Plastic Smile (Russell's Attic Book 4) (2 page)

“These dreams, you think they might be real stuff, things that happened to you?”

“I don’t know. The dreams, and the flashes—they’ve gotten a lot worse since the thing with Dawna. I thought maybe she left some sort of…mental scarring, or something, but now I wonder if she broke something free.” Dawna Polk, functional telepath, had attacked me psychically in a last-ditch effort to save her organization of global puppet masters. She’d almost killed me with the onslaught.

“Jesus Christ,” I said suddenly.

“What?”

“What she said to me, as she was—” The attack was still confused in my head, a chaos of light and shapes, but something had just come back to me, something I’d forgotten. Or maybe buried. “She said—she told me—”

“Russell? What she tell you?”

“She said
remember.”

Chapter 2

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

The sun was just rising, washing out the city in pale morning 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 Hole was technically Checker’s converted garage-turned-hacker cave, but at this hour of the morning 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. I was here, but I wasn’t happy about it.

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 stupidly, after a good eight seconds.

“Hi,” 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, and tried not to think about how long I’d been refusing to talk to him.

“Can we come in?” said Arthur after another highly awkward fifteen seconds. I was supremely glad he was there; Arthur was Checker’s friend, too—friend and business partner. His presence meant it was a lot less likely Checker and I would end up in a shouting match that would end with me storming out.

“Uh, 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’s going on?” said Checker.

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

“Yeah,” I said. “I think I…I’ve been having…”

“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,” I said.

“She doesn’t have to. It’s okay. 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 might be a problem.” 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 and 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. I feel like I’m going crazy.”

Checker digested that. “We could take it slow,” he suggested.

“I told myself not to,” I argued. The note had been in my writing, with my signature, the precise math of the handwriting analysis leaving no doubt I had penned it.
Do not try to remember under any circumstances,
it had said. “I still don’t think I should.”

“She been getting flashes,” Arthur said. “Since Dawna.”

Checker’s eyes got wide. “Oh. Crap.”

“She knew,” I whispered. “
I
didn’t even know, but she must have seen it somehow, and she—I think she broke something. And now that I’ve been
thinking
about it, thank
you
very much—” I couldn’t keep an edge of accusation out of my tone.

“I’m sorry,” blurted Checker.

“Yeah, well, you should be.”

Arthur made a small sound beside me.

“I’m going to make some coffee,” Checker said abruptly. “I can’t think this early without coffee. Who else wants some?”

“Cas gonna have some,” said Arthur.

“I didn’t drink that much,” I objected, though coffee did sound great.

Arthur stood to follow him. “Let me help.”

I’m not terrific at reading body language, but since there was no way Checker needed help making coffee, Arthur clearly wanted to talk about me. I got up and crossed the living room to lean next to the kitchen entryway.

“Ain’t you should be apologizing,” Arthur was saying. “Should be her.”

“Maybe we both should,” said Checker, an irritated shrug in his voice. He inhaled sharply. “I’m not sure I pieced all that together, but—do you think I triggered her?” He sounded horribly guilty.

“This ain’t your fault, son,” said Arthur.

“Except that maybe it is, at least partly. Is she…how bad is it?”

“Ain’t know. Think she’d kill me if I told her to see someone?”

“What, like a psychotherapist?” Checker’s tone was hooded. “I’m not the best person to ask that question, you know.”

“Good help to be had out there,” Arthur said mildly. “System screwed you; don’t mean it ain’t a good idea.”

“Do you honestly think a psychologist would be able to figure this out anyway? We’re talking
psychics,
remember. Not to mention Cas’s math stuff. If she tried to be honest with them on any level, they’d call her delusional and accuse her of having read too many comic books.” Ceramic clanked, louder than necessary, and there was a beat of silence.

“Go ahead,” said Arthur. “I can bring it out.”

I retreated and threw myself back on the couch just in time for Checker to come back.

We sat in silence for a minute. The rich aroma of brewing coffee wafted out from the kitchen.

“What would you like to do?” asked Checker.

The question surprised me. “What, you’re not going to keep bullying me into trying to figure out who I was?”

He took a breath. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

And I probably shouldn’t have held a months-long grudge just because he insisted on worrying about me, but I was feeling too snippy to admit it. “Yeah,” I said instead. “I agree.”

He swallowed. “I’m…I’m asking you, then. What would you like to do?”

“I want to stomp out this crime wave,” I said.

His brow furrowed. “What?”

“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 yet.

I pretended not to notice. “Wasn’t that the whole MO of the guy in the red robot suit? Not being shown up?”

“The guy in the red—you mean
Iron Man?”
he squawked.

“Yeah,” I said. Checker had been indoctrinating me in science fiction for the better part of three years now, partially successfully. “Him. I liked him.”

“You would.”

“His math was all wrong, of course—”

Checker slapped his palms against his ears. “I’m not listening!”

“—talk about a complete failure in understanding
how physics works—”

Arthur chose that moment to reappear with the coffee. Black and unsweetened for me; Checker’s looked like it was sugared cream with coffee flavoring.

“Figure anything out?” asked Arthur, demonstrating his keen ability to put a damper on any conversation.

“How about this,” said Checker, apparently emboldened by my willingness to talk to him again. “How about I look into things for you? I’ll ask you questions, and see what I figure out, and if I find a good reason not to tell you what I find, I won’t.”

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.

“Sounds like a good compromise,” said Arthur, in a soothing voice that made me want to punch him.

“I thought you insisted on looking into my past already, without asking,” I said to Checker, only a little snidely. “I take it you already failed. What makes you think you’ll get anywhere now?”

“Because you missed the part about how I’m going to be asking you questions, genius. Are you in or not?”

“I won’t be able to tell you anything,” I reminded him. “I have no memory, remember?”

“Russell,” murmured Arthur. I was pretty sure he practiced saying my name that way.

“What!”

“Let us help you, girl.”

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

But I felt horribly hemmed in: Checker on one side, Arthur on the other, and my own damn brain on the third. I hunched into the couch, curling around my coffee mug. “I reserve the right to put a stop to this at any time,” I said.

“Unless—” started Checker.

“No. I say stop, you stop.”

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

I was tempted to throw it all out 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—

Checker put down his coffee mug on a coaster and picked up a tablet from an end table. “We’ll start off slow. What’s the earliest thing you remember?”

“You want to do this
now?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Well, I can’t answer that. My memories aren’t a well-ordered set.”

“You mean you don’t have a definite earliest memory?”

“No.” I stared into my coffee, letting the steam scald my skin.

“Can you remember anything from before you lived in Los Angeles?”

“No.” That wasn’t strictly true. “I only have—when I think of being a kid, I see—all people who look like me,” I admitted grudgingly. “Brown skin, black hair. Lights. Bright colors. And then some other image—a classroom, I think. That’s it.”

“Ain’t think it was likely you’re from the U.S.,” said Arthur. “Way you talk. You mix your dialect.”

“I don’t have an accent,” I objected.

“Well, you do—you’re General American, or close to it. But I ain’t talking no accent. Your vocabulary’s a mix.”

Checker frowned. “Yeah, I think I noticed that, too; I just didn’t think anything of it because I watch so much British television—but you’re right, Arthur. You use words like ‘mobile’ and ‘lift,’” he added to me.

“Flat,” said Arthur. “Washroom. Ground floor—”

“Okay!” I cut in, feeling uncomfortably scrutinized.

“But the American versions, too,” continued Arthur. “Like you got extra synonyms or something. Wonder if you know any other languages.”

“I don’t.”

“How do you know?” asked Checker. Without waiting for me to answer, he made a note on his tablet. “Never mind, we’ll figure it out.”

“The woman today.” Arthur sounded deliberately casual. “She said something about someone called the Fox. Someone you know?”

“No,” I said. “I have no idea what she was talking about.”

Arthur looked meaningfully at Checker, who scribbled more with his stylus. “Do we know who this guy is?” he asked as he wrote.

“Probably a criminal of some sort,” said Arthur. “Hear tell Cas might’ve…taught him a lesson.”

“Wait, you think this is someone I don’t remember?” I said.

“Could be,” said Arthur.

“I thought you said I must’ve had a different name before,” I pointed out. “She knew me as Cas Russell.”

“Cassandra,” Arthur corrected.

“Well, that is the full version of ‘Cas,’” I said, with a large helping of sarcasm. “I just happen not to like it much.”

Arthur and Checker exchanged meaningful looks again, and Checker wrote something else down.

“Enough.” I was heartily sick of this. “I’m done for the day.” I stood up and stuck my undrunk coffee on Checker’s coffee table; he moved it onto a coaster without comment. “I’m going to go get drunk and pass out,” I announced. I pointed at Checker. “You—when I wake up I want a statistical analysis of the recent increase in crime.”

“Way to be specific. What kind of statistical analysis, pray tell?”

“Any numbers you can get your hands on. Get me the data, and run your stochastic programs.”

“You realize that it’s not as easy as—”

“I have every faith in you,” I said, and stalked out the door without looking back.

I didn’t wait for Arthur to drive me home. I stole a car off the next street over instead. The shadows yawed and writhed at me as if a million eyes drilled into my back, but I paid no attention.

Chapter 3

I didn’t
sleep well.

As usual lately, my dreams were a confusing mass of colors and images, realities I thought I might be able to understand if I only had a second to look closer. I saw a dark boy with curly hair and a thin black girl. I saw mountains, and some type of aircraft, and a desert, and a jungle, and I screamed and I died.