Free Zero Sum Game by SL Huang Page B

his hands to his face, blood streaming freely through his fingers. I hoped Rio had pulled the blow enough that he hadn’t, well, killed him with it. I knew he could hit hard enough to do it. “Talk, Tresting. What was that all about?”
    He tried to focus streaming eyes on Rio. “I know who you are,” he croaked thickly, through the blood. “Heard of you, too.”
    “Have you now,” said Rio.
    “I know what you are,” spat Tresting. “Would’ve done the world a favor to blow your goddamn head off.”
    “I would prefer it,” said Rio, “if you did not take the Lord’s name in vain. Particularly when speaking of blowing off heads. It seems a poor choice for your soul.”
    Tresting stared at him. It wasn’t, generally speaking, the kind of thing people expected Rio to say, unless they knew him.
    “And I would prefer it,” I said, with all the menace of someone holding a gun in another person’s face, “if you not insult people I like.”
    “Chivalrous, but unnecessary,” Rio said to me in an aside.
    “Oh, I don’t know. I think it’s just necessary enough.” I raised my eyebrows at Tresting over the gun. “You meet a guy, you pull a gun on him—or, well, try—and then you insult him…Mr. Tresting, that’s just rude.”
    “Russell,” Tresting managed, and his voice was thready and desperate. “Russell. You don’t know what he is. Get away from him. Please.”
    “I know him,” I said, “and I trust him. If you want me on your side, deal with it.”
    He stared at me, long and hard, blood still streaming from his face. Then he straightened up with an obvious effort, mopping a handful of the blood off in a fruitless effort at cleanup. The man had steel in him, I’d give him that.
    “I will never,” he said, “be on the same side as someone like that.” He spat on the ground, the expectorant a bloody mess but the message clear, and, still using his truck for support, got around to the driver’s side, levered himself in, and roared away.
    “It occurs to me,” said Rio, “that being acquainted with me is not the best decision for your social network.”
    “Screw my social network,” I said.

Chapter 8
    Camarito was barely more than a truck stop, a ramshackle collection of buildings pretending to be a town. The gas station lighting up Main Street tried very hard to be a travel center and almost made it before giving up. A couple of truckers hunched over coffee at the mostly-deserted tables outside; Rio and I took one far away from everyone else. I sat back and watched the night while Rio went inside to pick up some coffees.
    The childish part of my brain wanted to write Arthur Tresting off entirely. Nobody who threatened and belittled my friends—or my not-friends, whatever—deserved my help, or even my acquaintanceship. But a small, insistent voice pointed out that Tresting’s distrust of Rio was not outrageously unreasonable, and was maybe even an indication Tresting might be a good guy, or something. I was never quite clear on where the gray ended and the black and white began, but it wasn’t a stretch to put both Rio and me among the condemned, whereas Tresting—I wasn’t sure. I didn’t like him, but much as I wanted to, I couldn’t dismiss him or the information he might have just because of what he’d said about Rio.
    After all, he wasn’t wrong.
    Rio…Rio came into this world not quite right. He doesn’t feel emotion the way other people do. Doesn’t empathize. He honestly does not care about other people.
    The one thing that drives him is inflicting pain. He craves it. He needs it. Some people are born for certain careers in this world; Rio’s talents mold him to excel at the worst of them all, the man with his tray of silver instruments whose mere presence in a room will cause people to scream and confess, the man who will smile through the spray of blood and revel in how much he loves his work.
    I have no illusions about Rio.
    In some strange joke of the