Simulated a calculated n.., p.30
Simulated: A Calculated Novel, page 30
Chapter Sixty-Three
There is no wind. The warmth of the sun beats on my face. I’m on a penthouse rooftop with a view of an old city. There are green hills spotted with richly colored villas, and beyond it lies a deep blue sea and what looks like a volcano.
I don’t know where I am. There’s no way of knowing unless I want to give myself away.
Under a beautiful wooden arbor covered with grape vines, Ennéa is lying on a chaise, her eyes barely fluttering open. Finally.
Drawing a deep breath, I move to her side and cross my legs like Madame. “You’re not hurt,” I say, in a sickly, sweet voice. “Everything is going to be ok. I got you out. Your identity is safe.”
“How did we get here?” She grips her head, her long dark hair cascading past her shoulders. She’s looking at her clothes now, which are different. They match our environment, wherever we are. She’s confused.
“I brought you here. I know all about you.”
She shakes her head, eyes disoriented. “There’s no way you know about this place. And I’m not who you think I am. You’re wrong.” Ennéa rubs her dark, round eyes.
“Oh, I know exactly who you are. Like you know who I am.”
“I’ve only heard rumors of the girl Madame loved. The protégé who betrayed her.” She gives me a once over, as if I’m not what she expected.
I lock my jaw, and stare at the vines, trailing and clinging on to anything they can.
“I had to betray her. It was necessary to take up her mantle. She trained me to be ruthless. To hide who I really was. Like she trained you. Do whatever it takes. Mask your identity. Be unknown to all.” I smile, that power in me rising, threatening to steal my soul. “She told me about you though. I had to see if you knew what you were doing. I have the master-file and Blacklist tech too. I certainly don’t need yours. But you did well. Organized, planned…quite the set-up, all without a soul knowing who you were. Except the boy. But he’s dead now. Quite brilliant.”
Her eyes turn innocent again. She’s shaking her head. “They lied to me. Whoever you think I am, I’m not her.” Then she looks around the roof, piecing together a puzzle. “How did we get here so quickly? We’re not even in Tunisia.”
I ignore her. “You have much to learn.” I sigh, shaking my head and walk to the wall surrounding the rooftop. My back is toward her, but I continue speaking. “This empire is mine, but I want to make you a deal. First, we rid ourselves of the radicals. They are beneath me. I never work with such volatile trash. I was surprised you did. The Sheikh was a nice choice, but he’s gone now. But if you did what I think you did, you got the money.” I turn back and face her as I add my stipulations. “If you prove that to me, we can be partners. Unless you want out, in which case, I’ll let you go if you surrender the plans you’ve already set in motion. Madame wouldn’t be so kind. But I respect you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She stands, checking everything like it’s fake. Being in this setting is the only thing working in my favor. She rummages through a drawer, and an envelope is there. My numbers flicker on an address in Sicily but I need to hurry, because I’m getting dizzy.
“Ennéa? I know that’s not your real name. I know Madame chose you. Because she chose me too. We can trust each other.” The words are bitter on my tongue. I pull the hair from my neck to reveal my scar. I’m disoriented. It’s hard to focus. Just like Noble said it would be.
Her eyes grow cold at seeing my scar. She’s connecting with me. Almost there.
“In the bedroom, there’s a small device.” She runs to retrieve it. She comes out with another holothumb, different from the master-file and Blacklist. She hands it to me. I press the bottom button, and a hologram fills the space between us. It’s another master-file. Every plan she’d put into place across North Africa and the Middle East. Accounts. Names. Dates. Governments. Targets.
She looks up at me, her eyes proud and sad at the same time. “I did everything she taught me. I set them all up. Every one of them will take the fall except for the ones I put in place, which have not yet been exposed. We have more than enough money for years to come.”
I stare at her brown eyes, a sour taste in my mouth and an ache in my heart. She’s nothing but a broken soul looking for a home. I’m not satisfied at all by my task though I know it had to be done. And I can’t take another minute.
“Thank you for your cooperation, Ennéa.” I push the red button and the screen goes black.
I peel off Noble’s neural simulator from behind my ear and look to my right. Noble is there, waiting anxiously. “It was recording. Did it work?”
“It worked.” I look over at the girl, surrounded by Bai’s men, removing my sim glasses from her. Her disorientation is now fading as she’s escorted from the room. My stomach lurches like a ship at sea.
Noble comes over to me, taking my arm to lead from the room. “The radicals are subdued in Tunis.”
“Good.” My head is in a cloud, but Bai rushes into the room.
“It’s Kai,” he says, “Come quick.”
We race behind Bai to the courtyard where a medic SUV is parked outside. Kai is in the back of the car, moaning and talking deliriously. His vitals are dropping fast.
The medic looks up. “We’ve got to get him somewhere with more equipment fast or he’s not going to make it.”
“You told me you could stabilize him!” I shout, gripping Kai’s hand. “I wouldn’t have done the sim if he wasn’t stable!”
“He was stable,” Bai barks, motioning to the medic to get in the car with Kai. “Now, he’s not. Now get in the car.” Bai is trying to stay calm, but his eyes are darting from Kai to the big mess in the Dar. He can’t leave because he’s in charge and has to clean up this operation quickly.
“We have a safe house in Tozeur with a medic and the equipment to save his life.” The medic climbs in the SUV to drive.
Noble checks Kai’s heart rate. “I’m sorry. My calculations say…you won’t get there fast enough. From Douz to Tozeur in a car is over an hour.”
Bai hits the hood of the car, frustrated. “Then what do you suggest?”
My eyes shoot across the darkened sand to a trial I’ve never faced in real life but have dreamed about since I was a child. I know what I have to do to save him.
“I can get him there in time,” I say, pointing. “In that.”
Bai cocks his head. “The helicopter?”
Chapter Sixty-Four
Bai looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “I won’t lose two people tonight!”
“I can fly it, Bai,” I shout. “Now get him in there and give me the coordinates. We don’t have time!”
Bai curses under his breath, then shouts to the medic. “Hurry! Help him carry Kai to the helicopter.”
I race over to the machine. It’s much smaller than it looks from a distance. It turns on easily enough, just like in the sims. Noble’s close behind, standing outside the cockpit.
They bring Kai around on the other side and secure him. The medic digs through the bag bouncing on his hip, putting pressure on wounds and checking vitals. “I need to travel with you.”
Kai is feverish and pale, but he’s fighting. His eyes are spinning but he sees me. “Jo?”
I touch his face. “I’m here, Kai.” I say. “Hold on. I’m going to get you to help.”
The medic’s instruments are already spilling out over Kai. The helicopter fits two, and Kai is sprawled all over the cockpit, and the medic beside him.
“I can come too,” Noble offers. No one knows my history in a helicopter more than Noble. But it’s a two-person helicopter and it’s already cramped with the medic who has to ride with Kai. Besides, Noble told Bai he’d help get the confessions.
“I can do this, Noble.” I give him my backpack with my sim glasses inside. “After you help Bai, take the Jeep and get out of here.”
He takes off my watch and puts it on my wrist. “You’ll need K2.”
Rotor wash from the blades swooshes down against Bai who’s pacing beside the machine, shouting orders and cursing.
Noble reaches up and grasps my hand. “Don’t listen to Agent Bai. Look at me. I wouldn’t let you do this if I didn’t believe you could. Trust your gift. Look for the fractals.” He cups his hand to my face. “I’ll meet you there, Jo.”
I nod. “Thanks.”
Noble and Bai duck and run away from the helicopter, then from a short distance away turn around to watch with anticipation.
Before I take off, I close my eyes, and breathe. There’s an invitation in the chaos, all I have to do is listen. I picture the helicopter from my sims and open my eyes. The rotor blades thump as the engine whines and revs. I move my hands over the controls lightly. I grasp them, wrapping my fingers around them, and then we’re up in the sky.
I glance down at Kai, focusing on his face and not the blood seeping through his bandages. “Hold on, Kai.”
His eyes flutter open at the sound of my voice. “Xiao Fenghuang?” Kai uses my Chinese name. “When did you learn to fly a helicopter?”
I laugh. “You don’t want to know.”
The palm groves wave under us now. And it’s dark, so dark. The helicopter pitches and rolls like a car being overcorrected on an icy road.
K2 is spouting coordinates, but I don’t hear them because I’m fiddling with gauges, needing to finesse the controls. It’s not a smooth take off and I’m still pitching forward. The medic tightens his straps, surely wondering if I even know how to fly this thing. Technically, I don’t, but I refuse to tell him that. Because somewhere inside me, I have everything I need.
The dense clouds above me that covered the moon are dispersing now. There’s light in the sky, but my numbers still aren’t surfacing. The helicopter proximity warnings go off in the cockpit. Terrain indicators squawk, too. I need to gain elevation and get up higher over the trees before I smash into something.
Sometimes all we need is to look up...but I can’t focus, until I see an auto-hover button on the flight director panel—my sims never allowed me to use one. It was too easy of a way out. But this is real life. I push it, and the helicopter hovers, stable in one place.
“What are you doing?” the medic yells. “We don’t have time to hover, we need to move!”
But I ignore him because we won’t make it if I can’t find peace.
My eyes dart up in the dark sky, and a starry host grabs my attention. I let my mind fill up thoughts of stony coral and bright lightning splitting into tributaries of light. Don’t think of what you see, but what it took to produce what you see.
Dunes. Oceans. Stars. The sound of the wind. The smell of the rain. The tail of a seahorse. Wonder grows in me like a toddler’s first visit to a playground. The boundaries of the sea. Above me, below me. Fractals everywhere. The never-ending patterns in the chaos around us. Treasure hidden in plain sight.
The key to unburying my gift is so close, within my grasp. All I have to do is see with new eyes.
I think about love and what it makes us do. How it grows in the dark like a seed in the ground, unformed, until water and light trickle down. Then it splits into a pattern growing both up and down, in two directions, beautiful replicas of each other but in different ways. It’s like roots and branches—one outstretched toward the sun, bearing fruit. The other unseen but securing life and holding the earth together. I turn off the hover and fly.
We’re high above the trees now. Safe from crashing, but it’s still a rough flight. While my sims helped to this point, I’m struggling to keep the helicopter in control.
I look down at Kai. He looks up at me, one eye swollen shut. “It’s pretty up here…you’re pretty up here…” His voice is slurred. His eyes roll back into his head. “Jo, I love you…” His bloodstained hand reaches out to touch mine. Then, it drops and he’s unconscious.
I think of what it took to produce what I have with Kai. Trust. Risk. Time. Love.
Numbers flash like lightning through the sky. The cockpit lights up, a familiar filter of angles, equations and numbers, and something new—charts measuring sounds, frequencies. Miles of patterns and scales unfold before me, until I’m flying with a map of my own. Every button on the dashboard is numbered and ordered.
The chop of the blades is a sweet rhythm in my ear. Noble said everything is speaking and now I’m somehow measuring it. Like unmapped territory, there are numbers and tools in my gift I don’t understand. But right now, I don’t care. The speed and distance now pulse in sync with numbers in my head. I can count every control switch and I have organized them within seconds. The dynamic systems around me make sense and flying a helicopter is as simple as playing with a new toy. I take the controls with confidence.
My numbers flow from inside me, a peaceful current like the sea, unhurried and deep. Then I see it—calculations in the midst of chaos. The world is spread out like a mosaic. Beautiful broken pieces so intricately put together that it forms the most stunning piece of art I’ve ever seen.
I fly over the earth, its chaotic perfection curving around every bend, the rough and complex meeting in the middle. The equations become like stories, defining everything I see. The very earth beats around me like a human heart declaring life, proclaiming the layers that make us able to love deeper even when trouble comes.
This time my gift is tangible in a way I’ve never felt before—like new growth on a plant in spring. I don’t fully understand what it means, but it’s more alive than ever, like the infinity around and inside us. A hope that nothing and everything lasts forever.
I fly into the sky, my mind zipping with numbers. I’m measuring—not sure how—twenty-eight sounds around me, but it feels silent, peaceful.
My gift is back.
It’s not going to leave me.
But the boy slouched next to me in the cockpit still might.
Chapter Sixty-Five
TOZEUR SAFE HOUSE
TUNISIA
The safe house in Tozeur is easy to locate with the emergence of my new gift. It’s exactly two miles out of the city, tucked behind a grove of palm trees. I bring the helicopter down smoothly on a sixteen-by-ten patch of gravel. It’s not a landing pad, but it will do.
Thirty feet away sits an inconspicuous old Dar, smaller than the one in Douz. Three men stand outside waiting for us. It’s been twenty-three minutes since we left Douz, and fifteen minutes since Kai passed out. The medic is yelling orders concerning Kai.
Even though an internal clock is ticking, it feels like slow motion as agents rush out of the safe house and over with a gurney, and lift Kai. I follow close behind. As we enter the house another man, clad in a bulletproof Kevlar vest, leads me into a nice room with a brown corduroy couch and a small table.
Within seconds, my gift has already calculated the number of rows the fabric has, the dimensions of the windows, and what percentage of the walls have paint flaking off.
Then I wait, with my eyes closed because the numbers swirling inside me make the future all too real. They’ve calculated the odds for Kai. It’s not helping. I stare out the small window and do the one thing I can, study the stars and look for a thumbprint.
After an hour and seven minutes Noble arrives at the door in a fresh change of clothes. I stand, but don’t rush. My numbers outline his physical features, and highlight small movements in his face, each equation telling me the numerical story of a boy.
“Hi.” His voice sends waves of frequencies undulating in the room. Coupled with my equations, they’re so strong I almost need to sit back down. “You made it.”
I nod, shakily.
“You were right about Kai. He didn’t fail. The holothumb was merged with the master-file. SMOKE is currently exposing networks all over North Africa and the Middle East.”
I sigh with relief and eight questions are ready on my tongue, chiefly, why he’s still here and not fleeing Tunisia. But Jace, the medic who rode in the helicopter, comes into the room, and pulls my attention.
“Kai’s stable and awake. He wants to see you.” He holds the door open. “You have ten minutes before Director Kane arrives. Agent Bai said you both need to leave before he shows up.”
Noble juts his chin toward the door. “Go ahead,” he says. “I’ll wait.”
Chapter Sixty-Six
The boy lying on the bed is beautiful, bloody, and bruised but not defeated in the least. The minute he sees me his face lights up, bright and victorious. He pushes himself up, all his energy directed toward me. “Hi, Trouble.”
He doesn’t even care about his banged-up body. Director Kane’s words about his aptitude for pain and recovery being off the charts return to mind. Was Kai born for this? Suddenly I don’t know what to think. My numbers are coursing over his beautiful face, and every time he saved me replays over and over in my head…I just want to know what Kai really wants.
I walk over to him, gently nuzzling my face into his.
“You smell different. What is that?” he asks, his eyes squinting playfully.
I sniff my sweatshirt. “Fire smoke and cardamom.” I sit on the edge of the bed. “I’m glad you’re not dead.”
“Me too.” He shakes his head and lets out a sigh.
The bruising of his right eye jogs a memory from China. “Well, you’re on brand by sacrificing yourself for others.”
He smiles. “For you.” The blood caked on his face earlier is now washed clean revealing swelling everywhere. Under it, all I see is the boy who saved me over and over again. A boy who risks his life so I can sleep.
For the last year, he’s been a spark of light in the midst of darkness, a sign life goes on. But what about now?
He tries to sit up.
“Lie down,” I say, gently pushing him back. “It’s finished. You solved the case. You’re the hero.”
“I had a plan to make it out, too, you know.” He stares at me as if I’m his medicine, his drug. The only thing keeping me together is the numbers zipping up and down his face like the first time I saw him in the pool house in Shanghai, shirtless, fixing stuff and watering orchids. The boy no one gets to see but me.
