Tal Klein - The Punch Escrow

But I had made it. I was alive.

Do the thing!

I had rehearsed this moment in my head before my escape.

“My name is Joel Byram. People are trying to kill me. My comms have been disabled. I need help!”

“Shhh!” Ifrit chided. “You don’t have to shout. We can hear you.”

I guess I was yelling. Wait—“we”?

I painfully lifted my head to try to gather my bearings. Beyond Ifrit, at the head of the table on which I was lying, was a lean, salt-and-pepper-haired, smartly dressed older man. The first thing that came into focus was his forehead. He had more creases on his forehead than I had metaphors to describe them.

The smoke from his cigarette snaked toward me, framing his face like he was in one of those old-fashioned film noirs from two centuries back.

“Is he okay?” the man asked her. A low, gravelly voice.

She nodded. “Yes, I think so.”

The man jerked his head sideways, and Ifrit, the only person who genuinely seemed to care about my well-being since the attack, left the room.

As she walked out, I tried once again to access my comms and pinpoint my GDS location to get an idea of where I was. But all I got was the same irritatingly familiar error message:

UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS. INVALID USER.

The man silently stared at me. The kind of icy, appraising silence that didn’t encourage small talk. Finally he rose and motioned for me to get up off the table.

As I got up, my body took the opportunity to remind my brain of its various aches and pains. The worst of it seemed to spread along my right flank. My wrist was also on fire, so much so that I could barely move my hand. My shoulder sent pulsing shots of pain with every movement, and my ass felt like I was sitting on a family of fire ants.

All of a sudden the room became more illuminated. Generic video streams of remote beachfront resorts played on the walls of the otherwise plainly appointed room.

“ Café? ” he offered, placing his cigarette down at the edge of the table.

I nodded and sat down in an uncomfortable nonadjustable chair wedged between the table and the wall.

“Turkish,” he told the printer, his Levantine accent lingering on the u like it was four o ’s long.

Soon, a small copper pot with a long wooden handle coalesced out of nothing. Next to it were two small ceramic cups atop tiny ornate saucers. He placed those on a small tray and then started back toward me.

He placed the coffee tray down on the plastic table. Then, confidently holding the pot by its handle, the man filled each cup about three-quarters full, the size of a shot.

“Back home, far away from here, there is a small man with a small cart who makes these the real way,” he said. “It took me a long time and a lot of chits to convince him to let me copy it, but now I can print it whenever I want.” 3

He sipped slowly. I wondered if he thought it truly tasted the same as the original from his memories.

He picked up his cigarette from the table, took another drag, then sat down on the chair opposite me, signaling it was time for business.

“My name is Moti Ahuvi. You are a guest of the LAST Agency. Land, Air, Sea Travel.” He spread his hands, indicating the small room around us. “That’s where you are. We cater to Levantines and other peoples for whom teleportation is not an option. I am responsible for security here.”

Well, at least I won’t be teleporting anywhere .

“My name is Joel. Joel Byram.” I paused to see if my name elicited any reaction. It didn’t. Hopefully that meant my face wasn’t all over the comms yet. “If you don’t mind my asking, why does a travel agency need security personnel?”

He half smiled. “The world is a dangerous place, my friend. People don’t want bad things to happen to them while they’re traveling. You would agree, yes?”

“I’m realizing that in spades today.”

He nodded knowingly. “ Yoel , I have some questions for you.” His brown eyes were focused but calm.

I adjusted my posture fruitlessly. Interrogation by travel-agency security might be a pointless proposition for most, but for me it was definitely a positive changing of the tides. I nodded for him to continue.

The Levant are a curious breed, known for several millennia of regional conflict prior to the Last War. Most significant to my situation, their now-shared culture prohibits human teleportation. An artifact of religious edicts still in practice from the old days before the war.

Moti took another small, considered sip of his coffee, then swallowed. “Your fingerprints and irises match a man named Yoel Byram.”

“Yes. Joel Byram,” I corrected him. “That’s me.”

He disregarded my correction. “But your comms come up unregistered. Do you understand that I am curious why?”

Something about his broken English and calm demeanor terrified me. But I was also somewhat relieved that we didn’t have to beat around the bush.

Remember your goal: reach Sylvia .

“Uh, yeah,” I answered. “My comms seem to be on the fritz.”

“What is this word fritz ?”

“My comms aren’t working. One minute they were working fine, and the next”— keep things close to your chest, Joel; you don’t know who you can trust —“I found myself at your doorstep.”

“Are you in trouble? Would you like us to call the police?” Moti asked.

“Yes, but—no! Don’t call the police!” I yelled, then quickly checked myself. Calmly, I said, “Look, there was this woman. Her name was Pema. She told me to come here. That you guys could help me.”

Moti took my answer in and reflected upon it for a few seconds. “Please, finish your coffee.”

I nervously sipped the rest of the warm black syrupy beverage, careful to avoid the grit at the bottom. I had briefly dated a Levantine girl in college who had taught me how to drink Turkish coffee. Since the drink is boiled rather than filtered, you have to drink at a specific angle and pace, lest the sediment in the bottom of the cup end up in your mouth—

As it just had in mine. “Ugh!” I spat out the bitter grit on my tongue—to the wry amusement of my host.

Ifrit reentered the room, placing a glass of water in front of me while Moti briskly yanked what remained of my coffee from me, then covered the cup with its saucer and flipped it upside down.

What the hell is he doing?

As he moved the cup around in his hand, I noticed his focus was on the sticky residue at the bottom of it.

Tasseography .

I’d heard of it before from my ex-girlfriend, but never seen it done. Reading coffee is one of the oldest cultural practices in the Middle East, dating back to the eighteenth century. One examines the coffee grounds left after someone has consumed a cup, studying the shapes and images that form in the dark grounds. From this, they can supposedly divine information about the drinker’s past, present, and—most relevant to me—future. Very cool, although one of the last people I might have expected to read my fortune from the bottom of a cup was the head of security at a travel agency.

Moti put the cup down and tsk-tsked. “Zaki!” he shouted. “Zaki, come. Bring the clipboard!”

Clipboard? What are we in, medieval times?

Almost immediately, another guy walked through the wall to my left. The seemingly solid barrier molded and bent around him like water as he passed through it. At first I thought he was a projection, but there was no telltale flicker. I was also curious why Ifrit bothered to use the door if she could just have walked through the walls.

Theatrics, maybe. What sort of travel agency is this?