I let my head drop into my hands. “So we take down Pithica, and people everywhere suffer. Or we let things stand the way they are.” I felt sick. And I hadn’t even been drinking.
“I’ve never met Dawna and her mind-mojo, and I’m still doubting doing this,” mumbled Checker, toying with the label on the tequila bottle.
“Ends justify the means, then?”
“What? Hey, whoa, trick question!”
“No,” I said. “It’s not.”
Checker frowned, considering. “You’re right,” he said finally. “You think you should always say ‘no,’ to that, don’t you? The saying? You say no, the ends don’t justify the means. Except—when you’re actually faced with the choice—”
“We say they have no right,” I said softly. “Except maybe they do. The math…” Dawna’s words came back to me, about the balance of more innocent lives saved at the expense of so few. The numbers agreed with Pithica, no question. The math was on their side.
But what if I was only having that thought because of Dawna’s influence?
But what if I only wanted to take her down because I wanted to be positive she hadn’t influenced me, so I was overcompensating—at the expense of innocent people?
But what if she wanted me to think that?
My head pounded.
“I’m not going to have a clear conscience no matter which way we choose,” said Checker. He took off his glasses and leaned back, rubbing his eyes. “What about you? Still think we should go ahead with this?”
I thought about what Rio had said. About free will, and humanity’s freedom to sin, and how nobody should take that away. Rio’s chosen path was clear: he was going after Pithica, and shit, if other villains rose up in their wake, he’d go after them, too.
Pithica might save people. They might be saving the world. But what they were doing was still wrong.
“Let me ask you something,” I said. “Would you like to meet Dawna?”
Checker jerked reflexively.
“Yeah,” I said. “I agree.”
He looked away.
“It doesn’t matter what the results are.” I was certain. I told myself I was certain. “They run the world the way they see fit, and twist around people’s minds to do it, and assassinate anyone who might get in the way. We have to stop them.”
“I just wish…” Checker murmured. “Darwin help me, I wish this were somebody else’s decision.”
“Well,” I said, “if it helps, remember that you and Arthur first started this because you were trying to find the people who’d murdered an innocent man.”
Checker picked up his bottle and contemplated it for a moment, then swirled the dregs and raised it toward me. “To Reginald Kingsley, then.” He sounded like a man at his own execution. “We’re going to destroy the world for you.”
“And save it,” I said. Save it for those who would ravage it. Checker was right. It was not a decision I wanted to be making.
I remembered what Dawna had said about the burden of making the choice, once one had the power—the decision of which lives to save, of which gray morality was better. We faced that choice now, too. And we would have to live with the results.
A tone sounded from the nearest computer. Checker moved over to it. “It’s the email account we gave to He Who Calls Himself Steve,” he told me. “Looks like your boy came through. With…holy shit, this is a lot of detail.” I stood up to look over his shoulder; he was scrolling through pages and pages of instructions, details on every kind of notification and authentication to send to each type of bank, government agency, monetary fund, or business. “They gave us exactly what we need—all we have to do is incorporate it. We’ll be ready to deploy within a few hours.”
And we’d hit a button, and everything would be out of our hands.
A crunch on the gravel outside signified Rio’s return; I went out to meet him fully armed, but he was alone and unperturbed. Evening was falling again, streaking the clouds red and pink across the broad Morongo Basin sky.
“Steve came through,” I informed him. “We just got the email. He give you any trouble?”
He looked at me.
“Nice one,” I said.
“Well. It seems I am capable of inspiring some fear.”
Considering what I’d gone through to get Arthur and Checker in the same room with him, and the fact that Dawna Polk was jeopardizing her whole organization to turn him, I thought he was making the understatement of the year.
“How does your work here progress?” Rio asked, following me back inside.
Most of the time he’d been gone had been spent rehashing our moral quandary—in comparison, the programming had been easy. “It’s done. Pretty much. We just have to set up and format the messages according to what we got from Steve and Company a minute ago. A few hours, tops. Have they deployed alerts to all the right agencies yet?”
“He said it would be done within two hours of our conversation, which time is now past. Your notifications will be taken seriously.”
“Hey, Checker,” I called as we came in. “We’re good to go. Steve’s sent out all the alerts. As soon as we’re ready, we can—”
The lights went out. Simultaneously, all of Checker’s monitors died, their glow an afterimage in the dimness, and the all-pervading hum of the electronics cut off, leaving us in sudden silence.
Checker yelled something inarticulate and possessive. He started flailing around in the grayness, trying to get his laptops restarted. Rio disappeared from my side as if he had been teleported.
I raced back outside, my foot hitting a windowsill to gain the roof in one bound. Rio was already crouched on the shingles beside a collection of armaments, peering through a scope to scan the valley.
“We’re not alone,” he said.
At first I thought he meant they had found us—I scanned the landscape, the empty desert snapping into a sharp relief of mathematical interactions—before I realized Rio wasn’t reacting as if to an offensive. “What do you mean?”
He lowered the scope and handed it to me, pointing toward the south. “Pithica didn’t locate us. This attack is widespread.”
It took me a minute, but I found the gas station and small cluster of buildings just visible in the direction Rio had indicated, tiny even through the scope. People were standing around outside, milling in a way that was not quite normal, some talking, some gesticulating broadly at each other. The twilight was deep enough that some lights should have been on, but everything was dark.
“What the hell?” I said. “A power outage?”
Rio pulled the burner cell out of his pocket, reinserted the battery, and hit the power button. Nothing.
“No,” he said. “Not a power outage.”
“Then what?”
He squinted toward the horizon. “EMP attack. Pithica was warned by the alerts going out. It’s protecting itself.”
Rio swung down off the roof; I followed closely behind him as we burst back into the house. “Explain, Rio!” I demanded. “How the hell did they—”
“Guys, everything’s fried!” came Checker’s panicked voice. “They must have hit us with an EMP; it’s the only thing that could’ve—”
“That’s what Rio said!” I interrupted. “Somebody start explaining now!”
“EMP,” said Checker. “Electromagnetic pulse, it’ll fry any electronics in the radius—”
“I know that,” I cut in. “I’m not an idiot. Skip to the ‘how’ part.”