Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

second Epoch Index was probably inevitable, predicted by the very existence of The Static. Why else would a future version of Henrietta want Quinn dead if not to prevent her from proactively dismantling her rebellion? In fact, Henrietta now believes that she has tried to kill Quinn at least twice across two different timelines: once with The Antecedent itself, and again through its mysterious emissions.

After she learned that Quinn was in the hospital during the attack, Henrietta tried to hack into her medical records, failed, then found an unpatched zero-day vulnerability in the CIA’s preferred medical provider’s back end, giving her access to the next best thing: all the financial data associated with her procedures. Quinn had been left with radar reflectors embedded in her left breast—beacons marking clusters of slow-growing but potent precancerous cells. An extremely unlikely combination that Ground Zero seemed explicitly engineered to exploit. A tragic but not unexpected death that her family and friends would mourn, but that nobody would find particularly suspect.

Henrietta’s theory is that her first attempt to kill Quinn in an even earlier timeline resulted in collateral damage—her ex-husband, just as they were in the process of reconciling—so her second attempt was designed to leverage the miscalculation by luring Quinn not toward The Antecedent itself, but into its lethal aftermath. And if that does not work, she will try again, escalating the brutality and complexity until she finds just the right sequence of events. Perhaps unsatisfied time cycles are what account for the world’s seemingly unrelenting campaign to attain chaos. Maybe they form the underpinnings of the second law of thermodynamics, which describes the tendency of systems to move toward maximum entropy. Instead of working to exit catastrophic loops, perhaps the future just keeps doubling down on the past.

The fact that Quinn is still alive could mean that Henrietta’s plan is, once again, destined to fail. That she should already be documenting possible ways to try again. As in all things concocted for a long-term slow burn, time will tell, but Henrietta is confident in the bets she has placed. And that the future is more of a suggestion than a fixed, immutable rule. If the only goal of The Static was to assassinate Quinn, why include the Antecedent equation, perfectly color-coded to invoke a persistent and distinct ghost?

Henrietta believes it is because Antecedent machines are nothing like nuclear weapons. The number of people in the world capable of procuring fissile material and figuring out how to sustain thermal reactions is inherently limited. But the number of people capable of building Antecedent machines is, for all intents and purposes, infinite. The pace of assassinations that Quinn and Ranveer will have to achieve in order to keep the world safe will be almost impossible to maintain.

When filling out her application, Henrietta did not specify a predetermined amount of time to be in suspended animation. According to the intake coordinator, she was the first test subject to select the “open-ended” option. As long as her vital signs are stable, and as long as the project continues to be funded, Henrietta will remain in stasis. Overwinter wants to study dormant biology for as long as possible; it takes years to reach Jupiter and Saturn, where the moons most likely to harbor extraterrestrial life silently and seductively orbit.

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