Scan

by Walter Jury

  In more ways than one. I lower my head and touch my mouth to hers.

  Kissing Christina is like instant anesthetic. Her lips taste like powdered sugar, and her hands are liquid soft as they skim up my arms, raising goose bumps. The air in my father’s lab is temperature controlled, kept right at a chilly sixty degrees no matter what time of year.

  I don’t really feel the cold, though, because I’m on fire right now.

  I nudge Christina back up against one of the lab tables, and she lets out this breathy sigh and gets up on her tiptoes. Her arms are around my neck and her body is pressed against mine. I can feel every curve. The warm tip of her tongue slides along my lips, and as I open my mouth and let her in, something inside me roars. My hands find her waist and lift her up so she’s sitting on the table. I pull her hips toward me, so I can stand between her legs, so I can get a little closer and feel her—

  Her hand on my chest, giving me the gentlest of pushes.

  It’s the only signal I need. Even though it’s like pulling the brakes on a speeding train, I manage to reverse course and lean back, giving her some space. Her other hand, which until this moment was tangled in my hair, slides down to my cheek. Her own cheeks are flushed this incredible shade of lush pink. Her eyes are on my shoulder. “Um,” she whispers, “if we could just . . .”

  She wriggles her hips and wrenches the hem of her skirt down to midthigh, and I feel like a total douchebag. I didn’t mean to push it that far. I know she isn’t ready for that. We’ve been friends for nearly three years, but we haven’t been together for that long. That’s not how it feels to me, though. I’ve been gone for this girl for so long that I can barely remember a time when she wasn’t the first thing I thought about in the morning . . . and yeah, the object of my fantasies, too. But as much as I want to touch her, I’m not about to screw this up. She means too much to me.

  “Yeah, of course.” I step back and turn away, staring at one of my father’s many flat-screen computer panels. This one wasn’t here the last time I sneaked in. The display is black, with three numbers in the center of the screen:

  2,943,288,494

  4,122,239,001

  14 (?)

  As I watch, measuring my breaths by the seconds, willing myself to calm down, the bottom number with the question mark next to it stays the same, but the top two numbers change, faltering down by two, up by one, down by three, up by five. The first number is shrinking steadily, but the second one is growing in a jumpy pattern.

  That’s exactly how the awkwardness between me and Christina feels right now.

  She’s silent, which makes my heart start to pound for a different reason altogether. My eyes and brain move a hundred miles an hour, trying to find a way to surf the tsunami of weirdness that’s hit us. Feeling jittery, I reach over and tap the screen with the numbers, and it flashes and evaporates like it was a screensaver. For a split second, the display is filled with an incredibly complex blueprint of some type, but it’s immediately replaced by a lurid red screen requesting a password. I back toward Christina quickly. “What’s that?” she asks.

  “No clue.” It was dumb of me to touch it like that—in this lab, there’s no telling what could happen, and I’m usually more cautious. But I’m not ready to leave yet, so I direct Christina toward the things I’ve already figured out. “Want to learn a few different ways to kill someone?” I offer.

  Her laughter is high and shaky. “What?”

  “We could play with some of my dad’s toys.” I gesture at the rack of slick black weaponry that takes up the far wall. My dad used to work for this company called Black Box Enterprises, a private weapons manufacturer. He quit right around the time my mom left us, but he still does jobs for Black Box as an independent contractor, and for some reason he attends all their board meetings. That’s where he is right now, in fact. I look over my shoulder at Christina.

  She hooks a finger through one of my belt loops and tugs me backward. Her arms slide around my middle, and her expression glows with mischief. “This sounds like an excellent plan.”

  She hops off the lab table and approaches what looks like a towel rack, over which hang several silver sacks woven from delicate steel thread. Thin wires coil from the bottom of each of them and connect to a black panel beneath the rack.

  “I’m not sure how you’d kill someone with these,” she comments dryly, pointing to the sacks. “Though they are kind of pretty.”

  “Oh, those won’t kill you.” I know because I was stupid enough to play with one once. Obviously, I survived, though at the time I wished I hadn’t. “You can put one of these babies over someone’s head and turn it on . . .” I flip a switch on the black panel, and the bags start to pulse with muted light. “It’s much brighter if you’re looking at the inside of the bag—or if your head is in one. The strobes from the fiber optics inside flash at the same frequency as human brain waves. It’s called the Bucha effect. Recipe for a seizure.” I would know. It took me a day to sleep it off.

  She takes a step back and runs into me. “I think I’m scared of your dad . . . but also in awe.”

  Which is kind of how I feel, and somehow, it makes me angrier at him.

  I lean over and snag a smooth black disk from a shelf full of similar devices. I leave my own grimy fingerprints all over it but don’t even care.

  “This one is actually pretty cool,” I say, pressing a tab at its edge. A screen appears across its surface—a map of the world, along with tiny command buttons.

  “Is that a GPS?” Christina leans close. Her hair smells like almonds, and I breathe deeply.

  “I’m pretty sure it can do a lot more than that.” I push one of the buttons and a prompt comes up:

  Ramses Satellite IV-467 password:

  Christina’s eyes go wide. “Do you know the password?”

  I chuckle. “I might.” I do. It’s my mother’s middle name. I have no desire to crash a billion-dollar satellite today, though. I may be angry at my dad, but I’m not that angry. I turn the satellite-controller thingy off and set it back on the shelf.

  Christina’s eyes dart along the wire racks and lab tables in the center of the long, hangarlike room, which hold an array of objects of various shapes and sizes, all black and slick and enticing. “So not all of these are weapons?”

  “Nah. Only that wall over there and the stuff on this table.” I gesture at the seizure bags, which are hanging right next to a set of innocent-looking vibracoustic stimulation probes that I’m fairly sure could stop a guy’s heart.

  She smiles, no doubt feeling safer now that I’ve directed her toward things that are less likely to kill her—or me—on contact.

  “Hmm. Let’s see,” she says as she moves toward the largest table in the room. Her fingers tap lightly along its surface as she approaches a device I’ve never seen before, one that’s sitting out in the open like my dad forgot to put it away. It’s just over a foot long, and about two inches wide. Like everything else my dad makes, it’s smooth and black, except for a port next to the power switch, kind of like a USB but not quite the right shape. Christina picks up the device and arches an eyebrow. “This has potential.”

  “Be careful,” I say. “I have no idea what that does.”

  “It looks like a security wand. Like at the airport?” She presses a button on the handle, and a strip of yellow light gleams from its center. Her lips curve into a suggestive smile. “I think I need to check you for contraband, Mr. Archer.”

  Her hips swaying, she slinks over to me and stands close enough to touch, close enough for me to smell the cinnamon and powdered-sugar scent of her breath, close enough for me to curl my fingers over the edge of the table behind me and hold on tight. She slowly extends the wand and waves it over my arm, sending blue light reflecting back at us. “Ooh, I like that. What a pretty color,” she says in a voice that raises my temperature a few degrees.

&nbs
p; She runs it up over my shoulder and around my neck, and then slowly, slowly, skims it down over my chest, that blue glow reflecting brightly in her eyes. Her gaze is fixed on mine, and that wand is sinking lower, and all I can do is hope the thing doesn’t detect blood flow or something, because I could be in trouble if she keeps this up.

  And then, just as the light reflects bright blue and blinding off the metal button of my jeans, Christina laughs and looks down at her feet. Johnny Knoxville is winding his wiry body around her ankles. I glance toward the lab’s door and realize I left it hanging open. Johnny meows, all high pitched and innocent, and I feel a rush of gratitude because I think he’s saved me.

  “Hey, Johnny,” Christina coos. “Are you feeling left out? Should I scan you, too?” She bends over and runs the wand over his back, sending plain yellow light bouncing along his sleek black fur and the gray tiles beneath his paws. He startles when he sees it and takes off.

  “Sorry!” she calls, then looks up at me. “I didn’t mean to scare him.”

  “Meh. He’s a total neurotic grump. Hard not to be when you live with my dad.”

  She spends a few moments looking for him under the lab tables, and before she straightens, she glances up at me and gives me a look that shoots fire through my veins. “Should I scan myself, do you think?”

  I . . . can’t speak. I just watch without breathing as she skims the thing up her bare legs from ankle to knee, wishing I’d had enough working brain cells to grab the scanner from her and do the job myself.

  She takes her eyes off me and looks down at her legs. “Hey,” she says, frowning. “The light is red.”

  She swings it in my direction. Blue. And back over her belly. Red. “What does this thing detect?”

  “Red hotness,” I say, because . . . damn. I’m still staring at her legs.

  She barely smiles at my lame joke. Instead, she turns the scanner off and sets it back where she found it. I slide my arm around her waist. “Okay, fine. The most obvious explanation is that I’m a guy. And you are most definitely not a guy. See? Blue for guys. Red for girls.” Even as I say it, I know there’s more to it than that, but it’s the only explanation that occurs to me at the moment.

  “Yeah. Hey. I’m getting kind of cold.” She points to the goose bumps along the usually smooth skin of her arm. “Do you think the cleaning lady’s done up there yet?”

  I pry Johnny out from under my dad’s desk and drop him in the hallway, then take her hand and lead her out the door. Just before I hit the button to slide it shut behind us, I look back at the screen I touched when we first came in. The screensaver is back on, the two huge numbers on top doing their little jittery dance, the final row still reading: 14 (?). It’s a mystery, a puzzle to solve. Then my eyes land on the scanner, and I smile. Two more puzzles to solve. The words of Sun Tzu come to me again, and for once the timing is perfect:

  Opportunities multiply as they are seized.

  AH, MONDAYS. MY ALARM GOES OFF AT FOUR, AND IF I don’t get my ass out of bed, I know my dad’s going to be in here at 4:01 a.m. with a glass of cold water to dump over my head. My sleep-weary carcass is in the workout room by 4:05 a.m., and my dad’s already there. Judging from the sweat drenching the front of his T-shirt, he’s been here for at least half an hour.

  “How was the board meeting?” I ask, just to be civil. I was in bed before he got home last night.

  “A bunch of wealthy people who think they should get whatever they want whenever they want, whether it’s good for them or not,” he says between sharp breaths.

  He returns his attention to the panel of his stair stepper, and I leave him to it. Surely if he’d noticed evidence of my little break-in yesterday, he would have said something. I think I’m in the clear.

  After my workout, I take a shower and then head to my room for a few hours of studying. Not for school. School is child’s play compared with what my dad has me doing. This morning, it’s finite element analysis and differential equations, and then modeling and dimensional analysis of biological systems. After that, I spend a bit of time on tactics and strategy, basic history of war stuff, followed by a half hour of drilling on the latest language I’m learning—Arabic. I swear my dad is training me to be a Navy SEAL or something. Maybe the family responsibility is to take over a small country somewhere.

  I emerge into the kitchen to find my dad sitting at the table with his best friend, George. Dr. George Fisher, to be precise, who works for Black Box Enterprises.

  “. . . that way I can be sure Brayton is being honest about his plans,” my dad is saying.

  George nods. “He’s eager to negotiate. He’s sending a vehicle for you at noon.”

  “Driver?”

  “Peter McClaren. Angus’s oldest nephew? A good kid. He just graduated from Yale, and Brayton hired him a few weeks ago.” George flashes an easy smile, maybe to counter the stern frown on my dad’s face. Things are always more relaxed when George is around. I can’t say the same thing for Brayton, though. He’s George’s boss, and he used to be my dad’s—until my dad quit. I’ve met Brayton only once—when he showed up at our door a few years ago, right after Dad resigned from Black Box, demanding to speak with my father immediately. I lurked in the kitchen as they argued in the living room, but they started speaking some language I don’t know yet. I didn’t catch a word after my father shouted, “How dare you come to my home.” One thing I knew, though: Brayton was pissed about something, and he didn’t leave any happier than he’d arrived. I walked away with the distinct impression that he needed surgery to remove the stick from his ass.

  “Hey,” George calls when he sees me, inclining his head of silver curls in my direction. “Look at this guy! I swear, I think you’ve grown two inches since I saw you last week.”

  “Hey, George.” I sit down in front of Meal Number Eighteen, which is steaming and fresh from the microwave. Ten-egg-white omelet. Four ounces chopped lean ham. One ounce cheddar cheese. Three ounces red pepper. Whole wheat English muffin. I am also lucky enough to get two tablespoons of apricot jam and eight ounces each of milk and juice. Plus my blue vitamin pill. And my dad has tucked a protein gel supplement next to my tray.

  Dad points to the supplement. “You forgot after your workout again.”

  I rip the tab off the little metallic envelope and suck it down. Lime flavor. As the slimy gunk slides over my tongue, I flip on the little flat-screen on the wall behind my dad, focusing on the recap of the Yankees game while he and George chat about the latest world population reports from the United Nations and the CIA. Baseball is much more interesting, until I hear my dad say, “. . . want you to see the anomaly. There are fourteen that don’t match.”

  “You have a theory as to why,” says George, watching him closely.

  Dad nods solemnly. “But I think the other numbers are accurate—and changing much faster than my previous estimates suggested.”

  I mute the television, thinking of the screen in my dad’s lab that displayed those three numbers. “Planning to end the problem of overpopulation with some of your weapons of mass destruction?”

  I say it as a joke, one of the many digs I toss at him over the course of a day. But George’s eyes go wide, and my dad sits back like I’ve landed a solid gut punch. His shock tells me it was a seriously low blow, but the feeling of power is irresistible. “Oh, sorry. Did that hit too close to home?”

  “Not at all. And once again I am reminded that my business will be none of yours, at least until you learn to think before you speak.” My father’s voice is a weapon unto itself. “I apologize for Tate’s lack of tact,” he says to George.

  Heat slowly creeps from my chest to my neck as George waves him off, and I let out a long, controlled breath. I’m not going to let it get to me this morning. “Maybe if you told me more about it,” I say quietly, “I wouldn’t say so many stupid things.”

  My dad slowly puts
down his fork and wipes his mouth with his napkin. His slow, precise movements are a total danger sign, and I’m not the only one who notices. Always the peacemaker, George chuckles and leans back, clutching his thermos of coffee. We don’t have any in the house, so he always has to bring his own. He takes a sip while giving my father an amused look. “Come on, Fred. You can’t blame him for being curious about your work. Where do you think he got that particular trait from, anyway?”

  Dad sits up very straight in his chair. His dark hair is neatly combed. His shirt is neatly pressed. He stares across the table at me. I am neither neatly combed nor pressed.

  Nor do I care.

  “‘Learning without thought is labor lost, but thought without learning is perilous,’” he begins, and I groan.

  “Forget it,” I say, plowing the last few bites of my breakfast into my mouth as quickly as I can, anything to get me away from this lecture, one I’ve heard a thousand times. It usually ends with how I’m not ready to know what he knows, so I should get back to my studies and shut up. “I’m sure you’re right. I’m sure I’m wrong. Happy?”

  I say most of this with my mouth full, and a few flecks of egg white hit my tray while I talk, which draws a narrow-eyed look of disgust from him. It feels like pure win, seeing his face twist up like that because of me. “Nice seeing you, George. I’ve got to get to school.”

  I turn away from my dad before his expression can shift back into that neutral, impenetrable mask he usually wears. I swing my pack onto my shoulder and smile. I’ve pissed him off, and I want to carry that thrill with me a little bit longer.

  Shouldn’t be too hard. I’ve got his magical scanner doohickey tucked safely in my bag.

  I whistle as I walk out the door.

  • • •

  My good mood sticks with me through the morning. My first two classes—Ancient History and Economics—are utterly snooze-worthy, but I can’t blame the teachers. It’s my dad’s fault—he made me learn that stuff a few years ago. But my next class is Advanced Chemistry, and I’m in there with a bunch of seniors . . . including Christina. So it’s great on a few levels. First, because even though I pretend to despise the class just to piss off my dad, it’s actually really cool. And second, because I get to stare at my girlfriend for an entire hour.