Infinity Lost (17 page)

“You may only be sixteen years old, but if you’re not taking any of this seriously I’ll wipe your mind clean like a rag to a whiteboard. Do you understand, Infinity One?”

Same old empty threat. They’d never actually wipe my mind clean. They need a soldier who can think for herself in a situation like this, not a mindless zombie. In fact, I’m not totally sure they can even do it at all, but as usual I’ll play along.

“I’m completely focused on the job at hand, sir.”

“Good. Don’t forget that I could have Onix scan your mind back at base to get the truth. I know what a good liar you are.”

“Yes, sir; oh, and by the way, I’m seventeen years old today, sir.”

“Happy birthday.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Mind scans. That they
can
do. I’m not worried. Onix is on my side. He fakes every one of my mind-scan results. They still hurt like a drill to the skull, though.

I hear the quiet creak of a door opening and I quickly focus my attention. Footsteps tap on concrete tiles, then muffle into the soft rustle of shoes on grass.

I peek around the corner and see the back of a silver-haired man in a white suit taking a seat on the bench. I watch as he leans forward and adjusts knobs on the telescope, pausing every now and then to look up into the night sky.

“Eyes on subject,” I say in my mind.

“Engage target,” the voice replies.

I step from cover and move silently through the night like a ghost. Forty feet from the back of the iron bench I leap, an unnaturally high, arcing leap. At the apex I cock my arm back and give a short whistle. The man turns his head in surprise and looks up in startled horror as I land like a crouched cat behind him, perfectly balanced on the thin edge of the back of the bench. He doesn’t have time to cry out for help, or even blink for that matter, as my arm shoots forward like a striking cobra. My pointed index finger pierces through his eye socket and into his brain like the tip of a dagger, popping eyeball juice all over the back of my hand like the jelly inside a plump, round grape. His other eyeball looks at me in morbid disbelief before slowly rolling back in his skull like a weighted marble. His mouth drops agog and his arms fall limp. Blood and eye goop run down his face, through his thick wiry moustache, and dribble fast and thick into his open mouth. I wiggle my spear-tip digit in his eye hole, mulching his brain a little more just for good measure, and his arms jut out comically in stiff contorted angles as his body quivers and spasms. His final gasping breath becomes a gargling death rattle as he chokes on his own blood and ocular fluid. I smile like the cat from Wonderland. I withdraw my finger with an unceremonious shlooping sound and his lifeless body rolls off the bench and onto the cool grass.

His name was Bernard Munce, former member of the board of directors of Blackstone Technologies.

I called him Walrus Face.

I remember that day when I was six years old, you bastard. The day you tore my dress and tried to violate me. All for what? “Scientific curiosity?” I would have killed you even if I hadn’t been instructed to. This is a very good day. I couldn’t have asked for a better gift. Happy birthday to me.

I look down at his dead body and grin. He thought he’d deleted every trace of his former life. He thought that we would never find him. He was wrong. As it turns out, dead wrong. I laugh out loud at my own lame joke. Still perched like a crow on the back of the bench, I inhale deeply and take in the stars. It really is a lovely night to be stargazing.

“Task achieved,” I say in my mind.

“Well done. Come home, Infinity One,” responds the voice.

Time to go.

I’ll scale the side of the building and disappear into the night through the back streets of the city. From there I’ll rendezvous with the transport and be back in England before dawn.

The sound of porcelain breaking on concrete shatters the silence and I spin around. A dark-haired man in his thirties wearing a black suit and red tie is standing at the open-access door; shards of broken teacup lie in a steaming puddle at his feet. “Mr. Munce?” he asks in a graveled whisper.

It’s Munce’s bodyguard.

There’s a look of shocked astonishment on his face as the gravity of the situation sinks in. It would’ve been nice to have finished the job before he got here.

Oh well.

His gaze flicks across Bernard Munce’s corpse and his expression changes from shock to one of deep sorrow. “Bernie?” he whispers again, his voice cracking. His eyes shift directly to me and his demeanor flash-changes to utter rage. With one fluid, well-trained movement, he whips a gun from a concealed holster and points it directly at my chest.

It doesn’t make any difference. In three-point-two seconds, he’ll be dead as well.

I spring at him from the bench like a vampire bat and his gun lights up the night.

BANG!

I envelop his head with my arms, twisting and pulling upward in a manner so practiced that it’s second nature, separating the vertebrae in his neck with a succession of muffled popping sounds. I backflip off his falling body and land silently in a crouch on the rooftop.

Three-point-two seconds.

I look down and notice the hole in the center of my chest where his bullet pierced my body armor. Point-blank range. Went right through. I poke my finger into the hole and pull my pendant out through it.

“Damn it,” I say out loud.

“What is it, Infinity One? What’s happened?” the voice asks in my head.

“Bodyguard. Shot me.”

“Damage report.”

“It’s OK. I’m uninjured.”

“Good. Rendezvous with the transport. Report back when you’re there.”

“Yes, sir.”

I look down at my pendant and run my thumb across the black, diamond-shaped stone set in the silver circle. There’s a sizeable chip in the center and thin cracks splay across its entire surface.

Damn it to hell. I may not remember where I got this thing, but for some reason it means the world to me.

I walk over, pick up the gun from the concrete and point it at the dead bodyguard’s head.
For cracking my pendant I’m going to empty every bullet in this gun right into your face. You can have a closed-casket funeral and we’ll call it even.

My finger tightens on the trigger. My hand begins to tremble. I feel very strange. It’s hard to describe the sensation. It almost feels like I’m sorry for what I’ve just done. Like it was wrong somehow. Like what I’m about to do is wrong, too. I look down at the pistol in my trembling hand and it feels like it doesn’t belong there.

I toss the gun aside and walk to the ledge of the building, trying my best to shake off the jitters. That felt decidedly unpleasant. What the hell was that?

I push it to the back of my mind and look over the edge into the street below. It’s an easy climb. I spot a police car turning down an adjacent side street. Its pursuit lights suddenly flash on red and blue and its siren wails into life, but it’s not heading toward this building. Guess I’m not the only one doing dark deeds in this city tonight.

I watch it drive away into the distance in the opposite direction, but strangely its siren is getting louder and louder. It changes in pitch, mutating in my ears until it almost sounds like a human scream. In fact, it sounds exactly like a human scream. A blood-curdling scream so loud that it feels like it’s coming right out of my own throat. It’s then that I realize . . . it
is
me.

Red light pours into my eyes and I’m cowering on the floor, holding my knees to my chest, screaming at the top of my lungs. With a loud smack, Bit slaps me hard across the cheek. The sting focuses my eyes on her scarlet-tinged face and I glare from side to side at the walls of the tiny room. With a computerized ping, they flick back to pristine white, as bright and clean as freshly fallen snow, mocking what I know to be true. Another stolen memory has reared its gruesome head, and it’s smeared from end to end with the blood of two men that I ruthlessly murdered, on the night of my seventeenth birthday, on a moonlit rooftop in Paris.

CHAPTER TWELVE

All I can do is stare at Bit, kneeling there in front of me. My eyes are wide open but I’m not really seeing anything. I’m just staring at her, then right through her. Farther I reel, deeper into the abyss, blindly clawing in the dark recesses of my mind, searching for more. Hoping to find an answer, an excuse, any damn good reason, any reason at all why I would brutally kill two men in cold blood. Of course I don’t find what I’m looking for.

Wait! My pendant!

It’s physical
proof
that I’m innocent. I quickly loop my finger under the chain, pull the stone out from the top of my blouse, and cradle it in my palm. It looks perfectly normal, undamaged, no different from any other of the countless times I’ve seen it. I smile and almost laugh with relief as I rub my thumb across its smooth black surface. I may be losing my mind, but at least I’m not a killer. My fingernail catches the curve of the silver circle and as the pendant flips over I suddenly feel all the blood draining from my face. There, spanning out from the center of the stone like a sinister cobweb . . . is a lattice of splinter-thin cracks.

I let the pendant drop against my chest. There’s no rationalizing or denying it. It
was
me on that rooftop. Dressed like a soldier. Moving like a hunter. Killing like an assassin and smiling like a psychopath. The truth is a jagged knife in my soul.

I just saw myself commit murder. Twice.

It’s true. It’s all true, and yet I just can’t accept the fact that such horrific acts were performed with my own two hands. These two hands. They’re quivering, wet with perspiration. In my mind the sweat becomes rivulets of blood. Thick gelatinous fluid drips down my wrist from the punctured sac of the deflated eyeball perched on my fingertips. I groan and retch as my stomach churns and a shiver of disgust ripples through my entire body.

“Finn . . .” Bit touches my cheek. “I’m so sorry I hit you, Finn, but you wouldn’t stop screaming. What’s wrong? Tell me.”

I look her in the eyes and pull her hand away by the wrist. “I murdered two people.”

“Finn . . . you’re hurting me.”

I look down and see that Bit’s hand is turning purple.

“Oh god, I’m sorry,” I say, releasing her.

Bit rubs at her wrist, her forehead furrowed with concern. “You said you . . .
killed
someone?”

I nod solemnly. “The dreams, Bit . . . the dreams I’ve been having. They’re not just dreams like I told you they were. They’re memories. They’re all coming back to me. They’re happening when I’m awake now, and I’m remembering all sorts of things. Things I never knew I had done. And right now, just a second ago, I remembered . . . killing two men.”

I can’t stop shaking. Bit sits down against the wall across from me.

“They’re happening when you’re awake now? What did you see?”

I ball my hands into fists, trying to stop the trembling. “I saw a rooftop, and I was there, and I had come to kill a man. It was me . . . but not me. It’s hard to explain but I . . . I knew it was me but I didn’t . . . I didn’t recognize myself.”

“It was you, but
not
you?”

“It really happened! I know it did!” Bit flinches at my sudden outburst. “His name was Bernard Munce. He knew my father. I killed him with my bare hands, Bit. And . . . and I
enjoyed
it. I really killed him, Bit! Him and his bodyguard. It was a month ago, on the night of my seventeenth birthday.”

Bit just sits there against the wall looking at me strangely, intently. There’s no fear or suspicion or doubt in her eyes at all. She’s looking at me like she’s studying me, almost as if she’s waiting for something.

“Someone has been messing with my mind, Bit; don’t ask me how I know, but I know for certain now. I swear it.”

“What do you mean, Finn?”

I want to tell her everything. About Jonah, about Nanny Theresa, about Carlo. Especially Carlo. Who he was, how much he meant to me, how he was stolen from my mind and erased from my life. Everything. But it’s all too much to find the words for.

“I’m not going crazy, Bit,” I say, choking back tears. “Something is happening to me and it’s real. I know it is. I just have to figure out what’s going on.”

“OK. I believe you. I really do,” she says sincerely.

“Thanks, Bit. Please don’t tell anyone about this. Not until I get it all sorted in my head.”

“Do you think you should’ve told me all this in front of that?” Bit says, pointing up at the Drone.

“I’ve said it. Can’t take it back.”

I look up at the Drone, standing there as still and rigid as a silver mannequin.

“From what I’ve seen, they only seem to listen to Percy’s bracelet-thing, anyway.”

Bit smiles and nods. “His command module. Yeah, it looks that way. I’d love to get my hands on one of those things.”

“Yeah,” I reply, tucking my hands under my arms to stop the tremors.

“Hey, Finn. Y’know that guy you . . . killed? That Bernard guy?”

I nod. The images flash back across my mind and my skin crawls.

Bit picks at her fingernail and looks at the floor. “Try not to feel so bad about it. He deserved to die.”

I squint at Bit. That was the last thing I expected to hear coming from the lips of bookish little Bettina Otto. “Deserved it?” I ask incredulously.

Bit nods and looks up at me, right into my eyes, like she’s searching for something in them. “Yes. Especially after everything he’s done.”

Did she just say what I think she said? OK, I take it back.
That
was the last thing I expected to hear from her. Why would she say that? Does she somehow know what he did to me when I was a little girl? If so, how? There’s no way that she could know who Bernard Munce was. It’s impossible. I can’t have told her. I didn’t even remember that I had met him myself until I dreamed about it on the bus this morning. And even then I thought my imagination was playing tricks on me! In any case, she’s wrong. The memory of what he did when I was young is real, I know that now. But it surely didn’t deserve a death sentence.

I’m trying to cut through the writhing coils of confusion to form a coherent question when the wall beside us suddenly slides open, revealing a short, bright-white corridor.

The Drone juts a hand out, directing us into the passage, and Bit springs to her feet. I sit in stunned silence, trying desperately to wrap my head around what she just said to me. I look up at Bit, completely lost. She’s just standing there, her hand outstretched toward me, her face devoid of emotion.

“Coming, Infinity?”

Infinity? That’s the second time she’s ever called me that, and both times were only in the last few minutes. What is Bit not telling me? How did I do all those things on that rooftop? Whose was that man’s voice in my head? With more questions than answers reeling in my mind, I tuck my pendant of shame away and wearily take her hand. One way or another, when I pull myself together, she’s going to tell me what she knows. I’ll make damned sure of it.

Bit strides ahead and I drag my feet after her, more confused than ever, the Drone in step close behind me.

We walk down the short white corridor and it ends in another frosted-glass door with another big number one on it. It slides open automatically and we go through into a bright rectangular room the size of a tennis court. It has sky-blue walls with wispy white clouds floating gently across them. They must be huge reality-definition video screens. The shiny white floor and low ceiling of the room are absolutely spotless. There’s a door in each of the four walls, all with a different large gray number embossed on it. Professor Francis is there to greet us; he’s frowning, standing in the center of the room with six glossy-white chairs positioned in a row before him. Another Drone is standing motionless a few feet behind him, its hands by its sides like a soldier. The word “SECURITY” is scrolling in red across its mask, too, just like the one that brought me here. Our robotic chaperone walks past us and, with a rigid little half-spin, takes up a position behind the Professor as well. Those things are so freaking creepy.

The Professor clears his throat and looks down his nose at us. “Miss Otto. Didn’t think anyone saw you trotting off after Miss Brogan, did you? I saw you.” He holds an open palm out toward the row of chairs. “Take a seat, ladies.”

I’m still shaken from that horrific memory, so a seat would actually be quite nice right now. Bit sits down beside me and I look over at her. She doesn’t look back; she just stares straight ahead with the smallest hint of a smile on her face. I’m not sure why, but that little smirk of hers makes me uncomfortable.

We sit there in silence. The disgruntled Professor flanked by two identical silver female bodyguards set against a bright-blue sky and fluffy white clouds makes the whole scene, quite frankly, surreal.

“Just so I don’t have to repeat myself . . .” he says, adding a tapping foot to the bizarre equation, “. . . we’ll wait for the others to arrive before I begin.”

No sooner have the words come out of his mouth than the door with the big gray number three on it slides open. Brent steps through, followed closely by Brody. They’re both disheveled. Brent’s formerly brushed and styled fringe has been blown into a mess, and his nostrils are ringed with drying blood. He looks more pissed off than I’ve ever seen him, and that’s quite a feat in itself. I can’t help but smile, and for the briefest moment the sorrow and shock of all my new memories are dulled a tiny notch, even though one of my hands won’t stop quivering.

“Take a seat, gentlemen,” Professor Francis instructs in his best attempt at a stern voice. They both walk over to the chairs, ignoring me and Bit, and sit at the opposite end of the row. The two Drones that followed them in walk over to join the others in line behind the Professor.

Door number four slides open and Ryan saunters through, looking indignantly over his shoulder at the Drone behind him. As he gets nearer to the row of chairs, his attention shifts to Brent, but his expression remains the same, dagger-throwing glower.

He walks right past the boys and takes a seat beside me; his scowl transforms into a cheeky smile and the sparkle in his sideways glance instantly returns. “Well, hello there. Come here often?”

I smile to myself and shake my head.

“Quiet please, Mr. Forrester.”

“Sorry, Professor.”

Professor Francis scans our little row of delinquents, his arms still folded, still scowling at us, still failing miserably to intimidate us. I can’t help but wonder what exactly he could possibly say to a bunch of teenagers who, for the most part, have probably never been told off or punished for anything before in their lives. Maybe we’ll have to stay in this boring room for the rest of the trip. Stuck in a room with Brent and Brody for hours would definitely be punishment enough for me.

Half a minute goes by and still Professor Francis stays silent. I frown, wondering what on earth he’s waiting for, when suddenly I remember the empty chair between Ryan and Brody.

Who is that chair for?

The quiet shooshing sound of door number two opening causes Ryan to turn, revealing three red scratch marks streaked down his left cheek.

“Ryan, your face. What happened?”

“
She
happened,” he whispers, looking past me.

I turn my head to see the unthinkable. Margaux Pilfrey sashays through the door with her head held high, raking her manicured fingernails through her long blonde hair. Percy appears from the open door behind her. He looks drained, but not a hair is out of place.

“Computer, another chair for me,” he says dejectedly. With a quiet electronic ping and a soft hiss, a white chair identical to ours molds up from the floor beside the door and he flumps into it. Another Drone emerges from the door beside him and joins the others in the line.

Margaux strides over, stops in her tracks, and thrusts her finger at the empty chair.

“I am not sitting next to that Forrester animal.”

“You’ll sit, Miss Pilfrey, or you’ll be charged with assaulting Mr. Forrester. I don’t imagine that would look good on anyone’s permanent record,” Professor Francis warns, eyeballing the whole row.

I can tell by the look on her face that she’s weighing the consequences carefully. “Fine,” Margaux says venomously. She walks over, plops down on the chair beside Ryan, folds her arms, crosses her legs, and screws up her eyes to match her furious pout.

Professor Francis sighs deeply.

“Honestly, I’m extremely disappointed with all of you.”

“But, Professor—” objects Brent.

“Let me speak, please, Mr. Fairchild.” Professor Francis looks at the floor and slowly shakes his head. He takes a handkerchief from the inside pocket of his tweed jacket, plucks his glasses from his nose, and wearily rubs the lenses.

“Once upon a time, I could have had my pick of teaching positions at some very prestigious schools, you know.”

He puts his glasses back on and looks down his scarlet-tipped nose at all of us. “But I chose to accept a job at Bethlem Academy. It might interest you to know that there was once an insane asylum of the same name.”

He tucks the handkerchief away and puts his hands behind his back, completing his all-too-familiar lecture-delivery stance.

“The manner in which all of you behaved today makes me wonder whether I took a wrong turn all those years ago and did indeed end up teaching physics to a bunch of teenage mental patients.”

Bit’s hand shoots up.

“Yes, Miss Otto, I’m well aware you were not directly involved in the altercation, but the fact that you chose to sneak away into a restricted area without permission certainly does not absolve you of guilt, now, does it?”

Bit slowly lowers her hand.

Margaux snorts. “None of this is
my
fault, and how dare you call me a mental patient. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“You very nearly took out Mr. Forrester’s eye, Miss Pilfrey.”

“It was self-defense.”

“Well, how can that be when Mr. Forrester was clearly being restrained by the . . . the . . .” Professor Francis waves his hand in the general direction of the six identical silver androids behind him.