Infinity Lost (16 page)

I’m genuinely shocked.

“What’s down there?”

“Well, a lot of it is storage and empty labs your father used for research and development. They’re boring; that’s why I never mentioned them. But on sublevel nine there’s a device called a neural interface. I can use it to . . . to introduce virtual combat scenarios directly into your mind to help with your training. It’s like being inside the best video game ever.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely. Let’s go try it out. Whatya say?”

“OK. Sounds cool, I guess.”

He presses the button on the wall and the door leading to the pod shaft slides into the ceiling, opening into darkness.

I open my eyes, bewildered. I groan at the ache in my back and clutch the bump on the back of my head. What the hell was that? For a fleeting moment I was home again. I said it was a week after my birthday, so that means it was a little over three weeks ago—on a day that I don’t remember at all. Yet another day ripped away, cut and pasted over with a manufactured memory.

Maybe all the memories Jonah stole from me, and all the days he changed in my head, are fighting to resurface. Maybe the dam is cracked and it’s leaking, crumbling, about to burst.

If that’s the case, the thought terrifies me. If the day of Carlo’s murder is anything to go by, I’m not sure I’m ready to know what else Jonah has taken away from me. I need to get out of here. I need to get up and get out and run as far away from this place as I can.

The side of the pirate ship juts up at my feet from the solid “water.” After a few short pants, I recover my breath and force myself up onto my elbows. Percy’s face appears over the railing above me, closely followed by Ryan’s. “Are you alright, Finn?” Ryan calls down.

Before I can respond, Percy issues an ominous order out across the ocean.

“Take her to the vacant Clean Room. Through air-lock one.”

For a split second, I wonder who he’s talking to. He’s looking just past me. I tilt my head back, following Percy’s sight line, and see a female-shaped Drone Template robot dressed in smooth silver from head to toe bending down toward me. It grips me under the arm and lifts me up onto my feet with no effort at all. It takes a tight hold of my wrist and twists, maneuvering me into a painful arm lock.

“Ow! Hey! Get your hands off me!”

The Drone doesn’t even turn its dark plastic mask in acknowledgment. A single illuminated word in red capital letters scrolls across the surface of the smooth black oval, and it pretty much says it all.

SECURITY

“You need a little time to cool off, Miss Brogan. It’s for your own good,” Percy calls down at me with phony concern. The Drone turns and pushes me along a white-tiled pathway that has sprouted up through the surface of the silent ocean. I struggle to get free, but the android is incredibly strong, gripping my wrist like a vise.

The Drone marches me away like a prisoner, resigned to my unjust capture. Before long I’m out of earshot of the boat, but movement catches the corner of my eye. I strain my neck back over my shoulder to see that a commotion has broken out on the lower deck. Ryan is in Brent’s face, arguing and pointing toward me. Brent pushes Ryan, who swiftly cracks him in the nose with a hard right hook. Brent clutches his face and drops out of sight behind the railing as Brody springs onto Ryan like a panther. Percy, Miss Cole, and Professor Francis are all yelling for them to stop while Percy stands off to the side, eyeballing the boys and mouthing instructions into his wrist. The rest of the group looks on from the top deck, staring in morbid fascination as everything goes to hell. More black-masked silver suits arrive on the lower deck and grab the three boys, dragging them back from the edge of the railing and out of sight.

I quickly scan the group for Bit, but I can’t spot her. Movement in the shadows catches my attention and I finally see her. Bit is inexplicably dangling off the rear of the ship, her feet kicking beneath her as she hangs by her fingers from the loose rungs of a knotted rope ladder. She drops into a crouch on the hard “water” and straightens her glasses. With one last sideways glance to check if the coast is clear, she fixes her eyes on me and breaks into a sprint, running as fast as her legs will carry her across the solid surface. I can’t help but smile and shake my head. I’ve known her for almost four years, and even after all that time, shy, mild-mannered Bettina Otto still manages to surprise me.

No one up on the deck seems to have noticed that she’s missing. I had always thought that Bit had a knack for going unnoticed, but until this moment I had never thought of how handy it could be. Maybe it’s due to blindly following Percy’s orders, or perhaps it really is because of Bit’s ninja-like abilities, but even the Drone seems oblivious to her presence, even after she’s caught right up to us and is walking beside us, wheezing to catch her breath.

“You could’ve waited for me,” she whispers with labored huffs.

I smile at her. “Like I had a choice.”

There’s that familiar hiss again as just up ahead, a wide rectangular opening grows in the surface of the black glass wall. The Drone ushers me through into an elevator-sized room with bright-white glowing walls. Bit and I both squint in the light.

“Where are you taking us?” I demand, but there’s no answer from it. “I can walk on my own y’know.”

It ignores me like it’s leading a sack of potatoes instead of a disobedient teenage girl.

“This has to be some kind of human rights violation. My father is Dr. Blackstone. You’ll be a pile of scrap metal for this. Recycled into a toaster!”

My empty threat goes unacknowledged. It’s really no surprise. I know my father doesn’t give a damn what happens to me, and this robot probably wouldn’t care even if it could.

Suddenly without warning, the room drops and Bit steadies herself on the wall to keep from falling over. The wall that she’s leaning on slides sideways so quickly that Bit falls anyway, out onto the shiny white floor of a wide hallway. Its walls are curved and jagged and seem to be made of some kind of sparkling crystalline material. It really is quite beautiful. It’s how I imagine it would be inside a massive quartz geode.

The Drone walks on, still holding me tight, still pushing me forward, past Bit and onward down the hall. Bit jumps to her feet and springs after us.

“Finn, where do you think it’s taking you?”

“I heard Percy say something about a clean room?”

Bit frowns. “Why would they be taking you to a clean room? That’s a room where they make computer chips and stuff like that.”

“I don’t care where they take me, just as long as I’m not in that dome and one step closer to getting out of here.”

“What happened back there, Finn? You said that you didn’t faint. Did you do it on purpose? Of course you did. I knew it! That’s brilliant.”

I look sideways at Bit. Why would she think I would do that? Anyway, now is not the time to try and explain. I give Bit a tiny shake of my head, mouth the word “Later,” and look sideways at the Drone. She seems to get what I’m trying to say; she gives me a little nod and follows on in silence.

The Drone forces me down one passage which links to another and to another which turns a corner into another. It’s like I’m being taken into the heart of a maze of crystal caves. All the way through the labyrinth, the only sound is the syncopated tapping of the Drone’s silver boots on the floor and a low hum that emanates from every wall. I hadn’t thought about what it would look like beyond the boundary of the dome, but I did expect there to be people here. Workers? Staff? Someone? Anyone? We’ve been walking for a couple of minutes now and we haven’t seen another soul.

Eventually the Drone stops outside a frosted-glass door marked with a large gray number one. With a quiet “shush” it slides open before me. The Drone releases its hold, nudges me in the back, and I stumble forward through the doorway. As deftly as a mouse, Bit ducks through the doorway and scoots to my side. The Drone steps in after us and the door slides shut behind it. This new room is tiny and claustrophobic. It’s hardly a room at all—more like a small, white, walk-in closet with some kind of metal grating as a floor. There’s barely enough space in here for
me
to be comfortable, let alone Bit and that lady robot as well. Bit looks nervous and I have to admit that I’m not exactly feeling very calm, either.

“Y’know, you didn’t have to come with me, Bit.”

Bit shrugs her shoulders and smiles at me. “That’s what I’m here for. Want some gum?”

I smile and hold out my hand as she drops a piece into my palm. I pop it in my mouth and chew quietly as I take a good look at the tiny room. There’s not much to see. “What are we supposed to do in here?”

“Just wait I guess,” whispers Bit.

“Wait for what? Are the teen police gonna come and arrest me for passing out?”

Bit smiles. “They should arrest Brent for punching you. He’s seriously insane.”

“He hits like a girl. Next time I see him, I’ll show him how a woman throws a punch.”

Bit tilts her head to the side, looking from one of my eyes to the other. “Infinity?”

“Ahhh . . . yes, Bettina?” I reply, frowning. She’s being weird.

“Oh, nothing,” she says, giving me a timid smile.

She’s being
really
weird. I nervously smile back.

Suddenly the room switches color from stark white to blood red and our smiles instantly vanish.

“Finn.” Bit grabs my arm tight.

I’m about to say that everything will be OK, without even the slightest clue if it actually will be, when a voice that I’ve known since I was thirteen years old booms through the walls.

“You are entering a sterile laboratory. To maintain its clean working environment, dust- and foreign-particle evacuation will commence immediately. Please remain still.”

Bit and I look at each other wide-eyed. There’s no time to call out to Onix or even think about what’s going to happen when all of a sudden an intensely powerful gust of wind surges up from the floor, blowing our skirts and hair vertical. Bit shrieks and wrestles to retain her dignity as our school uniforms are violently flurried upward in the hard blast of air. The Drone stands as still as a statue. I instinctively shut my eyes against the rushing tempest—only for a split second—and when I open them again, the wind is deafening in my ears as I fall through the cold night air.

I see lights, scattered like twinkling diamonds across the dark cityscape, each tiny glow illuminating a different section of the streets and rooftops far below me.

My lips don’t move, but I can hear my own voice speaking in my head, muted but perceptible, like a whisper in the back of my skull.

“Twenty seconds to touchdown.”

I pull a cord on the harness and I’m jerked upward as my parachute opens. I drift on the breeze, pulling the toggles as I descend, expertly steering the chute through the chill of the night toward a group of four even-height, flat-topped buildings 160 feet below. I blink and my night vision flicks on, turning my sight grainy green but a thousand times clearer, replacing the shadowy angles and vague dark outlines with sharp-edged details of the rapidly approaching structures beneath me. Sixty-five feet above one of the rooftops, I pull a second cord. The parachute cuts away and evaporates silently into smoke above my head, like tissue paper touched with a lightless flame. I drop like a missile through the night sky and land hard. The sickening crack of my ankle breaking comes from inside my combat boot, but I don’t even wince as I roll smoothly into a low crouch. The pain signals shoot up my leg toward my brain where they’re recognized, processed, re-routed, and converted into a low-pitched pulsing warning tone in the back of my mind. Motionless, I wait a few seconds for the pain signals to quiet as my bones repair. The warning tone ceases and I take off, sprinting across the open, concrete-tiled expanse of the rooftop. I slide to a halt, pinning my body-armored back against the wall behind a rooftop-access door.

I cautiously peer around the corner and take in the layout. The concrete tiles end at the edge of a line of shrubbery surrounding a large circular area of perfectly manicured grass. There’s a rock water feature at the far edge trickling down into an inlayed pool of koi carp. In the center of the grass circle, I see the back of a beautiful wrought-iron park bench. Just in front of it, propped on a sturdy-limbed tripod, is a large telescope—the kind amateur stargazers own if they have a spare four hundred thousand dollars kicking around. Flickering torches on the perimeter cast a gentle firelight across the entire garden area.

I concentrate for a moment and the exact time pops into my head: 10:29 p.m. and fifteen seconds. In forty-five seconds, give or take, just like he does every cloudless Sunday night, a man will walk through the door opposite me.

“Infinity One. Report,” says a male voice in my head.

“Situation cool,” my own voice says in my ears, as I speak without speaking again.

“Cool?” the voice says with a tone of annoyance. “Is that how we talk when we’re in the middle of a mission?”

“No, sir. Sorry, sir,” I reply in my mind with military terseness.