Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (best english novels for beginners txt) 📗

learning to fly at Nairobi Aviation College. A Chinese man arrested by the Ministry of Public Security for selling banned video games. A geneticist working for a South African food-processing company. A Russian hacker who lost her legs in a retaliatory missile strike. A young former executive of Petróleos de Venezuela. A top v-sports athlete obsessed with prime numbers and cryptography. The nine-month-old son of an Omani investor. Nine months old. And at least a dozen others—all mostly unremarkable. “Bullshit,” Quinn says. “What kind of terrorists?”

“All kinds,” Ranveer says. “Even the kind you used to hunt before you began hunting me.”

Quinn shakes her head. “That’s impossible,” she says. “We never found any nuclear terrorists.”

Ranveer shows a row of impeccable white teeth as he grins. “Exactly.”

“You’re sick,” Quinn tells the man across from her. “You’ve been murdering innocent people. Children. Babies. There’s no way they were all terrorists.”

“They weren’t,” Ranveer agrees. “Not yet. Remember, the Epoch Index came from the future.”

“Why didn’t you just have them arrested?” Quinn asks. “Or have them—I don’t know—watched or something?”

“That wasn’t an option.”

“Why?”

“The digitally signed death certificate of each target was the decryption key for the next block. The only way to decrypt the entire list was to eliminate every target on it. Each death had to be verified, and they had to be done in the correct order.”

Quinn recalls the flag that her dashboard raised about the victims’ ages. “From oldest to youngest,” she says.

“So it would seem.”

“That’s very clever,” Quinn says with a sardonic grin. She feels like a trial lawyer about to eviscerate her witness. “But it’s also complete bullshit. And I can prove it.”

“I already know your objection,” Ranveer says.

“What?”

“You’re going to say that some properties of death certificates are predictable. Name, universally unique identifier, birth date, address. But some—like time, cause, and place of death—are not.”

“Exactly. And any change in the contents, no matter how minor, changes the entire digital signature, which means unless the targets were eliminated at exactly the right time, in exactly the right place, and in exactly the right way, it wouldn’t work.”

“Except…” He pauses, presumably to give Quinn the opportunity to find the flaw in her own logic.

“Except what?”

“Except for the fact that the blocks were encrypted in the future, Ms. Mitchell, when all of those details were already known.”

Quinn leans back in her chair and smiles. She no longer feels intimidated by the man across from her, but oddly invigorated by the exchange.

“I’m impressed,” she says. “You’ve really put a lot of thought into this, haven’t you?”

“No,” Ranveer says. “Someone much more ruthless and calculating than I put a lot of thought into this. I’m just following orders.”

“That’s hard to imagine,” Quinn says.

“What?”

“Someone more ruthless and calculating than you. Who is he?”

Ranveer leans forward, placing his arms on the steel surface between them and interlacing his long fingers. He watches her with his perfectly black eyes, and she perceives in him a tranquility that is simultaneously comforting and unsettling.

“You.”

Quinn’s expression instantly changes. She takes in a breath and starts to say something but stops. Before she can counter, Ranveer continues.

“You are the one who saves countless lives, Ms. Mitchell. You are the one who figures out how to adapt to an insane and disintegrating world. I came here to tell you that Molly did not die in vain, and that your life has not been wasted. I came here to tell you that you are the architect of the Epoch Index.”

Molly. Hearing that name come out of this man’s mouth both infuriates and weakens her. Quinn’s hands are pressed into the metal surface in front of her, and her eyes are one blink away from spilling tears of both rage and pain.

“I promised you irrefutable proof,” Ranveer continues. “The Epoch Index had a short, clear-text prologue. Perhaps you’ll recognize it. We know what we are, but know not what we may be.”

“That’s a—” Quinn shakes her head. “That doesn’t mean anything. That’s from Hamlet. You’re going to have to do a hell of a lot better than that.”

“Oh, I can,” Ranveer assures her. “The last decrypted block—the one I was picking up when we nearly met on The Grid—wasn’t a name. It was a message. For you. From you. Your most private memory. Something you never told anyone and never wrote down. Something to prove that the Epoch Index is real, and that you are its creator.”

Quinn cycles through a deep breath and swallows. “What is it?”

“Your last name wasn’t always Mitchell,” Ranveer begins. His dark eyes are eerily serene and perfectly steady. “You used to be Quinn Claiborne.”

He pauses, presumably waiting for a reaction. Quinn shakes her head to show him that she is both underwhelmed and piqued.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she says. “That’s public record.”

“You changed it back to Mitchell, your maiden name, after your brother’s surgery,” he continues. “After the radiation therapy ensured that he would never be able to have children.”

He pauses again. This time, Quinn is quiet.

“Your husband, James, was upset. You fought about it for days. He proposed that you hyphenate your name, but you refused. You went back to Mitchell and insisted that your children bear your last name instead of his. He had two brothers who both had children. His name wasn’t in danger of dying out. But continuing the Mitchell line was up to you. What angered James was not that you wanted to give up his name. It was that you chose your father’s name—the name of a man who so clearly never cared about you—over the name of a man who loved you more than anything else in the world. That was why he felt betrayed.”

“You—” Quinn isn’t sure what she wants to say, but she wants this to stop. This man is sick. Anyone who would play these types of games is sick. She will not participate. She will not play, and she will not let him make her cry. “James could have told someone that. He could have told