Scorpion

by Christian Cantrell

  28

  TISSUE

  QUINN WOKE UP this morning with a touch of the wine flu, which she is now working through by perpetually cresting the apex of a stair-climber at her local Worldwide Fitness Center, while simultaneously keeping a close eye on her message queue.

  Even with the promotion she was given after tracking down and assisting in the capture of the Elite Assassin, Quinn can barely afford a Worldwide membership on a single salary. She and Moretti made a tacit agreement that Quinn would take the money while he claimed most of the credit, but if she’d known how anemic the raise would turn out to be, she might have reconsidered.

  As a general rule, Quinn does not think about the decision she made back in that privacy room almost six weeks ago and over four thousand miles away, and she has talked to no one—not Henrietta, not Moretti, not even Van—about what was discussed. Of course, her handset recorded the whole thing, which she deleted before it could be collected as evidence, claiming (much to Moretti’s explosive dismay) that she failed to put the device into surveillance mode because she was so unnerved by being left alone in a little concrete bunker with such a vicious and prolific killer.

  Quinn has no idea how the man apparently known only as Ranveer knew the things about her that he did, but Occam’s razor suggests the most likely scenario is that she told a friend about her father, and that friend betrayed her confidence and emailed another friend. Or she confided in a therapist (God knows she’s seen enough of them) who stored her case notes online. She doesn’t know exactly how or when, but her most closely guarded secret must have ended up digitized, and subsequently swept up by Russian or Chinese hackers specifically probing for potential intelligence-related blackmail targets in and around the Washington, D.C., area. And like every other piece of personal information on the planet, it would have eventually found its way down into the shadowphiles.

  In Quinn’s mind, Ranveer is nothing but a sociopathic contract killer ultimately distinguished not by his handsome Middle Eastern demeanor or refined aristocratic manners, but purely by the fact that he was willing to take on jobs that other assassins had enough integrity to turn down. Even without the recorded confession, he is now paying for his hubris by serving multiple consecutive life sentences in one of the most technologically advanced maximum-security detention facilities on the planet, owned and operated by the International Criminal Court and located in an undisclosed location. Which, Quinn happens to know, is the northernmost coastal district of The Hague.

  But Quinn is not so detached from her emotions that she doesn’t know the truth about why she sequestered those twenty minutes of conversation and entombed them somewhere as secure and protected as the facility in which they took place. Even though she knows that she will never see him again, there is something about Ranveer that terrifies Quinn—something she is afraid she will carry around with her for the rest of her life. It has nothing to do with being in the same room with a man willing to inflict such unspeakable harm on others purely for the privilege of flying Sultan Class and living in the world’s finest hotels, and everything to do with the things Ranveer made her question about herself.

  * * *

  —

  Rather than a ponytail, Quinn is wearing a black Lululemon Baller cap, and her straw-blond hair is starting to stick to the perspiration on her bare shoulders. She doesn’t love that the stair-climber puts her ass, hips, and thighs directly at eye level for the entire D.C. metropolitan area to leisurely contemplate, but she has been coming to the gym regularly enough since getting back that her self-consciousness and her self-esteem have finally achieved a kind of uneasy equilibrium. Plenty of middle-aged male members get busted gawking at her in her capri leggings and strappy black tank top, which, after it happens enough, begins to annoy her, but plenty of men also can’t be bothered to look up from their phones as they walk past, which, frankly, irks her even more.

  This particular Worldwide has recently been remodeled and all the screens have been removed. Once sweat-proof and impact-resistant polymer metaspecs got cheap enough to be impulse buys among the suitably affluent, the constant assault of Estonian cybergrime music videos and zero-g cosmetic surgery infomercials radiating from arrays of mission-control monitors became the club’s most frequent complaint. Now, the majority of cardio machines don’t even have screens; in their place are plastic surfaces with tracking-pattern inlays to which metaspecs affix any one of dozens of virtual views users incessantly flick through.

  The icon Quinn’s phone uses for an empty message queue is a smiley face, and she wonders again whether that’s because you’re supposed to be happy when you don’t have any messages that require your attention, or to cheer you up because nobody wants to talk to you. In an attempt to ignore it, she watches a tiny virtual version of herself ascend the 354 steps toward the head of the Statue of Liberty. Her avatar is fiercely determined and seems to dip her chin and toss her ponytail from side to side every time she lifts a knee. The semitransparent, volumetric model rotates in sync with the spiraling stairs, and Quinn’s bright scarlet surrogate looks to her like an alien parasite swimming up a helical artery to Lady Liberty’s brain, where it will zombify her and force her to destroy Lower Manhattan. But as soon as Quinn breaches the neocortex, the virtual figurine sinks down into the stair-climber’s plastic podium and the Washington Monument sprouts in its place, with avatar-Quinn barely a third of the way to the top. Quinn is sick of progress holograms rotating right in front of her face, so she swipes it away and parks a boring 2D dashboard in its place.

  A club notification is summoning some unlucky mother down to the childcare center. Nothing good comes from your presence being requested at the Fit Kidz Klub. The first time Quinn got paged was the last time she brought Molly. Back then, they used the PA system, and Quinn hadn’t even finished stretching when she was alarmed to hear her name announced and subsequently discovered that Molly had punched a boy in the stomach and knocked the wind out of him. According to her, he would not stop making fun of her name, which she had written out in its entirety on her name tag. Molly Mitchell! Molly Mitchell! Molly Mitchell! And then Ooof! Little punk. Quinn was thoroughly embarrassed at being asked to leave and irritated at having to miss her workout, but when she asked Molly why she punched the kid in the stomach, and Molly answered that it was so she wouldn’t leave a mark on his face, some deranged and probably damaged part of her was proud.

  Naturally there was plenty of boilerplate parental rhetoric about using our words instead of our fists, going to an adult for help, not violating other people’s personal boundaries, etc., but then they got to the heart of it: Molly hated her name. More specifically, she hated how it sounded when you said it together with her last name. Molly Mitchell. Why couldn’t she have Daddy’s last name? Molly Claiborne?

  Quinn looked up at James, certain there would be a subtle but unmistakably smug, see what you did? expression on his face. But there wasn’t. Instead, he knelt down to Molly’s level and explained to her the concept of alliteration, and how it applied to the names of superheroes’ alter egos. Clark Kent, Peter Parker, and Miles Morales. Bruce Banner and Jessica Jones. A bunch more he couldn’t think of just then. The name Molly Mitchell meant that she would grow up to become a hero. They had to give her mommy’s last name. It was, he told her solemnly, her destiny.

  As gracious and endearing as James was being, Quinn had to admit to questioning whether the whole hero angle was the right approach for a kid like Molly—whether it might lead to even more gut punches, or possibly even a graduation to broken noses or dislocated jaws. Perhaps a secret collection of teeth. But Molly seemed to accept her new responsibility with a great deal of dignity and poise, and afterward they all went out for sprinkle-dipped custard and then to the playground, where Molly kept an eye on the smaller kids to make sure they were safe, and even relocated several insects she found in the grass far enough away that they would not get trampled. That night, wh
ile they were tucking her in, she explained that Molly Mitchell was her “altered ego,” but that her hero name was “the Scorpion.” Earlier that week, her class had gone on a field trip to the Natural History Museum in D.C., and one of the insect zoo curators offered to let someone hold a shiny black arachnid. Nobody stepped up except for Molly, who—according to what had already become well-established Sunrise Elementary lore—showed absolutely no fear whatsoever. The teacher took a picture and sent it home, and Quinn could barely even stand to look at it. That kid clearly had something inside her that Quinn did not. Whatever it was, it must have come from her father.

  * * *

  —

  During the long flight from Zürich to Joint Base Andrews on the C-130 Hercules with Moretti and his tactical team (terrible conversationalists, by the way, which was just as well given the perpetual pinches of dip in their lower lips and their constant need to spit into their empty energy drink cans), as her mind was trying to anticipate a return to normalcy, it occurred to her how overdue both she and her Honda Clarity were for maintenance. The car needed a new cooling fan; Quinn was delinquent on her mammogram.

  Mammograms aren’t like other forms of cancer screening. Quinn recently learned about a woman who had dedicated her life to discovering a universal cancer vaccine, but who somehow ended up pivoting to narcotics manufacturing, and subsequently had to flee the country in order to avoid arrest. For some reason, the woman felt her life was in danger, so her identity and location were being withheld, but according to the segment Quinn watched on the plasma glass in the radiologist’s waiting room, she’d recently returned to the United States and somehow managed to negotiate a plea deal allowing her to participate in a work-release program in partnership with a nonprofit cancer research lab. In her very first week, she released open-source plans for a device as simple to use as a Breathalyzer that she believed would be able to diagnose early-stage lung cancer in seconds and at essentially no cost. Apparently, she’d transformed herself from corporate and social pariah into a public-health folk hero in just weeks.

  But mammograms are still stuck in the past. Technicians in cute scrubs use words like “compression” and “tissue,” but the reality is that you’re having your boobs squeezed in a panini press. It is little comfort that the machine uses state-of-the-art particle imaging and detection technology developed for use in the Large Hadron Collider, since it feels like the only carryover from the particle smasher is the smashing part.

  Your reward for all this is supposed to be absolutely nothing. As in clean results. You’re supposed to get dressed, hand over your co-pay, and feel good about yourself for being such a grown-up today. Maybe treat yourself to a Starbucks on your way back to work. What you are not supposed to do is be shown to an isolated room at the end of the hall with serene pastel paintings on the walls and boxes of tissues on side tables. And the scans are not supposed to show little white dots in the left breast that were not there before and that you are told are calcium deposits. And the follow-up needle biopsy is supposed to reveal that all of this is actually nothing—just something to keep an eye on—rather than a condition that has a long, hard-to-remember name. During your next consult, you are not supposed to need to take everything off and get into a gown, and there is supposed to be banter between you and your doctor, not silence as the paper crinkles beneath your bottom and she flips through your pathology reports. You are not even supposed to have pathology reports. And you are never ever supposed to hear the words “partial mastectomy” come out of a breast surgeon’s mouth.

  But that’s just the technical term, Quinn has been assured. Better to think of it as a surgical biopsy. A more detailed fact-finding mission. And the procedure is minimally invasive. The radar reflectors that the breast surgeon distributed throughout the tissue during yesterday’s quick outpatient pre-op procedure will guide the robotic instruments with unprecedented, submillimeter precision. Sure, she’ll be sore for a few days, and she’ll be more comfortable wearing sports bras for about a week. She’ll want to avoid things like stair-climbers until the discomfort has passed. But that’s about it. And should they find the worst, they have plenty of options. More-aggressive surgery, hormone therapy—even genetically individualized immunotherapy, should she prove to be an ideal candidate. With a healthy lifestyle (keeping her weight down, eating more vegetables, and, sadly, decreasing her alcohol consumption), her prognosis is very good. Just a tiny loss of tissue, that’s all.

  But her breasts are not tissue. They are what provided Molly with sustenance for the first year of her baby’s life. They are part of what signaled her transition from girl to young woman—changes she hated at first and didn’t want, then wanted just a little bit more of, then eventually came to feel were just right. In Quinn’s opinion, her breasts are one of her more attractive features, and certainly a long-time obsession of her ex-husband’s. They are not just something she has; they are part of who she is.

  Quinn does not think she can go through this alone. If she has to, she will call her mother or her brother, but not yet. Once again, her eyes dip to the message queue icon, which now looks as if it has fallen asleep and is dreaming of kittens and birthday cake. Last night, about halfway through her third glass of wine, Quinn sent the long, vulnerable email that she’d written to her ex-husband after scheduling the appointment and that had sat in her outbox awaiting sufficient courage—liquid or otherwise. And now she is waiting to find out whether James is open to not just being with her during the procedure, but, when all of this is behind them, maybe even trying again.

  The day after her diagnosis, Quinn called her doctor’s office and left a message for the breast surgeon asking if there was any reason why she would not be able to have children after the procedure. In her experience, doctors seldom do anything they cannot bill an insurance company for, but the surgeon called her right back and spent fifteen minutes reassuring her that not only would she still be able to get pregnant, but unless further treatment was required, she would even be able to breastfeed. At that moment, as Quinn covered her mouth and wept into the phone and her doctor waited patiently for over a minute for her to be able to speak again, she realized that—even though having a child was like removing a critical organ from inside your body and letting it out into the world on its own where anything might happen to it, and if anything ever did, you would never be able to recover—Quinn was not yet ready to give up on being a mother.

  29

  GHOSTS

  HENRIETTA SITS ACROSS from a hologram of her long-dead father. She prefers him as a room-scale projection rather than the crisp, light-field refraction you get from metaspecs. Sometimes images focused directly against your retina can feel a little too real. But when you give them some space, the spontaneous quantum behavior of photons lends them a warm, otherworldly radiance.

  The effect works best when it is dark, so all the lights in Henrietta’s apartment are out. That means the scene is lit solely by the incandescence of her father’s angelic presence. Henrietta is sitting on the floor, her back against the couch, her crisscrossed legs tucked under a coffee table bestrewn by a generous spread of Korean takeout. The only space not occupied by redolent, miniature plates is her father’s virtual tray. When she was setting the whole thing up, Henrietta nudged the projection until his meal was right where it needed to be to make the illusion feel uncannily real.

  It has to be Korean whenever the two of them have dinner together. The neural network that is resurrecting her father was trained on hundreds of hours of video footage, and Korean cuisine was all he was ever recorded eating. Of course, Henrietta is free to wrap her own mouth around a bean and cheese burrito or feed on greasy slices of sausage and olive pizza, but then the smell in the apartment would be all wrong. Olfactory memory is a critical ingredient in the transcendental experience.

  She has him dialed down slightly in age—about a decade closer to her happiest and most salient memories. And
she has him dressed casually: an open cable-knit cardigan over a patterned oxford. That’s what she remembers him wearing on evenings and weekends when they worked on projects together or went on long walks, talking about anything and everything. Henrietta’s first word was appa, Korean for “daddy,” and that was what she called her father up until their very last conversation.

  As far back as she can remember, he called her olppaemi, Korean for “owl.” Sometimes saekki olppaemi, or “owlet.” The story of Henrietta’s nickname starts with the fact that she spent most of the first eight years of her life in the constant presence of ghosts.

  She probably started seeing them the day she was born, but it wasn’t until she was four that she developed the language to express what she was experiencing. They weren’t just people, she told her parents. They were animals and objects, too. Sometimes words and numbers. Symbols. Usually several different things mixed together into one unique and mysterious entity. They were always right there—everywhere she looked—and she could not understand why nobody else ever saw them.

  When she was five, her parents decided that Henrietta’s ghosts were more than just an overactive imagination. The neurologist they took her to couldn’t identify a cause and suggested a psychiatric evaluation. A month later, two different psychiatrists had diagnosed her with schizophrenia and were collaborating on an aggressive protocol of antipsychotic medication. Over the course of two years, they experimented with various combinations and adjusted her dosage. The drugs dramatically affected her moods and stunted her growth, but Henrietta never once stopped seeing her ghosts.

  And then one day, Henrietta’s father threw away all her medication and told his daughter that he believed that her ghosts were real. Her mother had forbidden her from speaking of them, so Henrietta had grown ashamed, but her father was eventually able to get her to talk to him again about what she saw. He sat her down at a table facing a blank, white wall, placed paper and felt-tip markers in front of her, and while she stared straight ahead at nothing at all, he watched as she diligently drew.