The 13 th tribe if-1

by Robert Liparulo

  Or crushed the thief’s throat beyond repair. The prehensor had the strength to do it; only Jagger’s conscious restraint kept the grip from its full potential. And in situations like the one with Addison’s assailant-in fighting mode with high emotions-he trusted neither his mental capacity for restraint nor his skills at manipulating the hooks with precision.

  But it wasn’t that he was a physical man with a physically demanding job, suddenly disabled, that drove the despair Jagger had felt after the accident, not really. That was just a kick in the face when he was down. The real wound was everything else that had been lost in the crash: the Bransfords, four people he had loved as deeply as he did his own wife and child. Four powerhouses of compassion and potential, snuffed out like paper matches.

  Move on, he’d told himself. Don’t dwell on it. Not now.

  He was getting better at tempering the perfect storm of self-pity, grief, and anger that swirled inside him… but as with RoboHand, mishaps still happened.

  He remained self-conscious enough about his missing limb to wear his sleeves long, hiding the artificial forearm that slipped over a stub just below his elbow. Cables allowed his biceps, back, and chest muscles to open and close the hooks.

  “Jag!” someone called. “Jagger!”

  He looked between the tents and saw Hanif at the corner of the monastery walls. Jagger waved.

  “Closing time!” Hanif yelled and tapped his wrist. As if on cue, a group of tourists appeared, streaming past him.

  Jagger raised his thumb.

  The monastery closed at noon, releasing scores of visitors to flow not to the parking lot but past the excavation on their way up Mt. Sinai to see the peak. The best time for the trek was at night, when the temperature was less oppressive and the reward was watching the sunrise on the God-trodden Mountain, as the locals called Sinai. The midday sojourners, however, hadn’t heard that sightseeing tip, or had arrived too late to heed it.

  Jagger headed for his closing-time position at the end of the split-rail fence, where his presence would discourage lookie-loos from lookie-looing too close to the excavation or becoming more than lookie-loos. It was at times like this-babysitting fat tourists like a museum guard-that he most missed being an Army Ranger or a bodyguard for foreign dignitaries and celebrities. At least then there’d been some action, even if only a false bomb threat or an overzealous autograph hound.

  He gazed at the two big excavation trenches. Maybe digging around in a dirt hole ten hours a day wouldn’t be so bad after all.

  [10]

  With posters of the latest muscles-and-mayhem movies and sexy women leaning on sexier cars, a lead guitar propped against an amp by an unmade bed, and dirty clothes scattered everywhere, Toby’s room looked like a typical teenage boy’s-except for the 9mm handgun on the nightstand, the bare bulbs under wire cages tacked to a stone ceiling, and the twin sixty-inch plasma TVs mounted to one wall.

  The plasmas were displaying different images of the same video game: views of a city from what could have been birds swooping between buildings, diving to take in streets packed with cars or sailing up over rooftops. Could have been birds, but weren’t. With a flick of Toby’s finger on a control pad, a missile shot out as if from the bottom of the screen, sailed through the bubbling tip of a fountain of water spraying up from a pond, and streaked under a crowded portico right into a hotel lobby. An explosion sent glass and bricks, cars and people flying away on currents of fire and smoke.

  “Yeah!” Toby said from a black leather chair.

  “Pull up,” Sebastian said, standing behind Toby with his hands on the back of the chair. “Pull up!”

  Toby did, and the screen showed the hotel facade drawing closer, sweeping down as the camera angled up. Sky came into view, but the camera zoomed toward windows on the top floor.

  “Pull up!”

  “I am!”

  The camera crashed through windows, and the monitor went black.

  “I told you,” Sebastian said, giving the back of the chair a fierce shake.

  “I did pull up!” The boy twisted around to glare at Sebastian.

  “You waited too long. You wanted to see the missile hit. You can’t do that. I told you, release the missile and get away. Shoot and scoot.”

  “Like this,” Phin said from a matching chair beside Toby’s. On the plasma in front of him, a missile shot out from the bottom of the screen, heading for a building with a big sign mounted above the doors: POLICE. The camera banked away, climbing. He laughed, a pronounced Ha-ha-ha! The camera continued to turn and climb, and a building slid onto the screen from the right, panning across it like a swipe-away transition between movie scenes. It filled the screen, and Phin’s monitor went black.

  “Ha!” Toby said.

  “Wait a minute,” Phin said. “That building’s in the wrong place!”

  “It is not,” said Sebastian. “You were supposed to study the maps.”

  “I did! It wasn’t on my radar!”

  “It was, I saw it.”

  “So did I,” Toby said. “I was wondering what you were doing.”

  “You weren’t looking at it,” Sebastian told Phin.

  “It’s too small… down there in the bottom corner. How am I-?”

  “You want it in the center of the screen?” Sebastian said. “Then how you gonna see where you’re going, what you’re shooting at?”

  Phin tossed the control on the floor. “This is stupid.” He stood and headed for the door.

  Sebastian grabbed his arm. “If you can’t even play the game-”

  Phin pulled his arm away. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll beat that thing by tomorrow. Stop coaching.”

  They stared at each other for a few moments. Phin rolled his head, audibly popping out the stiffness, and said, “All right, one more go, then I’m done.” He picked up his controller and dropped into the chair.

  “Watch the radar this time,” Toby said.

  Phin glared at him. “When we’re doing this for real, we’ll see who gets the most kills.”

  “You’re on,” Toby said and pushed the button to restart the simulator.

  [11]

  Jagger had just swung his leg over the fence’s top rail when he heard the distant voice of his son.

  “Dad!”

  He looked toward the monastery, over the heads of the streaming tourists. His vision landed not on his boy but on his wife. There was something about watching her unaware-ages ago, across a lecture hall as she bit her lip in concentration and furiously took notes; plucking a flower from their garden back in Virginia, smiling at its fragrance-that seemed not better than mutual attention but special, like sharing a secret.

  The sight of her pushed aside the blackness in his heart, leaving a less volatile but more aching emotion: guilt. After the crash he had allowed depression to get the better of him. His feelings had grown numb to her charms… to everything. He’d been bitter and hurtful to the people he loved the most-knowing it and hating it even as he did it. He’d felt like a junkie constantly scraping for a fix, but instead of heroin he craved misery in himself and everyone around him.

  Then Oliver had called, on the recommendation of a former client. It was an offer he hadn’t taken seriously at first. Not only would he be leaping back into security work, but he’d have to transplant his family from comfort and familiarity to isolation and an environment completely alien to them-the last thing any of them needed.

  But Beth had a different take on it: she saw the change as a fresh start, away from reminders, and he started thinking that the job could be a form of detox from his depression. And it was working: since moving to the Sinai, the close quarters, the challenge of living in a foreign country under isolated conditions, and his own renewed sense of purpose had energized them, individually and as a family.

  Now he wanted time to stop so he could simply watch her-like that moment when falling asleep feels so good, you want to stay like that all night. She pushed her hair off her face and smiled at
someone. Her eyes sparkled like sapphires held up to the sun.

  He caught two more sparks of that light, as though refracted from her, and saw Tyler running ahead. His son was weaving through tourists on the path, his arms and legs pumping furiously. He wore a miniature version of a guard’s uniform: desert camo shirt, matching shorts, boots, and canvas belt. The boy had begged to have Jagger’s old utility case, a canvas-covered aluminum box the size of a fanny pack, originally designed to carry night vision goggles on a belt. The goggles were gone and so were the canvas covering and felt liner, leaving Tyler’s stash of hard candy, coins, and rocks to clang around with impunity. With every step, the kid rattled like maracas.

  Jagger climbed off the fence and opened his arms to receive the bundle of pure energy that was his boy. Tyler leaped and nearly knocked him off his feet.

  Jagger oofed. “You’re getting too big for that.” He hoped Tyler hadn’t caught his quick frown. After the crash-losing his best friend and watching his father suffer-Tyler had started acting younger than his years. He’d convinced Beth to bring his old raggedy “blankie” out of retirement, along with a handful of favorite toys from his younger days. For a while he’d called them Mommy and Daddy, and had even wet his bed a few times. His behavior was all the more jarring because he hadn’t abandoned the introspective, logical thinking that Jagger had thought was advanced for a nine-year-old.

  A child psychologist they’d consulted said such selective regression was common among children whose immediate family had experienced trauma: it was a defense mechanism, a mental retreat to more stable, comforting times. She’d assured them it was temporary. Tyler was slowly catching up with his age, but Jagger still found himself babying his son-a behavior he suspected had more to do with his own guilt than with Tyler’s childish quirks.

  “Mom made sahlab,” Tyler said, his whole face smiling. “Are you thirsty?”

  “Does a camel poop in the desert?”

  Tyler laughed and squirmed his way higher in Jagger’s embrace until his head was above his father’s. He scanned the excavation. “Where’s Ollie? We got some for him too.”

  “Dr. Hoffmann’s working, Ty. Maybe now’s not the best time.” Tyler seemed to have made a hobby out of bombarding the archaeologist with questions and appeals for stories of previous digs.

  “He said I can come see him anytime I want. He likes talking about archaeology.” He leaned back in Jagger’s arms to give him a serious look. “You know I’m gonna be an archaeologist.”

  “And what excuse do you use when you bother the monks?”

  “ Bother? ” He punched Jagger’s shoulder. “They like talking about what they do too. Mom says everyone does. That’s why it’s so easy to interview people for her articles.”

  Jagger scowled a little. The last thing he would want to do was talk about himself or his work.

  Tyler said, “Did you know young monks are called brothers and old ones are fathers? Except when they talk to each other, then they always say brother.”

  “Even when they’re fathers?”

  Tyler nodded, eyes wide, like it was the craziest thing. “Anyway, I never told them I wanted to be a monk.”

  Jagger shook him up and down, making his treasures rattle. “How about a candy?” he said.

  Tyler expertly opened the utility case without looking and produced a gumball. He popped it into Jagger’s mouth. “Can I go see Ollie?” the boy asked.

  Jagger relented. “I’ll walk you over.”

  Beth reached them and held up a battered lunchbox emblazoned with Clone Wars stormtroopers. “Guess what I brought you?”

  Jagger shifted Tyler into his left arm. For all of the trauma that limb had suffered, his biceps were as powerful as ever. In fact, given the metal prehensor, carbon fiber socket, and nylon harness that crossed his back and anchored around his other arm, the “disabled” arm was stronger than his real one.

  He reached out, bypassed the lunchbox, and slipped his fingers around Beth’s wrist. He pulled her close, said, “This?” and kissed her.

  She smiled up at him. “Actually, I brought two.” Her lips found his again.

  Tyler made kissing noises.

  Jagger dropped Tyler onto his feet, and the boy started for the excavation. Jagger snagged the back of his collar with his hook.

  “Just to the fence, Dad. Promise.”

  Jagger released him, and Tyler climbed onto the fence’s top rail to sit and watch the workers milling around the dig.

  [12]

  Jagger turned back to Beth. “School out already?”

  She homeschooled Tyler in their tiny apartment in the monastery’s visitors quarters. After learning that Jagger had brought his family, Gheronda, the monastery’s abbot, had graciously offered it. Only Oliver had secured another room in the monastery. Everyone else hiked to the village’s one hotel.

  “We’re meeting Gheronda in the library later,” Beth said. “He’s going to show us some illustrated manuscripts and explain how he classifies and catalogs them.”

  “Ah, the old AMREMM supplement to the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules,” Jagger said with an air of professorial authority. He smiled at Beth’s surprise. “Father Gheronda cornered me on my rounds and gave me an earful. You’d think he built the library himself.”

  The monastery boasted an impressive collection of early codices and manuscripts, second only to the Vatican in quantity and importance.

  Beth laughed. “You know it’s just ‘Gheronda’?”

  “I’m not going to call a guy I barely know by just his last name. He’s been nice to us. I’ll call him President Gheronda, if he wants.”

  “Gheronda means elder. The monks bestowed it on him out of respect, to honor him.”

  Jagger turned away, then looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “Yeah, I knew that.”

  She slapped his shoulder, and they watched Tyler assume a wobbling standing position on the top rail. “This is a great experience for him.” She pushed herself into Jagger’s side and put an arm around him. “For me too. I’m glad we came.”

  Jagger nodded.

  “Dad,” Tyler said. “Which hole is Ollie in?”

  “Annabelle. Addison’s with him.”

  The boy jumped down, grinning. “Let’s go!”

  Beth whispered, “He likes her British accent.”

  “He likes everything about her,” Jagger said. He almost added, But not as much as I like everything about you — and it was true-but that he didn’t have to say it was one of the things he loved about her. Beth was more comfortable in her own skin than anyone he’d ever met. It wasn’t that she thought she had it all together; she was simply okay with not being all together.

  She opened the lunchbox, handed him a paper cup, and uncapped a thermos. She poured out a white liquid, thick as motor oil. Made from spices and salep flour-ground orchid tubers-sahlab was a favorite Egyptian drink. The locals, however, served it hot. Beth’s brilliance was in icing it.

  “So,” she said, “did you have a crush on someone when you were his age?”

  “Of course. My fourth-grade teacher, Ms. Duncan.” He blinked, furled his brow in thought. “I think.”

  Since the crash he’d suffered from long-term memory fragmentation-not amnesia, but a sort of fracturing of memories, so they were often recalled with no context: swimming in a lake as a boy with no memory of getting there or with whom or the events surrounding the swim; driving a car for the first time, but not knowing the make or model or where he’d been. He remembered his parents had died in a plane crash, but couldn’t conjure being told of their deaths. And the faces of the foster families who’d taken him in, but not how many there were or the age he was with each one. Sometimes two unrelated pieces of memory would butt up against each other, making him believe-at least until he did the math-that they were part of the same event. He distinctly recalled coming home from delivering newspapers on a cold, wintry day to find his mom making him a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup. Bu
t by the time he’d acquired his first paper route, his parents had been dead for years.

  Worst, his memories would sometimes pull images from things he’d never done-swashbuckling on a pirate ship, hugging a rifle in a foxhole-only seen in movies or heard from someone else; yet they were as vivid and real to him as watching Beth walk up the aisle toward him in her white gown or holding his newborn son. Confabulation, the doctors had called it.

  It all had something to do with damage to his parahippocampal gyrus, where the brain stored its photo albums and home movies. But CAT scans had revealed no trauma there, so the doctors scratched their heads and wondered if his problem was psychological.

  Just another jab from the Man Upstairs, he thought. In case losing my arm, my best friend, and my best friend’s family didn’t knock me down enough notches.

  “Or maybe she was the one I didn’t like,” he said. “But that alien that abducted me when I was ten sure was cute.”

  Beth didn’t laugh, just smiled sympathetically and rubbed his shoulder.

  They watched Tyler climb over the fence and pick something up out of the dirt, brushing at it and blowing away the dust.

  “I wish we’d met as little kids,” she said. “Wouldn’t that be wonderful, to have known your soul mate for your entire life?”

  “You wouldn’t have liked me.”

  She slapped his arm. “Don’t say that. How could I not?”

  “I’d have pulled your hair and called you names.”

  She made a smug face. “That’d just mean you liked me.”

  Jagger nodded and tugged her closer. “You’re really glad we came?”

  “We needed this.”

  “What about your writing? Do you miss it?”

  “I’m writing,” she said. “Just not articles. I’m making notes for my book.”

  “This would be a good setting for a murder mystery.”

  “It’s nonfiction. Stories of the people who’ve come here throughout history.”