the others. You have to get her out of here.”
“I will,” said Simon’s voice.
“He said he was going to help me.” The moment crashed back with terrible clarity. “Rio, I think he was following me. From the police station—maybe even from the mission, if he knew what D.J.’s plans were and picked me up there. He must have recognized me at the wellness center, and he wanted my help, and when I didn’t say yes, he said he was going to…”
The body of the young driver broken on the street crossed my vision again.
“I don’t know what he means by that.” I was almost babbling, a frightened pleading. “I don’t know what he’s going to do.” If I didn’t give him what he wanted, what lengths would that drive him to? What would he do if Checker or Pilar or Arthur—or someone like Tabitha—happened to be standing next to me at the wrong moment?
I saw the man—Coach—again, gripping me by the shoulders and looking into my eyes. “Go,” he said. “Good luck.”
And I turned and followed Rio.
“Oh, God,” I said. “Rio, he was … he was my friend, wasn’t he?”
twenty-two
“I RECALL the person you speak of, and I believe you did consider him so, yes,” Rio answered. “Now I strongly suggest you cease this attempt at discovering more.”
“He was my friend…” And now he wanted my help.
Just as Arthur had needed my help. I’d sworn I’d break apart the world to find him, struggling so hard to claim that identity for myself. Promising myself I wouldn’t fail my friends as Willow Grace had failed hers.
I wasn’t a very good person, by almost any metric. I wasn’t even Rio, with his impressive consistency, no matter how many repugnant acts he still allowed himself. But recently, I’d begun to cling to the idea of the people in my life who mattered to me. To the promise that I could protect them.
Now I wasn’t even sure if Arthur and Checker thought that way about me in return—maybe they never had. And the sudden remembered emotion about the person I’d called Coach …
It cratered into a desperate obligation. A need to prove myself in some way I couldn’t even define.
“Maybe I could help him,” I said recklessly. “Teplova’s surgeries, they’re just math. I can figure out what she did. I could find someone to undo it.” I wasn’t at all certain about any of that. But if Coach had any chance, it was probably me.
As long as he didn’t kill me before I could try.
Voices hummed dissonantly in the back of my brain. Rio was right, I was shaking everything loose, destabilizing my own coherence just when I needed to be able to think.
Too late, too late, Valarmathi mocked me.
“D.J. must have forced Teplova to make him into that. As a, as an experiment,” I plowed on. “Nobody would choose this. Nobody.” And once done, I could think of a dozen ways such a victim could be controlled, from dangling the prospect of changing them back to being the sole person who didn’t run in fear. D.J. must have figured out some way to interact with his own creations.
The horror lanced through me of Teplova at that operating table, threatened into putting a knife to someone she considered a close companion. Distorting his face and body into something people would react to like a monster in the dark.
“I am pessimistic a rescue in this case is possible,” Rio said. “Even if you could transform him back to his prior form, someone like him may never be able to return fully from such an experience. He is a serious threat right now, Cas.”
“You’re suggesting we put him down, then?” I demanded. “Shoot him in the head and be done with it?”
“There may not be a choice in the matter.”
I pushed myself up aggressively and swung around into the car. “I’ll make it a choice. We take down D.J., we rescue Coach, and we make sure everyone’s safe. That’s the new plan.”
Arthur and the others would back me up on that. They saw the value in never letting go of a person’s humanity, even if Rio didn’t. Even if I wasn’t so sure either. They’d take my side.
Assuming Coach didn’t kill any of them first either.
* * *
THE SPECTER of Coach’s promise to help pressed me to urgency. What did he know about me? Who might he hurt, in a state of mind that had been so forcibly wrenched from reality?
He wasn’t like that before, a