Infinite (6 page)

He chuckled, and together we went inside.

Lights flickered on, illuminating dusty furniture. The front section of the lab held the living quarters: kitchen, bedroom, and a small walled-off washroom. Low humming emanated from the laboratory in the back, where the machine produced the poison that had twice put Janan to sleep.

Slowly, others filed inside and made themselves comfortable on the bed, sofa, and the floor. Soon, I’d have to tell them exactly what this place was, though some could probably guess its purpose.

And would I tell them that the machine was making poison right now? Sam had only told me the other night, before the earthquake.

“Now what?” Sam asked me as we finished helping bring in supplies. The others would stay here only a few days, just long enough to recover from their injuries.

“Now we hope the sylph come.” I’d been certain they would be here waiting for me. They’d found me at Purple Rose Cottage, and then followed me here when I decided I needed to study what my father had done to them.

As Sam and I helped the temporary residents of Menehem’s lab clean the area and prepare an evening meal, I kept an eye on the forest outside. The sylph had to come. I needed to know what they wanted from me, and if they could help me stop Janan.

But when darkness fell, only natural shadows filled the woods.

MORNING DAWNED COLD and still, only a few flakes of snow spiraling down. But the vehicles were dusted with white, and the mountains looked like upside-down icicles. The frozen world made Heart and all our troubles seem far away, like a fading memory.

There were still no sylph, but I reminded myself they’d taken a while to come before. And Cris . . .

I gripped the windowsill and closed my eyes, suddenly back inside the skeleton chamber with Cris lying on the stone table, next to Janan’s body. The walls glowed red, and the silver knife flashed as he plunged it into his own chest. White and wind filled the chamber, and it seemed the world had been ripped open. Now he was cursed. A shadow of himself. Incorporeal.

Soft, peaceful snoring brought me shivering back into the present, and I picked my way between the sleepers and headed into the lab.

I’d been in here only briefly last night. It had been dark, and I hadn’t wanted to draw attention to what was going on.

Lots of metal bits and curiosities lurked in the back of the lab, most coated with dust and grime. The groaning machine that made poison was only the size of a bookcase, with a conveyer through the bottom, which pulled canisters under a spout, then pushed them onto the solid floor where they waited to be dealt with. When I’d come in last night, twenty big canisters huddled around the conveyer. I’d moved them aside and added a few empty ones to the “in” side.

Menehem had made a
lot
of extra canisters. But whatever his plans had been, death had delayed them.

Though the canisters were large, the metal was lightweight and they were filled with aerosol, so they weren’t too heavy for me to carry. One by one, I lined them up by the door at the rear of the lab and draped a heavy cloth over them. The door was too big to open now; cold air would shoot in and wake everyone.

Menehem’s notes indicated he’d taken six with him for Templedark. And according to the notes, Janan and the sylph developed a tolerance to the poison swiftly, but so far we had almost three times as much poison, and there was more coming.

Maybe it would be enough to stop Janan during Soul Night.

Finished, I sneaked back into the living area and crouched next to Sam. In sleep, his face was peaceful and soft. I touched his cheek and traced the contours of his jaw and neck. He smiled a little as he opened his eyes. “Ana.”

I leaned down to kiss him, quickly because groans and rustling blankets indicated others were waking, as well. “Make sure the back door gets opened later so I can take the poison outside without everyone noticing.”

He squinted and rubbed his face. “Why?”

“I want to hide it.”

“From everyone?” Alert now, he pushed himself up and whispered by my ear. “Is there someone you don’t trust?”

“No.” I glanced at the people stretching in their sleeping bags and speaking to neighbors. “It’s not that. I just don’t think they’d understand. Not everyone. Someone—any of them—might get the wrong idea and destroy the poison.” I didn’t have a
plan
for the poison yet, but I wanted as many options as possible.

“Do you have to tell them what it is?”

I shrugged. “If they ask, I’ll have to tell them the truth.” These people were on my side because they didn’t want newsouls to suffer. But that didn’t mean they were willing to give up their own immortality for the possibility of more newsouls. They didn’t know—wouldn’t understand—that reincarnation was over anyway.

Sam looked dubious but didn’t say anything else about it, and we spent the next hour assisting with breakfast while Aril and Lorin complained bitterly about Armande’s absence.

“He’d be able to deal with this. Somehow.” Lorin glanced over her shoulder at the dozens of people wandering around the living area. “And there’s only one baking sheet. How are we supposed to feed all these people?”

“You’ll manage,” Sam said, putting on another pot of coffee. The morning passed quickly as Rin went around and treated injuries again, checking on my arm as well. While everyone was busy, I sneaked the canisters outside.

Taking them with us when we left was out of the question. Who knew where we’d travel? But I didn’t want to leave them just sitting in the lab. If Deborl had looked at Menehem’s research, he’d know where the lab was.

There was a wide, clear yard in front of the lab, but behind it was densely forested with spruce and pine and cottonwood trees. Rocks and boulders jutted everywhere. A deer path along a cliff face led to a shallow cave, its entrance mostly concealed by snow-covered brush. Perfect.

Two hours later, I had all the canisters tucked inside the cave, heavy blankets draped over them to insulate them from the cold. Thank goodness Menehem had kept so much junk in his lab.

When I returned, sweaty and gross, everyone was settled down and discussing where to go next. Sam lifted an eyebrow as I sat next to him, and I nodded, ignoring the conversation I had nothing to do with, in favor of thinking about where
we
might go next, and when I might get a chance to work on translating the temple books.

“Ana,” Lidea said, “what is this building? How’d you know to take us here?”

I shifted and wanted to look to Sam or Stef for help, but everyone was waiting. I had to appear confident.

“This is Menehem’s laboratory. It’s where he disappeared to after I was born.”

Dozens of faces turned to me, not hiding the revulsion and loathing at the mention of Menehem and his experiments.

“Is this where he started Templedark? Is this where he started killing our friends?” someone asked.

I resisted the urge to lower my eyes. “Before you say anything, let me tell you what happened.

“The Council told you that Menehem admitted responsibility for Templedark, but that’s not the whole story. It starts almost twenty-five years ago, when he was looking for ways to control the sylph. One night, while he was experimenting in the market field, Ciana was dying in the hospital. He was working with a gas, and there was a minor explosion. Wind took the vapor toward the temple, and the temple went dark.”

Everyone looked pale and sick. Lidea said, “What does that have to do with this place?” She squirmed, as though this air might be contaminated.

“Well, you know Ciana died when the temple was dark. And in the Year of Songs, I was born instead.”

“The gas did it?” Whit asked.

I nodded. “Yes. Once he realized what he’d done, he left Heart to figure out the details. The mixture he’d been working with had been a mistake, one he wasn’t sure how to reproduce. So he built this place, and eighteen years later, he had a breakthrough.

“He’d been working with sylph. I can show you footage, if you want. He documented everything. And one day, his mixture put all the sylph in the area to sleep.”

A couple of people muttered, but mostly they just waited.

“He experimented on the sylph repeatedly, logging how long the poison affected them, the size of the doses—everything. He realized they quickly developed a tolerance for the poison, so it was useless as a weapon.

“And then,” Orrin said, “he took the poison to Heart.”

“Why are you calling it a poison?” Moriah asked. “It doesn’t kill them, does it?”

Other people chimed in with more questions, but stopped when I held up my hands. “It doesn’t kill them. They recover, and there seem to be no lasting effects. But they are put to sleep involuntarily.” I shrugged. “If someone did that to me, I’d think of it as poison.”

Moriah nodded, satisfied with that.

“As for what happened next, Orrin, you’re right.” I fidgeted with the hem of my shirt. “For reasons only Menehem will ever understand, he trapped dozens of sylph in eggs, then took them and a large quantity of the poison to Heart. He set the sylph free and delivered the poison. That night, dragons came too.”

The lab was silent, except for the humming of the machine in the back.

“So.” Moriah tilted her head. “The poison was intended as a weapon against the sylph, but it affected Janan too. Why? How? They aren’t the same things.”

I glanced at Sam, but he offered no answers. “I don’t know,” I said at last. “There’s a connection between them, but I don’t know what it is.”

“And we’re here because . . .” someone in the back asked.

“Because we’re safe here.” For now.

“What about the poison?” Lorin asked. “Is that still a danger?”

A danger. Not an option for stopping Janan. It was as I’d anticipated: they didn’t mind the newsouls who already existed in their lives, but they weren’t willing to risk their own immortality.

Maybe if they knew that oldsouls had been replacing newsouls this whole time—not the other way around—they’d think differently. But even if I told them, they wouldn’t remember. The memory magic would never let them.

I hated that. They’d
all
made the bargain for immortality. Every one of them had traded countless newsouls for their own reincarnation. And none of them could remember.

“The poison isn’t a danger,” I whispered, as though I hadn’t just hidden twenty canisters full of it. “Menehem used an incredible amount on Janan the night of Templedark, and the sylph gained tolerance exponentially. If he isn’t immune to it now, he’s very near.”

They nodded, mostly reassured. After a few more questions, we slid the cover off the video screen and prepared a few discs so they could witness Menehem’s first success with putting sylph to sleep, and his first ideas on how to prove the existence of Janan.

Then, after convincing Rin to give me as much basic medical training as we could fit in, I pulled out the temple books and began the long process of translating the few symbols I knew.

Sam leaned over. “I thought you were going to tell them that I turned on the machine.”

I cast my eyes down at the books and smoothed a bent corner of paper. “It’s easier if they don’t know.”

I’d been attacked and betrayed too many times to trust anyone but our closest friends. People had been
killed
because I’d trusted someone I shouldn’t have, like Wend, and I wouldn’t let that happen again. Not ever.

From now on, I’d tell everyone only what they needed to know, and when they needed to know it.

A few days later, Sam received a call. When he clicked off, he was pale. “That was Armande.”

Everyone in the lab went quiet.

“Deborl has named himself Speaker. With the majority of the Council gone, that makes him the sole leader of Heart. He’s sent Merton and a team of three dozen out of the city. Armande doesn’t know what they’re after or what direction they headed, but I think it’s safe to assume they’re looking for us.

“Meanwhile, Deborl has put several of his friends in charge of the guard, and all the entrances to Heart have been sealed. There’s a citywide curfew, and anyone who stands up for newsouls is imprisoned.”

No one spoke.

“It gets worse,” Sam said. “Deborl has dispatched air drones, programmed to find us.”

I used my hand to mark my place in the temple book on my lap. “Why send air drones if he’s sent people too?” I shook that away. “Rather, why send people if he’s sent air drones? That seems like a waste of time.”

“Perhaps he has another goal for them.” Whit glanced west, toward Heart. “At any rate, we won’t have to worry about Merton and the others for a while. We disabled all the other vehicles in Heart, and it will take them days to walk here in this weather, assuming they even know where we are. It’s the drones we need to worry about.”

“I may be able to reprogram those.” Stef looked up from her SED. “Though I can’t promise Deborl’s people won’t catch the changes. I’ll monitor the program.

“I’m also sending the archive of maps to everyone’s SEDs, so we ought to go over your route once more—and then you should leave. Everyone not staying with Ana needs to get as far away from Range as possible. Tonight.”

That evening, the eight vehicles parked in front of the lab were gone. Only Sam, Stef, and Whit remained with me.

“Why don’t we leave?” Whit asked, as we settled down for bed. “If Deborl is searching for us, why are we staying in one spot?”

“I’m waiting for someone.” But when I stared out the window, Cris and the other sylph were nowhere to be seen.

NOW THAT THE others were gone, Menehem’s lab was too quiet, and I spent all my time poring over the temple books and translations of symbols, hoping for a breakthrough. But if there was anything about how to stop Janan, I hadn’t seen it yet.

“We need to consider moving on,” Whit said one afternoon. “Every day we stay here is another day Deborl might find us.”

“Especially since we’ll have to walk.” Sam flipped through his SED, checking for earthquakes and eruptions around Range. From beside him, I could see several red dots on the screen, but none of them were very large.

“And carry all our things.” Stef looked up from reading through Menehem’s notes on building his machine.

“We’re waiting for the sylph.” I turned a page in the temple book and scribbled out a few more possible translations. “And Cris.”

Whit cocked his head at me. “Wait, how will Cris be here? He died during the riot on market day.”

I groaned and dropped my face into my hands. “Stef. Your turn.”

She sighed. “You promise if we tell him enough, he’ll start to remember?”

I nodded, face still buried in my hands. “It worked on Sam. The magic will crack and fade, but it takes time.”

“I’m sitting right here,” Whit muttered darkly.

“Cris is a sylph now.” Stef headed for the kitchen area, an empty coffee mug in hand. “When Deborl trapped Cris, Ana, and me inside the temple, Cris sacrificed himself in order to free us.”

“You were inside the temple?” Whit asked.

I slammed the temple book shut and grabbed my notebook. “This is what Cris told me: five thousand years ago, Janan was your leader. The leader of all the humans, as far as I can tell. He was just a man, nothing more. But he craved immortality, so he gathered a group of warriors and went hunting for the secrets of eternal life. Something big happened. I don’t know what. I’m studying the books, trying to understand. Then Janan and his warriors were imprisoned in towers all across the world. When his followers—you—heard of his capture, they went to free him.

“They—you traveled until you reached an immense wall ringing a single tower. But when you tried to free him, he said the phoenixes had imprisoned him because he had succeeded in his quest: he’d discovered the secret to immortality.”

“And then what?” Whit asked.

“Then . . .”

Stef lifted an eyebrow, a silent question. Did I want her to say it?

I shook my head. No. No one else needed to bear that guilt. And . . . it was easier if they didn’t know.

Sam looked at me with a sudden and penetrating curiosity, as though he could tell I held back something important.

I averted my gaze and continued speaking. “Then Janan shed his mortal form. He became part of the temple, which was already infused with phoenix magic, and began the journey to immortality.
True
immortality, without the cycle of life and death and rebirth. He wanted you all to wait for him. He wanted to come back and rule you as he had before”—so he’d told them—“so he caused you to reincarnate.”

Stef nodded. “We allowed Meuric to bind us in chains inside the temple, and then Janan became part of the temple. We were all bound to him.”

From across the room, Sam’s gaze was dark and heavy and grieving.

“Does that mean—” Whit glanced from me to Sam and back. “Oh. You’ll never be reincarnated, will you?”

I shrugged and opened the temple book again. “It’s not important.”

“It is—” he started.

“It’s not. There’s nothing we can do about it, and even if we could change it, the cost is too great.” I tried to focus on my work, but my vision was misty. No matter what happened, this was it for me. I had this one fleeting life.

I had to make the most of it.

“All right.” Whit’s voice was soft; he was only conceding because he wouldn’t argue with a girl who’d live only once.

I didn’t look up from the book, but I could feel everyone’s stares. Their pity.

Sam’s grief.

“It’s not important,” I repeated. “After Soul Night, no one is getting reincarnated anyway. Not even you. The next time someone dies, they’re gone forever.”

A heavy silence descended on the lab, this simple and terrifying truth a smothering snow. I should have said it more gently. They all knew the truth, but they probably didn’t appreciate being reminded any more than I enjoyed being reminded about my newness.

After a moment, Sam took a seat across the table from me. “We keep talking about Janan ascending and returning and how it will destabilize the caldera enough that it erupts, but what does Janan’s ascending actually mean? Will he stay here? Go somewhere else? Be corporeal or not? You said he doesn’t have a mortal form anymore. Will he be just a soul flying around?”

“If you can say he even has a soul,” I muttered, but Sam’s words struck something else inside me. No mortal form. Just a soul flying around.

Like sylph?

“He was human once.” Stef leaned against the wall, her arms crossed. “He must have had a soul at some point.”

Less sure, but unwilling to argue, I turned back to Sam’s question. “I don’t know what will happen, or how. That’s why I’ve been trying to translate these books.”

“Then let’s do that.” Sam picked through my notebook, finding my potential translations of strings of symbols from the books. “This symbol means Heart, city, and prison?” He pointed at a circle with a dot inside.

I nodded. “That’s my best guess. You’ve mentioned the wall in the north before.”

Sam hesitated. “Yes. I remember the wall.”

“Cris told me about another white wall in a jungle.” I’d repeated this story to Sam already, and Stef knew it, but Whit hadn’t heard it. “He said he was collecting plants and came across crumbling white stone. When he climbed on top of a tall piece, he realized the stone had once been a huge wall, which circled a collapsed tower. There was enough rubble around the tower to indicate it had once been as tall as the temple in the center of Heart.”

“But there were no other buildings,” Stef added. “It was like Heart, but without our homes and the Councilhouse, if you looked at it from above, it would look like a circle with a dot in the middle.”

“Right. And I’m guessing they were all prisons, like the temple inside Heart originally was for Janan. Cris told us that all the warriors with Janan were imprisoned separately so they’d never join forces again. That also begins to explain why Heart is built over a caldera that size, even though it’s entirely impractical.”

“Why?” Whit asked.

“Because it was a prison. It was meant to deter people from coming to rescue him. The other prisons we know of are in the frozen north, and in the jungle where not even the water is safe to drink. Who knows where the others are?” None of my friends would be able to remember the locations, even if they’d seen them. Not without a lot of prodding and leading questions, and I could only offer leading questions if I had an idea of where to start. Like Sam’s death. Or symbols Cris might have seen. “Maybe under the ocean, or in deserts, or high on a mountain where the air’s so thin you can’t breathe. They could be anywhere.”

“To be fair to us, though, Heart didn’t look dangerous at first.” Stef frowned. “Except for the geysers and mud pools and fumaroles . . .”

I nodded. “You were on a quest to find your leader, anyway. You believed he’d been wrongly imprisoned, because that’s what you were told.”

“Who told us?” Whit asked.

“I’m not sure. Cris didn’t mention.” I frowned and tried to recall everything he’d said, but those hours in the temple were a blur. I’d been so afraid and depressed.

“And how’d we get the key?” Stef asked. “Someone must have taken it, because otherwise, Janan never could have gotten out to speak to us, and we never could have gotten in.”

I doodled spirals in the margins of my notebook. “If phoenixes built the prisons, it seems likely they would have had the key, as well. Someone must have stolen it from them.”

“That seems like a reasonable conclusion,” Whit said, but I wondered how much of the conversation he was actually retaining. “Perhaps your books will give us the answers.”

“That’s my hope.” I turned the page. The spiral of writing was easy to see now, and I’d gotten better at spotting the symbols I knew, without having to search for them. But it wasn’t enough. Time was running out, and what if I deciphered the text only to realize it was a list of complicated instructions that I couldn’t possibly complete before Soul Night?

What if the books only told me I was too late to stop Janan?

I couldn’t think like that.

“Well, let’s keep working for now.” Sam turned my notebook toward me again. “Just tell us what you need us to do, and hopefully the sylph will show up soon. It took them about a week when we were here before.”

“Thanks.” But we’d been here a week and a half now. Either they’d come, or I’d misinterpreted their actions before, and they wanted nothing to do with us.

Shrill beeping jerked me from my slumber.

In his sleeping bag next to me, Sam squinted around the front room, looking just as confused as I felt. “What’s that?” Whit echoed the question from his place on the sofa.

It was Stef’s turn on the bed. We all looked up at her as SED light illuminated her face, making her skin eerily white. “We have to go.” Her voice was rough with sleep, but something in her expression snapped. “We have to go.
Now.
”

Everyone scrambled up, elbows and knees thudding on the floor, and within five minutes, we’d swept our belongings into backpacks and rolled up our sleeping bags. When everything was ready, we turned off the lights and headed outside, leaving the soft thrum of the machine in the lab.

The night was crisp but motionless as we headed east down an overgrown path, continuing away from Heart. Darkness made the unfamiliar ground difficult to navigate, but moonlight shone down, reflecting off ice and snow. Our breaths misted, reverse sylph.

When the lab was out of sight, I adjusted my winter clothes, which I’d thrown on too hastily, and took in the midnight surroundings. “What was that alarm, Stef?” My voice sounded so loud in the darkness.

“A warning that someone had overwritten my commands for the drones. Before, I could keep them away from the lab, searching other areas of Range. But someone else is in control now.”

“Can’t you take back control?” Whit asked.

“If I had more time, and a data console. My SED just isn’t powerful enough.”

“Stef’s Everything Device isn’t everything after all?” Whit teased.

Stef glared, and no one laughed.

“What about Orrin and the others?” Whit asked. “Will the drones be able to find them?”

Stef’s nod was barely perceptible in the dark. “It’s possible, but unlikely. They’re far enough out of Range now. It was the lab we needed to worry about.”

“And he’ll find it,” I added, “because he’s seen Menehem’s research. He wouldn’t come out here himself, though. Not after the guard station.”

“Right.” Stef tapped her SED, bringing up a screen filled with unfamiliar codes. “He doesn’t know what’s in there that we might use to fight back. Menehem has always made Deborl nervous.”

Menehem had probably made a lot of people nervous.

Maybe that was part of what made me so frightening to others: not only was I a newsoul, I was Menehem’s daughter.

We stopped to rest where the wide path dipped into a hollow, keeping us out of sight. Trees and mountains rose high around us, blocking most of the moonlight. It looked as if the path kept going for a ways beyond Range, but it wasn’t maintained regularly. Mostly deer and other large fauna had been using it; tufts of fur had caught on brush, and hoof and paw prints stamped the snow.

There was little evidence of the caravan of exiles passing through, though when I bent, I found snapped blades of frozen grass and twigs, crushed into smeared vehicle tread marks. Time and weather would erase those, and the four of us would leave even fewer traces.

“We should get far enough away from the lab that the drones won’t find us quickly,” Whit said. His voice was harsh on the still night. “And we should get off the path, because won’t that be the next guess? We left the lab and took the path?”

Stef nodded. “I don’t like that it’s so obvious.”

I drifted along the edge of the path, searching for . . . something. I wasn’t sure.

“What are you thinking?” Sam appeared beside me, a warm, dark presence that calmed and excited me. We’d had no time alone, except for the moments before sleep, and those had been exhausted moments, separated by our bedding and a small stretch of floor. We were just close enough that we could see each other and reach to touch, but no more. If we’d been closer, if he’d been holding me at night and I’d kissed him, I don’t know that I would have ever stopped.

I turned my face to the stars. “What do you see?”

“The sky.” He wrapped his arm around my waist, pulling himself close. “Lots and lots of sky.”

“How often do labor drones clear this path?” We were outside of Range now, beyond where people regularly traveled. There was no reason for the path to be so clear. Even the trees above looked as though they’d been pushed aside recently, though not with the evenness of a labor drone. The fallen branches all had jagged edges, as though they’d been ripped from the trunks.

“Not very often.” Sam lowered his voice. “I see what you mean.”

“What lives this way? Trolls?”

“Yes.”

And they traveled this way frequently enough to carve a path through the woods. “Do you think the others would have run into trolls?”

“I don’t know.” Sam tilted his head, listening. I listened, too, to the soft voices on the trail, a pale breeze rustling pine trees, the clatter of some small creature high in cottonwood branches, and a pack of wolves howling in the distance. “I don’t hear anything unusual.”

“Me neither. Still, I agree with Stef and Whit. We need to get off the path.”

We turned toward our friends again, but just as Sam began to speak, a deafening screech came from above.

Everyone looked up at once.

It was shaped like an eagle, but big enough to block out half the sky.