Zero Sum Game (23 page)

“Really, Ms. Russell?” said Dawna, a hint of humor in her voice.

“It was worth a try,” I said aloud, and reached around to untuck the Glock and the TEC-9 from my belt and leave them on the ground, too.

“Everything,” said Dawna. “I must say, it’s almost as if you doubt me.”

I slid the knife out of my boot and left it with the firearms.

Dawna lowered her hands. “That’s better,” she declared, and I felt a sharp pang of frustration. Rio had warned me, but something in me had hoped his stark description an exaggeration. Mind reading had seemed too absurd, too unbelievable. But here was Dawna Polk, able to see exactly what I was thinking as if she’d cracked open my skull, to look at me and
know—

“Yes, I do,” Dawna said briskly. “Now, we do know you can be…an effective person, even unarmed. Please believe Mr. Tresting will continue to be a hostage to your good behavior.” She raised her voice slightly. “Take her, please.”

More shadows glided out of the surrounding rooms, black-clad bodies punctuated with the distinctive hard angles of the well-armed. If I had been here alone, I might have looked for a way out, even with Dawna reading me—might have tried to get away even if the mathematical expectation read death. But if I made a move…
goddamn Arthur.
I shut my mind away from calculating escape routes and let gloved hands pull my wrists behind me; the plastic bite of a ziptie cut into my skin.

This was why I should never care about another person’s welfare, I thought.

“Oh, Ms. Russell. Caring about others is what makes life worth living,” Dawna chastised me.

I squinted at her. I might not be psychic, but I couldn’t hear any irony in her words. She seemed to believe that.

“I do,” she said. “Now, I apologize for the less than ideal treatment you are about to receive. But you and I have a lot we must talk about.”

She nodded to her people, and I felt a gentle shove of a strong hand on my shoulder. I took the cue and walked out among the press of heavily armed bodies, out into the night and into the back of a white van that had materialized from nowhere.

As the van rumbled to life and rolled away from the ghost town, I tried not to think about what Dawna had said. She wanted to talk to me.

She wanted to
talk
to me.

My chest felt tight, and I couldn’t get enough air.

Dawna Polk wanted to talk to me.

Raw terror began crackling around the edges of my thoughts.

Calm down,
I ordered myself.
Think. Strategize.
Dawna wasn’t here now, only her faceless black-clad people who surrounded me silently, armed with M4s in their hands and sidearms on their thighs, and their well-armed discipline was trivial. Eight people became nothing when I had mathematics on my side. But the sure knowledge that Tresting was in a similar windowless van surrounded by equally armed guerillas stayed me; Dawna had told me she would kill him if I didn’t cooperate, and I believed her.

I needed a way out for both of us.

But if I couldn’t find one, how long would it take Dawna to turn me inside out, to destroy everything I was and replace it with whatever personality she chose? How long before she scraped my brain free of any errant opinion, made me a parrot for Pithica’s goals? If her earlier influence was any indication, I wouldn’t even notice it happening. I would become a puppet who blithely continued to think herself a real human being.

Panic rose, flooding my brain with static, crowding out any attempts to plan. A new and unfamiliar emotion dragged at me—
helplessness.

I had never been helpless. I’d never faced any threat I hadn’t been confident of overcoming eventually, not with my mathematical abilities—

My abilities. Did Dawna know what I could do? If she didn’t, if I managed to hide it, I might have just the edge Arthur and I needed to escape. Did I have the slightest chance of it? Had I already given myself away?

Dawna could read any thought off my face; I had no hope of masking any information she might seek from me. But she wasn’t seeing every last bit of knowledge in my brain, was she? Surely that would be impossible. If she knew every last fact in everyone’s head at every moment, the deluge of information would overload her. Might I potentially be able to shield something from her, something like my math prowess, if I simply didn’t think about it?

Yes, because it always works to try
not
to think about something!

I squashed back the panic and racked my brain for ideas. If Dawna asked whether I was a superpowered math genius who could make like a one-woman army, a twitch of my eye would tell her yes, but unless she already suspected as much, she would have no reason to ask, would she? The question would be so far outside her fundamental assumptions; it would never occur to her unless I gave myself away. I couldn’t turn off seeing the numbers, but if I refrained from calculation as much as I could, would it be possible? Mathematical connections made themselves apparent to me all the time. Letting that sense lie latent would be as insurmountable as turning off my hearing—or, more accurately, trying to ignore everything I heard. Could I damp it down enough to hide it?

Wait. What if I did the opposite? Dawna likely didn’t know a great deal of mathematics; she wouldn’t be able to tell the extent of my abilities unless I connected them to reality. If I focused inward instead—well,
not
thinking of something might be almost impossible, but
thinking
of something was a much easier strategy, and focusing on innocuous trivialities might crowd out every thought I didn’t want to have. Messy computation would provide the perfect static, which meant I didn’t have to bind back my mathematical capability—I would instead hide it in plain sight.

Not to mention that if I provided enough white noise in my brain, I might not only have a chance at camouflaging my math skills, but potentially keep other stray thoughts from surfacing, as well. If Dawna asked what I was trying to hide, the answer would truthfully be
as much as I possibly can.

She might see through the guise right away, of course. But at least now I had something to try.

Over an hour later, when the van pulled to a stop after rolling downward for several long minutes into what felt like an underground parking structure, I’d filled my brain with unending computations of the nontrivial zeroes of the Riemann-Zeta function. If that ceased to occupy my full concentration, I threw in constructing a succinct circuit and calculated a Hamiltonian path in it at the same time, and also tried to keep up a run factoring a string of two and three hundred-digit numbers, one after the other. It was math—but it was normal, uninteresting math, heavy computations I hoped would weary Dawna with their tedium the moment she saw them, dry manipulations of numbers that would frustrate her as an obvious strategy to hide something else.

Most people’s eyes glazed over the instant equations came on the scene. I hoped Dawna Polk would be no different.

Chapter 23

I kept up
the computational white noise as the paramilitary troops brought me out of the van, refusing to look at the mathematics for escape routes even for interest’s sake and pointing all my concentration inward. Forcing myself to ignore the math drenching my surroundings strained my brain, but even though Dawna herself might not be in evidence yet, I was sure security cameras were recording my every microexpression. If my ploy had even a chance of working, I didn’t want to let up the effort for an instant.

The guards marched me down several flights of stairs and through a series of bare cement hallways to a door with the weight and thickness of a bank vault’s, which they manhandled open to reveal a cellblock with a row of empty jail cells. Concrete cinder blocks formed the back wall, but iron bars partitioned the cells from each other and from freedom, leaving no privacy for the prisoners. My captors ushered me into a cell near the middle of the row and surprised me by cutting the zipties around my wrists before sliding the bars closed and locking me in. Then they left—not far, I felt sure—save one guard who stayed at attention at the end of the cellblock.

I peeked mathematically and quickly discarded every option for escape; even I’m at a disadvantage when I start out locked in a cell with no assets. I sat against the concrete wall and went back to my Riemann-Zeta calculations, chugging out another few decimal places for the imaginary part of the latest
s
I was contemplating.

The door at the end of the cellblock opened, and my heavily-armed friends reentered, this time with Tresting between them. More bruises purpled his face than before, and a trickle of blood marked a split lip. The bruising struck me as odd somehow, but instead of trying to calculate why, I buried myself in a Hamiltonian path analysis.

I scrambled to my feet.

“Hey, you all right?” Tresting called.

“Yeah,” I said, keeping my mind whirring on my succinct circuit and another Riemann-Zeta root in the background. “You?”

“Yeah.”

He left off speaking for a minute as the guards hustled him to the cell next to mine; they cut his hands free as they had done for me and locked him in impersonally. Once they had left again, Tresting turned toward me, rubbing his wrists. “I’m sorry,” he said, all weighty and heavy and undoubtedly sincere. “So sorry. My fault, all of it.”

“Not really,” I answered. I honestly didn’t blame him; I had known full well what I gambled when I went in after him. “They must’ve hidden somehow till I got there. She obviously had this planned.”

“Not what I meant,” he said. “Knew it was a setup. I shouldn’t’ve…just got desperate. Didn’t want to lose the lead, you know?”

“I know,” I said. “It’s okay.”

“No, it ain’t. I heard what she said. They set the trap for you, but on your lonesome, you might not’ve been dumb enough to fall in. Was me got us caught.”

“She played us all,” I said. “Human nature, she said, right? She can predict when we’ll be stupid.”

“Maybe.”

“It was my fault I was there just as much as yours,” I said. “I came uninvited in the first place, remember?”

He exhaled sharply and unhappily. “Any idea why they want you?”

It was a good question. Two nights ago they’d tried to kill me with no questions asked, and now they had set a trap for me? The only good guess my earlier brooding had come up with was that this all had to do with my minimal ability to break away from Dawna’s brainwashing after the fact. Of course, considering how easily she had gotten to me during our meeting at the coffee shop, and how profoundly the effect had lasted before Rio’s insistent intervention, I didn’t have much hope of the supposed resistance helping me out now.

“I guess I’ll find out,” I said.

“Yeah.” Arthur was looking at his hands, still reflexively rubbing them against each other. “You know, you could’ve run, when they threatened me.”

“No, I couldn’t have.”

He glanced at me and then nodded, as if he understood what I meant.

Absurdly, I felt as if I had passed some sort of test. “Besides, you would have done the same for me,” I pointed out, embarrassed.

“Yeah, but I got a reputation for self-sacrificing idiocy to uphold.”

“Well. We all have our flaws.”

He huffed out a breath that sounded almost like a laugh, and any tension that had remained after the last time we saw each other slipped away. Arthur went to sit down on the floor, leaning back against the wall, and I joined him on the other side of the barred partition dividing our cells while I factored another hundred or so integers. Most of them were easy, but I’d just hit a frustrating one that might be a semiprime.

“What do you think’s going to happen here?” asked Arthur after a while.

“I think Dawna Polk is going to come talk to us,” I said. “And then we’re going to do whatever she wants.”

“You got a plan?”

The Euclidean algorithm flickered through each subsequent remainder, subtracting and dividing and subtracting. “Resist as much as I can, I guess.” Of course, Dawna could make me think I was resisting when I was doing exactly what she wanted me to do. We would both be her babbling lap dogs eventually.

What had Rio said? That the conversion would take time, if her goal went fundamentally against her victim’s personality? Months, even, for a result opposite to the person’s psychology?

What was my psychology? Axiomatic, probably, but I’d already witnessed her ability to rewrite those axioms to let me rationalize anything. I had no defense against her. Neither of us did.

“I ain’t never been one to consider suicide an appropriate solution,” said Tresting beside me, “but in this case…”

I snapped my head around to look at him. Killing myself hadn’t even occurred to me. “Well, I guess that’s one way to avoid her influence,” I managed.

“Avoid it, and make sure she ain’t never make me do nothing to my—to anyone I cared about. Or anyone else.”

If his main concern was being used as a tool to hurt others, then he was definitely the better person. “I…if you want to do that, I can make it quick,” I offered, the words dry in my mouth.

“Thank you,” he said quietly. “I’ll let you know.”

We lapsed into silence. Eventually I curled up on the cement floor and tried for some sleep. One of the guards brought us food and water every few hours, and Arthur was graceful about turning away when I needed to use the steel toilet affixed to the wall. The wait was humane, if tedious.

I noticed my chronic headaches had gone away. Instead of being a relief, their sudden lack only spurred my anxiety. The headaches had come on whenever I resisted Dawna’s influence—what did it mean that I didn’t feel them anymore?

Fuck. I buried myself in more mathematics. It was all I could do.

Busy with my constant stream of monotonous mental arithmetic, I didn’t bother to keep track of the time, but at least a full day had passed before the door at the end of the cellblock opened again to reveal a familiar frizzy-haired and freckle-faced figure.

“Hi,” said Courtney Polk, coming down the cellblock to face us.

Arthur and I stepped forward in our cells. “Hi,” I said warily.