S Huang - Zero Sum Game

“Of course.”

“Are you trying to take down Pithica?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“And you want me to stay out of it.”

“Yes. Will you?”

I closed my eyes. I had no leads. Tresting wasn’t talking to me. Courtney was gone. Rio wouldn’t help me. I had no allies, and nothing to follow up on.

“All right,” I said.

Rio’s tone when he answered sounded awfully like relief, even though I knew that wasn’t possible. “Thank you, Cas. God bless you.”

I hung up the phone with Rio and found myself with nothing to do. Giving up on investigating Pithica meant I had zero obligations. I still felt bad about dumping Courtney’s case, but between Dawna masquerading as her sister and Tresting’s evidence that she had killed Reginald Kingsley, it seemed clear she was as hopelessly snarled up in Pithica and its machinations as it was possible to be. Which meant I didn’t feel too bad.

So I’d go with the obvious decision. I would lie low here for a week or two until the bruises and cuts on my face healed, which would help change my appearance from the composite, and then skip town. I wondered where I’d go; no city seemed more appealing than any other. Chicago? New York? Detroit? Maybe I should leave the country. Mexico was only a short hop away.

I lay back on the mattress and stared at the ceiling, and the bigger problem hit me.

I was off the job.

I wasn’t working anymore. And I don’t do well when I’m not working.

The numbers simmered around me. I tried to avoid acknowledging them, instead staring into space and yearning for some alcohol. How had I not thought it necessary to stock some hard liquor in my bolt holes? Or even something stronger? The prospect of being stuck here for days with no liquid medication, with only myself against my brain…

I gave myself a mental slap. Idiot. You can last for a few days. It’s only a few days!

The quiet room seemed to mock me.

If I stayed here a week…one week was seven days—168 hours—10,080 minutes—604,800 seconds—

I became hyper-aware of every breath, each one counting out another one of those seconds before everything would collapse, before I would fall—no, not counting another second, counting another 2.78 seconds. 2.569 seconds. 2.33402. 2.1077001. 1.890288224518154…

I clenched tingling hands into fists and tried to slow my breathing, to curb the rising tide of panicky dread. Technically I was still on a job, I told myself: hide and then escape the city. Focus on that.

For a few moments, I hoped I might fool myself.

I tried to unfocus my gaze, to concentrate on nothing, but my eyes locked on a crack in the ceiling plaster where something had banged against the dingy paint job. Numbers started to crawl out and through the spiderweb of cracks, a teeming, boiling mass—forces, angles, the entropy time-lapsing into the future and the past…the mathematical outlines of the impact and fracture and deterioration refined themselves further and further, the corrective terms layering themselves over each other until the units were so small they had no physical meaning, and they filled my brain, overflowing it—

I squeezed my eyes shut and flopped over onto one side.

An instant of blessed darkness.

A car horn sounded outside. The decibel level spiked in my head, the oscilloscope graph expanding and buzzing through my thoughts. My heartbeat thudded through me, each beat approximating periodicity—the waves broke apart, crashing and layering against each other, each amplitude spiking separately and adding another term to the Fourier series, sines and cosines repeating themselves and correcting in minute iterations. My skin stretched too tight, hypersensitive, every neuron registering forces and pressures, gravity and atmosphere crushing me between them, acting on my clothes against me and through the mattress below me where Hooke’s Law pushed back with a hundred tiny springs—

I jumped up and moved restlessly around the room. Every step was a thousand different mathematical interactions. I tried to channel it, wear it out: I ran up walls, flipped over, then vaulted into a one-handed handstand on the worn carpet. The forces balanced themselves immediately and automatically, the vectors splaying out in all directions like countless invisible guy lines. I started moving, kicking my legs back and forth as fast as I could, spinning on the spot, switching from one hand to the other, leaning myself away from my center of mass as far as the physics would allow, the calculations a swirling maelstrom around me.

Two hours later (two hours, seventeen minutes, forty-six seconds point eight seven five three nine two six zero nine eight two three one one one five seven…) I was at the counter of the nearest grocery store buying as many bottles as they had of the highest proof alcohol I could find.

“Having a party?” said the long-haired, pimply kid at the register. I thrust cash at him desperately. He counted with agonizing slowness. I was having trouble focusing on him; the image of his lanky frame slid back and forth between wavelengths of visible light and an infinitely complicated imbroglio of movement and forces, a stick figure of vectors.

“Keep the change,” I got out. He shouted after me, something about needing an ID, but I was already toppling out of the store and into the parking lot. I’d swallowed half the first bottle, the alcoholic burn lighting my esophagus on fire, before I became aware of the busy crowds surrounding me and the afternoon sun stabbing me in the eyes. My breath heaved in and out, but the alcohol was doing its work to take the edge off, its depressive effects calming the numbers until they were their usual manageable background hum.

“Excuse me, miss? You can’t do that here.” A security guard in a reflective orange vest was approaching me, an older white man with a bristly haircut, his gut pushing over his belt.

I took a deep breath. “I’m good,” I tried to brush him off. “I’m good.”

“Miss, I’m going to have to ask you to leave the premises,” he said, his superior tone already grating on my nerves. “Did you drive here?”

“No. I walked. I’m good.” And Tresting thought my first response was always to punch people. See? I can behave. “I’m good. I’m leaving.”

Another security guard strode quickly out of the store, a tall woman built like a brick. “Ma’am, the cashier says you didn’t show an ID for the alcohol.” She registered the half-empty bottle in my hand. “Ma’am, you can’t drink that here.”

“Yes, I’ve heard,” I said grumpily. “I already told him, I’m leaving.”

“Ma’am, could we see an ID, please?”

I put down the bottles and felt around in my pockets, in my pants and then in my jacket. And felt around again.

Shit.

I always carry a few fake IDs; I never know when I might need one. But along with my Colt, the Colombians had taken everything in my pockets when they’d captured me three days ago, and replacing my ID had completely slipped my mind. My scrambling fingers found that over the past few days I had accumulated a knife, several spare magazines, some loose ammunition, a couple of grenades from the other night, and a bunch of cash, but no IDs.

“I, uh, I forgot it,” I said. “Look, I’ll leave the booze, it’s fine.” I’d self-medicated enough already to stabilize my world for the moment. I could go back and check the Chinatown apartment to see if I had an ID in my stash in the drywall; I probably did. I raised my hands in a gesture of surrender and took a few steps back.

The two security guards looked at my half-drunk bottle on the ground. Then they looked at me.