Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

scrolling and pausing, scrolling and pausing. “Get me out of here now.”

“Darling, you have radar reflectors in your boob. They can’t stay there.”

“Now!”

“Settle down, sweetheart. Tell me what’s going on.”

“There’s been a nuclear attack.”

Destine releases the injection port and covers his mouth. “Oh my God. Where?”

Quinn looks up. The nurse lowers himself onto the bed beside Quinn’s legs. Quinn is having trouble breathing.

“Paris,” she chokes, and then begins to sob.

31

  PLUSHIES, CATS, AND PACKING

JIJI CROUCHES ATOP an intricate, carpeted, multilevel cat tower in the corner of Henrietta’s bedroom. He is engaged and attentive, transfixed by her every action, his paws drawn in beneath him and his long, lean tail dangling and twitching.

Three or more feet above the floor is a good place for Jiji to be, considering Henrietta Yi is the proud mother of, at last count, just north of nine hundred vibrant plushies. They are arranged in stadium seating along all four walls, stacked from carpeted floor to popcorn ceiling, and sorted according to color in strict spectral order. Most are Pokémon, though the complete casts of Zelda, Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Angry Birds are harmoniously commingled. There are gaps in the prismatic mosaic for a single window obscured by bamboo slats, the bedroom, closet, and bathroom doors, and Henrietta’s bed with its yellow Pikachu throw pillows and the three incrementally increasing, meandering Zs mounted up the wall at the head. Jiji’s cat tower is like a sapling that has managed to penetrate the thick layer of bright, fuzzy underbrush in order to stretch toward the overhead Poké Ball light. Just to get to the lowest platform, he has to clear a good three or four rows of exotic, implausible creatures as they transition in hue from blue to indigo.

Henrietta’s collecting and incessant organizing resumed after she moved from Geneva, where she was leading particle detector backlog research at the LHC, to Northern Virginia to work for Alessandro Moretti at the CIA. Her first new plush toy since she left home for college was an especially limited Pokémon collectible known as Mimikyu. Mimikyu’s backstory had always fascinated Henrietta. It is a mysterious Pokémon that spends its entire life mimicking Pikachu by hiding beneath a childish costume—a tiny, secretive creature with an extremely deadly nature attempting to masquerade as everyone’s favorite.

There are boxes and envelopes waiting for Henrietta at the foot of her front door almost every day when she gets home from work, and about once a week, she tears down the entire collection and fastidiously builds it back up. She maintains a database of every Pokémon plush ever made; has bots monitoring all the best sites, making trades and placing bids; uses AI to predict the time, region, and contents of the next drop. Posts photos and rumors online under half a dozen contrived and meticulously maintained identities. Rather than working toward a Nobel Prize, Henrietta occupies her prolific mind with the mantra “Gotta catch ’em all.”

But her armada of online shopping agents and bots have now all been disabled. Tomorrow, there will not be any new loot to add to her collection, nor any reason to update her database. Today, Henrietta is packing.

Her bag is open on her bed, and between a compact assortment of underwear and a stack of neatly pressed and folded dresses, she finds a depression sufficient for a pouch of tightly wound cables and dongles. The suitcase is brand-new, purchased from AliExpress just for this trip. Both sides of the cherry-blossom-pink, hard-shell case are emblazoned with the subtly dazed Hello Kitty face. The feline’s pure and virtuous eyes are small plasma-dot screens that occasionally blink and search from side to side, and the pattern of her iconic bow is customizable through an app on Henrietta’s phone. Last night, Henrietta upgraded the firmware, then trained her new case on her exact body shape and gait so that it would follow her around like a newly hatched chick.

Henrietta’s metaspecs are aglitter, and she lifts her arm and checks the inside of her wrist, where there is a long, scrollable, virtual list. As she checks “Cables and dongles” off, prompting a bright and reassuring chime, she winces. There are puffy red streaks of fresh cat scratches beneath the hologram, and for a moment, Henrietta is frozen, her eyes closed and her fist clenched. After the pain and residual anger have passed, she shakes her arm to dismiss the to-do app.

“I’m putting you in charge, Jiji,” Henrietta announces. “What’s next?”

Jiji ceases cleaning between the pads of his front paw, opens his eyes, and blinks.

“Well?” Henrietta prompts. “I’m waiting.”

“Instructions for Simon,” the cat says, having loaded the relevant list and located the first unchecked item. His voice is ironic and nasally—the type overly prone to wisecracking.

“Done,” Henrietta says. “I sent them right after breakfast.”

“Convert savings to crypto.”

“Transferred and tumbled,” Henrietta declares. “We caught a nice wave coming out of Asia overnight.”

“I’ll expect my usual fee,” Jiji says sarcastically. “What about your medication?”

“You can take that off the list,” Henrietta says. “I didn’t need it when I was a little girl, and it isn’t helping me now, so I stopped taking it.”

“All at once?” Jiji asks. “Is that safe?”

“That’s none of your business, mister,” Henrietta admonishes.

“Don’t train me on ten years of psychopharmaceutical literature if you don’t want me to use it.”

“Duly noted. Now back to work. We have to leave soon.”

“One last 360-degree capture.”

“Right,” Henrietta says. She positions herself in the approximate center of the room. “Start recording.”

Her vision goes entirely black except for the flash of a little red dot, then begins to come back in triangular, interlocking shards as she turns in place, lifting and lowering her chin in long, exaggerated nods. When she is back to where she started, the flashing stops, and the stitching together of an ultra-high-definition, three-dimensional model of her room is already in progress.

“Got it,” she says. “What’s next?”

“Pack one Pokémon plush,” Jiji instructs.

“OK,” Henrietta says. “I was saving this one for last, but I