Plastic Smile (Russell's Attic Book 4) by SL Huang

word was brittle.
    “This is why we need a better way of fighting back,” I said. “Picking off these assholes one at a time is never going to be enough.”
    Checker folded his lips together.
    “What the fuck.” Part of me was itching to start a fight, and Checker was both available and infuriating me. “Arthur just got shot and you still don’t want to help me?”
    “Can we talk about this later?”
    “When? After I get shot? After you do? After Pilar is walking down the street by the office and gets mugged?”
    “That’s not fair—”
    “Of course it’s not fair! That’s the whole reason we need to do this!” Of course it’s not fair, mimicked a voice in my head that wasn’t mine. We were born to it. I pushed away the phantom. What the hell was going on with my brain? “I’m trying to make it fair, and you won’t help me.”
    “Because I’m against this. Influencing people’s thought patterns is wrong. It’s wrong and it’s evil and I’m not going to help you do it.”
    “What, I’m evil now?”
    “Not what I said,” he snapped. “But I wouldn’t want my brain messed with, and I’m not going to help you do it to anyone else. Period.”
    “Oh, you think you’re likely to get caught up in a mob, do you?”
    “Not the point.”
    “It fucking well is the point,” I said. “Because if you were, and you temporarily lost your ability to reason, I guarantee the thing you’d want most in the world would be for something else to beat that feeling back.” I knew the argument was going to work as soon as I started it, and I tried to keep the egotistical triumph off my face. “Crowd psychology is like a drug. This is going to help people not be affected by something that would otherwise make them feral and amoral against their will. And you don’t want to help.”
    He hesitated.
    “It’s not a pacifier, and it’s not messing with people’s brains,” I insisted. “It’s preventing the deindividuation from doing it.”
    Checker leaned his elbows against his desktop and dropped his face against his hands. “Screw you, Cas.”
    “You should know by now. I’m always right.”
    “That is not even close to being true.” He sat back up, taking off his glasses to rub his eyes. “I want you to leave out the Hole. I don’t care what you say; I don’t want my brain affected by this.”
    “Fine,” I said. “Your delicate little neurons will be spared.”
    “And if this thing starts making people so peaceful they want to lie down and die, I’m holding you personally responsible—”
    “You watch too many movies,” I said. “I’m telling you, it’s only going to affect people who are already getting their buttons pushed by groupthink.”
    “I’m still against it.”
    “And I’m still against you poking into my business, so we’re even.” Suddenly feeling every inch of the bruising from tonight, I hitched myself stiffly up to sit on Checker’s desktop between monitors and leaned back against a computer tower.
    I felt Checker move closer to me. He picked up a keyboard off the desktop and slid it on top of one of the towers so he could prop his elbows next to me. “Cas. Hey.”
    I curled my gloved hands loosely against my knees. Blood was starting to seep through along the seams.
    Checker nudged my legs with his shoulder. “You know, only you would assign yourself the problem ‘fight crime’ and then try to come up with a general solution.”
    “General solutions are the only ones worth anything,” I said.
    “Nah,” he answered. “For instance, I think we’re going to find a kickass particular solution to the Cas Russell recombination problem.”
    I huffed out a breath of air that was something like a laugh.
    “Tell me about some of your clients,” he said softly. “The regular ones, or the older ones.”
    “Don’t you have a police investigation to follow?”
    “I’m waiting on CSU. We have a minute.”
    God, everything hurt. I wanted to go sleep, but moving