Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

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,