by Camilla Monk
I’d have eaten my fourth cannoli, but it slipped from my hands.
Ten million dollars. Roughly half of everything my mother had left me—43.86 percent, taking into account the current exchange rate, if we were going to be picky. Sitting cross-legged on the tangle of black sheets on my bed, I was trying to concentrate on the thousands of files in Sabina Falchi’s laptop, but Dries’s words wouldn’t stop bouncing around my skull. Had my mother asked for this? Or was it something he had decided himself, because he knew he’d never be there for me?
For the first time since we had met in Tokyo, I felt an inexplicable guilt. I had never thought of Dries; I didn’t even know he existed, and once I did, I rapidly came to the conclusion that he was an arrogant asswipe and a menace to society. But he had thought of me, and the idea filled me with a sense of regret, like sand slipping from my fingers that I could never catch again.
Would Dries have made a good father? March was trying to change for me, to leave his past as a hit man behind and become a good citizen. Was it something Dries would have ever been capable of, for my mother and me? She’d said in her good-bye letter that she didn’t believe so, that he’d never choose us over his brothers. It seemed Dries wanted to believe the same, but I had this intuition, like a painful weight in my chest, that both of them had been terribly wrong, that maybe, if they’d talked to each other . . .
It was all in the past though. I already had a father—whom I would need to call again eventually. Dries and I could never recover the memories that weren’t, but I could at least try to clear his name. Well, of the plane bombing anyway.
I stirred with a yawn and locked my eyes on the screen of the laptop. There were years of research on that drive, but the only files Falchi had flushed were an archive containing ten-year-old e-mails and PDF scans. She’d apparently spent the first weeks of 2005 helping another intern with his thesis paper on titanium-based glass, and after that, it was mostly mundane communications with her boss or someone from HR.
Until May. I went through a particular series of e-mails; she’d been getting closer to a guy named . . . Lucca Gerone. Their exchanges often contained scientific discussions, but he was clearly interested in more. He’d been the one sending the scans in the archive. I opened the first one and blinked. Over a page where he had initially printed complex chemical model equations, Gerone had drawn Sabina. The portrait was a little manga-ish and overall pretty bad; I found it incredibly sweet.
I went through more scans of the same type, containing either doodles or chemistry jokes, until I reached a large drawing, covering a double page. For the first time, Gerone had drawn himself holding Sabina, ascending in a rocket toward a flying potato. No wait. The moon. A title had been hastily added with an orange highlighter: Another Practical Use for DPC: Taking You to the Moon and Back. My gaze lingered on the text I could make out under the drawing.
Nanocrystals explosion.
My pulse increased steadily as I zoomed on the paragraph. Dynamic Prismatic Crystals . . . kinematic analysis . . . ultrasound-induced structural stress . . . molecular single crystals mimicking mechanical processes at macroscopic levels . . . When exposed to ultrasound waves within the aforementioned range . . . fragments travel up to 105–109 their own length . . . High risk of instability.
Now, that was a good start—or a terrible one, whichever you prefer. A recipe involving yttrium, aluminum, and neodymium—those crystals had been one of Gerone’s research projects at Novensia. According to Gerone’s notes, the resulting nanopowder would enhance Ceraglass’s optical properties and shock resistance, effectively creating “a new generation of highly resistant light-transmitting material.”
I browsed through the remaining scans feverishly. Failed attempts to stabilize the formula, more jokes about the danger of possible practical use. One folder contained a video shot inside a test chamber. A couple minutes long, it was a practical demonstration of the chain reaction Gerone’s notes hypothesized: microscopic crystalline structures vibrated and popped apart one after another under the effect of the chosen ultrasound wavelength. The whole thing might have looked underwhelming—anodyne, even—to the untrained eye, but a brief scale calculation told me all I needed to know about what kind of energy would be released and what sort of damage might occur if playing the same game with several tons of those.
Yet Gerone hadn’t seemed too worried about what might happen if his crystals ever landed in the wrong hands . . . or the hundred-foot-long sky roof of a jumbo jet.
A soft knock at the cabin’s door startled me.
“Biscuit? Can I come in?”
“Sure, you need to see this!”
March entered the bedroom like a ghost, careful to close the door behind him without so much as a whisper. He walked to my nightstand and placed a bottle of water there. “For the night,” he said.
He had noticed. This man had officially become my boyfriend less than five days ago, but he had already figured out that I woke up at night to drink water and would wander to the nearest tap if no bottle was available. I took a reverent sip, my eyes never leaving him as he sat next to me on the bed.
“You said I needed to see something?”
“I think I found what Dries was looking for. Well, no, it’s not what he was looking for, but check this . . .”
For the second time, I went through Falchi and Gerone’s tender exchanges and showed March the files: the fun doodles of the beginning, which progressively became more, his declaration of love, drawn on a printed version of his research paper about the ultrasound-sensitive crystals, and the experiment footage.
I paused on a particular file containing various sinusoidal graphs and comments. “You see those lines? They describe the minimum frequency and amplitude you need to expose the crystals to, in order for them to explode—243 kilohertz, it’s in the lower spectrum and way beyond the human-hearing range. You need special equipment to generate that.”
March nodded, his perplexity artfully concealed by a frown of concentration.
“You believe that’s what happened to the plane? The sky roof material reacted to some kind of . . . high frequency signal, and it triggered an explosion?”
“It’s possible. That kind of frequency is short range, and according to Gerone’s data, it triggers a chain reaction in the crystals. Supposing someone built a transducer that’s powerful enough to emit the signal and placed it less than ten feet away from the sky roof, concealed as a laptop for example . . . I think it would work. And it could make it past security: no liquid or explosives involved.”
“What about Gerone himself? Did you find anything else about him in Falchi’s files?”
“Nope. I looked him up online, but I found almost nothing. It’s like he lived in a cave after Novensia: no address, no résumé, no search engine results, no social media . . . zilch.”
“I see. I’ll send your report to Phyllis; she’ll research his whereabouts.”
“Okay. You know, the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that this has nothing to do with a terrorist attack at all. Maybe something happened to Gerone while he worked at Novensia, and Sabina Falchi knows about it.” In my mind, the airport footage replayed. Sabina Falchi’s surprise, their long exchange, then her sudden distrust when he’d tried to hold her back. “And if our hooded guy is Lucca Gerone, that’d explain why he saved Falchi: he knew the roof’s material was contaminated with his crystals, so he stepped in.”
March stroked my arm pensively. “That would also imply he knew what would happen. Perhaps Pio Maraì will be able to tell us more about him.”
“Maraì . . . Novensia’s CEO? Do you think he knows what’s going on?”
“I’m tempted to believe so. Phyllis and I did some research of our own: he left Rome in a hurry shortly after the crash.”
“Seriously?”
He winked at me. “But no mortal can escape the claws of the fearsome Phyllis. Novensia operates a secluded research center on the island of Vis in Croatia. Mar
aì sometimes retreats there to conduct operations. His private jet landed in Zagreb thirty hours ago. He probably fled to escape an upcoming crisis.”
Impressive. I had no idea if I should be glad or horrified that for the past six years Phyllis had put those skills to the service of helping March screen his “clients.” I looked through the window. It was past 1:00 a.m., and we were sailing south fast. “That’s where we’re headed?”
“Yes.”
I closed the laptop and let myself fall flat on the mattress. “Okay, I think the last drop of my energy just left me. Heard it run off down the hallway.”
He bent down to brush his lips to mine. “Good night then. Sleep tight. It’s been a long day.”
“A bold understatement, Mr. November.” I tugged at his hand. “Will you stay?”
His arm extended over me to turn off a lamp on the wall next to the headboard. “Perhaps until you fall asleep?”
“You need to relax too . . .”
I could tell he was tempted: his shoulders were slouching already. I wrapped myself around him, hoping to crumble his last defenses. March let his body fall onto the mattress, taking me with him. His lips found mine in the dark; his palms cupped my cheeks, so warm, even as he said, “I should let you rest.”
No. Not when I could taste coffee and sugar on his tongue. Not when he had sworn to me he would take me with the strength of a thousand suns as soon as we found a bed for that. Yeah, I’m quoting from memory. Maybe he didn’t say it exactly like that. Regardless, there was no longer any hesitation in March’s gestures as he lifted my T-shirt, mindful to kiss and nuzzle each square inch of skin he uncovered. In between delicious shivers, I returned the favor the best I could, working the buttons of his shirt with shaky hands.
At some point, an unidentified elbow—okay, mine—nearly kicked the laptop to the floor. This required an awkward pause in order to move it to safety on the coffee table, along with our respective clothes, which had somehow been properly folded in the meantime. Don’t ask. It’s like when I saw that both his gun and a couple of condoms had materialized on the nightstand: there are levels of organizational skills modern science can’t explain. I felt March’s body stretch atop mine, our underwear the last obstacle in the way of savage, breathless LEGOing. In a bed that was unlikely to explode. Also, this time we had protection. And still, my neurons kept flipping through the list of terrifying scenarios that might somehow prevent successful intercourse.
Tsunami? None recorded in the area recently, as far as I knew.
Meteorite? Odds were 1 in 700,000 in a lifetime. Low—but very real.
Random bum attack? Improbable. But we had a gun anyway.
Phone call? Oh no. Please, no.
Or maybe it just wouldn’t work. Or it would hurt too much . . .
I closed my eyes and tried to clear my mind, inhaling March’s clean, soapy scent. I thought of the way they say it in French: la première fois. the first time.
“Are you all right?”
March’s strained whisper snapped me out of my linguistic considerations. I had spaced out, and he needed me to tell him if it was okay to keep going. His hands stroked my sides gently, tickling me a little. Was it the same for him, was he . . .
“Are you nervous too?” I asked in a voice so small that I barely recognized it as mine.
There was a hoarse chuckle in the darkness before he buried his face in my neck. “Yes. You have no idea.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s been a little while for me. And you’ll only have one first time.” He pressed a kiss to the corner of my mouth. “I almost wish I was strong enough to wait a little more.”
“I’m not sure I want to stay a virgin forever,” I mumbled.
“You won’t.”
Indeed. As if to give some literal weight to this statement, March molded his body into mine. And I felt everything. Hot skin, the muscles coiling underneath in anticipation. The mystery bits too, and the caress of that soft, sexy, manly chest hair against my skin—divine fleece! Rug of Eros! I’d have to tell him someday. But not tonight, because I wasn’t sure how he would react to that strange fetish of mine.
I opened my eyes wide and tried to memorize every detail, the way the moonlight coming from the window chiseled his features, his eyes boring into mine, and the soft smile I knew was for me only. I touched my lips to his and pushed him back, just a little. Enough for me to wiggle to a half-sitting position. He watched, still as a lion about to pounce, as I removed my bra and tossed it across the room.
If it ever registered in March’s brain that the move constituted a blatant act of littering, he chose to overlook it. Because breasts. Fun size ones, to quote him, but the magic works with those too. He was back atop me in a heartbeat, and I welcomed his onslaught with a giggle . . . then incoherent whimpers. I remember the exact moment, by the way. My fingers were digging into his scalp, urging his mouth on, when a sudden rush of air cooled our skin. The cabin’s door slammed open so hard I heard the wood crack, and the lights came on. Lightning fast, March let go of me to reach to the nightstand. Less than a second later, I lay on the bed, stunned, while he stood in his boxer briefs, gun in hand.
In the doorway, Dries looked livid. Possibly because my bra had landed at his feet and his ex-favorite disciple was aiming at him. Flushing a nice shade of Tabasco red, I rolled swiftly to wrap myself in the comforter like a libidinous burrito.
Dries’s gaze swiped from the flimsy piece of white cotton on the floor to my face sticking out from the covers before settling on March. One of his eyelids twitched, but he schooled his features into a derisive sneer. “And now, on top of that, you’re going to shoot me, Judas?”
March lowered the gun with a sigh. “Can I ask you to please knock?”
The culprit brushed off imaginary lint from his shirt. Ice crackled on the walls as his voice filled the cabin. “I believe your own room is at the other end of the hallway,” he told March. “As for you, young lady, weren’t you supposed to be working on my disk?”
Seriously? Did I say something earlier about a sense of guilt, regret, or whatever over my relationship with Dries? Please give me a moment to go fetch a giant eraser and a jug of White-Out. I mean, watching him stand there, playing the part of the outraged father, when, honestly, he was just smug about successfully cockblocking March. I popped a hand out from the comforter to point at the laptop sitting on the coffee table. “All my notes are in a folder on the desktop, along with the files we found. I’ll be more than happy to debrief you, but can you just go away? This is a little awkward.”
A sardonic smile twisted his lips. “Now, is it?”
I saw March’s fists clench at his sides, but he held his anger at bay, unfurling his fingers in a slow exhale. “Dries, I’m willing to take responsibility and discuss the matter with you but not here and not like this.”
How chivalrous, and a lot more diplomacy than Dries deserved. I squirmed to a sitting position and held my head high, mustering as much dignity as I could, given the circumstances. “It’s okay, March. He knows that we’re adults, and we don’t owe him any kind of justification.” I slanted my eyes at Daddy Capulet. “Get out, now. And wait for me on the deck. You and I need to talk.”
18
The Mountain Dew
“Aye, lassie! Let me tickle yer innards!”
—Diane MacRoth, Kilted Need
After I had given March a hundred of kisses to make up for what I feared might become the worst case of blue balls ever recorded in medical history, I trotted to the upper deck. As agreed, Dries was there, leaning on the bow railing, gazing down at the dark waves. I approached him slowly and rested my back against the railing, arms crossed.
Until I met Dries, I always thought I had inherited my ability to settle in angry and uncomfortable silence from my dad, who’d be in the Guinness World Records if they had a category for that. But I was now considering the possibility that genetics were involved: Dries was a passive-aggressive black belt,
masterfully building a stifling, nerve-racking atmosphere, rhythmed by his occasional intakes of air and the swells crashing against the hull.
He won. I spoke because it was either that or trying to push him over the railing. “Look, this needs to stop—you, treating me like I’m sixteen, and the way you barged in back there, it was unacceptable. And also completely creepy. Whatever your problem is, let’s talk it through. Like adults.”
It took him a good minute to answer. When he did, his voice held an unfamiliar edge: not just cold anger, or even exasperation, but perhaps an itsy tiny bit of hurt. “I dragged that little punk out of the dumpster he lived in. I trained him. I gave him everything. For Christ’s sake, I bought him his first crosswords! Me. Not his junkie mother! Not that good-for-nothing father who loaded her with speedballs until they picked up her body from the bathroom floor. Does he think he takes after him? I don’t think so.” He paused and pointed an accusing finger at me, although I suspected it was March he was seeing. “I made him. I made that boy, and all the reward I got was that he took off, cost me two billion dollars, and hooked up with my daughter.”
A painful weight set in my chest as I tried to connect what Dries had just said with March’s words back in the plane. She couldn’t really take care of me . . . he wasn’t home much. It was fine that way. March, king of understatements. Who loved his mother so much he wouldn’t taint her memory with the truth, who wouldn’t even mention his father, probably because he couldn’t forgive him.
Because someone had replaced him anyway.
It was the word boy, the way Dries said it. To the best of my knowledge, I was his only child. His years forming March might be the closest thing he had ever experienced to a father-and-son dynamic. March too had found in his mentor what his biological father had been unable to embody: a role model, someone to believe in his potential and tear him out of his chrysalis. Maybe the reason Dries made such a huge deal of our relationship was that, consciously or not, he regarded it as incestuous.