Infinity

by Jus Accardo

  He twisted the key with a jerk and yanked it from the ignition. “You don’t know shit about me. About her.” He fisted the keys until his knuckles went white. “You don’t know anything about our relationship—and something tells me you wouldn’t know epic if it came along and smacked you on the ass.”

  “Oh.” His irritation hit the spot. “So then I’m wrong?”

  “I loved her,” he said through clenched teeth. “More than anything else in this world.”

  I believed him. I mean, why else would he have jumped across realities to hunt down her killer? But love was a funny thing. There were different kinds. Different levels. The way he described the relationship with his Kori didn’t sound like true love to me. Pointing that out to him, though, would have been pointless. He was clearly in denial, and I wasn’t that angry.

  I gave up and inclined my head toward the house. “This it?”

  “Penny Bloom’s.” He nodded to the gray SUV in the driveway. “Think that’s hers?”

  I slid around and pushed open the car door. “Only one way to find out for sure.”

  There were no signs of activity, and the place was dark. Cade got out of the car and made his way up the walk. I followed, staying behind a few paces. Acid bubbled in my stomach, that uncomfortable rumbling that went hand in hand with worry.

  One foot in front of the other, we climbed the three steps onto Penny’s porch. The methodic wooden tapping as Cade rapped on the door was like a gong in my ears. “Mrs. Bloom?”

  No answer.

  He knocked again.

  More silence.

  With a huff, he pounded his fist against the door, harder this time. When he met with the same response, he tried the doorknob. To our surprise, it turned without resistance.

  “Huh,” I said, pushing the door open a little wider. “That should have been obvious.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Breaking and entering isn’t obvious.”

  I winked. “It’s not breaking and entering when the door is open.”

  “I cannot believe how much like Noah you sound.”

  That was enough to shut me up instantly.

  Cade stepped around me and crossed the threshold. The house was dark, and there was a stillness to the air that made the hair on my arm spike to attention. I knew without going farther that we were alone here. Still, we searched. Through the living room and into the kitchen, there were no signs of a struggle. Nothing was broken or seemed out of place. Dishes were stacked on the counter in neat piles next to the sink, while the table in the far corner of the room was decorated with dainty placemats and a vase with fresh-cut flowers.

  I sighed and started for the stairs. “Is it possible she went out of town?”

  “Anything is possible,” Cade said, coming up behind me. “She’s not the same as my world’s Penny. Considering the door was unlocked though, that’s probably unlikely.”

  At the top of the stairs, I hooked a right, while Cade went left. There was a bedroom on either side, both empty. “Now what?” I asked, leaning against the wall beside a large oak dresser. “Where do we go from here? She could be anywhere. Maybe Dylan isn’t going to go after her.”

  He shook his head. “Not a chance. They sentenced Dylan to die, and I know my brother. He’ll never let it go. Getting what he feels is justified revenge is just as important to him as finding Ava.”

  “So, then…?”

  “I hate to just walk away, but my gut is telling me to move on to the next name. Dylan isn’t going to waste time. We can double back and check here again.”

  Walking away almost felt like giving up on Penny, but in my gut I knew he was right. She wasn’t here, and waiting around wasn’t a good call. What if, while we hung around here waiting just in case she returned, one of the other two people were hurt? Killed? A good soldier knew how to make the hard calls. But, on the other hand, you never left a man behind.

  “What about someplace else? Is there another place we could check?” I was grasping at straws, but I had to try. “Someplace your Penny might go?”

  He frowned. Almost like he felt sorry for me. “We already know she’s not like my Penny Bloom. We don’t know where she works, what her hobbies are. We don’t even know if she has any family on this world.”

  “Where she works,” I exclaimed. Why hadn’t I thought about that? I dashed across the room to her dresser and began pulling open drawers. “Just look around. Maybe there’s something that can tell us where she works. A pay stub—anything.”

  Cade didn’t look hopeful, but he nodded and disappeared into the other room. I went to work rifling through her personal items and pulling papers from her desk. After I’d torn through everything in the room, I moved on to the next.

  I pulled open the next drawer. We’d both moved into the last room. “So was this what you always wanted to do?” I asked, making conversation to distract myself from the fact that I was in the last room and had yet to find any information leading me to Penny.

  “Travel from one dimension to the other, you mean?”

  I rolled my eyes and sifted through a pile of neatly stacked papers. “Yes. Because that’s every child’s aspiration… I meant the army. Did you always want to enlist?”

  Cade moved to the closet. The door opened with a squeal and he bent down to pull out a stack of boxes from the back. “Actually, I always wanted to go into veterinary medicine.” He snorted. “Noah was going to cure sick people and I was going to help animals.”

  I stopped shuffling through papers to turn toward him. “Seriously?”

  He smiled. “Sure. We had it all planned out. The Man and Beast Clinic.”

  I laughed, trying to picture them working side by side. I could almost see Cade as a vet, but Noah as a doctor? I still couldn’t picture it. “Man and Beast Clinic?”

  He shrugged and turned back to the boxes. “We were twelve. It was Noah’s idea.”

  Of course it was…

  I remembered what he said about his world’s version of my mom. “Bet Cora loved it.”

  Cade laughed and grabbed another box. “She promised she’d be our best customer.”

  A lump formed in my throat. It was so stupid for me to be jealous, yet I was.

  He was quiet for a moment, and when he spoke again, his tone was softer. “When I was nine, Cora found an injured bird. She brought him home and called me over.” He snickered. “One of the few times I wasn’t at her house already. Even then, she pushed me. Challenged me. She asked me what I thought we should do to get the bird back its his feet.”

  “It sounds like you love her very much.”

  He was quiet for a few moments. “I do.”

  The lump got bigger, but I tamped it down. This conversation needed to go in a different direction. “So what did you end up doing? For the bird, I mean.”

  “Well, it was my idea to give it two Advil, Nyquil, and a full body cast. Cora gently suggested a vet.”

  It was hard not to picture a younger version of Cade, with his serious expression and matter-of-fact attitude prescribing Nyquil to an injured bird. “Sounds like a smart lady.”

  “She is. I miss her.” He turned to me, and I saw it. The exact moment he realized what he’d said. “Shit. Kori, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  I held up my hand and shook my head, but the lump in my throat threatened to choke me, so I simply smiled and turned away from him to resume my inspection.

  We searched the rest of the room in silence. It took about twenty minutes to get through the whole thing, and when we came up empty-handed, at least Cade looked sorry. “We’re out of time, Kori. We have to move on.”

  I sighed and slumped back against the refrigerator. I’d gone through the living room and guest bedroom while Cade took on the dining room and bath. We’d tackled the kitchen together. “I just thought maybe…” My voice cracked and I couldn’t finish my sentence.

  Suddenly he was in front of me. “Hey.” He grabbed my hands and squeezed tight. Just once. “I get it. I d
idn’t wanna give up on her either. We’ll come back, I swear.”

  “If we leave, that’s it. We won’t find her alive. Coming back later isn’t going to cut it, and I know you know that, so don’t bullshit me, please.”

  He brought his hands to my face, tipping my chin upward so that we were eye to eye. Expression going from soft to fierce, he said, “I have to believe that we will. And I need you to believe it, too.”

  What I believed was that he believed it. In that moment, standing there and looking into his eyes, I finally understood how he’d been able to do what he’d been doing. Jumping from place to place. Failing to save the girl he loved over and over. He believed. Not because he was innocently optimistic, but because he had no other choice. A walking, talking, version of if at first you don’t succeed… Soldier determination never appealed to me. The can do attitude and slightly cocky air that the drill sergeants instilled in them from day one of boot camp had always put me off. But right then, I found his attitude about the whole thing the most attractive thing I could think of.

  Before I could think twice, I leaned in and kissed his cheek.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, letting my head fall back against the fridge. I turned so that we weren’t face-to-face.

  “No. I’m sorry. I know what you must think, and it’s wrong. I—” His eyes locked on something to my left. “No. No way is it that simple.”

  “Simple?” I twisted so I could see what he was looking at. I couldn’t see the front, but it looked like a pamphlet of some kind, stuck to the fridge by a panda bear magnet.

  He grabbed the paper and stepped back, holding it out for me to see. It was covered in lush trees and showed a happy couple walking up a wooded path. “Fallow Park,” he announced, giving it a slight shake. “It’s a trail map. We found our link! She hikes just like my Penny.”

  ...

  It was already two in the afternoon by the time we pulled into the parking lot. Almost halfway through our first day and we’d gotten nowhere. I was keeping my fingers and toes crossed that this little side trip changed all that.

  On the way over, Cade called Noah and asked him to meet us here. With the three of us searching the park, maybe we’d get lucky—that was, if Penny Bloom was even there. Noah took the two first trails, and Cade and I had just finished walking the last two. We’d come up empty-handed.

  I stuffed my hands into my pockets and fought a shiver. It started to drizzle the minute we got out of the jeep, and we’d been hiking down the main trail for a while now. My hoodie was nearly soaked through, and my socks, thanks to the generous hole in the front corner of my Keds, were a soggy mess.

  “Back on our Earth, they close this park so that Penny can run.”

  “Are you serious? They close the entire park down? Just for one person?”

  He nodded. “Tribunals are important to our legal system and society. Almost royalty in a sense. As you can probably imagine, just like with any other thing, there are those who don’t agree with their judgments or the amount of power they hold. It’s not uncommon for attempts to be made on their lives, so their security detail is high priority.”

  “That’s crazy.” I stepped over a large branch in our path. When I put my foot down, it slipped in a patch of wet leaves. The world tilted to the right, but Cade was fast. He grabbed me before I went down, lifting me up and setting me back down on the other side.

  “Careful,” he said, stepping away.

  “Yeah,” I countered, feeling heat rush to my cheeks. His gaze lingered a little too long, but to be honest, mine did, too. He wasn’t what most girls would call conventionally hot. He was good-looking, sure, but it was more than that. The way he held himself and the strength in his eyes. Studying him, I noticed his right eyebrow sat slightly higher than the left, and his nose was a smidge crooked. Like Dylan’s. I wondered if they did it to each other. It was those little imperfections, in addition to the scar, that made him attractive. Made him worthy of a good, long look. If you bypassed the controlling attitude, I could almost see why the other me fell for him. “I’m a klutz,” I added, finally.

  “And I’m a flying monkey,” Noah said with a snort. He came up behind us and snapped his fingers several times, pointing to the end of the trail. “I didn’t find anything on the other two paths. This is the last one. Could we please keep moving? I’m turning into a frozen prune.”

  “Not sure it’s worth it.” Cade stuffed his hands into his pockets and sighed. “We haven’t found much difference in geography from Earth to Earth. This part of Fallow Park leads to the cliffs. The trail basically ends here.”

  Noah nodded. “It was worth a shot. I say we officially call it and try tracking down Miles and Odette.”

  They turned and started back, and I reluctantly followed. I took about four steps before the faint sound of something stopped me cold. “Is that—?”

  We all froze, listening. It was faint, but I was sure it sounded like a woman. A woman calling for help.

  “Penny…” Cade took off with Noah right on his heels. I followed. Through the thick trees, I stumbled after them, far less graceful, and broke through into a large clearing. But there was no one in sight.

  “Where is she?” Noah scanned the area left to right and stomped his foot. “I don’t see a damn thing.”

  “Someone! Help me!” the voice cried again, this time louder.

  It took a moment, but when I realized where the sound was coming from, I almost threw up. “The cliff,” I whispered, horrified. “It’s coming from over the edge of the cliff.”

  We rushed forward and peered over the edge. Sure enough, there she was. Dangling precariously over the ravine below, from the middle of an unstable-looking tree trunk that jutted out from between two large boulders.

  “Jesus,” I breathed. She was secured by only her left wrist, angry red marks marring her skin. Her left shoe was gone, probably lost to the water far below, and mud streaked her blue and pink jogging suit.

  Cade pushed me aside and settled on the edge, swinging his feet over. Just as he was about to drop down to the trunk, Noah grabbed his arm and yanked back furiously. “Are you insane? That thing won’t hold you. You try to go out there and get her and you’ll both fall.”

  He was right. The tree was thick, but it wasn’t rooted in the rock well. Every few moments little bits of dirt and debris pulled loose from the base. It was holding Penny, barely, but it wouldn’t hold Cade too. The chances of them surviving the fall was slim. It had to be at least thirty feet to the water below, the path obscured by multiple jagged rocks.

  “Shit,” he cursed.

  “Please,” Penny cried. Her grip on the rope slipped, and her right hand pulled free. The movement jerked the tree trunk and shook several larger rocks loose from the surrounding area. I watched them fall, bouncing off the cliff until they splashed into the water below. My stomach tightened. “Please help me!”

  “Ideas?” Cade said to Noah.

  They stepped to the side, whispering, and I sank to the ground next to the edge. “It’s going to be all right,” I called as soothingly as possible. She struggled to look up, toward the sound of my voice, and the tree trunk shifted a bit. “Just stay as still as possible.”

  She wrenched her neck in my direction and a sob escaped her lips. “I was on the path. This guy came out of nowhere…”

  “We’re going to get you up.” She nodded and I stood. There wasn’t much time. Panic was a normal human reaction. Poor Penny wouldn’t be able to keep it together much longer from the looks of it, and I couldn’t blame her. Even the most badass soldier would have an issue with this situation. We needed to get her up. Now.

  Cade and Noah were too big. They’d get her—and themselves—killed. And if that happened, I was a goner. There was no hope of me getting that key from Dylan without their help. Like it or not, I’d been wrong earlier. My life was in their hands.

  The decision sucked, but it was the only one. Heart thumping, I said, “I’ll do it.” I wedged
myself between them. “I’ll climb onto the trunk and get her.”

  They stopped talking and stared at me.

  “What’s the other choice?” I pointed to the edge of the cliff. “That thing is unstable as it is. If either of you steps onto that trunk, it’s pancake city. But if I go…”

  “No way,” Cade said, while at the same time, Noah shrugged and said, “Okay.”

  I should probably be offended by Noah’s lack of regard for my life…

  “If we don’t do something now, she’s going to fall,” I pushed. My gaze went to Cade’s. “I won’t stand here and let that happen. Not when there’s something I can do to help her.”

  “What can you do? You’ll never be able to pull her up,” he argued. He cast an angry scowl at his friend, who seemed oblivious.

  “I’m stronger than I look,” I countered, even though he was right. I’d never be able to lift her onto the trunk by myself, and even if I could, I doubted it would be able to take all the movement. The jostling required for me to possibly wrestle her up would knock the trunk loose, and we’d fall for sure. But I had a plan. One that might be able to work around my lack of upper body strength. “And just so we’re clear, I wasn’t asking for your permission. I was telling you so you’d help me.”

  Cade stared, wide-eyed, and Noah pushed him aside. “What’s your idea?”

  Deep breath. No pressure… “I realize this isn’t ideal, but the alternative isn’t an option.” Dad always said I could take control of a situation like a true military brat. Time to prove him right. Turning my back to them, I counted to ten and crouched down. “Penny, I’m here with Cade and Noah, two soldiers from the Fort Hannity Military Base.” Technically it was the truth. “We’re gonna get you up.”

  She made a small whimpering noise, but nodded, and I stood. I pulled off my hoodie and handed it to Cade. “There’s a rock jutting out about five feet down. It looks just big enough for two small people. If you can lower me down, I can throw her the hoodie.”

  Noah wasn’t impressed. “To keep her warm? What good will that do?”

  I bent down and dug into the back pocket of my jeans. As a general’s daughter, I’d learned to always be prepared. That meant having enough cash in case of emergencies—and a nice sharp pocketknife. I held it up. “He has her tied with one hand free.” I took the sleeve of my hoodie and forced the ring at the end of the knife through the threads. “I toss it to her with the knife attached, and she uses it to cut herself loose and swing to me. You guys pull us up.”