Plastic Smile (Russell's Attic Book 4) (23 page)

“You…” My hand had come up of its own accord, my finger pointed, trembling. “You!”

“Cassandra—Cas—don’t—”

“Don’t what?
Don’t try to remember?
Why, because I’ll know what you
did?”

“Cas!” Checker’s voice again, high with alarm. “Cas, what is it?”

“Admit it!” I screamed the words, spat them in Simon’s face. “It wasn’t a dream, was it? You—it was real!”

He won’t be remaking you, Rio had said.

Rio had lied.

“This was never about protecting me, was it?” I was hyperventilating. Oh, God. “You telling me to block it all out—not to try—”

“It
was
to protect you!” interrupted Simon. “It
is.
Cassandra, I was not lying, I swear. This will kill you—”

“This will kill you,” pleaded Simon, somewhere dark and close and far away. “You must let me—it is the only way—”

The world seesawed.

“Cas!” Someone grabbed my arm. I shoved him off violently before I realized it had been Checker; he flailed as his chair tilted but managed to catch himself against the wall before he fell. “Cas!”

“Pithica didn’t take my memory,” I said. “It was you. It was you.”

Simon’s face was stricken. He didn’t reply.

The room fell into a silence so complete it was as if all the air had been sucked out of it.

Checker broke it. “He did
what?”
he whispered.

“He’s the one,” I said. “He erased me. Admit it. Admit it!”

“It was—I had to, we had to.” Simon’s eyes darted desperately between Checker and me. “I can explain—you were dying—”

“I was someone else, wasn’t I?” My throat closed. “I was a—I was somebody, and you destroyed her. You killed her, and she didn’t want to, she didn’t want to go…”

Simon was breathing raggedly. “You have to understand—”

“I can feel her.” Suddenly everything made sense, too much sense, stampeding through my head like it wanted to take me over. “She wants to come back. You killed her and she didn’t want to die, and now she wants to come back.”

“Not
her,
Cassandra,
you.
You! We were saving your life!”

“No! You weren’t!” Certainty surged in me, the certainty of voice and memory and knowledge creeping through into my own goddamn brain. “You killed her, and you wiped her brain, and you made me on top of it. Don’t tell me I’m not fucking remembering it right because
I am.”

“You
what?”
Checker was leaning forward in his chair as if he were about to physically throttle Simon. I’d never heard him sound so dangerous. “You overwrote her like a fucking hard drive? You utter
piece of shit—”

“Stop!” I thrust out a hand, my other one cradling my forehead as if it could keep my brain from fracturing.

Waves crashing—

Glass breaking—

Wood splintering—

“Thank you.” Simon ran a hand through his hair and gestured limply at Checker. “He doesn’t understand. I’m trying to explain; we had to. You were—it was killing you, and I had to do it, I had to save you—”

“Shut up.” I took a step forward, putting Checker behind me. “I didn’t tell Checker to stay out of this because he’s wrong. He’s not. But this is between you and me.”

The certainty in Simon’s face faltered.

“You erased my memories.”

“To save your life! It was the hardest thing I ever did!”

“You?” My mouth twisted, going crooked and ugly. “The hardest thing
you
ever did? Please, try to convince me this is about you. I’m just rabid to hear it. Go on, try.”

“That’s not what I…” His dark skin went paler, the color draining from behind it and leaving it brown parchment. “Don’t you get it? You were going to die!”

“Oh, I get it. You did what you thought was
best.”
I was biting out the words, each a sarcasm-coated pill. My voice had started trembling around the edges. “You went into my head and you took the most important parts of me and you want me to thank you.”

“Did she even get a say in it?” said Checker from behind me.

“I told you, stay out of this,” I snapped at him without turning around. I stayed focused on Simon. “Whether or not you
asked
to blank out everything I was—” I stopped. Simon’s features had gone tense and taut as if some too-large emotion were trying to burst through; he folded his lips together deliberately and looked away from me. “Fuck you. You didn’t ask me, did you.”

“I did!” he insisted. He sniffed. “I did—I tried to convince you. It was the only way! You said, you kept saying that you—it would mean forgetting me, never seeing me again, forgetting
us,
and you said you couldn’t bear that. We were in
love,
Cassandra, do you understand?” He was blinking furiously against tears; they spilled over and slid down his cheeks and over his jaw, dripping onto his collar. “You wanted to keep on going together until you destroyed yourself and died, and I couldn’t watch you do that! Even though it meant losing you. Even though it meant going into your thoughts when I had told myself I would never—when I had promised—and even when I knew it meant I would never be able to see you again, that seeing me might remind you—” His voice broke. “I gave up everything I had told myself I stood for, I broke every rule I had, I gave up
you—
because I had to save you. Even if it meant I lost everything!”

I slugged him.

The punch was so fast he never saw it coming; his head snapped halfway around and yanked his body after it. He staggered and fell against Checker’s couch.

“
You
lost everything?” I cried. “You?”

He cowered away from me. “I’m trying to explain!”

“And I don’t like your explanation.” I crossed my arms, keeping my fists trapped in my armpits. I wanted to do a lot more than sock him one.

We were in love,
he’d said, as if he’d expected the words to break me. As if he had some claim on me.

Instead, it only cemented my revulsion.

Somewhere far away, I laughed. “Gotcha.”

I clung to my fury, tried to keep myself in the present. “You keep bleating that you did this for my own good,” I said. “You know who else says that? Dawna Polk. You’re not so different from her after all.”

He drew into himself, hunching down and leaning on the arm of Checker’s couch like it was holding him up.

“You took everything I was. Everything.” He had been the one to take the math from me. Not Pithica or Halberd or whoever else lurked behind me. Him.

I didn’t know how I was certain, but I was. My fractured memory knew.

“You took everything, because
you
thought it was right. And you stand here, and you whine about how painful it was for
you,
and you tell me the only reason I wasn’t fully on board with it was that I was so in love I needed a few more minutes of
your
magnificence—that’s the only reason my former self would have for not having her personality erased, is that it? I’m sure she had no other objection at all.” My voice rose, cracking over the space between us. “You’re a raging egotist, you know that? And whoever I used to be, you murdered her.”

“Vala would have understood,” he mumbled. His shoulders shook. “We were in love. I did it for her.”

“God save us all from your brand of love,” I said.

Of everything I’d said, that was what defeated him. He hugged his arms around his chest, shrinking into himself.

“Get out,” I said. “I never want to lay eyes on you again.”

He half-turned back to me, like he wanted to argue. But then he looked at my face, and whatever his psychic ability saw there, it made him curl back and close himself away and stumble for the door without another word.

I sank down on the couch and dropped my head into my hands.

Valarmathi. Be polite.

I don’t like being touched, but then, you don’t like touching people.

It works, right? Ignore everyone else.

Valarmathi might get her wish and come back to life. Or maybe she’d kill us both in trying. I wasn’t sure she even existed anymore—but then, I wasn’t sure I did, either.

“Hey,” Checker said. He’d come over next to me.

I didn’t answer.

His moved a hand as if he were going to reach out, and then thought better of it. “Do you want to talk—”

“No.”

“Okay.”

I squeezed my hands against my face until it hurt, as if I could hold myself together. I thought about the shattered bits of memory and emotion that belonged to a dead woman, the pieces of feeling that I now knew echoed from someone who hadn’t wanted to leave. And the life that had taken her place, my own half-life, bereft of any real meaning…even the proofs I’d tried lay impotent, dangling threads of elegance I knew had to mean something, but didn’t.

Simon had no idea what he had taken from me.

Even worse, I only existed because of his clumsy attempts at playing God. Valarmathi and I were completely different people. Did that mean I owed every part of who I was to Simon?

The question festered in me, turning me inside out and making me question every part of who I was, and I hated it, because nobody except me should have had the slightest claim on myself.

“Do you want to be alone?” asked Checker.

Even if he left I wouldn’t be alone. Valarmathi lurked in the shadows, mocking, making me wonder if I wasn’t a creature born entirely of Simon’s own making. I thought about Rio and his belief in a deity who had brought all of creation into being, a God responsible for who we all were at our cores. Some being who had
made
us. How could he believe in something so violating?

Checker moved his chair a little closer to me and sat back, his hands relaxed in his lap.

“Thanks,” I said.

We sat that way for a long time.

Chapter 23

I stayed
at Checker’s place that night. I didn’t even ask—he ordered in food and brought some sheets and blankets out to the living room to stack beside me on the couch. I didn’t say anything, but I was grateful.

Arthur came and joined us late in the evening. I got the sense he already knew what had happened—Checker had asked me quietly if it was okay if Arthur knew, and now I belatedly connected that when I’d seen him on a tablet he must have been sending an email version.

That had been considerate of him. I didn’t want to relive it, even by hearing someone else relay things.

“How you feeling, Russell?” Arthur asked, sitting down next to me.

“Losing it,” I said baldly. There was no use putting up a front anymore.

Valarmathi snickered.

“He erased me,” I whispered. “He…”

Arthur put a hand on my back, gently supportive.

“And Rio knew.” He had to have.

Giggling. “We stole the second one. What do you think they’ll do?”

“I’m living in someone else’s body,” I said. “I don’t even know if I’m a real person.”

“Hey,” Arthur said sharply. “Stop that talk now. Ain’t matter what they did to you, you got the same worth and value as anyone else.”

“Even the woman whose life I stole?” I said bitterly.

“Wasn’t your doing,” Arthur said.

“I know. After all, I didn’t exist when they killed her, did I?”

“Cas…” Checker said, but he didn’t seem to know what to say after that.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said. After all, nothing had changed, had it? I was still going to go insane and die, unless I let Simon violate me,
again.
He and Rio hadn’t lied about that; my own mind was bone-certain.

And Rio was still going to tear Los Angeles apart at the seams if I didn’t do something to stop it.

Checker and Arthur didn’t say anything. Somehow it was comforting, that they offered only weighty silence instead of platitudes.

“I don’t want to die,” I said.

Arthur’s hand squeezed my shoulder, hard.

“I’m—I’m not trying to be the false hope guy,” Checker said, “but maybe there’s still a third option. Something we haven’t thought of.”

“Yeah,” I said, unconvincingly.

I ran my hands over the uneven stitching of a patchwork quilt, the colors faded but still vibrant.

I cleared my throat. “If there is a third option, it’s got a deadline. And…I don’t think it’s a very long one.”

Arthur squeezed my shoulder again.

After a minute, he said, “If it’s a psychic you need, maybe more of ’em are out there. We met two already.”

“One not connected to Pithica?” I snorted. “Good luck.”

“It’s worth a try,” Checker said, reaching for his tablet, but I could tell he was lying. There was no way we’d find another telepath to help me.

“Maybe we talk to Rio,” Arthur said. “He knows this world, seems to me.”

In all my life, I never would have expected a solution like that to be coming from Arthur. “I’ll give it a shot,” I said. In spite of everything, I still trusted Rio. He wouldn’t have supported Simon’s decision to…delete me. The only reason he even talked to Simon seemed to be in an effort to keep me from dying, and it wasn’t like he was wrong about that.

I was viciously glad to remember how he’d beaten up Simon in the warehouse. Rio was still on my side. In this, at least.

You listen to me.

No.

“I shouldn’t exist,” I said. “He should have let her die.”

“I—um, not in any way excusing what happened to you, but—selfishly, I’m kind of glad you do,” Checker said. He shrugged a little. “Exist, that is.”

“Same,” said Arthur.

I took a shuddering breath. “Are you sure about that? I’m pretty sure I’m more trouble than I’m worth.”

“You
have
saved both of our lives.” Checker gave me a lopsided smile. “So, you know. I wouldn’t write you off so quickly.”

“Eh…” Arthur said, and I couldn’t help laughing a little.

They sat with me until I fell asleep on Checker’s couch. I woke up in darkness, covered in a blanket, and knew what I had to do.

♦ ♦ ♦

Jacob Pourdry
awoke with my gun in his face. Even in the dead of night, tousled with sleep, he had the look of an animated Prince Charming—slick and handsome with conniving eyes and a con man’s grin.