“Thanks,” I mumbled. I realized something. “You think Pithica’s pretty bad, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Cas, the Lord could force us all to peace and righteousness if He wished to. Our world would have no war, no pain. Instead, He gave us free will.”
Huh. That wasn’t a bad way of looking at it. “But you could argue that Dawna’s using her free will,” I pointed out. “Even if it’s to take away other people’s.”
“And like all those who use their freedom to harm others, she sins in doing so.”
“Oh.” I mulled that over. Because Rio was the only religious person I knew, I tended to forget that mass murder wasn’t supposed to be in the playbook. Except…Dawna was doing the exact same thing Rio did: hurting people to make the world a better place. “But what about what you do? I thought—your God…”
“Cas, I am a condemned man in the eyes of the Lord,” he said. “I have sinned far too gravely.”
Shock rippled through me. Rio believed in God and also believed that he was going to go straight to hell? “But you…” Words failed me.
“Do not think me such a tragic figure, Cas. I am too weak to my baser desires. The least I can do is use them to do God’s work.”
I was stunned. Not that I believed in heaven or hell myself, but the fact that Rio did and still thought no matter how faithful he was, the former was closed to him—I couldn’t imagine living that way.
Rio had given me a lot to think about. It was so strange—Dawna had seemed so right, her logic absolutely inescapable. Rio had only brought up more questions, and not even entirely consistent ones, and if possible everything was less clear than it had been and I was developing a killer headache to boot, but at least I knew the muddy snarl was my own thoughts on the matter.
“Did our friend Miss Polk discuss anything else with you?” Rio asked.
“Not really. Mostly she just offered to answer my questions.”
Rio looked far more serious about that than I would have expected. “I see,” he said again.
And the realization blazed through me, viscerally painful, my recovering wound hot with agony and every nerve ending on fire. By asking her questions…by asking her questions, I had been willingly telling Dawna everything she wanted to know. I had asked about what I had thought was important, and in asking about it, I had thought about it, and in thinking about it…Jesus Christ, if she had let me keep going, I would have asked her about everything, given away the smallest detail of everything I knew, as far back as I could remember.
But she hadn’t been interested in any of that. She had stopped our session even though I was still ready to spill a lot more than I already had. Thinking back, I realized with horror that she had only taken the time to converse with me on one topic: Rio. She had turned the conversation toward him at the very beginning, and then taken all the information I had.
“Oh, God,” I said. “I—I’m so sorry. Rio, she only wanted to talk about you—” Dawna was a bloody psychic; I had given away every last morsel I knew about Rio in that conversation; I was sure of it. Tresting’s treachery was nothing compared to what I had done. “I told her…I told her—” I was so stupid. The only person in the world I could trust, and I had spilled my guts about him at the first opportunity.
“Cas, calm yourself,” said Rio. “I expected that. I do not think you could have given away anything of harm to me. Take me back through what you spoke of, as nearly as you can remember.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said desperately. Why couldn’t he hate me? “She’s a mind-reader! She got everything!”
Rio raised his eyebrows. “She had me her prisoner and could not use anything you gave her to any effect. What does that tell you?”
It didn’t matter whether she had hurt him with it; I had still betrayed him. I turned away.
Rio sighed, the barest susurration of breath. “I promise you it is of no consequence to me. Melodrama does not suit you, Cas.”
Melodrama? I had just proved myself completely untrustworthy, and he was calling it melodrama?
“In fact, considering why I am insusceptible to her influence, had you been able to resist her, you would now have a far more significant worry.”
I still felt wretched, but that almost got a laugh out of me.
“Now, humor me, Cas. Take me through your discussion with her. I don’t believe there is any cause for concern.”
Chapter 28
Now that I was awake, the hours passed slowly. I discovered I detested convalescing. It was extremely boring. The one saving grace was that I was still technically on a job, at least enough to satisfy my messed-up brain. Despite Rio’s and my discussion about what had gone down with Dawna, I still hadn’t talked to him or Arthur about what our next step would be regarding Pithica.
Of course, Rio still wanted me off the case. Ordinarily someone else’s objections wouldn’t have stopped me, but I had a sneaking thread of suspicion that he was right, that dealing with Pithica truly was out of my league. I’d never felt that way before, and I didn’t like it.
Presumably, Rio was still going after Dawna himself, but he wasn’t telling us about it. Arthur, meanwhile, was mired in some sort of guilty cognitive dissonance between what Dawna had convinced him of at first and what she had inherently convinced him of later by trying to have me killed in front of him, and seemed perfectly content to hover over me as I recovered. He spent a lot of time on his phone, too, though I never heard him reach anyone.
As for me, I decided to defer my decision on what to do about Pithica. If I could fool my brain for a while longer into thinking I was still working, that was fine by me. I still couldn’t figure out if I wanted to charge after Dawna Polk with everything I had or run as far away as possible and hope she never found me. Not to mention that some part of me still thought her logic might be right and Pithica might be a pinnacle of moral rectitude and I should do everything I could to help them. It was confusing. And I got a headache whenever I tried to think about it seriously.
Rio had given me a secure laptop to use, and I spent the hours reading up on the latest papers in recursion theory to give me something to focus on. It was marginally interesting.
On the fourth day after I’d woken up and been able to keep track of time effectively again, I remembered my email and went to sign in. I didn’t use email much. The only person I talked to about anything other than business was Rio, and he was strictly a phone person. The only thing I used email for was to get messages about potential jobs, though most of the people who knew to contact me did it via a permanent voicemail box. Likewise, I used email more as a message drop than for anything else.
I did have three overtures for possible work, all old clients or people who had been referred by old clients, which was how most people found me. Two looked dead boring, the other only vaguely intriguing, but at least they would keep me busy if I ducked off Pithica. Provided I stayed in LA, I thought—I might have to go back to considering a disappearing act if I decided to run. My autoresponder had already taken care of the “on a case, will reply shortly” messages and none of the circumstances sounded urgent, but I took the time to dash off replies anyway, telling them that I was currently busy with a job but that I was potentially interested and would be in touch.
That left one message, from an address I didn’t recognize. I clicked on it, frowning a little. It was encrypted. I passed my public key around to anyone who wanted it, but I didn’t know many people who would have sought it out, let alone used it. I decrypted the text—and my whole body went cold, like a ghost had reached out and touched my soul.