Tal Klein - The Punch Escrow

Her head rang loudly as the back of his left hand smacked her across the face. The force of the blow caused her to release her captor’s hand.

There were deep, oozing teeth marks in two of his middle fingers. “I’m doing my best not to allow anger to ruin this moment,” Taraval said, breathing heavily. He forced a contented smile on his face. “There is no progress without pain. A blood sacrifice, we’ll call it. Now it’s time for yours.”

He took out the Gehinnomites’ jamming device and reenabled Sylvia’s comms. “Now, my dear. I’d like you to log this console into Honeycomb. Don’t, and I’ll clear every human being on the island of Manhattan.” He set the ecophagy cage radius to forty kilometers, then hovered a finger over the execute icon.

He would do it, she could tell. Taraval had nothing left to live for but his plan. She nodded, blinking away the rain as she executed a remote log-in. A complex patchwork of graphics appeared on the crane operator’s console—it was now fully operational.

“There,” she said. “Now get into the glacier and out of my life.”

“Happy to oblige,” tut-tutted Taraval. “Just need to clear a few things up first.” Before she could do anything, he again disabled her comms with the Gehinnomites’ device.

“What?” Sylvia kicked in frustration, powerless to stop him. “I did what you asked. Now keep your promise!”

“Sylvia, my dear. Did I mislead you? Apologies. That was less a promise than a threat. And really, what good are threats if one is not committed to follow them through?”

She bucked against her magnetic suspension, to no avail. “Why, Bill? Why do they have to die?”

“Every day, millions of people put their lives in our hands,” he said. “Sometimes we must clench our fists as a reminder that trust is not merely a thing we earn, but one we deserve. You, however, needn’t take part in this demonstration. Indeed, it would be a shame to write you off as collateral damage. Please know you are still very welcome to join me.”

Sylvia—speechless—shook her head in revulsion.

“No? I suggest you reconsider.” Then, his fingers still dripping ichor, he tore off another piece of tape and placed it roughly over her mouth. “A muzzle for a misbehaving pet,” he said, pressing an icon that lowered the magnet to about three meters below the operator booth. “Do a little dance if you change your mind. You have about ten minutes.”

THE BATTLE OF CHELSEA PIERS

UNLIKE NORMAL TCs, which hold only a handful of foyers and vestibules at each location, freight TCs can host dozens of portals. As we looked over the massive rain-drenched shipping yards, it seemed like we would never locate Taraval or Sylvia amid the chaos of blaring alarms, blinking yellow lights, and constantly moving cranes.

It was disheartening. I’d never really considered that we’d have to canvass such a vast area to find our wife. But we quickly realized that Taraval wanted to be found. He stood next to the operating booth of a crane that was several hundred yards away. He wore a conductor’s yellow hard hat, waving to us from the console, his soiled and torn lab coat flapping wildly in the rain.

It took a moment to register that the thing hanging from the crane’s magnet was a person, suspended upside down like a worm on a hook. Bait. An offering who looked exactly like— Oh my God .

“Sylvia.” I didn’t know if it was me or Joel 2who had spoken.

My body acted before my mind. My legs were already midstride when I realized I was running across the wet pavement. I’d broken away from the detachment. It took all of two minutes for me to disobey Moti’s orders, to disregard any risk or consequence. I could hear Moti yelling behind me. I knew that was why I ran first. I didn’t want logic or reason holding me back from doing what instinct demanded: save her .

It took me a beat to realize that Joel 2wasn’t with me. Not being in his head, I could only speculate as to why. I knew that his anger had made him braver than me. I think on some level, he believed, as did I, that when she saw us side by side, she would know immediately which one was her real husband. And seeing that realization would be, for him, worse than any Gehinnomite torture.

“Shit,” Moti said. “I said no distractions.”

She was less than a minute’s run away from me. Two maroon containers nearest Sylvia sat on a conveyor leading to a warehouse at the far end of the pier. They had ladders on their sides, which I climbed, taking care not to slip on the rain-slick rungs. It wouldn’t quite bring me within reach of Sylvia, but at least she would see me. That was the extent of my ad-libbed plan. Get her to see me .

Once I got to the top of the container, she did. Her face hung upside down about two meters above me. It was the first time I’d seen her in person since the morning of July 3. Fresh blood trailed from her lips to her hairline. Her damp hair stuck to her skin in small curlicues.

She sees me .

Behind the fear, I detected the flicker of uncertainty in her eyes. I knew it from discussions of things much less dramatic than our present situation, such as, where should we stay for our tenth wedding anniversary? I almost laughed at this, knowing that now she was wondering which of her husbands she was looking at—the one she had downloaded or the one spared from destruction by the Levant.

Her eyes crinkled, then went wide as she remembered something. She struggled to talk around the tape covering her mouth.

“Ekmmphy grrg!” she shouted.

“What?” I asked, thinking maybe the wind ate her words.

She worked her jaw, pushing and stretching on the tape until a portion of it came away. “The ecophagy cage!” she repeated. “Taraval expanded it—he’s going to clear New York! Once he’s in Honeycomb, the whole city’s going to be eaten by nanos.” She was screaming now. “Get out of here!”

Holy shit. Holy fucking shit .

I hesitated, unsure of what to do next. Behind me Moti, Zaki, and the Levantine operatives were making their way to Taraval’s crane. Joel 2was in the back of the pack, walking, not running. Still racked by hesitation. His eyes met mine. I moved my hands apart from each other to create an expanding ball, and—

I’ve heard that some twins claim to share a special psychic connection. This sort of seemingly psychic link isn’t necessarily mysterious: any two people who know each other very well and who have shared many common experiences—including siblings, married couples, and even best friends—may complete each other’s sentences and have a pretty good idea what the other person is thinking, but that’s not telepathy. The idea of twin telepathy has been around for over six centuries. It appears, for example, in the 1844 Alexandre Dumas novella, The Corsican Brothers , which tells the story of two once-conjoined brothers who were separated at birth, yet even as adults continue to share not only thoughts but also physical sensations. One twin states, “However far apart we are now we still have one and the same body, so that whatever impression, physical or mental, one of us perceives has its after-effects on the other.”

So—despite the physical distance between us, despite the fact that we’d only known each other for less than a day—I knew Joel 2knew it, too: Taraval wanted us within range of his ecophagy cage. I suspected he wouldn’t be taking us with him—only he had a ticket to his final destination. The rest of us would simply depart and never arrive anywhere, cleared by the teleportation nanos. It was impossible to tell how far he had extended the cage—or if he had set any boundaries at all. Maybe he aimed to destroy as much of this world as he could before leaving it behind for whatever greener pastures he imagined existed on the other side.