Infinity Bell: A House Immortal Novel (10 page)

The bad news just kept coming.

“What time anomaly?” he asked with far more calm than I was feeling. I kept glancing back in the shadows behind us, expecting Domek to be there with a gun.

So far the shadows were just shadows.

“Wings of Mercury experiment,” Quinten said. “It was our great-great-and-greater-grandfather’s experiment. And, according to the notes I’ve compiled, the break in time he triggered is going to mend. In just over two days. I think I can stop it.”

“How?”

But there was no time for an answer. A blast ricocheted through the tunnel.
A bomb?

“Go.” Left Ned grabbed Abraham’s arm, pushing him to move past us down the tunnel. “Domek must have blown the hatch. He’ll be on us.”

I jogged after them, caught up, and took Abraham’s other side.

Abraham was supporting more of his own weight and his breathing was steady. He’d gotten enough water and rest back there that we could sprint for it.

So we ran.

Down to the end of the tunnel. Hard right following where Gloria had gone.

Could be a dead end.

Could be a trap.

Could be Gloria had been captured and we were running to our doom.

Could be none of that mattered because Domek was
behind us, and he would kill us deader than dead if he caught us.

A light ahead of us descend in a single dull-yellow beam from the ceiling. That light showed a shaft leading upward at the end of the tunnel.

“Hurry!” Gloria pulled a cage door to one side and waved us in behind it. “Where’s Quinten?”

I ducked out from under Abraham’s arm, leaving him to lean against the back of the cage—maybe an elevator—and peered through the darkness and dust behind us for Quinten.

I couldn’t see him, but the light he carried arced and then hit the ground. He’d thrown it away. I didn’t know why.

“Quinten!” I got three steps into the dust toward him when a hand shot out and grabbed my wrist.

“Run, run, run!” Quinten said.

We hauled it into the elevator. Gloria worked the controls. It was an old freight lift, mechanics and gears, pulleys and chain. It clattered and rumbled, starting up.

“Did you see him?” I asked Quinten.

“Cover your ears,” he said.

Which was a weird answer, but then it all clicked. He had a lot of different medical compounds and chemicals in that bag he’d packed. If he didn’t have something that was already a bomb, he was sure to have packed something that could pretty quickly become a bomb.

I covered my ears.

The blast hit, sound and impact simultaneously pounding over us. Dust and rock smothered out the air, stung my eyes, and covered us in grit. I prayed the mechanics on the
lift would withstand it. I prayed that Domek wouldn’t withstand it.

The elevator shuddered like an animal that had just had its jugular cut.

It slowed but kept rising, grinding and shrieking as it cranked up and up.

Quinten was saying something, but I couldn’t hear him after that blast. Gloria shook her head, pointed at her ear, then pressed her fingers over her lips. Quinten shut up.

Neds and Abraham were covered in a thick layer of dust. I supposed we all were. They had seen Gloria’s signal and weren’t talking either.

The elevator hopped to a stop. I hoped we were at the top and not dangling somewhere between.

Gloria pulled the cage door open and stepped through it. We were in a concrete enclosure lit by a dull bulb on the wall, a single steel door directly opposite us. “This is it,” she said. I didn’t know how loud she was talking, but I wouldn’t have understood her if I hadn’t been watching her lips.

She took a second to bat the dust off her shoulders, head, face, and hands while we all stepped out of the elevator, Abraham under his own power.

“Which wire do I cut?” I asked.

Quinten flicked a look at me, then at the elevator gears that were exposed. He pointed. “That should work.”

I reached over, wrapped my hand around the cable chain, and pulled.

Not as easy as it looked, but I am an uncommonly strong woman. It finally gave under my insistence.

“It won’t stop him,” Left Ned said. “He’ll keep coming until we’re dead.”

“Just trying to buy us some time,” I said as we hurried over to where Gloria was picking the lock on the steel door.

“No key?” I asked.

“Never had one,” she said.

“Let me.” Right Ned flicked a ready-all out of one pocket and a slim knife out of the other.

Gloria moved aside, and Neds got busy with the lock. Right Ned gave a little “Aha,” and had it sprung in less than three seconds.

“Three seconds? You’re getting rusty, Harris,” I said.

“Want me to reset it so you can give it a try?”

“There’s no time for squabbling, children,” Quinten said.

Neds stepped back and pulled his jacket hood up, so that at the casual glance you wouldn’t suppose he had two heads.

I adjusted my scarf and took a look at Abraham. He had his hands in his pockets, and with the dust and scruff, even the stitches on his face were difficult to see unless a person got close enough.

Quinten and Gloria left their heads bare, which was a good move. Five people all hooded up might be more than a little suspicious.

Gloria opened the door and we all stepped through.

The light wind and clear, sunny day made me want to gulp down big lungfuls of the cleanness of it. I’m not claustrophobic, but that run through the tunnels had my shoulders creeping up.

The elevator had deposited us in an alley between
two buildings, one that must be a restaurant, from the smell of hot oil and fish that was coming from it. The other looked shut down for renovations.

Right or left?
Left was darker, leading to a narrow cross street and another jag of alleys.
Safer in shadows.
Right was light, a busy street, maybe a park beyond it. Vulnerable and exposed.

Abraham strode off to the right, to the light.

“Where are you going?” I asked, jogging after him and catching his sleeve.

He paused and shifted a little woodenly to look down at me. Those wounds of his were giving him zero flexibility. He still radiated heat from that fever and was sweating hard. “I know who can throw him off our trail.”

“Not that way,” Quinten said. “Every camera in the city and sky will see us out in the open.”

“Domek will expect us to hide,” Abraham answered. “He’ll chase us down the darkest alley he can find, and it will become our graves.”

“The cameras will give us away,” Gloria said. “To the Houses. More assassins.”

“I know someone who will help us with that,” he said. “Cameras shouldn’t be a problem for him. Hurry. Domek will find a way out of that tunnel, even if he has to climb the elevator shaft to do it.”

I let go of Abraham’s sleeve. “Who?” I asked following him. “Who do you know who can help with the cameras?”

But by then he was at the end of the alley and striding out into full and open daylight.

Quinten is leaving for the summer, but no one will tell me where he’s going. I don’t know if he’s coming back.

—from the diary of E. N. D.

W
e couldn’t stand here waiting for Domek to storm out of the tunnel, guns a-blazing. But walking into the sunlight—the open, public world—felt a lot like painting
CATCH
ME
across my back while standing naked in the middle of the road.

I didn’t want to follow Abraham out into that sunlight. But I didn’t want to lose him either.

“Matilda,” Quinten said. “Don’t.”

Too late. I pulled back my shoulders and stepped, as casually as I could, from between the buildings.

To my surprise, there were no gunshots. No automatic armed forces out there ready to cuff me and throw me in jail. No one even looked my way.

It was a nice day on a nice-enough street in the middle of the city. A patch of green beneath scant tree cover created a small park across the street. People in vehicles
and on foot went about their business as people always did: getting where they were going in the world without ever really looking around at it.

But no matter how nice the day or city was, the street and sidewalk and buildings all had some kind of surveillance built into them.

We were, right this moment, being recorded.

I spotted Abraham striding down the sidewalk to my right. He stopped in front of an advertising screen that scrolled across a narrow section of the building jutting out onto the sidewalk.

I heard the others exit the alley behind me.

“Stupid, stupid,” one of the Neds, Left Ned, I thought, was muttering.

“Take it easy and stroll,” I suggested, not looking back at him. He came up and matched my pace.

The sidewalk wasn’t all that crowded at this time of day, and the few people who passed us wove by without even slowing. I did my best not to stare at each of them, wondering if they were gunmen hired by the Houses or if they were signaling our location to people who were.

“What the hell is he doing?” Right Ned asked.

“Something smart, I hope.”

“Doesn’t look smart from here,” Left Ned said. “Looks like he’s . . . ah, shee-it. He’s calling out.”

He was right. Abraham held his left hand in the center of his chest, palm outward and said, “Whiskey echo lima tango Oscar November, 1880 Vail. Link.”

We stopped about ten feet away from him. It sounded like a nonsense string of words, but something seemed familiar about it too.

Then it came to me: he was using old—very old—
military alphabet phonetic. And I realized what he’d just spelled out.

“Crap,” I whispered.

“What?” Right Ned asked.

I shook my head and I chewed on my bottom lip, waiting for the sirens, waiting for Domek to round the corner behind us or for someone to open fire from one of the never-ending streams of cars moving past us.

I waited for the answer to Abraham’s message.

The screen filled with bright yellow, and a location just down the block and across the street flashed across it. It happened so quickly, I would have missed it if I’d blinked.

Abraham turned toward me. “Follow at a distance.” He started down the block.

I glanced at Quinten. He was stock-still, his hand in Gloria’s, as if they were two people in love out for a stroll. Which might actually be true.

But they were also two people who were on the run from the law.

“Did you get that?” I asked him.

“I did. Thoughts?”

He was asking me if we were going to follow Abraham and put our lives in the hands of the man he’d just contacted. “Better than going back the way we came.”

“Go,” Quinten said.

So we went, following Abraham, Quinten and Gloria walking far enough behind us, it didn’t look like we were all traveling together.

My heart revved too high, pounded too hard. Every loud sound made me want to duck; every second we were out in the open, I expected bullets to start firing.

I hated this. Hated being exposed.

Abraham crossed the street through a narrow gap in traffic. Neds and I stopped on the corner, waiting for traffic to clear.

“Really would like to know what the hell we’re doing,” Right Ned said. “Who did he contact?”

“Welton,” I said.

“Damn,” Right Ned said.

Welton was the head of House Yellow, Technology. When I’d been around him, he had seemed to be a friend to not only his galvanized, Foster First, but to all the galvanized, who treated Welton like a younger, annoying sibling.

“Do you think bringing a head of House into this is a good idea?” Left Ned asked.

“No. But this wasn’t my idea. If any of the heads of Houses can be trusted, it might be Welton.”

“None of the heads of Houses can be trusted,” Right Ned said.

Yeah, I was worried about that too.

“I don’t mind putting my money where my mouth is,” Left Ned said. “And I promised I’d see this through with you to the end. But that man of yours just gambled with my life. With all our lives.”

“With whatever we have left of them,” I said. “We’re all gambling. Time isn’t really something we have to spare, you know. We have to take some risks.”

“Do you believe Quinten about the time thing?” Right Ned asked. “That he can fix it so you don’t die?”

“You know my brother,” I said.

He snorted. Right. He didn’t know my brother. They hadn’t met before yesterday.

“Yes,” I said. “He thinks he can make it so that I won’t die when time heals.”

“Do
you
think he can?”

I shook my head and wished the traffic would open up so we could get across the damn street. “I don’t know. If we don’t get caught. If Domek doesn’t shoot us down. If we can get home with the intel we need? Maybe.”

“Intel?” Left Ned asked.

“What I was looking for earlier this morning. We need to confirm the calculation of the experiment. Quinten thinks Grandma had it written in her journal, which was taken when our parents died. I’m trying to track down a copy of it.”

“Your drifty-minded grandmother? He thinks something in her lost journal is going to be a fix-all? That is . . . shit. Finding it in time . . . that’s impossible,” Right Ned said.

“I know. But if there really is only one last place the calculation was written down, I can only assume someone would have wanted to make a copy of it somewhere.”

He reached out and took my hand. I was standing on his left, and so it was his left hand that took mine. Right Ned controlled that side of the body, while Left Ned controlled the other side.

“We’ll make it work,” Right Ned said softly.

Neds had a way of seeing things, visions when they touched a person, me included. Right Ned had never made me ashamed of what I was made of or what he’d seen of me when he’d touched me. Just the same, contact with the Harris brothers was a very rare thing. Which made his gesture all the more endearing.

I squeezed his fingers and let go of his hand. “Yes, we will,” I said. “Come hell or hinterlands.”

Traffic finally broke and we jogged to the other side of the street.

“Just make me a promise,” I said once we were on the sidewalk again.

“Another one?” Left Ned asked.

“Please.”

Right Ned peered over at me from beneath his hood. His eyes, blue as spring, were clouded with worry. “All right. What?”

“If things don’t go our way,” I said.

“They will,” he insisted.

“But if they don’t.” I waited to make sure he wouldn’t argue.

He nodded.

“If they don’t,” I continued, “I want you to take over leading House Brown.”

“Whoa,” Left Ned said as if all the air had been pushed out of his lungs.

“Are you listening to the nonsense that is coming out of your mouth, Matilda Case?” Right Ned asked.

“I am. And I am serious.” I took a chance and shot a look back the way we came. I couldn’t see Domek in the people there. Didn’t see an armed man wearing all black in the shadows. Was it possible he hadn’t found a way out of the tunnel yet? I thought he was the best of the best. We couldn’t be that hard to track.

“You’ve proved that you know how to stay below radar,” I said. “You know a lot of people who are willing to help others—”

“If by
willing
you mean ‘can be bribed,’” Left Ned said.

“—and I know you care about people being free. People like Sadie and Corb. People like me and my brother and Gloria. Please. Promise me you’ll take on the
communication hub at the farm and try to keep House Brown safe from the other Houses.”

“I make it a point not to make deals with delusional people,” Right Ned said. “For one thing, we’re going to make it through this.
You
are going to make it through this. Brilliant brother has a plan, and all that.”

“Then make the promise,” I said. “Tell me you’ll take over House Brown if anything goes wrong. Since you know it’s all going to go fine, what do you have to lose?”

We were striding along a little faster. Abraham was a ways ahead of us and had picked up the pace a bit. Neds shifted his wide shoulders so both of him could look at me.

“Matilda,” Right Ned said. His eyes were sad. So were Left Ned’s. “Don’t make me promise that.”

“House Brown needs a man like you,” I said. “Both of you.”

“Fine,” Left Ned said, “I promise.” His voice was a little rough around what sounded suspiciously like emotions. “Now will you shut up about it?”

Right Ned just gave me a sad smile. “I promise.”

“Good,” I said. “I like knowing it will be in good hands.”

Abraham had stopped in a loading area in the shadow of a building. He had his arms crossed over his chest. We walked up to him.

“Welton Yellow?” Left Ned demanded in a low whisper. “For hell’s sake, how is that going to do any good? We already have one killer on our asses, in case you forgot.”

“What was your plan to get out of the city?” Abraham asked coolly.

I would have bought the stone-cold act Abraham was putting on if he wasn’t sweating so badly. His color had gone off too, or maybe it was just the coating of dust, but
he looked greener around the edges, with dark, purple-bruised shadows, as if everything under his skin was leaking and bleeding.

“The old freight lines,” Right Ned said. “Substations. I know a guy. He can get us to Kansas. There’s a woman there who can get us within a couple miles of the farm.”

“Freight lines?” Quinten asked as he and Gloria closed in behind us.

“From back before the Restructure?” Gloria asked. “Those haven’t been in service for more than a hundred years.”

“They haven’t been in service for the Houses,” Right Ned said. “Not even for House Brown. But they work. Things get shipped. Private sorts of things.”

“Black market?” Abraham asked. “That’s all reported to House Silver.”

Neds made a so-so gesture with his hand. “People skim, people barter, people get what they want if they try hard enough. I got us passage.”

“How do you even know about this?” I asked. “House Brown could have used those connections once or twice over the past few years.”

Quinten’s eyebrows shot up and he leaned back just a bit, maybe surprised that his little sister would be willing to deal dirty. Yeah, well, times had been hard and it had fallen on my shoulders to care for not only our farm and family, but also any of the House Brown people who had emergency needs.

And everyone has emergency needs.

“Like I said,” Right Ned repeated, “I know people. Not the kind of people you want to invite around for tea.”

“Unless your life depends on it?” Abraham asked.

“Pretty much. Folk who run this rail aren’t here to do you any favors. Money talks. Trade too, if you’ve got something worth trading. Like those medical supplies.” He nodded toward Quinten’s duffel.

“We’ll have plenty to trade,” Gloria said. “Were we supposed to meet someone?”

“We?” Quinten turned toward her. “Not you. You’re staying here.”

“No, I’m not,” she said.

“She can’t stay here,” I said. “They know she helped us. There was a killer in her shop. Who, by some miracle, hasn’t found us yet. Is that making anyone else jumpy?”

“Welton,” Abraham said. “He set up a few diversions for Domek. False leads and trackers.”

“You’ll be in more danger if you travel with us,” Quinten was saying to Gloria.

I turned to her. “Do you have anyplace where you can drop out of sight?”

She shook her head. “If all of you weren’t right here with me, I’d be calling out to your place, asking you if you knew someone in House Brown who would let me hide out with them.”

I nodded, turned back to my brother. “She stays with us until we can find her a safer place to be.”

He threw both his hands in the air, then spun away from her direct stare and paced two or three steps away and back. “This is a terrible, terrible choice,” he said.

“It’s my terrible choice to make,” she said.

“Where’s the entry to the freight line?” Abraham asked.

“Down a couple streets near the old library,” Right Ned said.

“There’s nothing near the old library,” Gloria said.

“There’s a hidden entry to the freight line.”

“I don’t like this,” Quinten said.

“None of us like it,” Gloria answered. “But all of us are doing it.”

“So, what are we waiting for?” I asked.

Abraham was still standing with his arms crossed over his chest. He uncrossed his arms and ran his right hand back through his hair. It was a very purposeful thing to do. A signal.

A loud pop echoed out down the street. Then another and another in quick succession. Six, a dozen.

I bolted into the shadows, searching the street. So did everyone else except Abraham. “Gunfire?” I asked.

Abraham hadn’t moved. “Power overload on old wires,” he said. “House Yellow really ought to have taken care of it years ago. Cameras, traffic control, and backup systems will be out for days. Streets are going to be a mess. Satellite feeds broken. Tracking anyone and anything will be impossible.”

He grinned and it was a wicked sight. “We’re as invisible as the head of House Technology can make us. Let’s go.”