Scatter, p.25
Scatter, page 25
She froze in the act of returning the disk to its assigned slot in the back cabinet. Then she finished putting it in before turning back to me. Her eyes were bloodshot and wet, which unnerved me. “You really want to know?”
“I do.”
She took two steps towards me where I’d turned in my large chair, going onto my knees to look over the back of it comfortably. She stopped. “When I was little, my world was full of magic. But not the wonderful, fun kind. It was the magic of gods who kept the balance in the universe. If you did things one way, all was well. If you did not, you threw things out of balance and invited terrible things.”
She paused. “Like what?” I prompted.
“If I didn’t eat my leeks, I would marry a man with pockmarks. If I left my shoes on the floor facing my bed, the spirits would see it as an invitation to join me there at night.”
“Superstitions.”
“Yes, but all around me. From the time I was born. Like control! It only got worse when my mother died. My father would watch everything I did. The gods and spirits, he said, watched everything I did. If I did not do exactly as he said, they would come at night and pull my soul from my body. Sometimes I wished they would.”
Remembering the story of how her father had rented her out as a sexual slave, I felt the gorge rise up in my mouth. Somehow, manipulating her through beliefs in unseen spirits was even grosser and more pernicious than just beating her. External scars healed. Internal ones festered.
“Yet one thing I kept hoping,” Wenling said, her voice very small, “was that fate, yuánfèn, would one day bring me to the man who would save me.”
She stared hard at me, challenging me to somehow take the next leap in understanding. I had no idea what she thought I should see.
“I never got Mr. Chan!” she cried. “I never got Mr. Chow!”
“Which one did you want?”
Wenling screwed up her eyes, put her face down with her hands clenched by her side and screamed so loudly I was concerned for a moment that I’d pushed her too far with this entire inquiry.
“They are both fake! Actors! The colors are fake! The lights! The rain! If they want Ms. Chan to cry, they add glycerin to her eyes! It is all acting! Anyone can do that!”
Then, as if to prove her point, she ducked her head, and when she raised it again to look up at me, her face was sweaty, but calm, her hands relaxed, her entire manner back in its usual poise.
“Wenling, I’m…”
“I think this is done. It is time to describe the demonstration we will do tomorrow.”
She did.
27
Proving time travel
We had sex that night. It wasn’t lovemaking. I was too aware of her deep yearning for something I couldn’t give her and my own yearning for a woman I could no longer have. But it seemed to be part of the joint endeavor we were in and pleasurable on its own terms.
Even if I did find myself taking carefully examining the scars on her back to make sure they weren’t, as Lena had suggested, some of Wenling’s “acting.”
They were real.
Our attachment on that level, at least, was real.
It couldn’t remove the stress of our upcoming proof of time travel, though.
We woke up early, had breakfast, I showered and shaved, then Wenling sat me down to go through it all again. As she talked, I kept shaking my head at the awesome, wonderful simplicity of it.
From SCATTER’s end, it required only:
a) a sealed SCATTER box,
b) something they’d hidden inside it, and
c) their surveillance of the box until it was retrieved again.
Our contribution would be for me to open that box, examine the contents, then jump back in time with the memory of the contents to before the opening, in which new timeline we’d ensure the box was never opened until SCATTER was ready to confirm our report of what was inside.
Then, assuming SCATTER trusted the secrecy of the box’s preparation and established protocols that made it impossible for someone else to scan the box from the outside, or for themselves to miss someone opening it to look inside, there would be no other way for an outsider to know what was in the box other than through the time travel method above.
They could, of course, guess we’d used Harry Potter magic or a Star Trek teleporter beam, but Occam’s razor demanded SCATTER go first to techniques they knew actually existed, like time travel. And they’d be right.
Contrast this peek-in-the-box with the proofs I’d done with Lena. Those had required her trusting me as much as I trusted her. I’d jumped back from timelines in which she’d told me secrets about herself I couldn’t otherwise have known, and I’d repeated them back to her. It was like telling her what she had in her pockets or what she’d drawn on a piece of paper without showing me. She’d had to believe I hadn’t tricked her somehow by studying her life ahead of time, having an accomplice, or pulling some other mentalist shtick. She’d also monitored my body having crazy reactions to a future, traumatized mind, entering it. And she’d had the advantage of having proved, to her own satisfaction, the theoretical physics of the process.
But it had all come back to Lena trusting me.
Similarly, with our earlier attempts to get SCATTER’s attention, those without Kenny’s time travel memory had to trust Kenny that something had actually happened. But if Kenny had been showing signs of rebellion or instability lately…
It was why today’s peek-in-a-box demonstration was not just brilliant, but necessary.
Once more Wenling and I stood together in the great room of Wenling’s house before her wall of tall windows. I wore jeans, tee-shirt, and sock feet, sweating with anxiety, while Wenling stood coolly to my left, smelling deliciously fruity and fresh, in lime green slacks and a glorious jade green, asymmetrical knit top with matching jade earrings, her hair piled on top of her head with some crazy, bands of twisting polished stones.
Outside, through the windows, the morning sun had just splashed over the snowy peaks of the Rockies and turned the fields of the Columbia Basin between them and us into a light show of glittering frost.
I held Wenling’s phone again, with a newly programmed number. I was not, as I’d expected from Wenling’s description of the plan last night, going to be opening the box myself. I was just going to be ordering another faceless minion of hers to do so while we watched through what the minion live-streamed to us via their phone.
I’d wondered if the SCATTER surveillance crew might just jump the minion and try to torture our location out of him. But the minute we’d received the location for the box drop, Wenling had immediately sent her own stealth surveillance team to the area. It turned out to be literally minutes from the CIA HQ itself. So SCATTER could have overwhelmed any team Wenling sent in, but I was pretty sure the CIA wouldn’t want to chance having a deadly firefight break out in the woods near a major artery that fed Washington, DC proper.
Because that’s where the box was scheduled to be dropped—in the woods. It was maybe fifty yards off the Turkey Run Trail, midway between the George Washington Memorial Parkway and the Potomac Heritage Trail that ran right by the shores of the Potomac River. Discrete fluorescent flags marked the path to it, visible in the winter forest, but only just.
When Wenling had shared that description, I’d had visions of SCATTER dropping their box and our team never locating it, but Wenling had informed me she’d had reports from both our pickup minion and the surveillance team saying they were settling in place. On the large tablet Wenling now held in the crook of her left arm, we could see the shaky footage of the bare trees and underbrush with pockets of snow clumped here and there despite all the days of above-freezing weather. We heard the rustling and whispered communications between the surveillance team members, who were all dressed in the light grays, greens, and blacks of fall camo.
In Wenling’s home in northeastern Washington State, the clock clicked over to 7:50 a.m. and all rustling ceased.
For ten minutes it felt like we were all holding our breath, listening to a trickle of water from somewhere, a few birds chirping, the snap of thawing ice breaking branches.
At exactly 8 a.m., 11 a.m. Eastern Standard Time out in Turkey Run Park, Wenling’s tablet feed gave us the sound of crunching boots. The surveillance feed we were getting swung around, trying to locate the sound.
There it was. It looked like some random dude in a puffy, dark blue parka, hiking boots, simple blue wool cap. He carried a box about the size of an orange crate, but smooth, burnished metal all around. It looked very heavy for its size, so I guessed it was lead-lined or something to block a simple scan of the interior. He stopped, looking randomly around him like he knew people and cameras were watching from somewhere, but he wasn’t too worried about it.
He set the box down on a patch of dark, dirty moss. He straightened, looked around again, then left the way he’d come.
How many eyes watched him go? Wenling’s crew had at least three people if you included the sneak-a-peak minion who now stood up on the side of the clearing a little to the right of the cameraman sending us the feed.
There was no other visible movement.
The minion, wearing the same fall camo gear as his fellows, walked to the box, crouched in front of it, and felt around the top. His fingers fumbled a bit at something on either side of, and there was a quick pop-pop and hiss, like gas escaping.
The minion paused, visibly sniffed the air, apparently decided all was fine, and leaned forward as he raised the lid.
“Scheisse!”
German, my mind processed. Meaning “shit.” Uh-oh.
“Your camera! CAMERA!” he screamed straight at us through the video stream. Then the image jolted as the surveillance guy holding the streaming camera obviously jumped from hiding and sprinted to join the minion. The image jerked and moved so fast the streamed video was a blur until the man holding it finally got planted beside the minion, aimed his camera, and the image resolved into…
A piece of paper. Burning. Crackling. Sparks popping off it.
Specifically, it was a full page of text on the raised bottom of the box, almost right up to where the lid had opened. The paper was burning in from around the edges. It had already consumed pieces of the text as the page shrank quickly. And as we watched, the flame seemed to erupt in spots all over the text, igniting it between them so that in seconds the entire page was burning, shrinking, curling, turning to ash.
As it did, I became aware a high-speed chirping had grown from somewhere deeper in the box. It peaked and…
The feed cut out.
We waited, but nothing came back up.
“They’ll call,” Wenling said.
We waited some more.
No one called.
“Were they attacked?” I asked, my mind still fixed on the video images burned into my memory.
“I don’t know,” Wenling said, her brow furrowed. “If so, they must have shot the camera first?”
“No. No, you’re right. If they’d wanted to shoot your people, they could have done it earlier. And there were no sounds of shots or any noises other than the fire and high thrumming…”
“You heard that?”
“Yes. Almost like a…” I wanted to say, like an electric god racing around a particle accelerator, but it had been nowhere near that big. “An EMP.”
“EMB?”
“E. M. P.,” I repeated. “Electro Magnetic Pulse. It fries electronic equipment. It would have taken out the camera that was streaming what we saw. But why?”
“Do you know why?”
“I…don’t?” I said cautiously, because Wenling had thrown her tablet to the floor and was glaring at me.
“Why don’t you? Do you know anything?”
“About this?” I started backing away from her. Her face was coloring with what looked like a murderous rage and she was stepping towards me.
“About this. About your brother. About your sister. Do I have to do all the work?”
“I…”
“You know nothing. You come up with little theories and play at being a caring, feeling man. But you are no man at all, are you?”
“Okay,” I said, finally catching on as she backed me towards the fireplace, her mouth almost spitting and her shoulders hunched, hand half curled into claws. “I get it. I told you in our prep that I in order to jump…”
“You’re supposed to be leaving me now. You’ve been hiding behind my skirts. Behind my money. Using me. Fucking me. All for what? Because you cannot do anything by yourself.”
“Actually,” I blurted back, as I backpedaled away from her, “I can. I have.”
“You can’t. You haven’t. Everything you’ve done for your brother was when you were a boy! Then you ran away. You let him be taken and abused. First drugs from the gangs, then drugs from SCATTER!”
“You don’t know they’ve used drugs,” I said as I tripped and half full, scrambling to my feet as she drove in a circle now towards the door to the drawing room. I could peel through there and out the front door again. Escape again. Run away. Maybe even get myself to jump like I did last time?
“SHUT UP!” Wenling screamed at me and lunged at me, spitting, making me dodge to my left, away from the drawing room entrance. Away from my escape.
“I don’t think…” I began, wiping the spray of her spittle from my face.
“So DON’T. THINK. YOU DON’T HAVE TIME TO THINK, YOU LOSER. YOU FAILURE. YOU MOTHERFUCKING BROTHER KILLER. SISTER KILLER.”
“I never—”
But she didn’t even acknowledge it as she screamed at me like she could read my own inner anxiety demon I’d managed to shut up for so long. “THERE’S A REASON LENA REJECTED YOU. BECAUSE YOU’RE WORTHLESS. YOU SHOULD BE DEAD.” She lunged forward and punched my chest, making me stumble backwards again. “THEY SHOULD HAVE TAKEN YOU, NOT YOUR BROTHER AND SISTER, BUT YOU RAN AWAY. YOU’RE A COWARDLY…”
“I’m not. I’m not. My sister…” When had I told her about Kansas? I never told her about Kansas! Except when I talked to my parents and Wenling, she must have heard.
“SISTER FUCKER! FUCKING FAILURE. FUCKING SAD USELESS WASTE OF FLESH THAT SHOULD BE DEAD. YOU RAPEY SON-OF-A RACIST PRICK AND BARBIE BITCH! YOU LOSER…”
“Enough!”
She shoved me again, and I hit the kitchen island, tripped, and went down, scraping my ribs and falling badly onto my right wrist before Wenling was on top of me, hitting and scratching me and yelling into my face, spittle flying. And while I subconsciously took in all her words and knew they’d become part of me, the main feeling I had was that she truly, really, desperately wanted to grind me into nothing. Maybe because she knew I needed it to jump, but maybe also because I DESERVED it. Because that’s what fucked up losers did. They sought out affirmations of just how bad they were. How worthless…
Yes.
How useless…
Yes!
How totally deservedly alone and…
I was standing in front of the window with Wenling’s phone in my hand. To my left stood a woman. Who? Right. Wenling. Fruity and fresh. Wearing lime pants and a jade green, knit top. Off-balance. Was I going to fall? No. It was her top that was asymmetrical.
I was…fine.
I took a couple deep breaths and fought bending down to put my hands on my knees.
I had this.
One jump.
I’d just jumped. It was just…oh, God, this was getting harder every time. Like my nine months of fighting to get my mental health back made it even harder when I ripped off all the emotional scabs that held together my heart and mind.
In the crook of her left arm, Wenling cradled her tablet with the video feed of nothing happening in the still winter forest out near Langley but birds cheeping and the occasional branch cracking. She didn’t seem to have noticed my momentary disorientation. Why should she? For her, nothing had happened yet but the boredom of waiting for the guy in the puffy jacket to arrive with the box.
Was she rehearsing her attacks on me in her head? Or maybe she didn’t need to. Maybe just seeing me even a little shaken brought out her feral survivor who knew the best way to protect herself was finding the weak throat in your opponent and going straight for it. And whether I was actually an opponent, I was definitely weak.
There was a crunching sound. The guy arriving.
“Oh shit,” I muttered and Wenling turned to me, really looked at me.
“You already saw this?”
I nodded.
“Then make the call!”
I nodded again and stabbed the quick dial she’d set up on her phone earlier before passing it to me. A small buzzing sound came from the tablet still cradled on her left forearm. The guy who’d just arrived with the metal box now looked around, knowing there was someone in the woods watching him. Someone sloppy enough to not have made sure their cell phone couldn’t vibrate against something that would let others hear it.
He didn’t run, though. He just set down the box, turned, and walked back the way he’d come.
“Yes?” said a voice in the ear I was now holding Wenling’s phone up to.
“Abort mission,” I said as we’d planned, in a voice I knew would be too distorted for anyone listening to identify. “Leave now. All of you. You will be contacted later for a debrief.”
“You know the package is here…”
“We see it,” I said. “Repeat. Abort.”
Wenling took the phone from my hand. “This is Tigress. Do not go anywhere near the package. Get your fucking asses out of there without being seen. Now.”
“Understood.”
Wenling ended the call and watched the video stream shut off as her team presumably booted it out of there. “Idiots,” she growled, and the sound of disgust in her voice triggered an entire avalanche of PTSD in me related to what had just happened for me here in this room, but now never would for her. At least for this version of her. This timeline.
In that other, still continuing timeline, I wondered how far I’d let her go before my very very broken-down will to survive had kicked in and I’d pushed her off me. Would she go for the knife again? Would she just keep screaming and haranguing and trying to kill me as she desperately believed her plan had failed? Because in that timeline, it had.
