Scorpion

by Christian Cantrell

  It could be decades, she was warned. And the chances of death or permanent brain damage increase by about one percentage point every year. But she is not afraid. She knows that when the hibernation pod is warmed and the synthetic umbilical cord detached, Henrietta Yi will be dead, and The Owl will be born.

  40

  THE SCORPION AND THE SNAKE

  ASPEN CHAPMAN IS finally getting his tattoo. His shirt is off, and he is straddling a chair, and over his left shoulder the needle whines like an angry hornet trapped in a plastic cup. The area has numbed up nicely, and at this point, he feels more pressure than pain—the intermittent swabbing of excess ink and the mopping up of tiny blossoms of blood.

  He was never afraid of the pain so much as his reaction to it. The artist had placed the two chairs for his bodyguards directly in front of Aspen in order to keep them out of her light, so if his eyes started watering, they’d see. Both Declan and McCabe have tattoos of their own. Big ones. The long, slender, elbow-to-wrist daggers of the Royal Marines.

  Aspen has been planning this day since he was thirteen. He made the mistake of asking his parents for their permission while sitting on the edge of their bed, watching them get ready to go out for the evening. They told him absolutely not. Not now, not ever. It would send the wrong message. The tabloids would cover a tattoo as though it were a parliamentary coup. It would be like when he wet himself at Disneyland Paris and the paparazzi got a shot of it. Front page of The Sun. “The Prince and the Pee.” He’d been only seven years old, his mother said. It was not his fault. But his father reminded her that “fault” had nothing to do with it. The point was the distraction. The spectacle of the whole thing. The embarrassment. The point was that, like it or not, they were not a family, but a brand.

  But Aspen Chapman was persistent. Though his parents countered his opening move, he had more. He stood up from the edge of the bed and followed them around their room. The breezes they made as they moved smelled like hairspray and aftershave and Scotch. He told them how he read that tattoos could be used to recognize people. If he ever got taken, it could help with the identification.

  His father shook his head and chuckled while cinching his tie. Aspen was already the most recognizable thirteen-year-old boy in all of England. His mother said she preferred he not get kidnapped in the first place, thank you very much. That’s why they had Declan and McCabe. Besides, if he ever did get taken, there was the chip. It worked anywhere in the world. He had nothing to worry about. A tattoo was just silly.

  He started to tell them that nobody would ever know. That it would be on the back of his left shoulder and that he would always wear a shirt—even in their pool because of the drones, and even when they went to the beach. That nobody would ever see it except for him. But his father swung around from the mahogany box where he kept his cuff links and Aspen flinched. The conversation, he told the boy, was over. And they would not be having it again. As Aspen ran from the room, his mother smiled at him and reached for his hair, but the boy dodged. Always quick as a snake.

  And resourceful. Even if he had to wait until he was eighteen, he would get his tattoo. He registered as a virtual Estonian resident, set up a corporation, changed crypto he mined off racks of hacked GPUs into Estonian cryoon, and used the shadowphiles to commission over a hundred designs. Then he wrote a Python script that randomly paired up two submissions, posted them to a poll online, and matched up the winners for another round. When he was fifteen, he wrote another script that used a neural network to generate variations that enabled him to test tens of thousands of random mutations until only one remained. Everyone’s favorite. The one he entitled The Asp.

  It was deceptively simple—seemingly complex in its intricate form, but elegant. The black silhouette of a long, stalking snake. He’d been called “Asp” for short for as long as he could remember. The asp was a symbol of royalty in ancient Egypt and considered the most dignified means of execution. According to Shakespeare, asp venom was how Cleopatra died—her chosen method of suicide.

  Four and a half years after being told directly and unequivocally that he was never to get a tattoo, it is now almost finished. His own brand. His parents are skiing in New Zealand, and he leaves for Cambridge at the end of the summer, so he only needs to keep it hidden for a few weeks. Declan and McCabe have agreed not to tell—as long as they are not asked directly. Next on his list is the surgical removal of the tracking chip.

  “We’re just about there,” the woman says into his ear.

  She is supposed to be the best. The studio flew her in all the way from the United States. She’s a middle-aged woman with a platinum pixie cut and a tattoo of a flat black scorpion on the inside of her forearm. But there is much more to her than that. Aspen sees more than most, and he can tell that this woman has a story. The scorpion covers rows of little white hashes that he knows she carved into her own arm, probably as a teenager. And when she bent over during prep, her tank top dropped, and he saw the pink crescent-moon scar on her left breast. Her arms and shoulders are toned, and he suspects that her black leather boots are composite-toed. She doesn’t wear just one pair of gloves, but two. And she’s wearing a ten-thousand-euro, high-carbon steel, optical-module chronometer with a synthetic diamond crystal. This is a woman who takes time very seriously.

  “Give me one minute,” she says. “We’re going to let that set while I go find more gauze, and then we’ll take some pictures and see what you think.”

  Aspen is aware of the woman cleaning up her space behind him. He watches Declan and McCabe smile at her, and then their eyes drop to ass height as she moves the curtain aside and steps out.

  “So, did it hurt?” Declan asks.

  “Not really. A little.”

  “Happy birthday, kid.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Mind if I take a look?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Declan pushes himself up. The space is cramped, and he shuffles past McCabe, and then steps around Aspen’s chair.

  And then nothing.

  “Well?”

  Silence.

  “I said how’s it look?”

  “I thought you were doing the whole asp thing,” Declan says. “The snake you’ve been working on.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I don’t know what this is, but it ain’t a snake.”

  “You’re fucking with me,” Aspen says.

  McCabe stands and shuffles past.

  “What the fuck?”

  Aspen twists his head as far as he can and rolls his shoulder forward but all he can see are the profiles of raised beads of blood. He grabs his handset off the tray, activates the camera, and passes it back.

  “Take a picture.”

  One of them receives the phone, photographs his shoulder, and then hands it back, and when Aspen looks at the screen, all he can think of is that, once again, he will be laughed at. He has spent the last hour and a half having a number tattooed on the back of his left shoulder—1337—and underneath, a tiny scorpion. The daughter of the one on the artist’s forearm.

  He knocks something over when he stands. When he rips the curtain open, there is already an audience. The manager rises from his stool, still holding his pneumatic tool.

  “What’s going on?”

  Aspen steps ahead of his bodyguards. He is still shirtless, and his ribs and abdominal muscles show as he breathes.

  “Where is she?”

  “Who?”

  “The bitch who was just in here. Who the fuck do you think?”

  The receptionist is holding a hot cup of coffee. “I just saw her go out the back. She said she was having a vape.”

  Asp turns to Declan. He feels his father rising up inside of him. “Go find her,” he instructs. He looks back at the receptionist. “You. Go get me a piece of paper and something to write with.”

 
“Why?”

  He is speaking very slowly now. Quietly. With precision. The way his father talks when he is focusing his fury. “Because all of you are going to tell me everything you know about that woman, and then I am going to—”

  Declan reemerges from the blackness of the back. His pistol is in his hand, and he is shaking his head.

  “Fuck!” Aspen screams as he kicks over the manager’s tray. McCabe has his gun out now as well, and the manager is backing away. “I said go get me a fucking piece of fucking—”

  At first, he thinks he’s been tased, but the current comes from inside. From bright lights popping behind his eyes. His jaw muscles spasm as he collapses. He feels himself kick and another tray is tipped. The receptionist has her handset out and she is either recording or streaming. Aspen cannot stop making that awful sound and cannot stop drooling, and when he feels the warmth spread as he wets himself, he realizes that everyone is watching.

  * * *

  —

  As soon as she sees she’s on the wrong side, Quinn spins and sprints and jumps the bumper. The car is long and low, and by the time she drops herself into the bolstered bucket seat and pulls the door closed, Ranveer’s already got it in gear. It is an old petrol-powered Jaguar, wrapped in satin black, as lean and lithe as the eponymous cat.

  “I’ll never get used to everything being backwards here,” she says as they launch.

  “Which is why you do the tattooing and I do the driving,” Ranveer says. “How did it go?”

  “As planned.”

  “Did you have time to clean up?”

  Quinn dangles a sealed plastic bag. Needles, cartridges, and doubled-up gloves. Wads of ink and bloodstained gauze.

  “You didn’t get any on you, did you?”

  “Not a drop.”

  “Good. That’s a particularly unforgiving neurotoxin.” As he shifts through the gears with quick, precise throws, the cat does not purr, but roars. “What number did you use?”

  “Good old 1337. Thought it was fitting.”

  While Quinn was at work, Ranveer traded the Land Rover they’d been using since they landed for the old mechanical F-Type. Just in case she came in hot, he’d explained, they needed something fast, but also something that the Department of Transport couldn’t remotely disable.

  Ranveer downshifts before a curve, and the supercharged V8 wails and pops. “What do you feel like for dinner tonight?”

  Quinn is just now feeling the stress of the last hour. She breathes and rolls her shoulders with a grimace and dips her chin to stretch her neck. Although she has grown more composed, she still feels the surge of emotions that she does not try to name. Which, Ranveer has assured her, is a good thing. The last thing you want to get complacent about is killing.

  “I want an entire pizza,” she says. “And I want an entire bottle of wine. And I want—”

  In her peripheral vision, she can see that Ranveer is shaking his head.

  “What?”

  “We can go anywhere,” he admonishes. “You can have anything.” He checks his blind spot and trades lanes with barely a twitch of his fist. “And the only thing that occurs to you is pizza?”

  “You didn’t let me finish.”

  Ranveer takes his eyes off the road long enough to politely prompt his passenger to continue.

  “As I was saying,” Quinn resumes, “I want an entire pizza. An entire bottle of wine. And I want them both in Italy.”

  Ranveer grins as the Jaguar passes beneath the airport sign. “I know just the place,” he says, then feathers the clutch and works the gears, leaving the dead snake behind.

  41

  IMPACT EVENT

  WHEELS UP AT Heathrow.

  It’s getting dark, but the ability to upgrade to supersonic as part of your membership in the Emirates Executive Worldwide Private Jet Program means that Quinn and Ranveer will be in Naples enjoying obscenely meat-laden and crisp organic vegetable pizzas, respectively, by nine o’clock tops. Swapping dishes like an old married couple has already become second nature to the two of them, since servers the world over consistently reveal themselves to be stereotypically gender-biased, unconsciously placing the lighter fare delicately in front of the lady before presenting the gentleman with his meat-themed meal.

  They’ll drink a full bottle of wine between them, then shots of espresso poured over butter-colored mounds of vanilla-bean gelato will see them off to bed—tipsy, sleepy, and extremely well fed.

  Since they are just coming off a job rather than planning one, they have settled in the creamy, quilted-leather lounge rather than the jet’s rear business center. As has become their ritual, their crystal champagne flutes touch daintily across the narrow aisle. There is no verbal accompaniment to the gesture; the things they drink to, they do not speak of.

  Quinn’s sip is followed by a dark, oyster-shaped Godiva, which she discovers is wrapped around a pearl of almond praline. She is about to summon the attendant to ask him if he has any of the chocolate-dipped strawberries that were in such abundance on the last flight when both she and Ranveer simultaneously receive incoming connection requests. Simon Baptiste. With a sidelong glance, Ranveer defers the question of whether or not they are still on the clock to Quinn, and after a moment of consideration, she casts to the cabin’s main plasma glass.

  It is clear from the size of Simon’s smile that he can barely contain himself. Quinn has noticed that, since they met that day in the belly of Kilonova, Simon’s style has changed. He has gone from straight regulation to some kind of European expressionism. Today he is wearing a pastel plaid shirt with a gray bow tie and matching sport coat, both of which look like they were made from the same heavy-knit material as sweatpants. Apparently, he was hiding a fair amount of hair beneath his helmet, because it is slicked back in the front and twirled up into a knotted bun that Quinn suspects Moretti despises. Rather than his full-face visor, he is wearing tiny, round, wire-rimmed metaspecs that must be right on the edge of being completely useless. It is as though it never occurred to Simon that he could be himself at work and deflect Moretti’s abuse until he witnessed Quinn and Ranveer flippantly disregard the rules.

  “I like the bow tie,” Quinn says without sarcasm. “It suits you.”

  Simon primly tightens it with a delicate tug. “Thank you.”

  “Why are we so dressed up today?”

  “Because we are celebrating.”

  “What are we celebrating?”

  “The fact that it works,” Simon declares. “Kilonova just passed its final test.”

  Ranveer sits up in his recliner. “You actually tried it?”

  “At very low power. Nothing detectable. And I used random noise, just in case. But yes, I actually tried it! Now all we have to do is…” He gives an imaginary knob a determined twist. “Crank it up!”

  “What does that mean?” Quinn asks. “Crank it up?”

  “Increase the power.”

  “By how much?”

  Simon looks apprehensive. “About an order of magnitude.”

  “Do we have that much power?”

  “Do we have that much power? No. But that’s why we built Kilonova here in the data center capital of the world. We’re right in the middle of four of the biggest nuclear power plants in the country.”

  “I thought we had our own nuclear reactor in the basement.”

  “That’s just for standby mode. We need at least ten times more power to generate detectable gravitational waves.”

  “But you’re sure it will work?”

  “Ninety…” He pauses as he hones his calculations. “…-two percent.”

  Quinn has found that scientists have an affinity for attaching probabilities to their predictions. For statements that she has learned to interpret as positive, the average is mid to high eighties, so 92 percent seems to be about as confi
dent as quantum physicists get.

  “OK,” Quinn says. “Then let’s do it.”

  Simon revives his radiant smile before reluctantly reining it in. “There is one thing,” he cautions.

  “What?”

  A quick check of his surroundings before leaning in and nearly whispering. “Mr. Moretti.”

  “What about him?”

  “Has he seen the dossier?”

  “No.”

  “He said he needs to personally approve every payload.”

  “The deal was I get unrestricted access to the past,” Quinn says. “As far as I’m concerned, he never even needs to know.”

  “That,” Simon says, “may not be possible.”

  “Why?”

  “Most of Northern Virginia is going to lose power.”

  “For how long?”

  “Up to three minutes.”

  Quinn leans back and watches the dynamically generated clouds projected across the jet’s domed ceiling.

  “What if we did it in the middle of the night?”

  “We could,” Simon allows. “But the security logs would be anomalous. I suppose I could start working all-nighters on a regular basis.”

  “Wait a second,” Quinn says. “What if we waited for the next thunderstorm. Right as a big bolt of lightning strikes. Everyone will think the storm knocked the power out and that it took a few minutes for backups to come online. Moretti won’t even notice. This time of year, we shouldn’t have to wait more than a few days.”

  “Brilliant!” Simon declares. “I hope you don’t mind me saying this, Ms. Mitchell, but you are a natural at this.”

  “Not exactly sure what that says about me,” Quinn says. “But thanks. How long are we looking at?”

  “According to the forecast,” Simon says as his tiny lenses sparkle, “Wednesday afternoon is our first transmission window.”