use—”
“Has your sense of familiarity granted you any actionable intel?”
“No, but if I keep trying—”
“Destroying yourself in such an attempt would be of no help to your friend.” He said it flatly. Factually.
“You’ve fought Pithica before we ever did. You could fill in a lot more for me,” I tried, knowing already what his answer would be. “We’ll be better off if we can pool that. Just tell me what you suspect, and I swear I’ll tell you if I start going off-kilter or something. Rio, please, it’s for Arthur…”
“I am not appropriately equipped to determine what information could be of too much harm to you,” Rio answered. “But Simon’s knowledge may exceed my own in any case. I suggest you direct these questions at him. He wishes to speak to you anyway.”
Of course he did.
Intellectually, I could have guessed that Rio would never have any sort of emotional investment in Arthur’s rescue. He was doing it only as a favor to me, and I wasn’t ungrateful. But somehow, his complete lack of regret in not answering made my skin prickle like fleas had crawled in under it.
Arthur deserved better. I wanted to be better. Jesus Christ, if I wasn’t the person he invited to his kids’ sports meets, at the very least I should be the one who could haul in every resource to save him from violent kidnappers, the optimum under this metric. If I couldn’t even do that …
A brief rustling sound on the phone. I felt Simon before he spoke, his concern pushing at me even through the telephone connection.
“Cas. Cas,” he said. “How are you feeling? Any residual effects?”
Picturing what we’d encountered at the wellness center still made my throat tighten and my stomach fold over, but I brushed it off. “I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?” He must have sensed my instant desire to tear his face off, because he continued rapidly, “Okay. Okay. All right. I have, um, information on your prisoner.”
“My what?”
“The man you left with us,” Simon reminded me. “The one who was probably responsible for destroying your office. Remember?”
A man who’d destroyed my office …
A voice on the phone. Australian. An indistinct face, yelling as I dropped him to the ground. The image of me locking an apartment door and leaving him.
The whole reason we’d started to be suspicious of a Pithica connection in the first place.
“Shit,” I said.
“We’ll keep reminding you,” Simon offered.
“Yeah,” I croaked. “Do that. Now what about him?”
“His name is Oscar. And Cas, he’s seen Arthur. He’s alive, at least as of earlier today.”
My knees felt like they lost the ability to hold me up, and I almost sat right on the sidewalk. I’d told Pilar, I’d told Tabitha, but hearing it was true …
Relief wasn’t supposed to feel this awful.
“Where?” I got out.
“I—we haven’t worked that out yet. He might be willing to tell me, but I don’t think he’s fully conscious of everything he’s done. You were right—he’s had severe psychological trauma.”
“Can’t you impress upon him that this is urgent? Or just—” I bit my lip. I knew what Simon would say to the suggestion that he go forth and rip everything we needed out of Oscar’s head.
It wasn’t even something I would generally consider ethical, especially with a guy we were concluding was someone else’s pawn. But if Arthur died because we didn’t get there fast enough …
Simon did me the favor of not finger-wagging at me for what he already knew I knew. “I can tell you this,” he said instead. “I don’t know for sure, but I suspect many of his psychological issues are related to the way he won’t stick in your memory.”
“What?” I said. “How?”
“Well, the mind is a malleable thing, Cas. What would happen to a person’s mind if nobody could ever see them?”
Cold crept up the back of my neck. As pissed as my friends could make me, the thought of becoming a ghost … unable to make any human connection, anywhere, because no matter what I did, good or bad, tender or cruel, no one would ever, ever acknowledge I existed …
Fuck.
“So, it isn’t him who’s mindwiping people of his face, then?” I said. “Can you tell how…?”
“I’m still not sure. He definitely doesn’t have any special, um, powers, if you want to use that word. He’s within all the norms for a human.”
We’re outside the norm, whispered a voice in my head. But we’re still human.
Not true. “Normal” has a specific mathematical meaning. So does “human.”
“Cas?”
“I’m here,”