base of operations to another big city would make no difference at all to me. I had no reason on earth not to get out, and every reason to run as far as possible from a place where a lot of people seemed to want either to kill me or to scramble my brains into an omelet.

Like Dawna Polk.

I shivered and wrapped the bed’s thin blanket around myself, pulling it tight. The chronic headache had resurged as a dull throb. Dawna Polk—a woman who could look at you and read anything she liked from you, no limits, easy as you please. A woman who could pluck out your deepest secrets. A woman who could compel you to do anything. Believe anything.

I remembered how I’d felt after I’d spoken with her, when I was defending her to Rio to the point of irrationality. I had felt perfectly normal. Every thought, every reaction, had seemed to follow logically from the last. As far as my brain had been concerned, Rio had been the person acting strange. It had taken Rio’s pushing, and consequently me doing something wholly and appallingly out of character, for me to realize something was wrong—and if “Steve” were to be believed, even that wouldn’t have snapped most people out of it.

Of course, the most obvious question was also the most terrifying one: aside from getting me to tell her my immediate plans and making sure I didn’t look too closely at her, had Dawna Polk suggested anything else to me?

How could I know any of my decisions since talking to her were my own? How could I even be sure I hadn’t been contacting her and then purposely forgetting about it? Leena Kingsley was proof that Dawna was capable of obliterating or changing any memory I thought I had. All of reality was suspect. I couldn’t be sure of anything.

The feeling was paralyzing.

I tried to think back through everything that had happened so far. It all sounded like me, and no odd blank spots struck me, but if I was compromised already, then that meant nothing.

I had a desperate urge to talk to someone who knew what I was supposed to sound like, to check myself and figure out which way in hell was up. I needed to talk to Rio anyway, I thought; we needed to touch base and compare notes, and with Tresting turning his back on me, I needed every lead I could get—and Rio might have new information.

Of course, he’d also been tracking Dawna Polk. If he’d talked to her, too…

I suddenly felt strangled, like I was having trouble getting air. If Dawna Polk had seen to meddle with Rio’s faith in God—if she had shaken his moral compass even in the slightest—

Fuck.

“Get a grip, Cas,” I said out loud.

I couldn’t sit here wallowing in indecision. That itself might be what she wanted. I still had to make choices, and hope like hell they were mine to make.

Do the math, I told myself. How many variables? How many possible paths? She can’t have microscopic control; it’s not practical. The thought let me breathe a little easier. Dawna Polk might have some foothold in my head, but there was no way she could have predicted every event that would happen to me and implanted her preferred reaction to it. At least, I hoped not. And are you really so egotistical that you think you merit her full-time puppet mastery?

It depended on what she wanted with me, I supposed, which brought me back to wondering why she had even called me in the first place. It was clear Pithica already had the resources to pull Courtney out of the cartel’s clutches if they had chosen to. So why me?

I mulled it over for a while, but I had no idea. The only possibility I could think of was what Steve had said—that I had shown some sort of unusual resilience to Dawna’s techniques. Maybe Pithica had known that somehow and wanted to test me on it. Was this all an elaborate game to see whether I was capable of shaking off their influence? Or—Steve had said Pithica had some normal human agents; could everything have been a strange way of recruiting me? Maybe each interaction was supposed to build up some web of faith in Dawna and Pithica until I was their thoroughly domesticated delivery girl.

I shivered again.

But that didn’t make sense either. If that were the case, Dawna Polk would be failing miserably at her indoctrination effort. Pithica had done nothing but try to kill or brainwash both me and the people I’d been working with since I’d rescued Courtney; I feared and distrusted them now more than ever, particularly Dawna. It would be nice to assume they were making mistakes, but that seemed like wishful thinking. No, I was missing something.

Dammit. I wasn’t sure how to begin to unsnarl this whole mess—like I’d told Tresting, I wasn’t an investigator. I didn’t usually need to figure anything out beyond how to get through a locked door.

I definitely needed to get in touch with Rio. And sooner rather than later.

I left most of my small arsenal under the mattress, disdaining the shoddy guns for the Ruger I had stashed in the wall, and set out to find an electronics store.