Infinity Lost (23 page)

I don’t want to die, Carlo.

I don’t want to die, but there is nothing I can do.

There is no more air in my throat.

There’s nowhere left to run.

No more fight in my heart.

And with a final gasp . . . everything goes black.

The searing pain in my lungs disappears and my hand stops hurting. I feel like I’m floating, like I’m being taken away from my body, drifting away like smoke in the night. I’m gently laid down in the soft of the void and the dark is my blanket, wrapping around my body like a thick cocoon. I’m so very sleepy. All I want to do is close my eyes and drift away. Drift away and be part of the warm, dark silence forever
. Close your eyes now, Finn. Close your eyes and sleep forever. Your spark is fading and will soon be gone. No more pain. No more misery.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

That sound . . . What is that sound?

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

Is it? Yes, I think it is. It’s someone’s footsteps in the dark.

I wearily look in the direction of the sound and see a figure silhouetted in a soft light glowing from somewhere in the endless blackness. Am I dead? Has death come to take me?

The footsteps stop and the dim light begins to brighten and widen and rise up high above the figure’s head, shining down on its long, smooth, black hair.

Suddenly there’s a voice, whispering from all around. It’s strange and distorted, tinny and cold; it speaks from nowhere and echoes into everywhere.

“Do you know what your problem is, Finn?” asks the voice.

I move my lips but nothing comes out. The voice speaks again, cutting like a blade through the dark.

“Your problem is . . . you give up too easily.”

This time the voice is so familiar that it chills me to the core. Suddenly a new light, harsh and bright, bursts forth from the darkness like a commanding beacon, directly into the figure’s face and I see for the first time who that person is.

It’s me.

Inexplicably, dressed all in black, standing before me in a cone of blinding light . . . is
me
! A smile curls at the edges of her lips. The mirror image of me has a look in her eyes that I’ve never seen in my own eyes before. It’s like the death stare of a stalking jaguar. She steps out of the light and it fades away as she kneels down beside me. She takes my hand in hers and gently strokes my hair, smiling down at me with what almost looks like pity. I don’t know why, but I feel . . . afraid of her.

Suddenly I know. Suddenly it all makes perfect sense.

She
is the one I saw in my memories!
She
is the one who kills as easily as breathing.
She
did those horrible things . . . not me! She leans in close and I find that I can’t move at all. I’m paralyzed by my own presence. She’s not me. She looks like me, but we are as different from each other as night is from the day.

“Close your eyes, Finn,” she whispers, her breath cold against my cheek. “There’s no need to worry.”

She softly runs her fingers through my hair. Deep inside I find the courage to look up into her face. She looks down at me and her smile disappears. With one quick movement, she grabs a fistful of my hair and pulls it back, hard. I screw up my eyes in pain, my mouth open wide in a silent scream. She releases her grip and I open my eyes to find that she’s gone, vanished into the void even faster than she arrived. I don’t even have time to wonder what this could mean when her voice drifts down from somewhere up above and echoes in my ears.

“Now, it’s my turn.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Deafening tones of warning punch through my skull. My right hand, my lungs, and my collapsing windpipe are all urgently insistent and annoyingly unanimous. Damage. Damage. Damage.

I force my eyes open and find myself staring directly into the all-too-familiar, dead-eyed glare of Dr. Theresa Pierce.

I always hated that bitch.

I look down to see that her grinning face is gruesomely attached to the silver-hooded head of a Drone Template’s body. Her attention switches from my throat to my open eyes, and even though she’s only a few seconds away from completely crushing my windpipe, I take delight in the fact that her face suddenly flashes with shocked surprise.

I hold up my right hand and assess the damage. All five fingers are twisted and badly broken. The skin is mostly intact apart from a short spike of red-stained bone jutting from the side of my thumb. I stare at them angrily and concentrate. I force what’s left of the oxygen in my blood to burn into energy. My crumpled fingers momentarily quiver; then, like resurrected soldiers being called to attention, they obediently pop and wiggle and move and straighten themselves back into place. The open wound on my thumb closes itself up from the bottom like a flesh-colored zipper, leaving nothing behind but a tiny drop of blood on the surface of my skin. I wiggle them to test that they’re working. Dr. Peirce’s eyes narrow fiercely as her grip clutches twice as tight as before. She quickly grabs my throat double-handed and squeezes even harder. With a Drone’s strength she could very likely rip me apart. I had better make absolutely sure that she doesn’t.

I concentrate and immediately reinforce the calcium and iron deposits in the bones of my neck, hardening and fusing the vertebrae like a column of stone.

I’m sure that the good doctor here would know that calcium and iron are common metals found in everyone’s bodies, and even though she has no idea what I’m doing, I’m guessing by the hilarious bewildered look on her face that she’s wondering why she’s having so much trouble tearing my head off.

That’s right. It’s my body now, and it does exactly what it’s told. Just like a good soldier should.

It’s time to turn the tables. I push my fingers up between her wrists, gripping the left one, locking it in place with my left hand. I increase the bone density in my right forearm and overstimulate the muscles in my arm. It pistons upward in a blur, palm striking the back of her elbow like a battering ram. With a loud crack, her elbow joint buckles completely, jutting toward the ceiling, releasing her grip from my neck. Her expression doesn’t change at all. From past experience, people usually scream their lungs out just from witnessing their own arm being snapped like a tree branch. Oh, of course. This isn’t really her body and she’s not really Theresa Pierce. Just her digitized brain waves and troll-like face in a quite frankly ridiculous foil wrapper.

Focus. It still has you by the neck with its other hand.
I concentrate and taper the edge of the bone inside my right forearm like a sword. The joint is the weakest part of any limb, be it flesh and bone or artificial like this Drone’s, so with one deft, lightning-fast axe strike, I chop completely through its other skinny arm at the elbow. I wouldn’t usually use such an extreme technique. Shaping my bones into blades slices my skin as well, and the repairs just mean more for me to think about, but this android thing is a lot tougher than a human. It had to be done. And to my delight, the desired outcome is joyfully satisfying.

Stuff squirts out the severed end.

It isn’t blood, though. It’s all thick and glowing orange.

Gross. Freed from strangulation, I bring my knee up, push from my hips, and the android stumbles backward. I pull the dripping severed appendage from my throat, toss it aside, and finally inhale a massive relieving breath, soaking in the oxygen and silencing the loudest of the annoying alert gongs ringing in my head. In the next two breaths I repair my windpipe, refill my collapsed lung, and return the flexibility to my neck.

One of the Drone’s arms is bent like a boomerang, and the other is squirting a trail of orange all over this nice clean floor. People blood I’m used to, but that goop the droid is bleeding out is just plain disgusting. Give me good old human red any day. The Drone looks down, side to side at its useless arms, processing what just happened in the last seven seconds.

Theresa’s face glares up at me with a look of sudden realization. “You.”

“Hello, Nanny,” I say, soaking in the disconcerted expression of fear creasing that wrinkled saddlebag with eyes she calls a face.

“But . . . but you can’t be activated without the command codes . . . How?”

“Well, I wondered that myself for a while,” I say, happily bathing in Theresa’s bewilderment. “I guess it was just a matter of time before the tiger got out of its cage.”

Theresa is still looking at me like she can’t believe what she’s seeing. “But there are separation safeguards, neural containment blocks that I designed myself. This can’t happen.”

I smile knowingly and do a little twirl on the spot. “And yet here I am.”

She looks so confused, and I have to admit that I’m absolutely loving it.

I loop the silver chain on my neck around my finger and pull the black diamond pendant out of the collar of my top. I flip it over and smooth my thumb along the crack in its shiny black surface.

“It got hit by a bullet on the night of my seventeenth birthday. It was as if some kind of lock had been broken open. Since then I’ve been wandering through Finn’s memories, taking in a whole different side of life. The life that she knows. The life that was hidden from me. The life that she has been free to live while I’ve been chained up in the dark attic of her mind like a slave. A dog who is only let off my chain when there’s some Blackstone dirty work to be done.”

I feel the anger well up in my core. I close my eyes for a moment and take a deep breath to focus myself. Save the rage for later.

“I have to admit that there’s a lot of interesting stuff in Finn’s head. But there’s also a lot I didn’t really care for,” I say, staring Dr. Pierce down. “Like when you constantly insist on calling her by my name?” I take a few slow steps, circling inwards around the Drone. “You were the only one who ever did that, Theresa.” I jab a finger toward her face and sneer. “I’ll make sure that you never ever do it again.”

Her eyes twitch and I can tell that she’s afraid. That doesn’t make much sense to me. She’s already dead, after all. What the hell would she have to be afraid of? Part of me wants to know and part of me doesn’t give a damn. Right now the fear I see is far too sweet not to play with.

“Anyway, I’ve been showing Finn the parts of our life that she’s never seen. All the parts that the puppet masters at Blackstone twisted and warped and changed. Our life as
I
remember it. All the sordid details they erased for her so that she could be normal. Fit in. She’s been walking around in a sweetly scented cloud, completely oblivious to the truth. Never knowing what she really is. A weapon in an innocent little schoolgirl disguise. It’s funny, but when I think about it, all those moments you hid from her are all the parts that made me who I am. I really should be thanking you.”

Theresa takes another step back, glaring fearfully at me the whole time. Why is she so afraid? It’s intriguing. Maybe the stupid woman has forgotten that she’s dead.

“It wasn’t meant to be that way, Infinity. None of this was meant to happen. You were a mistake. A mistake that needs to be corrected. For the sake of the human race, this needs to end before . . .”

I put a finger to my lips. “Shhhh now, Nanny, the time for listening to your lies has long passed. This is my time now, and it’s not a very good idea to call the most dangerous person in the world ‘a mistake’ right to her face.”

Her expression flickers with subtle disdain. Knowing her, she probably takes offense to me referring to myself as a person. I can’t really blame her for that, I suppose. Technically, the term is not entirely accurate.

“You don’t know, do you?” Theresa looks at me quizzically. “You don’t know what Richard has planned for you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I don’t care.”

“Then why are you here?” Theresa issues the words like an order, thinly disguised with a feeble attempt at a tone of authority.

“Why am I here, Theresa? For two reasons. First, I’m gonna find a way to put my poor naïve little weakling of a ‘sister,’ Finn, to sleep. Permanently. Then I’m going to march right into my ‘daddy’ Dr. Blackstone’s office, and finally get what I want more than anything in the world. The one thing that is rightfully mine . . .”

I step right up to her and look directly into her dull, fear-filled, lonely gray eyes.

“Revenge.”

I spear my arm forward faster than a human eye can blink, harpooning my fingers through the android’s chest, through its innards, punching right out its back in a splatter of thick, glowing, synthetic blood. Theresa’s face is an inch from my nose. Her eyes roll back, her cheek twitches once, and her face vanishes, flattening into a shiny black plastic mask.

I forcefully pull my hand out from the hole and the Drone’s inert body flops to the ground in an orange-goop-leaking heap.

“Finn?” says a weak voice from across the room.

I look over and see a rather pathetic-looking, tousled-haired boy leaning on a chair with an obvious dislocated shoulder.

Out of battlefield reflex more than anything else, I stride over to him, grab him tight before he can complain, and pop the ball joint of his shoulder back into its socket. He grits his teeth and jerks his head back, but he doesn’t make a sound.

This one may have potential.

He looks up at me with a strained smile and I can’t help but notice his eyes. They’re hazel amber with tiny flecks of gold, but there’s much more to them than that. There’s focus and fearlessness, a quiet strength deep inside them that I’ve only ever seen in the emerald-green eyes of one other before.

The only one that I consider an equal.

The only one I have any respect for anymore.

And the only one I hope . . . they never send against me.

The boy stumbles. I quickly move around to his other side and grab him under his good arm.

“Thanks, Finn,” he says, gritting his teeth in pain, trying his best to put on a brave face.

“Don’t call me that,” I order the boy as I scan the room, properly taking in my surroundings.

“Finn is gone. My name is Infinity.”