Infinity Reborn (The Infinity Trilogy Book 3) (15 page)

Why do you hate me so much?
I think in reply.
Surely this isn’t the way it has to be. Both of us have a right to live. This body is as much mine as it is yours. There must be some way that we can exist side by side? We can share this body.

A bemused grin creeps onto her face as she slides off me and sits cross-legged on the floor beside my head.
“I know it may seem like it, and I might have even said it more than once, but I don’t hate you, Finn. But what I do hate,”
she says, poking me in the cheek with the point of her finger,
“are all the things you make me feel. Just the thought of your wet-blanket emotions infecting me makes my skin crawl. Honestly, how the hell do you expect me to be true to myself when your goody-good feelings burrow into my head like parasitic worms, and suddenly, I’m too guilty to shoot someone in the face or stab somebody through the heart?”

I can’t help what I feel,
I respond mentally.

“Oh, I know,”
says Infinity.
“And that’s the whole problem. For a while there you even made me think that I was beginning to care about your idiotic schoolmates. Otto has earned my respect, but you almost had me convinced that I was actually starting to like some of the others. Well, now my head is clear, and I know those thoughts were nothing but illusions leaking into me from you. I can’t live like that, Finn. I’m a weapon, and a weapon with a conscience is useless.”

But you don’t have to kill anyone, Infinity. No one can force you to do that anymore. You can have a normal, peaceful life.

Infinity throws her head back and laughs out loud.
“A normal life?! Oh, you crack me up, Finn, you really do. Sometimes I don’t know if you’re in denial or just plain stupid. In case you hadn’t noticed, we are like no one else on the planet, the first of a new species, superior in every way. There was never going to be any normal life for us. As long as we exist, somebody out there will want to own and control this body and everything it can do. Otto said that I was a slave, and she was right. You and I were both trapped in worlds we didn’t choose for ourselves, but the difference is . . . I want to be free.”

I want that, too,
I think.
We can learn from each other and find a way to make this work. Emotions don’t make someone weak; they make them human. We can do this together.

Infinity leans over me and slowly shakes her head.
“Aw, that’s so sweet. But you really don’t get it, do you? I’ve never once been asked what I want to do, only commanded to enforce the will of others. Used to protect the interests of the powerful by eliminating those who stand in their way. No one ever looked at me like I was a person. I’m seen as property, a tool to be used as my masters see fit. No one ever treated me as a human being, and there’s only one reason why—I. Am. Not. Human. And neither are you.”

Then . . . what are we?
I mentally ask.

“Honestly? I’m not sure,”
replies Infinity.
“I was told that I was made in a lab for only one purpose, to kill. I suspect the truth is much stranger, but I’m beyond caring. All I knew for sure was that I was better than anyone else. I was unique.

“At least that’s what I thought until I found out about you. I was curious at first. I wanted to know if you were treated any differently from me, and in a lot of ways, you were. Some people actually seemed to care about you, but the more I uncovered, the more I realized . . . your life sucks. I may have been a slave, but you, Finn, you’re locked in a gilded prison cell surrounded by idiots. You’re right; no one can force me to kill anybody ever again, but guess what? . . . I’m gonna do it anyway—because I like it. Nothing else compares. Well, you know what I mean,”
Infinity says as she playfully punches me on the arm.
“Here, let me remind you.”

Pictures of memories suddenly begin swirling through my head, and it’s like I’m falling through a flickering gallery of violence and turmoil, each image a jump to a different place and point in time when Infinity killed. I see angry expressions on the faces of strangers instantly wiped into dead-eyed stares by flashes of gunfire. I see Infinity’s fist gripping a sawtooth knife, plunging its red-smeared point into flesh left and right. There’s the glint of a long slashing blade, an enemy’s wide-eyed surprise, and the wet thud of a severed limb slapping onto concrete. I see fingertips spear into an old man’s eye as fluid and blood spurts from his eye socket over the back of Infinity’s hand.

Gurgling screams ring in my ears as I watch acid-splashed noses, eyes, lips, and tongues liquefy and drip through men’s fingers like molten wax. I see people’s skulls popping like paint-filled water balloons through the crosshairs of a rifle scope in a dozen exotic locations, and I witness a boot on the back of a man’s expensive suit, sending him sailing off the roof of a skyscraper toward a dotted line of streetlights a hundred floors below. Everywhere I look is another gruesome death. I can’t turn away or close my eyes to the horror, but what’s a thousand times worse than seeing Infinity’s nightmarish memories is feeling exactly what she felt. If I could only use one word to describe it, it would be joy, but to call it that completely betrays what I know the emotion to be. It almost feels as if I’m being overwhelmed by the sight of a beautiful sunset, but the hues of pink and purple and orange and red bathing the sky are the colors of an inferno burning the world to cinders beyond a horizon of insanity.

Stop. Please,
I plead in my mind as a sickening spasm rolls in my gut. The horrific images instantly vanish, and a feeble whimper squeaks from my throat.

“You’re welcome,”
Infinity says with a sarcastic smile.
“Look at us, Finn, being all civil with each other, remembering the fun times, hanging out like best buds.”

The radio on my chest crackles to life, and Bit’s voice issues from the tiny speaker. “Finn, I’m still at the bottom of the ladder. Dr. Pierce is at the top, trying to hot-wire the keypad to the hatch. But after he’s done that, we’re in!”

“Speaking of best buds,”
says Infinity.
“You’re
lying here, useless, while the girl you call your bestie does all the hard work. Y’know, if it wasn’t for me she would’ve been taken by those things right outside that door. I was the one who saved her, plucked her right off the ground, and threw her to safety. If I’d left it up to you, she’d be gone.”

You . . . did that?
I ask.

“Sure did. Like I said, Otto earned my respect. But if you insist on fighting me, Finn, I might not be so kind to your little friend next time. It only took three seconds to save her, but trust me, it will be just as simple and just as quick for me to end her.”

Wait a second . . . I don’t understand. How did you save her?
I ask with my thoughts.

“Your hands are my hands, that’s how,”
replies Infinity.
“And I’m warning you, if you don’t let me out, I’ll use those hands to—”

Oh my god,
I say, cutting her threat off with my thoughts before she can deliver it.
You don’t know how to take complete control, do you? If you did we wouldn’t be talking, you’d already have done it by now.

Infinity raises a finger at me and opens her mouth to speak, but no words come out. I can see her out of the corner of my eye as she slowly lowers her hand and glowers venomously at me. She looks mad. Real mad. There’s something she’s hiding from me, something she doesn’t want me to know.

All of a sudden something dawns on me. Infinity can read my thoughts. She did it out there on the promenade. She’s been doing it the whole time we’ve been talking. She’s doing it right now. I can feel her listening. But does that mean I can read her mind, too?

“Shut up!”
she yells. Infinity crouches over me and glares at me.
“You don’t know who you’re dealing with,”
she growls as she grabs my face, clawing her fingers into my cheeks.

At first I look straight into her eyes, refusing to be intimidated, thankful that my paralyzed body is preventing me from flinching. But then I decide to try something new.

What do you know, Infinity?
I ask.

She grabs my face harder and looks even angrier.
“I told you to shut up, you stupid bitch.”

Tell me what you know.

The corner of Infinity’s mouth twitches nervously.
“Whatever you think you’re doing, stop it,”
she orders, but her words are tainted with unease.

I could be wrong, but I think I just saw a flicker of worry in those eyes, or was it . . . fear?

“What?”
Infinity says incredulously.
“Why the hell would I be afraid of you!?”

The longer I look, the more I feel a strange pull inside my head, like my consciousness is being drawn out from the front of my skull.

“What . . . what are you doing?”
Infinity stammers. She tries to pull her hand away from my face, but she can’t. I can feel her trying to turn her head and take her eyes off mine, but she simply isn’t able to.
“I’m warning you, Finn! Stop!”

I get it now,
I whisper in my thoughts.
You said my hands are your hands, so does that mean that your mind . . . is also mine as well?

As soon as I think the words, something very strange happens. I begin to see past Infinity’s hateful stare and beyond her outer layers of bravado. Her expression softens like she’s hypnotized, and her fingers, gripping my face, relax.

The more I stare at Infinity, the stronger the tugging in my head becomes, until all of a sudden a spinning swirl of darkness appears on her brow, just above her nose. I will myself toward it, and even though I can’t move, it feels as though I’m rising from my body. The swirl expands until it’s a shadowy revolving whirlpool covering her entire face like a mask. Bigger and bigger it becomes, until it completely envelops my head, too, and I feel like I’m floating up off the ground and crossing a bridge through a dark gateway into a completely different place altogether.

CHAPTER TEN

My heart races as I look around and try to take in what just happened. I think I may have actually done it; I’ve pushed through into somewhere else. Whether this new place is Infinity’s mind or another part of my mind or a mixture of both, I can’t be completely sure, but whatever part of our psyche this may be, it’s a mess in here.

Scattered over a shimmering field of crystalline black are what appear to be the shattered pieces of thousands upon thousands of mirrors, haphazardly stacked in a single floating layer that reaches as high as I can see. There are a multitude of different shapes and sizes, and each fractured shard flickers with images. The very large pieces seem to be more stable, staying mostly intact, while the small and medium-size ones are noiselessly breaking and re-forming as the cracks separating them simultaneously heal together and then snap apart again.

I don’t know how long I’ll be able to stay in here, so I need to make the most of it and find out as much as I can. I take a few deep breaths to calm my nerves and begin scanning across the nearest images. They appear to be fleeting seconds of captured memories, and I’m surprised to see that I recognize a lot of them. Every snippet I can identify is relatively fresh; I’d guess no more than an hour or so old.

In one of them I can see Bit, standing in the underground lab. She’s holding a slate in her hands and speaking as everyone looks up at the holographic model of Blackstone Technologies floating in the center of the room. In another I see Jonah, Percy, Jennifer, and Professor Francis saying good-bye as they leave to walk through the tunnels to the second hatch. In another fragment I see Brody gently sliding Bit’s glasses onto her nose, and in yet another I see him again, lying on the path, scrambling through his satchel as the wave of robotic spiders closes in behind him.

I don’t know what this place is, but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s some kind of gallery of my very recent memories. But if that’s what it is, then why are some of the memory shards different from the others? I can see moving shapes and colors, but the images contained inside them are blurry, as if the fragments are jagged windows made of frosted glass.

I look over my shoulder, back the way I came, and what I see is not what I expected. It’s like I’m looking out my own eyes, staring at the ceiling at that same solitary moth fluttering around the light above where I’m lying. A moment ago I was looking up into Infinity’s face, but she’s gone now, which makes perfect sense when I think about it. I was never really looking at her to begin with. She was never there at all, and that entire uncomfortable conversation we just had was only in my mind.

“My . . . mind,”
says Infinity’s voice, her words reverberating from everywhere around me.
“Get . . . out.”

I spin back toward the wall of fragments, scanning for any sign of her. “Where are you?” I call out. “Show yourself!”

“Get . . . out!”
she demands again, but her voice sounds strange. It’s monotone and lazy tongued, almost to the point of slurring. Unable to tell what direction her voice is coming from, I search the bizarre mindscape, looking all around, but there’s no sign of her, until suddenly, a crack splinters across one of the frosted pieces and I catch a glimpse of her through the gap between two drifting shards.

Infinity stands on the other side of this wall of memories, facing me like a reflection of myself from a different reality. The fragments are constantly healing together and shattering again, so I have to bob and weave to keep her in sight, which is made all the more difficult because when I move, she does, too, but her actions are slightly delayed and in the opposite direction. From what I can make out, she’s dressed in some kind of formfitting black combat uniform, and she’s staring directly at me with an all-too-familiar bare-tooth snarl of anger contorting her face.

I take a few steps forward, and so does Infinity. I raise my right hand, and she does the same, although judging by the increased intensity of her dagger-throwing glower, she’s doing it very grudgingly indeed. I lower my hand again, and when she also follows suit, I suddenly wonder . . . am I controlling her?

“Never!”
Her voice echoes, and out of nowhere a strange compulsion to punish myself for what I was just thinking shudders through me. The bizarre feeling doesn’t make any sense. I am wondering why I would feel that way at all when I notice Infinity slowly opening her palm, and with a resounding grunt of effort, she jerks her arm upward and swiftly slaps herself hard across the face. To my utter surprise, my own hand opens, too, and moves as if it has a life of its own. Copying Infinity’s gesture at twice the speed, I knock my head to the side with a jarring blow as I brutally smack myself across my left cheekbone. I gasp in shock as the lingering sting of the impact prickles my skin. Clearly we both have a modicum of control over each other, and it seems Infinity’s payoff for striking herself lies solely in the fact that I feel it, too.

I glare at her angrily, daring her to try that again. I know she receives my challenge because the instinct to punch myself in the head ripples out from her and comes streaming on invisible waves through the cracks between the fragments. Infinity’s fingers bunch into a fist, and so do mine, but as she twitches hers toward her own nose, I stop it dead and force my trembling arm back down to my side.

Infinity lowers hers, too, and stares at me as waves of wild frustration pour out of her like ripples of heat. Suddenly I’m reminded of the reason I wanted to come here in the first place. “You can control me,” I whisper. “But not for very long. Why?”

Of course Infinity doesn’t answer, and I can’t read any clues from her thoughts, so either she doesn’t know or she’s blocking me somehow, but I
do
notice something else. For a split second, I saw her eyes flick in the direction of one of the frosted panes of memories. It could be nothing, but I’ve played poker with Bit before, and when she has a bad hand, she always glances out the window into the courtyard outside our dorm room. That’s
Bit’s
tell, did Infinity just reveal one of hers?

I focus on the jagged-edged, full-length-mirror-size puzzle piece she just looked at and step closer to it. I can feel her resistance, but Infinity steps forward, too. I lose sight of her behind it, but as I reach out toward the fragment, I can feel her doing the same on the other side. I press my palm against the surface of the foggy memory and try to wipe the frost from the blur of colors. It doesn’t do any good, but as I slide my hand away, toward the edge of the fragment, the whole thing moves as if there’s a hinge running the length of it from top to bottom. Excited at the prospect of my new discovery, I push the edge harder. Sure enough, the entire fragment begins turning on an axis, pivoting like a revolving door.

As the memory-pane side swivels to me, Infinity glares with contempt through the open gap. I can feel that she wants to reach across and claw at me, to shout at me again and threaten me with pain, but as she attempts to move her arm, I hold mine steady, and as she tries to speak, I clench my jaw tightly shut. There’s nothing she can do as the fragment rotates completely around, thankfully obscuring her from my sight again. It shudders to a stop, and I gaze upon the crystal-clear image on the other side.

And what I see . . . is
me
. My first thought is that maybe this fragment is partially transparent and I’m simply looking at Infinity through it. But I quickly realize that’s not the case when I notice that I’m wearing the same black hooded top I have on now, and instead of my hair being in a tight ponytail, like Infinity’s, it’s loose and hanging wet on my shoulders. This other me is standing over a stainless-steel basin, staring at my reflection in a clear strip on a steamed-over mirror.

I don’t have any recollection of this moment, but judging by what I’m wearing and the images of the recent past captured in the other shards, it can’t have been very long ago. I raise my hand to the center of the fragment, but this time, the instant that I touch it there’s a sudden feeling of acceleration, as the image pours out of the shard and folds completely around me.

I’m not standing in a dark crystalline gallery of memories anymore. Now I’m
actually
standing in front of the steel basin. Behind me in the mirror, I can see a beige concrete wall that glistens with fresh condensation. The room is warm and damp, and that clean soap smell of a recently run shower still hangs in the air. The color of the wall is a dead giveaway. This must have taken place in the washroom in Dr. Pierce’s underground lab.

I study the reflection of the me from the past. I have a distant look in my eyes, like I’m lost in thought. I raise my hand to my face, stroke it against my cheek, then smile. The smile slowly becomes a quiet chuckle, which soon changes into a demented giggle. All of a sudden I stop laughing, and that’s when I notice the darkness in my eyes and a feeling of unjustified rage rippling through me, just like when Infinity took me by surprise and made me slap my own face only moments ago. Suddenly I open my mouth, bare my teeth, and with a dead-eyed stare and a vicious snarl, I chomp hard into the pad of muscle at the base of my thumb.

My disturbingly emotionless eyes glare straight ahead into nowhere as my jaw clenches with voracious effort. I watch in horror as blood begins pulsing and dribbling from the bite, but I don’t stop. Rivulets of red stream down my face, but still I keep going. My movements are animalistic; I look like a starving dog, my neck spasming as my head bucks forward, driving my teeth deeper and deeper into my own flesh. I moan as blood flows freely down my arm into the sink, but I scream out loud as I feel teeth crunch into bone. I can’t turn away; this has already happened, and it can’t be changed. All I can do is ride it out.

I watch the reflection of me in the mirror as I wrench my gored hand from my mouth, and I gasp with relief as my trembling palm suddenly releases from the surface of the fragment and the horrible memory snaps back inside the shard, encased once again inside its frame. My heart is racing, and my senses are reeling, but underneath all of that I feel something much more sinister. In the washroom Infinity took control of me and made me bite my own hand, using pain to push me out. On the promenade she literally tried to scare me out of my mind by appearing as a bloodied and broken ghost, and when that didn’t work, she threatened to hurt someone I care about if I didn’t give her what she wanted.

Looking back at those memories with a clear mind, I can feel the intent of Infinity’s dark motives lingering in the shadowy alleyways of my subconscious. I know what she’s been trying to do! She’s been lashing out, using the small amount of influence that she has to try and weaken me, to tear holes in me, wearing me down physically and mentally so she can squeeze through and take over completely.

If I’m right, these blurred-out fragments must be instances when she momentarily regained control, and that’s why I can’t see them clearly. But one thing
is
becoming increasingly clear. Infinity has been bluffing this whole time. That’s why she didn’t want me to dig any deeper. She was afraid I would discover the reason why she can’t take full control. She is undeniably strong, but the truth is . . . I’m even stronger. Out of the two of us, I’m not the weak one . . . she is.

I can feel her hatred bleeding through the cracks as I turn away from the fragment and stride alongside the wall, searching for the next frosted-over piece. Through the spaces between us, I can see Infinity is forced to copy my opposite actions as she walks in the other direction, but she can’t escape me. Rage twists her face as she slides backward, like I’m pulling her along with an invisible tether. I spot another fogged-over shard and dash toward it, but as I reach out, my hand suddenly veers wildly in a different direction, and my legs disobey me, causing me to leap sideways farther along the wall. “What are you doing, Infinity?” I shout out, willing my limbs to obey my orders and deny hers.

I manage to regain control of one of my legs, but I stumble and fall onto one knee right in front of a large fragment. I look up and see that it’s different from all the others again. It’s made up of a collection of dozens of smaller shards that are cracking apart and mending back together in rapid succession. Some of the sections are frosted, and some are not, but all are tenuously combined into one unstable, shifting mosaic.

“You want to remember?”
Infinity growls.
“Then remember this!”

My arm thrusts out on its own, thudding against the patterned fragment, and the jagged pane quickly swings around on its axis. It wobbles unsteadily as it comes to a stop, and the lattice of cracks across its surface instantly solidifies into one clear image. In it I see a rectangle of light, and inside that is the large dark silhouette of a person. I recognize the shape immediately. It’s Jonah. For some reason I can’t understand, an unsettling fear shudders through me, and I can feel Infinity’s influence slither into my arm and force my palm against the surface of the fragment.

All of a sudden, my hand is pulled into the frame, and the blackness surrounding Jonah’s silhouette pours out and snaps shut around me like the walls of a dark box.

I’m sitting on a bed, staring at Jonah’s shadowy outline, as the feeling of fear swells and churns inside me. He reaches toward me, and I scream out in absolute terror. “GET AWAY FROM ME! WHERE AM I? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME!”

The fear rises and curls inside me as my hands jolt against the restraints strapped around my wrists. I gasp with horror as memories from years gone by begin pulsing forth from the depths of my mind. I see a white room with medical equipment lining the walls, and I’m sitting loosely in a cold metal chair, my body paralyzed.

“You won’t remember this horrible day, sweetheart. I swear,” Jonah whispers from a chair beside me. He adjusts a metal band on my head and wipes a tear from my cheek. “This won’t hurt at all,” he says as he turns his attention to a nearby computer screen. He swipes his finger across it, then he looks back at me and smiles. “Y’know, it’s funny how many times I’ve told you that.”