“I’m ready whenever you are.”
“Lend me a rifle,” I said to Rio. “The Vector, if you can spare it. And anything you’ve got for explosives detection. Then let’s hoof it.”
If this was a trap, maybe we could spring it hard enough to get taken to wherever Arthur was anyway.
sixteen
JUST WHAT I need, I thought, as I wedged the earpiece in before driving us off into the darkening evening in Pilar’s car. Another voice in my head.
Valarmathi snickered.
In the passenger seat beside me, Pilar was checking all her spare magazines were topped off. She’d had those in her trunk as well, apparently.
“Hey,” I said to her. “We should ask Mr. Mind Reader if he knows why you were able to pull us away from things when we were attacked at the wellness center. We need every edge possible.”
“I asked him already,” Pilar said. “He called last night to make sure I was feeling okay, you know, after. From what I could tell him, his best guess was…” She took a breath. “I’d never killed anything before. Not like that. He thinks I got a wash of, of something for a minute that fought the panic. A different emotion that was strong enough to disrupt it. I don’t think it’s something we could replicate.”
“Huh. Too bad.” Simon was always telling me mind manipulation wasn’t an exact science. Push here, pull there, corral a thousand variables to aim for a certain reaction and only land in the neighborhood.
People like Simon and Dawna could land in that neighborhood enough times in a row to hone down a thought to within a few neurons—metaphorically—but Teplova’s hard-coding surgeries didn’t seem nearly so precise. It might be worth trying to brainstorm how to disrupt their magic in some other way, if this lasted beyond tonight.
For tonight, we were stuck with Simon. I dialed and conferenced in Pilar. The phone rang a good four times before he picked up.
“What the hell took so long?” I said.
“What?” Simon sounded distracted. “Oh—I’m just…”
I waited for him to finish the thought, but he didn’t.
“Hey,” I said sharply.
“Sorry! What is it?”
“Hang on, Cas,” Pilar said. “Is he okay? Simon, are you okay?”
“Yeah. Yes. I’m a bit—uh. Knackered, to tell you the truth.”
He seemed a lot further gone than that. Shit.
“Well, get un-knackered,” I said. “We need you. Pilar and I are both staying on this call. We’re chasing down a lead on Arthur. If we run into any of Teplova’s creations, we need you to talk us down. Got it?”
“In the moment?” Simon said.
“Yes, in the moment,” I said. “Why, is that a problem for you?” Pilar winced at my tone.
“The continuous pushing against this … it’s difficult. I’m becoming more impressed with this, Cas. It may be crude, but it’s … wearing.” I was about to ask him what the hell he was talking about when his tone changed. “Oh. Oh. You forgot again.”
“Forgot what?” I said.
“Oscar. The man who tried to blow up your office.”
“That was D.J.,” I said. I turned down a winding back road that would shortcut some of the worst city congestion.
“Maybe D.J. is the mastermind, but the person who set you up is named Oscar. He arranged an appointment with you and then tried to keep you there. You knocked him down and then locked him up and asked me to come see if I could discover anything of substance from him.”
Despite the exhaustion threading his words, Simon’s speech was annoyingly patient.
And I did remember now.
Shit.
“The Australian,” I said, to prove it. His voice was easier to latch on to than his face. What Rio and I had discussed came back to me: the ways the doctor had left her legacy on so many varied people’s bodies. Or the ways she’d been forced to.
How did Oscar fit into the puzzle? Why had he been made—as some sort of covert operations test, an invisible man?
“He’s Teplova’s too.” I filled Simon and Pilar in, now that I could remember him. “He has to be. Plastic surgery. He must have had his face changed to make him forgettable, or, I don’t know, unimportant-looking.”
“Holy smokes,” Pilar murmured.
“Can you see it?” I asked Simon. “Can you tell what she did?”
“Plastic surgery … yes, it’s possible. In fact, that would make a lot of sense. I’m used to people blasting their emotions at me all the time, but his face … it doesn’t. I don’t think it’s that I couldn’t read him if I tried, but it’s more obscured. A bit, anyway.”
“Maybe