Alpha

by Jus Accardo

  Anderson narrowed his eyes. The intensity of his gaze was heavy, but there was no animosity there. I wasn’t sure what I saw. Compassion? Concern? Was he just as creeped out as everyone else that a guy with the face of a killer was walking the base, free and clear? “But you still need an antidote.”

  The virus was getting worse. I was losing the feeling in my legs—my hands all but gone—and every once in a while, my eyesight would grow watery. Everything would spin, then snap back to normal. With each inhalation, I felt an increasing twinge. Not a stabbing really, but almost an itch. At first it was localized to the center of my breastbone. In the last few hours, it had spread. Now I felt it reaching out all the way past my shoulders and halfway down both arms. There wasn’t much time left. I needed the antidote, or I was going to die.

  I would finally get what I deserved…

  I thought about all the blood on my hands. All the innocent lives I’d delivered to oblivion simply because I’d been following orders. All the families I’d fractured and all the pain I’d caused. I thought about Sera and how when this was over, she deserved peace. She had earned a good life far from the violence of the old one, and as long as I was with her, as long as I still breathed, that would never happen. I’d proven time and time again how weak I was. I’d never be able to walk away and leave her behind. I would attach myself to her like a parasite, sucking the goodness from her life and ultimately dragging her back to hell.

  Dylan was right. I was exactly like him.

  Standing, I looked Karl Anderson directly in the eye and said, “Your focus right now is stopping that other version of Cora. While she still lives, she’s a threat to you, to Sera—to everyone everywhere. The antidote is out of reach, and I’ve made peace with that.” He was confused, but before he—or anyone else—could argue, I left the room.

  I knew she’d follow.

  “Are you insane?”

  I didn’t slow. If anything, I picked up the pace, rounding the corner and making my way back to the barracks. “Is that supposed to be a trick question?”

  “Without the antidote, you’re going to die.”

  That time I stopped. “What’s your point?”

  Her mouth fell open, her eyes narrowing to thin slits. “You… Are… Have you lost your damn mind?”

  “You heard what I said to you earlier. Hell, you walked out, so I know you get it.”

  “I—”

  I clamped my hand across her mouth. “No. There’s no way to talk your way out of it, because in the end, it’s true. I deserve to die, Sera. For everything that I did. We can’t afford to have resources split between the antidote and Cora. She needs to be the focus.”

  She pried my hand loose and glared. “What you did is in the past. It doesn’t matter if you can remember it or not, it was another lifetime ago. You’re not that same person. Not anymore.”

  “Why? Because you say so?”

  “Yes!” she screamed.

  For the longest time neither of us said a word. We both stood there, in the hall right outside the barracks, breathing heavily and staring at each other.

  “Do you really think you’re the only one who feels this way?” she said softly. “Like they don’t deserve to be here?”

  “You cannot possibly be referring to yourself!”

  “I absolutely am.” Her voice rose a bit. “Yes, you have blood on your hands. Don’t I?” Before I could argue, she rushed on. “How many people do you think Cora has already killed with that virus—the virus she made using my blood? How many people will die if she manages to make more?”

  “How can you consider that your fault?”

  “It’s not my fault,” she fired back. “Just like the things you did weren’t your fault. You were brainwashed, G. Raised in a harsh society that made you believe their way was the only way. How the hell could you have known better?”

  Part of me knew she was right. The war had waged since before I was born. We were raised to believe the only way to maintain order was to follow our commands to the letter, never questioning, never straying. But another part of me, the part she’d woken in that cell in Infinity, raged against the facts. It told me I should have been able to see the truth. I should have stood up to them sooner. I should have protected innocent lives instead of taking them. What I did, how I changed… It was too little too late.

  “I’m not saying it’ll be an easy road.” She took my hands. “Neither one of us has had it easy. But I stand by what I said before—if we stick together, we can get through anything.”

  “Stick… What are you saying?” I wanted to leave her behind for her own good, but I’d still been crushed when she’d walked out the door earlier. When I thought she didn’t accept me. Now she was saying… “You can live with it?”

  She brought her hands up to cup the sides of my face. The warmth her touch gave me, calming and exciting in the same instant, stirred every ounce of tamped-down emotion within me. “I told you I wanted to be with you. Did you really think that had changed? I knew there was something in your past, G. Cora chose each of us for a reason. My living with it isn’t the question. The question is whether or not you’ll let yourself live with it.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Sera

  After Cade came to talk to G, I wandered around for a while on my own. The base—Fort Hannity—was much different than I imagined. First and foremost, there was no actual Infinity. There was, but it wasn’t a place or an entity on its own. It was a project conceived and overseen by this world’s version of Cora Anderson, Noah and Kori’s mother, in cooperation with the military.

  They didn’t harm anyone with the science, instead using it to learn and explore, but the idea behind it still scared me. The evil Cora—what G had started calling her—had used that same technology to steal me away from my home. I had no idea if there’d been an Infinity Division where I’d come from, but I’d had firsthand dealings with evil Cora, and it was terrifying. When I thought about the damage she could do if she were to let the poison out into the world—any world—my blood ran cold. That same technology, the one the Infinity of this world used for good, she could use to destroy millions. Those fears were probably why I found myself back outside the door to Dylan’s cell.

  “What do you want?” He was lying on his back, staring at the ceiling with his ankles crossed over each other. His jeans and T-shirt were gone, replaced with a dark blue jumpsuit.

  I sank to the floor just on the other side of the bars. “Honestly? I’m not sure.”

  “Come to poke the lion?”

  “No.”

  This time he sat up and faced me. There was venom in his expression, but also pain. He’d been so close to getting the girl he loved back. “Gloat?”

  “That would be petty.”

  He slid off the cot and stalked to the bars, wrapping his fingers around until they were white as snow. Placing his face against them, pushing so hard that it made him look almost alien, he said, “Then, What. Do. You. Want?”

  “To talk.”

  His gaze lingered, hard as stone and cold as ice, before he let go and took a step back. Slowly he sank to the ground in the center of the cell, facing me, and folded his hands in his lap. The turnaround was crazy. One minute he’d been rabid, the next it was like he was ready to chat about the weather. “So, talk.”

  “I’m not going to pretend to understand what you’ve been going through since losing Ava. But I do have to wonder what you think she would have thought about the way you handled it.”

  For a minute his expression turned stormy, eyes narrow and brows drawn, his lips mashed into a tight, thin line. His posture was rigid, and the set of his shoulders taut, arms so wound that you could see every vein. He held it for a long time before breathing out audibly. His face didn’t change, but his body relaxed some.

  “Contrary to popular opinion, I didn’t wake up one day and decide to go on a murder spree.”

  “So why do it?”

  “I was angry. On top of
keeping me from her, they were going to put me to death.” He let out a horrible sound. Somewhere between a snort and a strangled cry. “All because I couldn’t live without her.”

  “You killed Noah’s sister. The girl your own brother loved. Your friend. How can you possibly justify that? How could anything that happened have been her fault?”

  “It wasn’t,” he said softly. For the first time since I’d met him, Dylan looked young. Almost innocent. He looked tired and beaten down and utterly lost. “None of it was Kori’s fault, and not like it’s any excuse or consolation, but I felt horrible. Each and every time, I hated myself a little bit more.”

  “Bullshit,” I said, folding my arms. “If that were the case, if you felt any kind of remorse, you wouldn’t have done it over and over again.” I grabbed the bars and leaned into them. “You don’t continue to murder people if you feel bad about it!”

  “I went to the house that day to see her—our Kori. My only intention was to talk to her. To tell her what my brother had done. Ava was her cousin! She missed her, too. She was family—and I was trying to get her back. I thought if anyone could talk sense into Cade, it’d be her. I was—”

  “You couldn’t get her back, Dylan. That’s what everyone kept trying to tell you. You wanted to skip out and find a different Ava. The key word is different. She would never have been your Ava.”

  He glared at me but kept going. “I got there, and we started talking. I told her right off the bat that Cade had freed me. That I was going on the run…”

  “Did she threaten to call the police?” I swallowed. I hated hearing the pain in his voice because it humanized him—and that wasn’t something I wanted to happen. Not after everything that he’d done. Everything that he continued to do by not giving us the antidote.

  Dylan laughed, a grating sound that tore right through my flesh and gutted my insides. “Kori? God no. She offered me money. Supplies. She even tried to give me the keys to her car…”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, sickened. “How could you… Why…”

  “I just lost it,” he shouted, jumping up and launching himself at the bars. With a pointless shake, he sank to the ground again, shuddering. “I snapped. I saw her standing there, still alive, still breathing, and I thought about Ava. I thought about my brother and the council that had so callously sentenced me to die when all I wanted was the girl I loved back.”

  “That’s not an excuse.”

  “I know it’s not. And every single second I live—no matter how much longer that will be—I will hear her pleas. I’ll hear all of them, begging me to stop. Crying and screaming for me to think about what I was doing.”

  If I was going to do it, now was the time. I’d come here for a reason, and that reason wasn’t to hear his confessions. “Dylan, I’m not your Ava, but you said before that you don’t want to see me hurt.”

  “I don’t,” he confirmed. He folded his arms and frowned, and I knew he understood exactly what my reason for coming was.

  “Then please, please, tell me where you hid the antidote for G. Don’t make me go through what you did. Don’t be the reason I lose him…”

  “The antidote isn’t hidden, Sera.” It was the first time he hadn’t called me Ava. “I don’t have it anymore.”

  The entire world came to a screeching halt, and the air in my lungs turned to cement. I would have accused him of lying if not for the utter torment in his expression. “You—”

  “After I left you, Cora found me. I told her I’d used the poison. Gave her the antidote back.”

  “Why would you do that?” I wasn’t sure if I wanted to curl into a ball and cry for days or rip open the door and shred him limb from limb.

  “Because I wanted G to suffer like I was.”

  I jumped to my feet and punched the bars. Pain bloomed in my knuckles, radiating to each finger and up my wrist. I ignored it. “I’m the one suffering, Dylan. Me!”

  “I know and I’m sorry. Let me help you. That’s why you came here, right? To get my help with Cora?”

  I didn’t respond, not trusting myself to open my mouth.

  “I can get the antidote,” he rushed on. “I saw her snap it into the back of the locket she wears around her neck.”

  He was playing on the one thing I wanted more than anything. Did I dare believe him? “How do I know I can trust you not to screw us over?”

  Instead of the trademark grin I’d grown so accustomed to, Dylan frowned. There was so much pain in his eyes. So much suffering. Still, that didn’t ensure his loyalty. Dylan was faithful to himself—and to Ava.

  “I’ve done enough damage in the name of her memory. Let me do just one good thing. Something she could be proud of me for.”

  I hoped to God that Ava—that I—was enough motivation for him to stay on the straight and narrow. At least for a few hours.

  Now came the hard part. Selling the idea to Karl Anderson…

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  G

  “I can’t believe any of you are even considering this.” I’d been stalking the room from end to end for the last hour while they went over the plan.

  The plan… Ha.

  “What other choice do we have?” Sera begged me to walk into this with an open mind. To see it not as giving in to Dylan but as taking down a monster. One even bigger than him.

  I opened my mouth but closed it when I had nothing constructive to offer. They were right, in a sense. We had no other choice. And if it weren’t for the fact that Cora Anderson was still out there and still a threat to the entire multiverse, then I would have quietly slunk away to die in peace.

  “She’s not going to come alone. You all know that, right?” In the corner, Dylan sat in a metal folding chair with shackles around both his wrists and ankles. “She’s going to bring every bit of muscle she can scrounge.”

  “So?” Noah snapped. If anyone in the room was unhappier than I was about Dylan not rotting away behind bars, it was him. They’d been exchanging death-glares since the moment the guards marched him in, and if it wasn’t for Cade, I had a feeling Noah would have gone for the guy’s throat. “Planning on switching sides?”

  “I said I’d help take her down.” All eyes in the room swiveled toward him, and he frowned. With a nod in Sera’s direction, he added, “I’m doing this for her. Screw the rest of you.”

  At the front of the room, Karl Anderson looked to be holding together just barely better than his son. I couldn’t imagine how he felt. This was the person who killed his daughter then fled into the multiverse with his tech. He probably never expected to get his hands on him again, and now that he had, instead of hanging from a noose—or whatever the hell else this world used to put people to death—he was sitting nice and cozy in the same room.

  “Moving on,” Anderson said between clenched teeth. “I will feign unconsciousness, acting as the version of me who stole her information.” He fished into his pocket and pulled out several flash drives. Setting them down on the table in front of him, he said, “Do any of these look like the one she had?”

  “This one.” Sera reached across and grabbed a bright blue one with a silver stripe. She rolled it around in her fingers before setting it back down again. “Perfect match.”

  Karl nodded to Rabbit, who stood and took his place at the front of the room. He held up a small red cube. “I’ve created a trap of sorts. Cora can skip in, but she shouldn’t be able to skip out. This bad boy should fry her chip so she’s stranded here.”

  “What about the rest of us?” Kori, who’d been quiet until now, sat in the corner next to Cade. She glanced at him, then down to her own arm.

  Cade frowned. He took her hand and squeezed, then pulled her closer and wrapped an arm around her shoulder. “Rabbit knows the chips are important. He’d never risk them all.” He pinned his friend with a pointed stare. “Right?”

  “Course not. Anyone with a chip will have to steer clear at first. Thirty yards to be safe. Fifty to be certain. It’s a one-time us
e, so after the initial blast, you’ll be okay.” He snickered. “Do you really think I’d risk losing those chips? Those babies are going to jump us years ahead!”

  “Focus, Phil,” Karl said.

  He fought a grin. “Right. Right… Anyway, after…whoever…sets off the device—”

  “Dylan,” Sera said. She glanced over at him. “It has to be Dylan. He’s the one she’s coming to meet. I’ll be with him, but Cora knows how…motivated he is.”

  I expected him to protest, but instead he sat there, sullen and silent.

  “Okay,” Rabbit said with a nod. “After Dylan sets off the device, the cavalry should be clear to swoop in and clean up the mess. Deal with her guard, et cetera.”

  “Not gonna be that easy,” I said. These people had no idea what the hell they were dealing with. “Cora’s guard has been enhanced. Yancy alone could probably take out everyone in this room with his hands tied behind his back. The only one who has a shot at him is me.”

  “You?” Rabbit quirked a brow. “Why you?”

  “Because I was part of Cora’s Alpha project.”

  The others in the room had no idea what I was talking about, but Rabbit and Karl? Yeah. They knew something. Rabbit’s mouth fell open, and Karl visibly paled.

  “She went ahead with Alpha on that world?” Rabbit looked from me to Karl.

  “What’s Alpha?” Kori asked from the corner. She glanced at Cade, who shrugged.

  “It was a theory here. Cora refused to continue with it due to the side effects.” Karl came around the table and stopped a few feet from me. There was a hint of respect in his eyes, but also the unmistakable taint of fear. “Are you telling me you’re an Alpha, son?”

  I stood. “I am, sir.”

  The older man suddenly didn’t seem as thrilled to have me there as he was before.

  “Still think I should get that antidote?” I leveled my gaze at him and snickered, deep, dark, and wrong on so many levels. “Because I’d caution you against it.”

  “G!” Sera cried. “Stop it.”