Scorpion

by Christian Cantrell

  “Good. Keep us updated.”

  “Of course. Enjoy your…” He checks their local time in the corner of his vision. “Evening.”

  “Hey, while I have you,” Quinn says, “any word yet from Henrietta?”

  “Not since she got reassigned.”

  “Moretti still hasn’t told you where he sent her?”

  “Moretti doesn’t tell me much.”

  “Join the club,” Quinn says. “If you hear from her, tell her to call me. Tell her…” She pauses, unsure how vulnerable she is willing to be in front of Simon and Ranveer. “Just tell her I’m looking for her.”

  “Of course.”

  “And call when the dossier is sent.”

  “I will.”

  “Hey, Simon,” Quinn says. “One more thing. Thank you for doing this.”

  Simon nods, beams, and flashes a peace sign just before cutting the feed. Quinn lifts her champagne to her lips but pauses when she feels Ranveer watching her.

  “What?” she asks. “More silent disapproval?”

  “You don’t have to make this decision now,” he says. “Kilonova isn’t going anywhere.”

  “It may not be going anywhere, but what about us?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean if the future were a sure thing, we wouldn’t be doing any of this. You know as well as I do that any one of these jobs could be our last.”

  “Simon’s right,” Ranveer says. “You’re better at this than you think. We’ll be fine.”

  “Not if the Iranians finally figure out what happened to you and ask the Russians to shoot our plane out of the sky.”

  “I can handle Tehran.”

  “Not if Moretti changes his mind about our arrangement and there’s a takedown team waiting for us in Naples.”

  “As usual, you give the CIA too much credit. They won’t find us unless we want to be found.”

  “I found you, didn’t I?”

  Ranveer shrugs. “I like to think we found each other.”

  “Regardless,” Quinn says, “the only reason to postpone something you know you have to do is if some part of you secretly hopes you’ll never have to do it. And the only reason to hope you’ll never have to do something is if you’re scared.”

  “The dossier doesn’t scare you?” Ranveer asks. “Because it should. You’re gambling with thousands of lives, Quinn. Perhaps millions.”

  “Gambling with lives is what we do,” Quinn tells him. “I’m just placing multiple bets.”

  Ranveer capitulates with a thin smile, then reaches down beside his seat, reclines, and pulls a microfiber sleep mask down over his eyes. “Time will tell,” he says. “Wake me before we land. I’d like to shave before dinner.”

  Quinn watches the man she once pursued across the globe cross his ankles beneath a cashmere throw and prop his head up just so. By degrees, he has become less guarded around her. He now naps on flights wearing a goofy sleep mask that looks like a teenage girl’s training bra, usually snoring softly when his jaw drops open. He takes antacids in front of her when he has indigestion, and schedules hotel manicures and pedicures for the both of them. When they were shopping in Hong Kong, he asked her what she thought of the beard, and when she said she kind of liked just the mustache on him, his cheeks were clean-shaven by evening. And the other morning, when they had omelets, fresh orange juice, and coffee together on a terrace in Barcelona, Ranveer grimaced and arched his back before he pulled out his chair and sat, lamenting that he would not be able to do this forever.

  Quinn knows it is only a matter of time before they share the intimate experience of patching up each other’s bullet holes.

  * * *

  —

  She drains her glass of champagne, dims the cabin lights, and turns toward the window. The airspace over Paris is no longer restricted, and at Quinn’s request, the jet has dipped slightly south. Even from this altitude, she can see the distinct black circle etched into the city’s plasma-white glow from the steel and concrete containment dome. This is the closest she has ever been to Ground Zero, and it is probably the closest she will ever get. Her job is not to analyze the past anymore. Her job now is to always look ahead.

  The CIA has confirmed that the attack was the work of a single man and that, in some sense, it was an accident. He was a Japanese astronomer, and while he was using a neural network to analyze the backlog of data from an array of solar probes, he found something. A message along with a set of schematics for a device capable of generating particles that could travel faster than the speed of light. The instructions were clear. He was to make contact with the United States. It was critical to the security of the entire planet that the Americans have access to this technology. They would not believe him, of course, so he would need to show them. He would need to prove the effectiveness of the device by conducting a simple test.

  The event did put a dent in spacetime, but that was not its primary objective. The promise of time transmission would inevitably attract The Scorpion—a former CIA analyst turned terrorist hunter whom someone in the future desperately wanted dead. She’s the one the CIA would send to witness the demonstration and would therefore be eliminated long before she could become a threat.

  Officially, the assassination was successful. According to records retroactively updated by the CIA, Quinn was with her husband at Station F in Paris, and both were killed instantly. The two of them had recently remarried. Now they have side-by-side stars on the CIA Memorial Wall in Langley. James and Quinn Claiborne. Symbolic remains were placed in the two reserved graves beside Molly’s praying angel.

  She has not been back to the cemetery, nor has she seen the Memorial Wall, and she can’t imagine that she ever will. Quinn and Ranveer went from Kilonova directly to Dulles, used one of their new identities to fly into Iran to pick up Ranveer’s case, hopped from Tehran to the Persian Gulf, then skipped onto The Grid via Quinn’s first Dragonfly ride. This time, it only took the twins a few days to decrypt the first block. While they waited, Quinn and Ranveer stayed in a vacant exclave that had belonged to someone Ranveer once knew, but whom he would not discuss. Instead, he taught Quinn about his equipment, and together they explored the deadly potential of Moretti’s cases. But when they weren’t working, Quinn knew that Ranveer fixed himself strong drinks and went through the woman’s remaining things.

  Quinn does not know what became of her own belongings. She figures either her mother and brother drove down from Boston to rummage through her former life, or they let everything go to auction and collected their checks. Her mother would have used her portion to update her kitchen or put in a new bathroom, and her brother would have used his to stay high for as long as possible. Both would have been disappointed that it wasn’t more. Other than her car, the easiest objects to pawn would have been her engagement ring and wedding band, but she and James had been poor back then, so even combined, they were probably worth less than the Glock she left on the top shelf of her closet.

  For some reason, Quinn is glad that they did not get access to her digital life—that they would never get to scroll through all her pictures of Molly or watch the hologram of her laughing as a baby. That they could not claim her as their own loss. Along with her CIA credentials, Quinn relinquished her handset and all her private digital keys to Moretti. Everything left of her daughter was re-encrypted and is now in a cold-storage archive where it will probably remain forever—or at least for as long as the agency survives.

  She wonders if anyone found the letter her father left for her when he died and which she kept in the same box as the Glock. In it, he told her that she’d always been a difficult child, but that he’d done his best with her. Even though she’d grown distant and hostile toward him over the years, he still loved her, and he wanted her to know that he forgave her for everything. That he forgave her. “Distant” and “hostile” were th
e exact words Quinn had used to describe her father to at least three different therapists throughout her life, and now he was projecting that back onto her. Quinn remembers checking the envelope for another page. Checking the back of the paper. Sobbing while she reread the whole thing three times, looking for something she already knew was not there. Searching for something that had never been there, and that she had come to believe she did not deserve.

  Quinn now clings to what she learned from the last paper Henrietta published before transitioning from academia to the CIA. “Existential Risk Mitigation: Avoiding Astronomical Impact Events Through Early Intervention.” The important thing to remember about how objects and events influence one another, the paper explained, was that the effects compound over time, meaning that the earlier the interaction occurs, the more profound the effects. Intercept an asteroid headed for Earth when it is still millions of miles off, and just a small amount of energy is required to ensure that it passes at a safe distance. But wait until it is only thousands of miles away, and the amount of force required to make a meaningful difference is enormous. Given enough warning, it is even possible to intercept an object with nothing but white paint pellets, and over the span of enough time, the pressure of photons from the Sun colliding with the highly reflective surface is enough to move it millions of miles off course.

  For every new Epoch Index Moretti gives them, Quinn will send back a corresponding dossier. Names that must be eliminated today, but that, in a different existence, might be gently bumped onto an alternate track. A secret place in the past where Quinn can stash what remains of her humanity.

  Somewhere in the world, she imagines a frightened mother standing up for her son when her husband is drunk. Teachers who learn to support and encourage instead of constantly demean. A father understanding that, even though he was raised to be distant and cold, his son still needs to be hugged and to feel loved. A young woman insisting that she be seen.

  But most of all, Quinn thinks about an insecure and overwhelmed CIA analyst taking the afternoon off and picking her daughter up from school. Noticing a stranger in the neighborhood—a tall, eerily calm man keeping his distance, but always watching. Her feeling uneasy and deciding to take her daughter out for ice cream and to the bookstore instead of letting her swim in a neighbor’s pool. Never knowing how such a delicate nudge—an incident she would probably not even recall the next day—was the moment that, for her, everything changed.

  There is so much Quinn would like to tell that woman about her father, and about her husband, and about being a mother. About forgiveness, and about squandering time with the people she loves. But more than anything else, Quinn wants her to know that there is someone on her side. Someone who isn’t going anywhere. Someone who will never give up on her because she is worth fighting for.

  Wheels down.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  FOR ME, WRITING fiction is a constant preoccupation. I have to spend time with my characters almost every day, and at least a portion of my thoughts are always dedicated to chiseling out new plots, settings, and scenes. That means a lot of solitude. Staring through the kitchen window until I’ve forgotten what I’m supposed to be doing. Frantically (and sometimes impolitely) pecking out notes on my phone. Long walks and even longer hours sequestered in my office.

  I can’t imagine I’m the easiest person to live with, yet my family has never been anything but loving and supportive. I want to thank them all for not just giving me the space to indulge in my compulsion to tell stories but also for perpetually encouraging and inspiring me. That includes my wife of twenty-five years, Michelle; my incredible and talented daughters, Hannah and Ellie; and even my two scrappy pit-mix pups, Willow and Poppy.

  I would also like to thank my insightful, patient, and supportive editorial and production teams at Random House, including Ben Greenberg, Joel Richardson, Kaeli Subberwal, Clio Seraphim, Luke Epplin, and Avideh Bashirrad. I’ve now written four novels, but I’ve never put as much work into a single book as I did with Scorpion, and I’ve never had the opportunity to grow so much as a writer through a single project.

  I have to thank Justin Rhodes, the incredibly talented and creative screenwriter, both for his feedback on early drafts and for his friendship. His thoughtful emails and our long conversations were instrumental in crafting such a complex and multifaceted story.

  Finally, I’d like to thank Chris Goldberg for having such unflinching faith in this story early on; my agent, Joe Veltre, for helping me transform a side hustle into something so much more; and my manager, John Tantillo, for taking a chance on me more than a decade ago and sticking with me through not just the fruitful years but the barren ones as well.

  BY CHRISTIAN CANTRELL

  Scorpion

  Containment

  Kingmaker

  Equinox

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHRISTIAN CANTRELL is a writer and software engineer living outside of Washington, D.C. He is the author of the novels Containment, Kingmaker, and Equinox, as well as several short works of speculative fiction, three of which have been optioned for film or TV.

  christiancantrell.com

  Twitter: @cantrell

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