Null Set Read online

  Rio apparently thought I should run, too.

  A woman with short, steel-gray hair frowned down at a clipboard. “Have they told you—”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She nodded. “I agree. Giving up is for those who would have us fail. We will never do something great if we run.”

  Too bad for whomever had just slithered out of my hidden memories, because in this case I was going to do my damnedest to try.

  eleven

  I LEFT Checker’s place and walked back to my car. I sat down on the curb, holding my phone. A light breeze blew around me, and the sun wandered across the sky.

  After the initial shock, my brain had recalibrated to believe what Checker had told me. It was hard to imagine him having any motivation to lie about this. Unless he was trying to put me off Rio, but he’d always been open about his discomfort with Rio’s and my friendship—and he wasn’t the type to play games.

  Besides, I did know what Rio was. I knew what he was capable of. What Checker had claimed … wasn’t out of the question.

  What was out of the question was Rio going after someone innocent of real wrongdoing—someone like Checker—in a way I couldn’t persuade him to stop. I was as bone-sure of that as I was about the type of man Rio was, the type of pleasure he derived from doing unspeakable things to people. After all, I’d known him a hell of a long time.

  How long?

  I ignored the question.

  “He doesn’t go after innocent people,” I said aloud. “He doesn’t.” His faith prevented him, a religious faith that guided him to channel his proclivities into being judge, jury, torturer, and angel of death only to those he weighed as sufficiently evil.

  That didn’t include Checker. It couldn’t. It would violate every axiom of understanding I had. Rio wasn’t going to come after Checker or Arthur unless he thought he had to, and I was going to make sure he didn’t ever feel like he did.

  I dialed Rio’s number.

  The message from his permanent voice-mail box played, the one set up the same way mine was. “Call me back,” I said. My throat was dry.

  I hung up the phone and sat, and waited. The evening drew on and got chillier. I got up and drove back to the apartment I was using, watching for tails I couldn’t see.

  I’d made it back and was pushing open the door when my phone rang with a blocked number. “Hello?”

  “Hello, Cas,” said a flat baritone. Rio.

  “Hi,” I said. The word was tight. It was hard to know what to say.

  I’d never been good at hiding anything, however, especially from someone who’d known me as long as Rio. “He told you.”

  “I guessed,” I corrected. I shut the door and leaned against it, staring at a spot on the carpet. “You scared him. Badly.”

  “I meant to.”

  “Why?”

  “Cas, it’s important you not look into this. Will you trust me?”

  “Of course,” I said. “We’ll stop. We already have. I didn’t want to in the first place.”

  “I would have expected.”

  “Checker assumed you had a reason, you know. In between being petrified, he said he thought we should give it up anyway. You could have made your point without threatening him.”

  “Evidently.”

  “Rio…” I swallowed. “Please don’t do that again.”

  He was silent.

  “Checker is … important to me. I don’t know if you can understand that, but—please at least remember it.”

  “I shall take it into consideration.”

  “I don’t want to go back to…” I cleared my throat. “Before Checker and Arthur were in my life, I was— If something happened to either of them…” My voice rasped. I felt oddly naked saying this out loud, weak and maudlin, but I had to make him understand. “If it did, I’m not—I’m not sure what I’d do. I’m not sure what it would do to me.”

  Rio paused. “Understood.”

  “You’re not going to come after him, are you?”

  “No. Not this time.”

  “Not any time!”

  He paused again. “I can’t promise that, Cas.”

  “Yes,” I said. Anger started to burn in me, hot and furious. “Yes, you can.”

  “Cas—”

  “I can’t be worried about this,” I said. “This is not negotiable. Promise me, Rio.”

  He was a long time in answering. “All right.”

  The tension and frustration leaked out of me. I sank to the floor, my back against the door. “Thank you.”

  “Cas, how have you been?”

  The change in topic threw me. “Fine,” I said automatically. “What do you mean?”

  “This … sudden interest in past events. Was there a reason?”

  “I … I realized I…” I tried to steady myself. “I used to think it was normal, not being able to remember. It’s not, is it?”

  “No,” he said. “But you should not look into it.”

  “Okay,” I said. I trusted him.

  “Good.”

  “I didn’t want to anyway.”

  “Good.”

  I pressed my lips together. It was on my tongue to tell him about Simon, about the visions, about how I felt like I was starting to lose myself. But I didn’t. Rio had said to ignore everything from my past, and those were all squarely out of my past.

  I’d have to direct Arthur to stop looking into Simon, in addition to halting the investigation into me. Who knew what I’d do about the man himself. Maybe I should tell Rio about him, come to think of it—Rio was unaffected by telepaths, as far as I knew, and given what he’d said to Checker, I was willing to bet my Simon problem would swiftly cease to exist.

  I opened my mouth, reconsidering, and then shut it again, reticence squirming through me at the idea of aiming Rio at Simon in what amounted to cold-blooded murder.…

  That was weird. I didn’t usually get squirrelly about killing people. At least not people who were so clearly a threat. I remembered the way I’d tried to convince Arthur out of going after him … not to mention the way I’d felt like I couldn’t shoot Simon myself.

  And I felt like vomiting.

  Fuck. Simon had influenced me not to kill him, and telling Rio would effectively bust that, so I couldn’t.

  It really, really made me long for my enemies to take him down in a crossfire. Fucking psychics.

  * * *

  ARTHUR DIDN’T want to be dissuaded from investigating Simon, especially when I didn’t give him a reason for calling it off. He’d been doing a lot of legwork for a man with a fucked-up leg. First, he’d kept his promise to keep questioning people at the cemetery and discovered that not only had a next of kin been listed, on a record that had mysteriously gotten lost somehow, but that someone had been doing periodic check-ins by phone. When Arthur had pulled the records, the numbers all snaked back to countries on the other side of the world—Greece, Bahrain, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia.

  The people Arthur had spoken to at the cemetery had all enthused about how this person whose name they couldn’t quite recall was such a nice man, who cared so much, and they were happy to keep checking on the wall niche for him. Some of them said they were sure he’d stopped by, or maybe been there when my urn had been entombed in the wall … but none of them could agree on either a description of his features or the year it had happened. Or what relationship he was supposed to have had with me.

  Simon had made himself well liked and yet unmemorable, and gotten what he needed without technically brainwashing anyone. After all, people helped out likeable folk all the time, and forgot unmemorable ones.

  “I’m surprised he didn’t just make me decide he was my friend,” I said to Arthur. I’d come to the apartment I was lending him to tell him to quit his Simon efforts, and Arthur lounged back on the futon on his good side while I sat on a folding chair.

  “You’re not predisposed to it,” Arthur said. “You’d be wary of him whether he made himself likeable or not. But Russ
ell, you know you’re mixed up about him, too.”

  I knew. I pressed my fingers against my forehead as I remembered something. “He saw where Checker lives.”

  “Fuck, Russell. I’ll get them out of there.” He picked up his phone. “See, this right here is why when you say stop, I hear red alert. We gotta keep looking into this guy. Even if he messed you up in the head—especially if he messed you up. Can you see that, at least?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer before dialing Checker. A fair amount of profanity ensued from the other end of the line.

  “I should’ve known, I should’ve known,” I heard Checker say more than once. I also definitely caught my name.

  They were right. I should’ve seen Simon’s knowledge as an immediate, actionable threat, and I hadn’t. Only one logical explanation offered itself for that kind of oversight.

  Of course I’d trusted a telepath when I shouldn’t have.

  Belated guilt washed over me. I might not be able to prevent Simon from messing with my neurons, but I was the one he was targeting. I was the reason Arthur and Checker and Pilar were getting tangled up with a psychic. Again.

  We’d get the brain entrainment up and running, and then, if Simon was still dogging my heels, I’d leave town and give him the runaround for a while. He could chase me until he got tired of it. Or until the strange images rising in my head won and drove me insane.

  We stood on the roof of a silo, farmland quilting the land around us to the horizon, and Simon laughed. “We’re here; we’re alive; we’re free!”

  I’m not, I thought, but I didn’t tell him. Time enough for that later.

  Fuck, I needed to get a handle on this.

  Arthur hung up the phone.

  “It’s not Simon who’s making me tell you to stop,” I said, hoping that was the whole truth.

  “You can’t know that, Russell.”

  “It’s not.” I braced myself. “It’s Rio.”

  Arthur stared at me. I was pretty sure he’d momentarily stopped breathing.

  “I know you have a hard-on for Rio,” I said. “Quit it. He’s telling me we should stop, and I trust him, and you and Checker fucking promised me that you wouldn’t keep going if I told you no.”

  “We did, but—”

  “But?”

  “Russell! You got another psychic after you. You saw what the last one did. This isn’t a matter of preference anymore!”

  “Wait, you two digging into my past is a matter of preference?”

  He glared at me. “Not what I mean, and you know it.”

  “We already know this Simon guy’s a wuss. Objectively, Arthur; we know it objectively. He could’ve gotten whatever he wanted from all of us without anybody knowing, and he didn’t, because he’s a wimp. Rio’s a lot more dangerous than he is.”

  “You don’t know that. Maybe this Simon fellow just doesn’t have enough telepathic-type skill to do what you say. But he could still—”

  “He can erase himself from security cameras!”

  “And maybe that’s Telepathy 101. You don’t know what’s easy for him and what’s not.”

  He had a point. I didn’t like it when that happened. “Rio said stop, so we stop,” I said. “You really want to get you and Checker on his bad side? This is Rio we’re talking about.”

  I hoped he wouldn’t press the issue. I didn’t want to tell him Rio had explicitly threatened them. Arthur was the martyr type; it would probably make him even more stubborn.

  “Look into this instead,” I said, pulling out a sheaf of printouts. “Checker got me that list of Pourdry’s businesses and connections. If we shut him down, you and Pilar won’t have to be looking over your shoulders anymore. And you guys can be manual labor for me on all the hardware stuff I’m about to need, too. There’s a ton of shit to do without making extra work for ourselves.”

  “This conversation isn’t over,” Arthur said.

  “But you’ll stop looking into him for now?”

  He hesitated.

  “Arthur. This is important to me, and it’s important to Rio. You do not want to piss either of us off.”

  “There’s stuff you’re not telling me, isn’t there?”

  My lungs clenched. “Yeah.”

  He made a face and reached out a hand. “Give me the Pourdry stuff.”

  Feeling victorious, I handed it over. It was kind of nice that Arthur’s and my relationship had progressed to where he’d go with my word, even if it took a little convincing.

  I should have known Arthur would consider any respect or trust he might’ve ever had for me to be utterly compromised when it came to a psychic being involved. And I should have remembered he was a very good actor.

  twelve

  THE NEXT two weeks were a thankfully Simon-free flurry of activity. Arthur and I went out almost every day trying to track down Pourdry’s operation, but it was so well hidden by layers of legitimate-looking fronts that we kept hitting dead ends. From what we could determine, Pourdry never even showed his face personally anywhere, but instead was a mastermind from behind the scenes—we couldn’t find a single person who’d admit to having met him.

  So far, though the voices and nightmares still lurked and snapped at me with increasing and exhausting frequency, at least I hadn’t fallen apart in the middle of a dangerous situation again. Either I was fooling myself, or I was getting better at ignoring the mental lapses when it mattered. Maybe Rio was on the money about the right path being denial.

  And in between times, the little army of Arthur, Checker, Pilar, and I got a crash course in cell phone hacking. Checker was right: it was shockingly, terrifyingly easy. I’d calculated I needed at least two hundred and eighty-three of the fake cell tower signals to saturate LA effectively, and Checker had acquired our little hotspot boxes from various online companies through anonymized accounts and then had them overnighted to us. Each was about the size and shape of a wireless router, and even the power question turned out to have an easy solution—the boxes were low-draw enough that it had taken Checker about five minutes to sketch out a way to rig them to a solar panel and a rechargeable battery.

  I could put them on top of roofs, telephone poles, overpasses … anywhere people wouldn’t be likely to notice them. I had a lot more flexibility with placing them than I would have had with the Signet Devices themselves, because all I needed to do was get to people’s cell phones, not solve a delicate constraint satisfaction problem. After all, the app itself would be doing that part—Checker had already coded up my algorithm for deployment, and I didn’t even bother QA-testing the software. I knew the math was right.

  The ease of it all would have been discouraging from a national security standpoint, if one were more worried about national security than I was.

  With Arthur and me out investigating Pourdry, Checker and Pilar stayed at one of my crappy apartments and did the lion’s share of the deployment preparation, reprogramming and waterproofing the hotspot boxes and wiring them up to their new power supplies. The construction was monotonous enough for me to be glad to get out, even for our frustratingly fruitless field trips.

  “How are you going to set them?” Pilar asked, on the evening she, Checker, and I sat exhausted and stared at the monstrous stacks of rigged-up boxes. Arthur had taken off on some sort of personal errand. “I mean, are you just going to climb up and superglue them on top of lampposts and stuff?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll do that part of it. Some of the places might be hard to get to.” That, and I had to follow the proper mathematics for reaching my critical population density, hitting the spots with optimal and maximally independent mass flow rates of people.

  Pilar giggled. “I just got an image of you swinging from a traffic light over the PCH. Okay, so once these are all set, they put your app on everyone’s phones, and done?”

  “Sort of,” I said. “There’ll be a small delta. The app will download automatically whenever a smartphone comes within range, so it’ll keep downloading t
o more and more until we’re saturated, and from there all the affected cell phones should start coordinating with each other to put out the subliminal audio signals.”

  “I’m just looking forward to everything getting back to normal,” Pilar said. “Normal but with less crime, we hope, right?”

  “Yeah. And if we’re lucky, these things will start weakening all the big criminal organizations, including Pourdry’s. Once we can get to him, you won’t have to play musical apartments anymore.”

  “There’s still—um,” Checker said.

  “The telepath who’s stalking Cas?” Pilar piped up cheerfully.

  “Oh, right, him,” Checker said, which probably should have tipped me off but didn’t. “Him and … other loose ends.”

  He meant Rio. I’d reassured him multiple times that Rio had promised his safety, but he didn’t seem to entirely believe me. It irked me. “Simon hasn’t shown his face in weeks,” I said. “Maybe he finally listened to me and is leaving me alone. If so, we’re well shot of him.”

  “We can’t keep living our lives like he’s around every corner,” Pilar said. “Like Cas says, maybe he just … left. I say, once you and Arthur get this Pourdry dude arrested, we go back to our lives.”

  That also should have tipped me off, but didn’t. Pilar was a better liar than Checker was.

  “Get Pourdry arrested?” I scoffed. “What has Arthur been telling you? That’s not my plan.”

  “Checker and I will start putting together evidence on him,” Pilar continued brightly. “Right, Checker? So the police will be able to put him away instead of him wiggling out because he’s got things sorted out so well.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  There was a knock on the door.

  I went over and opened it to reveal a tall Asian man in a long duster. There was a yell and a bang from behind me.

  “It’s fine,” I said without turning around, then added to Rio, “I didn’t know you were in town. Hi.”

  From the sound of it, Pilar and Checker had rapidly vacated the front room of the apartment and escaped into the kitchen or one of the bedrooms, but I couldn’t help a slight sting of guilt—I’d forgotten to mention to them that I didn’t mind Rio knowing where my safe houses were. I stepped out into the hallway and shut the door behind me. “What’s up?”