talk, and I went over to the hospital for our sessions. I was slipping enough by the first one that I almost asked Checker to drive me. It turned out I should have; when Simon saw me, he chewed me out for being foolhardy enough to take the wheel of a car with Valarmathi creeping in on all corners of my senses.
So we were back to him taking unreasonable interest in my safety and me hating on him for it. Business as usual.
But after I sat by his hospital bed and got talked through two hours of sealing my previous life back into her box, Simon stopped me from leaving right away. “Wait,” he said. “Please. There’s something else I need to speak to you about.”
I hoped he wasn’t about to bring up what had happened between us. I still hadn’t sorted out my own thoughts on the matter.
But instead, he said, “I’ve been reading through Dr. Teplova’s research.”
I sat back down. He must’ve gotten it from Checker; I hadn’t known. “What’d you find?”
“I think we were right that she was originally from Halberd.”
“Okay,” I said slowly. “What does that mean for us?”
“This is—” He scrunched his face a bit, scratching at the back of his neck. “I talked to Rio about this too. He agrees with me that it’s too much of a coincidence.”
I frowned. I hadn’t seen Rio since the cleanup at Willow Grace’s—I’d called him asking to meet for a fuller debrief, and he’d picked up but said he was busy and would call me when he was free. I’d taken him at his word. It gnawed at me a little that he’d found the time to talk to Simon.
I pushed the feeling aside. “What’s too big of a coincidence?”
“You. Getting pulled into fighting something that came out of Halberd.”
A sudden coldness crept up my spine, like I was being watched.
“It was a lot of degrees of separation away, though,” I tried to rationalize. “We figured that Fifer found Teplova as someone to motivate her own ends, and Arthur stumbled onto her because of the way she was imitating D.J.…”
“Who was Checker’s old friend,” Simon finished. “Cas, what are the chances of that?”
“Do you mean literally? Because the number of variables—”
“Cas, where did you get D.J.’s phone number?”
“What?”
“I’ve been going back through everything, and—Cas, I talked to D.J. about this. He had no connection to Teplova, or her friends, or anyone else from Halberd. That phone number should never have been there.”
“And you’re claiming someone planted it to … to what, to help us? That’s kind of far-fetched.”
“No, it isn’t. Not with people who make it their mission to, to watch, and nudge things along in the direction they want.”
Fucking. Psychics.
“Rio thought they were involved all the way since this started,” Simon said. “And I—I know it seems a stretch at first blush, but I agree. Because think about it. What’s Pithica’s stated goal?”
“Well, they try to smooth out all global injustice by manipulating everyone into world peace—”
And I cut myself off, because I heard what I’d just said.
Manipulation. They cured the world of ills by manipulating people, as many people as they wanted or needed to get their end results.
“This is how they operate,” Simon said softly. “This is exactly how they operate. Coincidences and tiny changes, indirect steps from far away. Anyone who suspects a bigger web, that person will just end up being told they’re paranoid. If Fifer was a threat—or, more likely, Teplova was who they viewed as the original threat, going off independent that way—Cas, they got Fifer to take care of one problem, and by embedding a person with a six-degrees connection to you, they then set you up to take her down. A few weeks later … problem solved.”
Every organ in my body clenched, my skin tightening. They’d played me like a puppet—they’d endangered all of Arthur’s family—“Why not just fucking do it themselves?” I burst out. “They’re fucking telepaths. Wouldn’t it be easier for them just to walk in and tell Fifer to off herself?”
“Cas,” Simon said. “This is doing it themselves.”
“They used me,” I said hollowly.
“What you call telepaths—we aren’t the only type of people they have,” he agreed. “They could predict how you’d respond.”
My fingernails were digging rivulets in the heels of my hands.
“Cas,” Simon said. “I don’t think you could have done anything different.”
“We had a deal,” I hissed.
“Not to attack each other. Now that they know about you … they’re good at using the tools