Null Set Read online

  I’d self-righteously taken on that decision for the entire global population.

  Now I was seeing what I had wrought. Over the past year and change, criminal activity had gone from a slow ramp-up to an exponential explosion. Los Angeles had never been a particularly friendly city, but now it was becoming a nerve center for gang violence, for organized crime, for kids OD’ing in squalor and drive-by shootings in neighborhoods that had so recently bragged of safety and revitalization. Los Angeles wasn’t the only place, either. But in LA, we saw it up close and personal.

  I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t second-guessing the decision we’d made. And I was pretty sure it was even harder on Arthur than it was on me. He’d cared a lot more to begin with.

  The night was late enough for even Los Angeles’s preternaturally frustrating traffic to have died down, and Arthur sped up the freeway toward the Valley. Instead of heading to drop me at my current hidey-hole in Santa Clarita, however, he swung off onto the streets to pull up in front of a dim dive bar that was still open despite having zero other customers.

  “What are we doing here?” I said.

  “Gonna buy you a drink.”

  I suppressed a sigh. Arthur had an annoying tendency to go all worried-parent routine on me. But with the job over I wasn’t about to turn down hard alcohol.

  Arthur ensconced me in a booth at the opposite side of the room from the bar and then came back a minute later with a beer for himself and a glass of something stronger that he set in front of me. I knocked it back all at once. The burn felt cleansing.

  “Sounds like you and Checker are still fighting,” Arthur said after a minute. He hadn’t taken a sip of his beer yet.

  That was a subject I definitely didn’t want to discuss. “If Checker wants to be friends again, he can stay the hell out of my past. I told him I don’t want to know, end of story. He has no right to get all hacker-y and try to dig it up anyway.”

  “He’s stubborn. And he’s worried about you. He cares.” After a pause, Arthur added, “He’s not the only one, either.”

  “I’m fine,” I snapped.

  Arthur studied me, his expression unreadable.

  “What?”

  “What happened today?”

  “What do you mean, what happened?” I said it too loud. Rio murdering someone in front of me. The darkness shifting and changing to places and times I didn’t know.

  Arthur spoke slowly, picking out his phrasing. “Never seen you get … distracted like that before. Scared me.”

  I tried to tell him it had been nothing, but the lie stuck on my tongue. I pushed up out of the booth instead. “I’m getting another drink.”

  I persuaded the grubby bartender to give me the whole bottle, mostly by waving a C-note at her for a fourteen-dollar bottle of whiskey. When I came back, I slid onto the booth’s bench and chugged from it.

  Arthur watched me with what was probably disapproval, but he didn’t try to stop me.

  “You and me are supposed to be watching each other,” he said instead. “Remember? Making sure Dawna didn’t do anything permanent?”

  Right. Watching each other’s brains. I wasn’t the only one Dawna Polk had psychically attacked in a last-ditch effort to save her global string-pullers. Arthur hadn’t had an easy time of it either, but he also didn’t seem to be suffering any residual effects. Whereas I …

  Dawna had almost ended me that night. The whole onslaught was still a prickly jumble, parts of it intermittently remembered and forgotten, other parts only the shapes of a memory. But since then, my nightmares had begun slowly bleeding into my waking life.

  At least I was pretty sure she wasn’t still influencing me, though. She’d just scarred me badly enough for my brain to start chewing on itself.

  I’m doing very little, said the echo of power. Picking at threads, as it were. Your brain has the most inventive ways of trying to destroy you.

  I gulped some more whiskey, grateful for the slight edge it took off my senses, and then leaned my elbows on the table so I could press my head against my hands, conveniently burying my face behind my forearms and avoiding Arthur’s gaze.

  If I was screwing him over in the field …

  I had to tell him. Shit. Shit.

  “I saw things.” I tried to spit it out in one go, without hearing the meaning behind the words. I’d never planned to say it aloud, even as more and more of Dawna’s attack resurfaced, haunting me—

  I forced myself on. “When she was in my head. I saw … things from my past, I think. And this.”

  I reached into a pocket with a hand that felt like it was pushing through molasses and drew out a folded piece of paper. It had crumpled and gone ratty around the edges from being carried with me. I put it on the table and slid it to the middle, slowly, as if it were dangerous.

  I thought it might be.

  Arthur reached for the paper and unfolded it. Read it. Glanced up at me. “This is your handwriting.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You don’t remember writing it?”

  “Nope,” I said. “Dawna played that note for me in a vision. And then I found my own grave.”

  “Show me,” said Arthur.

  * * *

  WE PULLED up outside the cemetery just as the sun rose, washing out the city in pale dawn light as the day figured out whether it wanted to stay chilly or turn scorching. We were just moving out of Los Angeles’s version of winter, which meant it was still jacket weather but now mixed with increasingly frequent ninety-degree heat waves.

  The note was back in my pocket. Do not try to remember under any circumstances, it read, the precise math of the handwriting analysis leaving no doubt I had penned it.

  And my signature underneath. Cas Russell.

  I saw my own hands folding the note, the paper crisp and white—

  “Just in case,” a male voice said. “We won’t need it.”

  I turned to pass it to him—

  “Russell?” Arthur touched my shoulder.

  I shook myself. “This way.”

  The smooth asphalt of the paths shimmered in the morning sun. We headed down between the soldiering lines of headstones and well-manicured lawns.

  I remembered exactly where the columbarium was. Dawna had shown me the location of the note in my own head, and somehow my hindbrain had grabbed on to it and yanked, pulling me to drive, drive, drive here one night and then push inside the door until I stood here, in this building, surrounded by the soaring slant of wall plaques, each a human life burned down to a few pounds of ash—

  I was panting slightly. Arthur waited next to me, a steady presence.

  “There.” I pointed.

  Arthur moved over to the wall. I joined him. “Cassandra Russell” read the carved marble. The hand of death felt like it crawled up the back of my neck.

  Arthur ran his fingers over the cover stone and found the fine cracks in it. “Your doing?”

  “I broke it,” I said. “To get the note. I guess they repaired it.”

  “You knew it was here,” said Arthur. It wasn’t a question.

  I swallowed. I didn’t know why I wanted to cling so hard to not saying anything, to not admitting the mounting trouble I was having with my own goddamn brain. But a good part of me—most of me—wanted to run. Hide. Ignore. Bury myself elsewhere, somewhere I’d never have to face anyone who might guess how much I was teetering.

  I pressed my hand flat against the marble wall as if it would anchor me here. “Today, at the port,” I made myself say. “You asked what happened. I saw—I think it was a memory.”

  Arthur straightened toward me. “You saw something?”

  “It was—I don’t know. Some guy. I was talking to him.” I didn’t mention the other memory, the one with Rio. Arthur already didn’t like Rio. He didn’t need to know I was hallucinating the man’s murders. “It was … I was there, for just a second, and then I was back.”

  The door to the columbarium pushed open. I spun away from the wall like
I was guilty of something.

  Arthur, who was a lot better at undercover work than I was, merely turned toward the noise as if it were the most natural thing in the world. An elderly caretaker with a full beard and a haircut that rivaled Einstein’s had come in carrying some gardening and cleaning tools.

  “Morning,” Arthur said.

  “Good morning,” the man answered genially, and moved to cross past us, going about his duties.

  “Excuse me,” Arthur called. “This wall niche, any way I can contact the next of kin?”

  “Oh. Oh.” The man patted down his coverall with his free hand, as if he were looking for a phone number to pull out and give to Arthur but had forgotten where it was. “You’ll have to ask in at the office about that. They open at nine today.”

  “Thank you, I’ll do that,” Arthur said.

  “That’s the one that got vandalized, isn’t it?” The man squinted past us. “Yes, I know they called the family about it. Such a shame, what kids will do these days.…”

  Called the family?

  My senses dulled, the world closing in on me. Who the hell—

  “Hey, Russell. Russell.”

  Arthur had a hand on my shoulder. The caretaker had shuffled off.

  “What the fuck did he mean by that?” I ground out.

  “I take it you didn’t get a call,” Arthur said.

  I moved my head in a stilted shake. I’d put that note in the wall. I had; I was sure of it. And the cemetery had called someone else.

  “This is so fucked up,” I said through a hoarse laugh. “Dawna pulled some batshit scrap of something out of my head and then I go to find it and the fucking thing tells me not to remember.…”

  My hands twitched, my fingers recalling the tactile memory of dragging a pen into the shape of words. Do not try to remember …

  The ballpoint snagged against an irregularity beneath the paper, making the r turn topologically inequivalent.

  “I’m telling myself not to,” I said with an effort. “That’s the core of it, right? I need to trust myself. I need to stop.”

  “Sounds to me like you might not have a choice,” Arthur said quietly. “If this is happening … you can’t erase the memories of your life at will, right? Lord knows I’ve tried.”

  “It’s not my life, though,” I said. “It’s someone else. Someone not me. I don’t care, I don’t want it, I fucking warned myself not to—”

  I stopped.

  “What is it?” said Arthur.

  My breath hitched in my throat. “I just—something Dawna—”

  You might have a chance at fighting me. If you weren’t already fighting yourself.

  “Russell? What’d she do?”

  “Dawna—she—” How had I forgotten? How? Dawna’s words reverberating through every corner of my mind as she’d taken me apart … “I thought she just left some sort of—some sort of injury, or mental scarring, but that’s not it. That’s not it.” My voice sounded hoarse, as if I’d been screaming. “She’s the one who told me. She told me to…”

  “Told you to do what? Russell?”

  “She said—she said remember.” I swallowed. Uncontrolled nightmares made real, invading my waking consciousness. Dawna had made it so. She hadn’t stabbed me in the psyche; she’d merely opened a door and ordered me to look.

  That was all. That was everything.

  “She told me to remember,” I whispered. “And now … I think I am.”

  three

  ARTHUR CAME with me to the Hole, probably because he was afraid I would chicken out.

  The Hole was technically Checker’s converted garage-turned-hacker cave, but at this time of morning and after the night we’d all had, it was marginally more likely he was in bed in his house rather than online. We tromped up the ramp onto his porch, and I pounded on his door loudly enough that I probably woke several of his neighbors. When he didn’t answer right away, I pounded again.

  It took six and a half minutes, but finally we heard the deadbolt slide back and a skinny white guy with a goatee swung the door open. He blinked up from his wheelchair at us in the morning light as he shoved his glasses onto his face; his hair was tousled with sleep and he wore pajama pants and a T-shirt with a picture of the Milky Way on it and the words, “You are here.”

  “Cas,” he said, after a good eight seconds. I couldn’t tell if he was glad to see me or not.

  “Hey,” I said.

  He couldn’t seem to think what to say back. I crossed my arms tightly and looked at the worn floorboards of the porch, trying to ignore how long I’d been refusing to talk to him.

  “Can we come in?” said Arthur after another highly awkward fifteen seconds.

  “Okay. Right,” said Checker, and moved back from the door, pulling it open the rest of the way for us.

  We followed him into his living room. Arthur sat back on the couch; I remained standing, shifting from foot to foot.

  “So what are you doing here?” said Checker.

  “Cas has something to say to you,” Arthur answered.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m having … I’m having a problem. I think I…”

  “You got something to say before that,” interrupted Arthur firmly.

  “I do?”

  “You do.”

  “What?”

  Arthur just kept looking at me meaningfully. The awkwardness ratcheted up a couple more notches.

  “Oh, for the love of Tesla,” said Checker. “Arthur, stop it. He’s trying to get you to apologize,” he said to me.

  “Oh.”

  “She doesn’t have to. Cas, I forgive you for being such an asshole to me, okay? Done. Now, what’s going on?”

  Some of the tension in the room bled out. I moved over to sit next to Arthur on the couch. “The memory thing,” I said. “I think … it turns out it might be an issue.” I braced myself for a sarcastic I told you so.

  “What happened?” Checker said instead. He wasn’t a person I would have generally characterized as “gentle”—brilliant, cheerful, voracious, slightly mad, but not gentle—but he sounded that way now. As if he wanted to protect me.

  Which was ridiculous, of course, since I could have kicked his ass and Arthur’s together without breathing hard, but I was suddenly, incongruously, reminded of how much I missed spending time with him.

  I cleared my throat and tried to focus. “I don’t know if looking into it would make things worse or not,” I ground out. “But I feel like … I don’t know.”

  Checker digested that. “I’m still willing to help you track down your … whatever your previous life was,” he said. “Maybe understanding more would help? We could take it slow.”

  “I don’t know,” I said again, more belligerently. “I still don’t think I should.” I’d told myself not to … but what was the alternative? Do nothing?

  “She’s started getting flashes,” Arthur said. “Since Dawna.”

  Checker’s eyes got wide. “Oh. Crap.”

  “Since then, but … worse lately.” I rubbed at my face. “She broke something. In my mind. And then you being all ‘Cas, you have to find out who you were,’ like picking a goddamn scab—”

  “I’m sorry,” blurted Checker.

  “Yeah, well, you should be.”

  Arthur made a small sound beside me.

  Checker took a breath. “All right, I’m asking you. What would you like to do?”

  Like I had an answer for that. I opened my mouth. Shut it. Opened it again. “I want to stomp out this crime wave.”

  “What?” Checker said.

  “Dawna’s not the only one with a superpower. If she could do it, I should be able to, too.”

  He snorted a laugh. “Only you would decide to fight crime because you don’t want to be shown up.” Then he looked uncertain, as if he wasn’t sure if it was okay to take the mickey with me again yet.

  I pretended not to notice. “It’s only a matter of time before LA’s being run by warring organized crime rings
. We’re not going to let that happen. There’s got to be a way to cut them down.”

  But Dawna was a psychic. How to leverage mathematics to do it instead? What was a supernatural math ability good for? I’d need to merge it with some sort of technology.… “Pilar,” I said aloud. “I need to talk to Pilar.”

  “Russell, we were talking about you,” Arthur murmured.

  Right.

  “How about this,” Checker said. “If you really feel like you don’t want to know … why don’t I take the lead for you? If you’re comfortable. I’ll ask you questions, and try to find out where you came from, and if I find a good reason not to tell you what I find, I won’t, but at least we’ll know if there’s anything, anything dangerous, or if there’s any way we can help you.…”

  Despite having been the one to come here, I still felt inclined to snap at his suggestion. But then I’d have to answer his question about what I did want.

  Putting my history in Checker’s hands … it felt vulnerable, too trusting. Even though I’d been trying to make a conscious choice to trust more, to force myself to believe in the people I now called friends … this was a hell of a lot to ask.

  Besides, Dawna had been the one to tell me to remember. The last thing I should be doing was listening to her. But Arthur was right: whatever chaos she had pried open inside my head, ignoring it was no longer an option.

  The only choice remaining was to change a variable.

  I hunched into the couch, curling around myself. “I reserve the right to put a stop to this at any time.”

  “Unless—” started Checker.

  “No. I say stop, you stop.”

  He waited until I looked up, then met my gaze seriously. “Okay. It’s a deal.”

  I was tempted to stop right then, tell them we weren’t going anywhere with this. In fact, something in me was already screaming about what a bad decision this was, some intuition lambasting me that this was wrong, wrong, wrong—

  I forced myself to nod.

  Checker and Arthur exchanged a glance. “All right,” Checker said. He reached over to pick up a tablet off an end table. “We’ll go slow, okay? What’s the first thing you remember?”