Recursion - Blake Crouch Page 0,44

the Human Body by Andreas Vesalius, Physica by Aristotle, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy by Isaac Newton, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and two novels—Camus’s The Stranger, and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

At the bank, she closes her savings and checking accounts—a little under $50,000. She takes $10,000 in cash, puts the remaining $40,000 into a brokerage account, then walks out into the noonday sun with a white envelope that feels woefully slim.

Near Highway 1, she stops at a convenience store to gas up her Jeep. When the transaction is complete, she throws her credit card in the trash, lowers the soft-top, and climbs in behind the wheel. She doesn’t know where she’s going. This is as far as she planned last night on the rig, and her mind is racing with both exhilaration and terror.

There’s a dime in one of the cup holders. She flips it in the air and catches it against the top of her left hand.

Heads, she goes south.

Tails, she goes north.

* * *

The road winds along the craggy coastline, the sea yawning out into gray mist several hundred feet below.

She speeds through cedar forests.

Past coastal headlands.

Across windswept balds.

Through towns that barely warrant a name—tiny outposts on the edge of the world.

Her first night, she stops a couple hours north of San Francisco at a refurbished roadside motel called Timber Cove, which is perched on a cliff that overlooks the sea.

Sits alone by a fire pit with a glass of wine from a bottle that was made just twenty miles inland, watching the sun drop and considering what her life has become.

She takes out her phone to call her parents but hesitates.

At this moment, Marcus Slade is expecting her imminent arrival on his decommissioned oil platform to begin work on the chair, no doubt believing that the knowledge of its true, mind-blowing capability rests solely with him. When she fails to show up, he’ll not only suspect what she’s done, he’ll turn the world inside out looking for her, because without her, he doesn’t have a prayer of building—or, in a sense, of rebuilding—the chair.

He might even use her parents to get to her.

She sets the phone on the ground and crushes it under the heel of her boot.

* * *

She pushes north up Highway 1, taking a short detour to a place she’s always wanted to see on the Lost Coast—Black Sands Beach in Shelter Cove.

Then on through redwood groves and quiet seaside communities and into the Pacific Northwest.

A couple days later, she’s in Vancouver, heading up the coast of British Columbia, from city to town to village to some of the most beautifully desolate country she’s ever laid eyes on.

Three weeks later, while meandering through the wilds of northern Canada, a storm catches up with her as night is falling.

She stops at a roadside tavern on the outskirts of a village that’s a relic from the Gold Rush days, settles onto a stool at a wood-paneled bar, and drinks beer and bullshits with the locals as a fire burns in a massive stone hearth and the first snow of the season whisks against the window glass.

* * *

In some ways, the village of Haines Junction, Yukon, feels every bit as remote as Slade’s oil rig—this hamlet in the farthest reaches of Canada, tucked into an evergreen forest at the foot of a glaciated mountain range. To everyone in the village, her name is Marie Iden—first name inspired by the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and whose work led to the discovery of radioactivity, the last name by one of her favorite thriller writers.

She lives in a room above the tavern and gets paid under the table to tend bar on weekends. She doesn’t need the money. Her knowledge of future markets will turn her investments into millions in the years to come. But it’s good to keep busy, and it might cause questions if she has no apparent source of income.

Her room isn’t much—a bed, a dresser, and one window that overlooks the emptiest highway she’s ever seen. But for now at least, it’s all she needs. She makes acquaintances, no friends, and enough wanderers pass through the bar and the town to afford the occasional twenty-four-hour-lonely-heart liaison.

And she is lonely, but that emotion appears to be the norm here. It didn’t take her long to clock Haines Junction as a refuge for a distinct class of people.

Those looking for peace.

Those looking to hide.

And,

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