Somewhere, either close by or far away, or possibly both, I heard movement. A voice gave directions, and people started breaking up, moving around. Dawna dismissing her troops, a final thread of lucidity in me knew. The shadows moved and mutated as they shifted away.
And then everything exploded in a cacophony of noise.
It was thunderous, terrible, threatening to pull me under. Gunfire shattered the air, each blast erupting through my whole head, and too much light, and people shouting and screaming and crashing and breaking, and a woman’s scream, and my head felt like it burst apart and the world fractured and spun, tearing me apart with inertial force…
The ground fell away. Someone was lifting me. I tried to fight back but I couldn’t, and then the pain blazed up and shattered me again, redoubling, whiting out everything else.
I wasn’t aware of much more after that; I blinked in and out of consciousness. I caught vague sensations of being carried, of rapid movement, of jerking to a stop and several voices shouting. Every new slice of awareness layered on another spasm of agony, until my thoughts stuttered incoherently like a badly tuned radio, the screeching overwhelming any other sound until I only wanted to turn it off—
The floor vibrated now. The air, too—so loud it shook me apart, and I wondered if this was what death felt like until the word helicopter floated through the strands of pain. Then time skipped again and the vibration of a different vehicle rumbled through me, a car, and two men were arguing, shouting: You shot her! and She aimed for me and I don’t expect you to understand. And part of my brain heard Rio’s voice and thought, Good, he got it!, even though if he hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been alive to think those words.
The next time I wavered to semi-consciousness I was lying still, on something soft, and I could tell I was very, very drugged. I struggled for a moment against the layers of mental wool before giving up; the warmth of unconsciousness hovered right below me, beckoning me back.
Arthur’s face swam into view. I had just enough awareness to think, Huh, weird, before the world melted away again.
Chapter 27
My senses stayed foggy for a long time. I kept seeing Arthur’s face during my intermittent spurts of consciousness, which my brain still thought was strange, but eventually it adapted. Rio was around, too. I became vaguely aware of Arthur making a fuss about letting Rio near me, which didn’t make any sense. Rio and I went way back. Arthur must not know that.
He also must have forgotten how Rio had saved all of our lives. And had kept his hand steady, which had saved me. If he weren’t such a good shot, shooting exactly where I aimed…the thought struck me as funny. I started to giggle, but it hurt too much.
Odd that Arthur would forget all that; he’d been there.
Occasionally I registered the presence of a third person, a middle-aged black woman who must have been a doctor. I tried to push her away the first time I figured out she was there, but I didn’t think the signals even made it out of my brain.
Time seemed slippery, too much of an effort to hold onto. Half the time I thought I was awake but then realized reality wasn’t Hausdorff, and what kind of topology was I in anyway if Twinkies were allowed? And the totient function was a rainbow, a beautiful rainbow and the greatest mathematical discovery of all time, but if you put a Möbius strip in the fourth dimension could a rabbit still hop down the side?
I became more lucid slowly; maybe they were weaning me off the drugs, but I stopped thinking I was the next Erdős every time penguins waddled through my dreams on a four-colored map. I slept or floated, the world still foggy but solid now, which was a vast improvement over it being wibbly.
The disorientation cleared enough once for me to see Rio’s face as he changed my dressing. His movements were swift and certain, and his lips moved in the whispered litany of a prayer.
“Rio,” I slurred. “You’re a good friend.”
“I’m not your friend, Cas,” he said quietly. “You know that. Don’t ever think otherwise.”
I did know. Friends cared about you. But friends also knew you well enough to communicate without words, and did things like save your life and then stay by your side and take care of you while you were injured. Did it matter that Rio didn’t care about me, as long as he acted like he did, and always would? Did it matter that he did it for other reasons, for his own grand religious reasons, instead of because he felt any sort of affection for me?
Plenty of people were only generous and kind and giving because they thought it was the way of God. They were still good people. What was friendship, after all?
I slipped back to sleep.
The first time I woke enough to have a real conversation, Arthur was back. “Hi,” I rasped.
He was instantly attentive. “Hey, Russell. How you feeling?”
“Fuzzy,” I answered. “Where’s Rio?”
His lip twitched. “Out.”
“You still don’t like Rio?” I frowned at him, trying to string the right words together. “He saved all our lives. He saved me. Again.”
“He shot you!” burst out Arthur.
“Because I told him to.” How could he not get it? “I knew I could line up a nonlethal shot.”
“A nonlethal—! Russell, do you have any idea how gunshots work?” He took a deep breath and visibly calmed himself. “That was absolutely, positively a lethal shot. Any gunshot can be lethal. You get hit in the leg it can kill you.” His voice cracked. “Russell, he shot you in the chest and you almost died, and if the bullet ain’t bounced and missed your heart—”
“I made it bounce,” I told him thickly. “It bounced ’cause I told it to.”
Arthur looked like he wanted to cry.
I ended up drifting off again at that point, but the next time I opened my eyes, feeling a good deal more alert, Arthur was still beside me, almost as if he hadn’t moved. It was kind of creepy. “How you feeling?” he asked immediately. “Up to eating something?”
“Don’t you have a job?” I said.
“Pithica was the only case I was working on.”
I couldn’t help thinking it strange that he kept hanging around. The last I remembered, we’d been at each others’ throats and he’d been swinging between trying to get Rio sold into slavery and having a massive guilt breakdown over getting me killed. “You don’t have to be here,” I told him. “You can go if you want.”
“I ain’t going to leave you alone with a…with someone who shot you,” he said darkly.
I started to sigh, but it hurt too much. They’d taken more of the drugs away, I realized. “We’ve been over this,” I said. “It was the plan.”
“Getting yourself shot is not a plan.”
“It allowed Rio to get us out of there,” I argued. “Any other option would have gotten one of us killed.”
“This one almost did get you killed!”
“But it didn’t.” He was making me tired, and my whole body ached. “You said something about food,” I reminded him, even though I wasn’t hungry. “I could get behind that.”
Arthur hurried off to make me some soup, and I fell back to sleep.
When I finally woke again I was starving, but Arthur wasn’t in his usual spot next to me. I could hear his voice, though; I looked over to see him on the other side of the room, leaving a quiet but intense voicemail for someone.
I pushed myself up a few inches and looked around. I was in a spacious studio apartment, and not one I recognized; it must have been Arthur’s or Rio’s. An IV stand stood beside my bed, with a long clear tube that wound around until it ended in a catheter taped into the back of my hand. On the way it passed over a crumpled pillow and blanket on the floor—someone had been sleeping close enough to keep an eye on me. Probably Arthur. Jesus.