S Huang - Zero Sum Game

As long as I had an instant to react, however, I’d have the edge. And Tresting didn’t have a chance without me, I reminded myself. I took a deep breath, every sense alert, and nosed the car forward down the makeshift road.

The GPS said I was still a few miles away. The car crunched over the rocky ground, the empty night rolling by quietly to either side. Before long a handful of buildings rose ahead, a ghost town looming out of the desert: a couple of boarded-up businesses, a graffitied gas station, a string of warehouses that had probably encouraged the town to grow here in the first place. Darkness cloaked all the buildings, and they sat heavy with the stillness of the long-since abandoned.

I let the sports car roll to a stop and watched from a distance. Nothing moved. The moon lent its gray light to the emptiness, but only showed each hulking, shadowed building as darker and more vacant than the next. I sat for a moment, measuring out likely places for danger to come from, extrapolating probable threats. Snipers? Possible, though they didn’t have many vantage points here; the lines of sight danced through my senses and crossed at poor angles. Mines in the road, as the motorcycle gang had tried? A bomb that would obliterate the entire town, one already set to detonate, one I would never even see before it went off?

That was all more dramatic than Pithica’s preferred MO, though. Maybe they wouldn’t care how they took me out; after all, I lived off the grid anyway, and no one would miss me. But wouldn’t they want a better explanation for Arthur’s demise? How much would they care about disguising it?

I wasn’t keen to find out. My current objective was to find Tresting and leave. We could return with a much better plan than sneaking in haphazardly and separately in the dark.

I goosed the sports car forward, the tires crunching on gravelly asphalt. As I came to the outskirts of the town, a familiar shape rose out of the darkness and distinguished itself: Tresting’s truck.

I stopped the car and slid out, drawing the Smith & Wesson. I reached out my other hand to press against Tresting’s hood. The engine was cold. He’d been here for a while already.

A slight scuff in the dirt. I spun and dove to the side in a crouch, bringing up the Smith—

I recognized the silhouette and let my finger up off the trigger. “Tresting. Shit.”

He lowered his weapon at the same time I did. “Russell? What you doing here?”

“Backing you up.” I straightened, staying wary. “Checker called me in.”

He sucked in a breath. “Course he did.”

“What’s the situation?” I asked, keeping my eyes on the darkened buildings.

He turned back toward the town. “Ain’t rightly sure. Nothing here.”

My spine prickled. “What do you mean, nothing?”

“Been through the place three times,” Tresting said. “Was real leery of surprises the first time through, but…nothing.”

That didn’t make any sense. “What about the tracker?”

“Ain’t found it yet. Looks to be in the second warehouse there—” He nodded toward the hulking buildings. “—but the signal ain’t precise enough for me to pinpoint. Searched the place top to bottom, and can’t find anything.”

“Show me,” I said.

I let Tresting take point, trailing him to the warehouse. I kept my gun drawn, my senses wired, but the street stayed empty.

Tresting led the way inside, prying up a metal roll-up door with a loud screech of steel. I glanced around sharply, but our surroundings didn’t give a twitch in response.

I ducked into the warehouse, my eyes straining against the leaden darkness inside. A few grimy skylights let in scant moonlight, but didn’t provide any more contrast than outlines of gray on gray. Someone had tried to refurbish the inside of the warehouse, badly, and had never finished—flimsy walls attempted to partition the vast floor space and formed a maze of unceilinged half-rooms, as if a giant had approximated an office cubicle jungle with cheap sheetrock.

“Could be anywhere,” said Tresting softly, his voice echoing. “Might be hopeless.”

“I think we can narrow it down,” I said. I’d taken great care to pay attention to the coordinates Checker had given me, and to what the GPS had read when I stopped the car. I did a quick extrapolation in my head given the precision of the tracker—it had to be the northeast corner. “This way,” I murmured, heading in that direction.

Tresting seemed as nervous as I was, even after having searched the whole place already. This time he hung back while I led, watching our six in a semicircle as I found a way through the wide aisles between the drywall.

“It has to be somewhere past here,” I said, and then realized I didn’t hear Tresting’s footsteps behind me anymore.

I slipped to the side and whipped around, gun barrel first.

Tresting had disappeared. Instead, a slender silhouette was stepping out of one of the unfinished rooms and raising delicate hands in the air.

Everything went cold. Even in the darkness I recognized Dawna Polk.

“Hello, Ms. Russell,” she said. “My people have Mr. Tresting. Please put down your weapon, or unfortunately he will be the one to suffer for it.”

He said he searched the building. He said he searched the building! Where had they been hiding? And why?

“You have questions,” acknowledged Dawna. “The reason we did not show ourselves before now was that we were waiting for you.”

How could they possibly know I would show up?

“We made some educated guesses about human nature,” she answered with a small smile. “We’re quite good at that.”

But what did they want with me in the first place? And why not just kill us?

“I shall explain everything in good time,” said Dawna. “But you are quite correct; we do wish you to accompany us whole and unharmed for the moment. Your new friend Mr. Tresting is more expendable, so please, put your weapons on the floor.”

Jesus Christ. She was reading my mind.

And to make everything orders of magnitude worse, they’d grabbed Arthur so quickly and quietly I hadn’t heard a whisper of it. Some serious muscle must be lurking in the shadows—I’d fought alongside Tresting; he was no slouch.

And now Pithica had him.

I lowered the Smith & Wesson slowly and placed it on the cement floor, keeping my hands away from my body as I stood back up, wondering just how far Dawna Polk’s powers went.

“Really, Ms. Russell?” said Dawna, a hint of humor in her voice.

“It was worth a try,” I said aloud, and reached around to untuck the Glock and the TEC-9 from my belt and leave them on the ground, too.

“Everything,” said Dawna. “I must say, it’s almost as if you doubt me.”

I slid the knife out of my boot and left it with the firearms.

Dawna lowered her hands. “That’s better,” she declared, and I felt a sharp pang of frustration. Rio had warned me, but something in me had hoped his stark description an exaggeration. Mind reading had seemed too absurd, too unbelievable. But here was Dawna Polk, able to see exactly what I was thinking as if she’d cracked open my skull, to look at me and know—

“Yes, I do,” Dawna said briskly. “Now, we do know you can be…an effective person, even unarmed. Please believe Mr. Tresting will continue to be a hostage to your good behavior.” She raised her voice slightly. “Take her, please.”

More shadows glided out of the surrounding rooms, black-clad bodies punctuated with the distinctive hard angles of the well-armed. If I had been here alone, I might have looked for a way out, even with Dawna reading me—might have tried to get away even if the mathematical expectation read death. But if I made a move… goddamn Arthur. I shut my mind away from calculating escape routes and let gloved hands pull my wrists behind me; the plastic bite of a ziptie cut into my skin.