The girl who would live.., p.1
The Girl Who Would Live Forever, page 1
THE GIRL WHO WOULD LIVE FOREVER
REBECCA CANTRELL
Praise for Rebecca Cantrell
THE GIRL WHO WOULD LIVE FOREVER
“Rebecca Cantrell’s THE GIRL WHO WOULD LIVE FOREVER is a wildly Hitchcockian tale of friendship and murder set within the cutthroat world of biomedical research. It has a ripped-from-the-headlines authenticity and is written at a blistering pace that left me breathless. I defy anyone to anticipate the twists and shocking revelations in this taut mystery. It’s a pure adrenalin thrill ride.” — James Rollins, New York Times bestselling author
A TRACE OF SMOKE
“The playful, but also despairing, decadence...captured vividly by Cantrell.” — Wall Street Journal
“[A] bold narrator and chilling historical setting... unusually vivid.” — New York Times Book Review
“There’s so much to love about this novel: the setting, the characters, the sexual tension.” — USA Today
"Magnetic and seductive."—examiner.com
THE BLOOD GOSPEL
“A thriller of dark subterranean complexity, rather like a rare, vintage redwine.” — New York Journal of Books
“This work is all thriller fans would expect from a combination of Rollins and Cantrell: cutting-edge science, ancient history, and a solid gothic mystery plot. Fans of the authors will not be disappointed, and those who lapped up The Da Vinci Code will be clamoring for more in this series.”” — Library Journal (starred review)
“Rollins, noted for his fast-paced thriller-adventure novels, often decorated with religious iconography, and Cantrell, a writer of historical mysteries with Nazi Germany as the backdrop, combine their talents for this mash-up of thriller and paranormal... the pacing is heart-pounding and the conceit irresistible...The Da Vinci Code meets vampires.” — Booklist
THE WORLD BENEATH
“Cantrell has ventured into deep, dark places...a taut and dangerous struggle.” — The Edge
“The Tesla series is an excellent, original, and addictive series...Cantrell is firmly ensconced as one of my go to Thriller writers now.” — Parmenion Books
“Cantrell's THE WORLD BENEATH simply blew me away: exciting, visceral, inventive, illuminating...a shocking thriller that shines a light on the beauty and horror hidden just out of sight beneath the world's greatest city.” — James Rollins, New York Times bestselling author of The Sixth Extinction
DEDICATION
For Max, Toby, and Jim for hanging in there all these years
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
EXCERPT FROM THE STEEL SHARK
ALSO BY REBECCA CANTRELL
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
NEWSLETTER
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
CHAPTER ONE
The scold’s bridle is an iron cage worn on the head. When locked in place, it secures a spiked bridle bit over the tongue. From the 1500s to 1800s, this form of painful public humiliation was designed to punish and silence the wearer, usually a woman. Want to step back in time and see how it felt?
The ting of Ivy’s pen against the iron bridle echoed through the empty exhibition room. She slipped on the virtual reality helmet, settled the disposable tongue depressor in her mouth, and stepped back in time. Tallinn’s Town Hall Square, just on the other side of the museum’s thick stone wall, bloomed to life. Winter there, too, and snow dusted cobblestones and wooden market stalls.
The flat iron band that ran down to the bridle bit obscured her view of the scene and the steel bead glued to the tongue depressor dug painfully into the top of her tongue. The taste of metal filled her mouth. Not nearly as uncomfortable as the real thing, but enough to remind her constantly of its presence.
Medieval craftsmen in woolen capes and pointy shoes hurried from the cheese stall to the sausage stall. She did a slow pan around the busy square, studying each stall and actor. All clear. Then the scene jumped a little. A quick jerk to remind her that her husband held a leash connected to the back of the cage and he determined what she should see.
With measured steps, she walked through the square ahead of him. Snow and straw squeaked under her boots. Voices filled the air. A woman stopped in front of her and glared with cold, contemptuous eyes that tried to hide a spark of fear. After all, it could be her in that bridle next time.
A man in a hat spit on Ivy, the sound so clear she flinched away. And then the narrator read the words that she had written to put the device into historical context. They told how similar devices were used in Britain, Europe, America, China, and Japan. Usually, the husband requested the bridle for his wife, but other male relatives could too. When not doing chores, she and the bridle could be chained to a hook on her wall. The voiceover actress’s strong performance carried her along.
In the real world, a hand tapped her shoulder and she jumped, winter scene bobbing. With an exclamation, she spit out the tongue depressor and yanked off the helmet. She felt lighter and calmer instantly. The exhibit was too immersive, but that was a good thing.
“Sorry to bother you.” Liilia’s lips pursed in annoyance. She handed Ivy her cellphone with a significant look. “Your phone is buzzing a million times a minute.”
Ivy looked down at the screen. Twitter. Why was she tagged in a hundred tweets?
Her heart rose. Today was the release date for her first novel. Clearly it was getting a lot of press. Maybe people were buying it and reading it and liking it and she wouldn’t have to spend her life designing museum exhibits about public shaming and other tortures. Maybe this was her big break.
Liilia cleared her throat.
“I’ll turn it off.” Even though she ached to read the notifications, Ivy held down the power button. Liilia had a strict policy about phones on the job. She had a strict policy about nearly everything, and Ivy wasn’t sure enough that her book was going to break out to risk losing this job.
“The final run through?” Liilia looked at her watch. She belonged to the era of wristwatches, and kept to her schedule like a Japanese train conductor.
“I’m on fifteen of sixteen. Everything looks good.” The exhibit, which aimed to give attendees a virtual experience of torture and public shaming in the Medieval era, was solid. “The motion glitch over by the cheese stall is fixed and the audio syncs perfectly.”
She itched to pull out her phone.
Liilia nodded. “Good.”
“The Iron Maiden is all that’s left.” Claustrophobic and dark, she’d left it to last. The sense of being shut in alone to die felt too powerful there. Ivy had insisted they add a trigger warning to it and, over Liilia’s protests, she’d won.
Liilia cracked a smile. “I’ll take it. Go to your signing.”
Ivy stared at her. “I—-what?”
“You heard me. It’s a big night. You’ve done good work here. Take off a half hour early.”
“Thanks.” Ivy pushed down the urge to hug her and fast walked toward the door in case this was a trick. She passed the rack, the Judas Chair, the Iron Maiden. Each lurked in its own stone alcove, artfully lit. Visitors could touch and interact with these replicas. The original devices were in another room next to Medieval-style sketches of them torturing hapless victims.
“You feeling ok?” asked Lucas at the front desk. The tips of his white linen coif bobbed when he spoke. All the reception staff had to wear period garb.
“Liilia let me go early.”
He rocked back in his battered wooden chair, eyes wide. “Wow.”
“I have to get out of here before she changes her mind.”
Lucas jumped up and raced to the coat check. He returned with her hat, scarf, and leather jacket and thrust them into her hands.
“Good luck tonight,” he said. “I’ll come by for your reading.”
A jolt of fear shot through her at the thought of reading her book in front of people. “Did you know that some people fear public speaking more than death?”
“Go before that sinks in,” he said.
She hurried through a heavy wooden door hung before Columbus stumbled on America. When she stepped into Town Hall Square, the cold hit her. Her jacket wasn’t warm enough, but she hated to let it go. It had been her mother’s. She stamped her boots against icy cobbles, took a deep breath, and turned on her phone.
While she waited for it to boot, she gazed at the towering pine decked out in golden lights and red hearts. The center of Tallinn’s Christmas market cheered her every time she saw it. Sixty feet of Christmas joy was about enough. With a cup of mulled wine.
Her phone binged to life and she logged in to get to Twitt
“I’ve got everything set up, but I can’t get the connection working. Are you sure your publisher sent the right link?”
Ivy wasn’t sure about that at all. She talked Rita through the setup process, verified the link in her own email, and put in an emergency call to her editor. All the while, she hurried toward the bookstore, going as fast as she dared on the ice. It was a couple kilometers away and she was out of breath when she arrived.
Rita met her at the door and pulled her into the warmth and light. “I rebooted. It seems OK.”
Ivy’s phone buzzed. She touched it in her pants pocket then rubbed her cold hands together.
“Come see the setup.” Rita herded her deeper into the store. “I’ll take your coat.”
Ivy peeled off her coat, gloves, and scarf and Rita grabbed them and hung them over one arm. Ivy’s phone buzzed in her pants pocket, again and again. Her book must be blowing up. Even though she’d waited for this moment since she was a little girl hiding under her bed reading while her parents screamed at each other, she couldn’t believe it. Today she officially became an Author. She might never have to see Liilia’s smiling face again. She might be able to hunker down in her apartment and write. She was already casting the movie by the time Rita stopped walking.
“Here’s the display.” Rita pointed to a veritable shrine to Ivy’s book. Seven copies propped up on a luxurious spread of dark green velvet. “Green because of the cover. I know space is black, but black doesn’t grab you. The book got lost, and I wanted to pick out the green in the spaceship lights. And it matches the store more. Plus Christmas colors.”
“It really pops.” Ivy had never seen her book in the wild before. She’d received a few advanced reader copies but they had black and white covers, like generic soup at the store. But this. This looked resplendent. Her day had arrived.
“I set up a table in the science fiction section.” Rita dragged her across the green carpet. “For the signing.”
Ivy’s phone buzzed again and her hand twitched toward her pocket.
“I borrowed a rope from a friend who does events,” Rita said. “You’ll be at the lectern.”
Green velvet draped the lectern. Next to it a stack of books and a poster of Ivy’s author photo rested on the table. Her head had never been that size before. She was glad she’d paid extra for a professional photographer.
“I got an easel for the photo,” Rita said. “Maximum visibility.”
A line of wooden folding chairs faced the lectern. Ivy’s friend Anu already sat in the front row. She waved urgently and mouthed “Now.”
“Could I have a minute?” Ivy asked.
“Let’s check the lighting and the camera. You’re livestreaming on the internet and I want to get everything right. The store must look good for your first worldwide appearance.”
Worldwide. Ivy’s knees wobbled. Across the room, Anu texted into her phone. Ivy’s phone buzzed again.
Rita had already maneuvered her to the lectern. “Stand right there.”
Ivy stood. Anu looked worried, and nothing fazed Anu. She must be happy for her friend. Well, this was a big deal. After a lifetime of obscurity, Ivy’s first novel had emerged into the world and clearly the world was paying attention. Her phone buzzed again. Anu didn’t look happy. Ivy’s bubbling excitement fizzled, but only a little. It was her night.
“I don’t like that light.” Rita adjusted it and moved to the camera. “Still not right.”
Ivy stood, not sure what to do with her hands. She pulled out her battered Advanced Reading Copy and touched the black and white cover. She’d put a yellow sticky note on the page she intended to read after he’d marked it up with a blue pen to remove sections with spoilers before practicing it in front of her bathroom mirror.
Her editor had told her not to read from the beginning, because that was already up for free on Amazon. She needed to hook them with something later in, a passage that made the stakes clear. Had she chosen the right one? It was her first time reading, ever, and she didn’t want to mess it up.
“Say something into the microphone,” ordered Rita.
“Something,” answered Ivy. “Something. Something.”
Anu smiled, but Rita shook her head. “Let me adjust this.”
Ivy’s phone buzzed again. Not Anu. She’d stopped texting and sat like a runner about to jump off the blocks at the start of a race.
More people filed in. Lucas and Liilia from the museum. Her writers’ group. The four of them looked even more nervous than Anu. Did everyone think she’d blow it up here? They waved frantically, and she waved back. She gave them a thumbs-up sign. Nobody gave her one back.
Between the lights and the microphone and the internet, Ivy never left her place at the podium before the event started. Before she knew it, Rita stood in front of her and introduced her, reading advanced rave reviews so hyperbolic Ivy blushed.
Then her turn came and Ivy talked about her inspirations. Her worries about climate change balanced against the hope that the world would go on, and that humans would one day colonize space. About how huddling inside in the cold dark of a Tallinn winter made her think about living in a space station. How snowsuits felt like spacesuits. How the long dark of a northern winter mirrored the vast emptiness of space.
When she wound down, Rita called out. “Please read us a section.”
Ivy took a deep breath and opened the book.
Captain Jasper smiled as air hissed into the airlock, equalizing pressure between the shuttle and the Curie. The airlock reeked of gunpowder, like Luna, and she drew it deep into her lungs. She’d been on medical rotation on Earth for the last six months, building up her bones, and the smells there were overwhelming—salt from the Southern California ocean, rain against hot asphalt, exhaust, and the musk of humans stewing in the heat. The simple scents of Luna were perfume to her now.
Ivy cleared her throat, dropped her voice from the nervous squeak, and continued.
Jasper rubbed the stubble on her scalp. She kept her hair shaved close for spaceflight. One less thing to fuss with. When she’d captained her first voyage it had been black and shiny, like a mink. Now she saw as much white stubble as black. She’d grown grizzled and old in the service.
The Curie had carried survey teams from Earth to Luna, Mars, and Enceladus. But this was her most important mission of all. She bore within her hull a pilot, an engineer, and four scientists who worked feverishly with data they’d received from probes exploring their destination planet. A botanist. A biologist. A geologist. And a doctor. If all went well, they would remain on the planet’s surface to make it fit for human colonization. Then the women who slept in the cryogenic bays below would be revived in their new home. If they failed, the last vestiges of humanity would live out their lives closed up in metal coffins. They’d suffocate in the ship’s hull or die under vast domes carved by the robots they’d sent ahead.
Ivy felt the rhythm of it now. She read another page, closed the book, and looked up at her audience. Scattered applause. Everyone looked worried. Even Rita’s good cheer had vanished.
Ivy went cold. She had humiliated herself in front of the world, streaming live, and she struggled to keep her face calm.
Rita spoke into the silence. “Now we’ll take questions from our online audience.”
Anu jumped to her feet. She pointed to her phone, then to Ivy’s pocket. Ivy took out her phone and it buzzed with a text from Anu. Other texts too.
Online trolls attacking your book. I’ll feed you questions on your phone
All those tweets were from people who hated her book?
Anu texted again. How does faster-than-light travel work?
Ivy gulped, repeated the question for the audience, and answered. “The ship uses something called Alcubierre drive that’s been posited by a theoretical physicist in Mexico named Miguel Alcubierre. The drive contracts spacetime in front of the spaceship and expands spacetime behind it, basically folding spacetime around the ship’s hull. The Curie has two parts: living quarters in the middle and a ring around the living quarters that holds the drive.”
She usually had a longer answer and demonstrated it with a folded piece of paper and a pen, but she’d been thrown off. Trolls attacking her book. Had they moved to attacking her personally?
