Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

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