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

the enter key before redirecting and savagely stabbing at delete. Back then—back before James had been taken away and she still had a chance to rebuild—she knew that she was not a murderer. But now, Quinn is not so sure. There is a quiet, unsettling rage within her that she thought would pass, but that has since settled neatly and comfortably into place, and that she is now afraid might never go away.

The second time in a year that Quinn got into an accident, her father did not yell like he did the first time. She stood behind him while he was at his desk and explained what happened at the intersection as calmly and clearly as she could. Her voice quivering, her fingers fidgeting with the staple in the corner of the packet from the body shop. She’d already gotten an estimate on the repair, and she would pay for the whole thing herself. She’d even called her boss at the ice cream shop and asked for extra hours. If there was an increase in her insurance, she would cover that, too. It wouldn’t cost him anything, she promised. When he continued sitting there quietly—chin up, eyes down, hands flat on the desk in front of him—Quinn was confused.

“Aren’t you mad?” she asked him.

“What makes you think I’m not mad?”

“You’re not yelling.”

She remembers how he took a deep breath and closed his eyes before calmly responding: “It’s when I’m not yelling that you should really be scared.”

Quinn backed out of his office and went upstairs to her room. Closed and locked the door. Put a pillow over her face as if she were smothering herself so her mother and brother would not hear her cry. For the first sixteen years of her life, Quinn’s understanding of the people around her had been flawed. The emotions that people show—no matter how intense—are the ones that are the safest because they so clearly communicate our actions and announce our intent. It is the feelings we can’t see that give us a false sense of security. Once Quinn understood, she put the pillow aside and sat up on her bed. Took a deep breath just like her father had and willed herself to stop crying. Even managed a slight, disquieting smile. If the rest of the world functioned by hiding its true nature from view, why should she be expected to play by a different set of rules?

—

“Siqi,” Quinn prompts—the wake word for the CIA’s Structured Interactive Query Interface. Her phone is charging in the center console, and she can see the screen light up in her peripheral vision. If her car were a model year or two newer, it would not let her interact with her phone unless she was either parked or in full autonomy mode. “Start a new query.”

“Please identify one or more indices.”

Quinn has Siqi configured to use a generic male voice. The text-to-speech library the platform relies on is obsolete, so it sounds like an old toy found in a forgotten box. The phone’s Bluetooth connection routs the stilted, synthesized audio through the Honda’s speakers.

“The most recent local copy of the shadowphiles.”

“How many conditions?”

“Two.”

“First condition data type…”

“Identity.”

“Whose identity?”

“Mine. Quinn Mitchell.”

“Second condition data type…”

“Text.”

“Please define…”

Quinn already knows that her identity is smeared all over the shadowphiles. Thanks to countless database breaches and myriad hacked accounts, everybody’s is. So she needs to combine her identity with a term unique enough to narrow down the results. One of the most distinct and disturbing details the Elite Assassin got right. The last thing she did just before sealing the valve on the oxygen tank.

“Baby monitor.”

“Conditions defined,” Siqi says. “Executing query against local shadowphile index.”

As though on her own form of autopilot, Quinn surprises herself by swinging into the empty parking lot of the Cherrydale Baptist Church. As she passes it, the RGB plasma-dot marquee transitions from a message of justice, love, and mercy to simply: PRAY FOR PARIS.

She parallel parks across a couple of perpendicular spots, dials the Honda into park, and looks down at her phone. The results of the query will tell Quinn everything. If Siqi finds just one match—no matter how obscure—she will know Ranveer was lying. Manipulating her in exactly the same way she used her favorite quote from Hamlet to manipulate her own marks. But if it returns nothing—if Quinn cannot verify with absolute certainty that the Elite Assassin simply bought access to the details he claimed proved his story—she will have nowhere left to hide.

“One result found,” Siqi says, and Quinn instantly feels the cinch of fear release and fall away. She does not see it coming, but the three simple words unleash a well of relief that rises up and condenses into tears. Although she hates the fact that what she did to her father somehow found its way into the shadowphiles, at least she now knows the truth. And depending on the distribution of nodes and the type of encryption, she may even be able to have the most shameful moment of her life redacted.

“How many nodes is the data stored across?” Quinn asks.

“Three.”

That’s doable, Quinn thinks. She can probably identify and attack all three before the data has a chance to replicate further. But it also doesn’t make sense. Three nodes means basic redundancy—not what you’d expect from data that should have been circulating for years. Such a small number of nodes is more characteristic of a leak that found its way down into the shadowphiles as recently as just last week.

“Subtract the timestamp on the result from the current time and format the difference into the largest possible time-based units.”

“Eleven days, sixteen hours, forty-two minutes, and six seconds.”

“What the fuck,” Quinn says.

“Command not recognized.”

“Describe the context of the result.”

“Crime scene report filed by the Royal Oman Police. Quinn Mitchell is listed as an associate investigator.”

“That can’t be right,” Quinn says.

“Authenticity verified.”

“Why would a crime scene report be available on the shadowphiles?”

“The majority of crime scene investigation reports leak to the