Robert Liparulo - The 13 th tribe

Or crushed the thief’s throat beyond repair. The prehensor had the strength to do it; only Jagger’s conscious restraint kept the grip from its full potential. And in situations like the one with Addison’s assailant-in fighting mode with high emotions-he trusted neither his mental capacity for restraint nor his skills at manipulating the hooks with precision.

But it wasn’t that he was a physical man with a physically demanding job, suddenly disabled, that drove the despair Jagger had felt after the accident, not really. That was just a kick in the face when he was down. The real wound was everything else that had been lost in the crash: the Bransfords, four people he had loved as deeply as he did his own wife and child. Four powerhouses of compassion and potential, snuffed out like paper matches.

Move on, he’d told himself. Don’t dwell on it. Not now.

He was getting better at tempering the perfect storm of self-pity, grief, and anger that swirled inside him… but as with RoboHand, mishaps still happened.

He remained self-conscious enough about his missing limb to wear his sleeves long, hiding the artificial forearm that slipped over a stub just below his elbow. Cables allowed his biceps, back, and chest muscles to open and close the hooks.

“Jag!” someone called. “Jagger!”

He looked between the tents and saw Hanif at the corner of the monastery walls. Jagger waved.

“Closing time!” Hanif yelled and tapped his wrist. As if on cue, a group of tourists appeared, streaming past him.

Jagger raised his thumb.

The monastery closed at noon, releasing scores of visitors to flow not to the parking lot but past the excavation on their way up Mt. Sinai to see the peak. The best time for the trek was at night, when the temperature was less oppressive and the reward was watching the sunrise on the God-trodden Mountain, as the locals called Sinai. The midday sojourners, however, hadn’t heard that sightseeing tip, or had arrived too late to heed it.

Jagger headed for his closing-time position at the end of the split-rail fence, where his presence would discourage lookie-loos from lookie-looing too close to the excavation or becoming more than lookie-loos. It was at times like this-babysitting fat tourists like a museum guard-that he most missed being an Army Ranger or a bodyguard for foreign dignitaries and celebrities. At least then there’d been some action, even if only a false bomb threat or an overzealous autograph hound.

He gazed at the two big excavation trenches. Maybe digging around in a dirt hole ten hours a day wouldn’t be so bad after all.

With posters of the latest muscles-and-mayhem movies and sexy women leaning on sexier cars, a lead guitar propped against an amp by an unmade bed, and dirty clothes scattered everywhere, Toby’s room looked like a typical teenage boy’s-except for the 9mm handgun on the nightstand, the bare bulbs under wire cages tacked to a stone ceiling, and the twin sixty-inch plasma TVs mounted to one wall.

The plasmas were displaying different images of the same video game: views of a city from what could have been birds swooping between buildings, diving to take in streets packed with cars or sailing up over rooftops. Could have been birds, but weren’t. With a flick of Toby’s finger on a control pad, a missile shot out as if from the bottom of the screen, sailed through the bubbling tip of a fountain of water spraying up from a pond, and streaked under a crowded portico right into a hotel lobby. An explosion sent glass and bricks, cars and people flying away on currents of fire and smoke.

“Yeah!” Toby said from a black leather chair.

“Pull up,” Sebastian said, standing behind Toby with his hands on the back of the chair. “Pull up!”

Toby did, and the screen showed the hotel facade drawing closer, sweeping down as the camera angled up. Sky came into view, but the camera zoomed toward windows on the top floor.

“Pull up!”

“I am!”

The camera crashed through windows, and the monitor went black.

“I told you,” Sebastian said, giving the back of the chair a fierce shake.

“I did pull up!” The boy twisted around to glare at Sebastian.

“You waited too long. You wanted to see the missile hit. You can’t do that. I told you, release the missile and get away. Shoot and scoot.”

“Like this,” Phin said from a matching chair beside Toby’s. On the plasma in front of him, a missile shot out from the bottom of the screen, heading for a building with a big sign mounted above the doors: POLICE. The camera banked away, climbing. He laughed, a pronounced Ha-ha-ha! The camera continued to turn and climb, and a building slid onto the screen from the right, panning across it like a swipe-away transition between movie scenes. It filled the screen, and Phin’s monitor went black.

“Ha!” Toby said.

“Wait a minute,” Phin said. “That building’s in the wrong place!”

“It is not,” said Sebastian. “You were supposed to study the maps.”

“I did! It wasn’t on my radar!”

“It was, I saw it.”

“So did I,” Toby said. “I was wondering what you were doing.”

“You weren’t looking at it,” Sebastian told Phin.

“It’s too small… down there in the bottom corner. How am I-?”

“You want it in the center of the screen?” Sebastian said. “Then how you gonna see where you’re going, what you’re shooting at?”

Phin tossed the control on the floor. “This is stupid.” He stood and headed for the door.

Sebastian grabbed his arm. “If you can’t even play the game-”

Phin pulled his arm away. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll beat that thing by tomorrow. Stop coaching.”

They stared at each other for a few moments. Phin rolled his head, audibly popping out the stiffness, and said, “All right, one more go, then I’m done.” He picked up his controller and dropped into the chair.

“Watch the radar this time,” Toby said.

Phin glared at him. “When we’re doing this for real, we’ll see who gets the most kills.”

“You’re on,” Toby said and pushed the button to restart the simulator.

Jagger had just swung his leg over the fence’s top rail when he heard the distant voice of his son.

“Dad!”

He looked toward the monastery, over the heads of the streaming tourists. His vision landed not on his boy but on his wife. There was something about watching her unaware-ages ago, across a lecture hall as she bit her lip in concentration and furiously took notes; plucking a flower from their garden back in Virginia, smiling at its fragrance-that seemed not better than mutual attention but special, like sharing a secret.

The sight of her pushed aside the blackness in his heart, leaving a less volatile but more aching emotion: guilt. After the crash he had allowed depression to get the better of him. His feelings had grown numb to her charms… to everything. He’d been bitter and hurtful to the people he loved the most-knowing it and hating it even as he did it. He’d felt like a junkie constantly scraping for a fix, but instead of heroin he craved misery in himself and everyone around him.

Then Oliver had called, on the recommendation of a former client. It was an offer he hadn’t taken seriously at first. Not only would he be leaping back into security work, but he’d have to transplant his family from comfort and familiarity to isolation and an environment completely alien to them-the last thing any of them needed.

But Beth had a different take on it: she saw the change as a fresh start, away from reminders, and he started thinking that the job could be a form of detox from his depression. And it was working: since moving to the Sinai, the close quarters, the challenge of living in a foreign country under isolated conditions, and his own renewed sense of purpose had energized them, individually and as a family.