Infinite (Incarnate)

by Jodi Meadows

  His fingers paused over my cheek, then continued down in a warm trail. He didn’t ask what I was talking about.

  “I should have. I had a chance, and I hesitated. If I’d just acted, we wouldn’t have to deal with him ever again. Whatever hate he spews in our absence, it’s because I didn’t just shoot him.”

  The vehicle slowed further and crawled over a lump in the road. The baby whimpered, and everyone tensed, but she didn’t wake.

  “No matter what Deborl does,” Sam said, “his actions are his. You shouldn’t accept any blame for what he chooses to do.”

  “But if I’d just done it—”

  “No. He’s still responsible for his actions.”

  “All right.” That made me feel a little better, but I still should have done it. Neither Sam nor Stef would have hesitated.

  “And either way,” Sam murmured, “Janan would still be ascending on Soul Night. We’d still be escaping Heart, because Deborl isn’t the only one to feel that way. If you’d done it, that might have—in others’ eyes—proven every awful thing he said about you.”

  But still. The idea of never having to deal with Deborl again . . .

  “Regardless.” Sam’s voice was warm and deep and filled with compassion. “I’m glad you didn’t.”

  As the sun rose, Orrin pointed out bulges in the land that hadn’t been there before. The road had buckled under the pressure, leaving cobblestones jutting up at strange angles. Everywhere, ice shone blinding-bright in the sunshine, in sheets or icicles or hoarfrost on trees.

  No wonder we’d been forced to travel so slowly; at anything more than a crawl, we’d have slid off the road.

  It wasn’t until late afternoon that we came within sight of Menehem’s lab, a colossal building of iron and ugliness. Stables and cisterns stood on one side of the structure. Snow coated the solar panels on top of the lab, but they could be swept clean with one of the extendable brushes Menehem had kept inside.

  All eight vehicles formed a semicircle and engines quieted. Calm stole across the yard. Even the wind died. With the ice dressing the world in white, the front of Menehem’s laboratory was as still as a painting.

  “Are you ready?” Sam squeezed me. “Everyone’s waiting for you.”

  He was right. Everyone in our vehicle was looking for me to make the first move. This had been my father’s lab. He’d left it for me, as well as everything inside. Including the poison that would put Janan to sleep again, if we could produce enough.

  I wasn’t sure I liked the responsibility of this kind of power, the ability to stop reincarnation.

  But reincarnation wasn’t natural, and souls suffered for it. Didn’t that mean I needed to right this wrong if I could? I couldn’t ignore it. But this power, the existence of the poison being manufactured in that building, was too much for one person.

  Just like the power of reincarnation was too great for Janan. He shouldn’t get to decide who lived and who never lived. He took away their choices.

  I stepped out of the vehicle, cold air nipping at my cheeks as I turned toward the building. The lab key turned in the lock. I typed in the pass code, and the machinery beeped. Only when the door swung open did others begin to join me outside, gathering babies and bags to lug toward the wide door.

  “What is this place?” someone muttered, sharp on the winter evening. I’d forgotten we hadn’t told everyone what was here.

  Sam stepped alongside of me. “Ready?”

  I flashed a tight smile, hoping he’d ignore my worry. “When we came here last autumn, there was a dead raccoon inside. So I’m a little nervous about what else might have crawled in during our absence.”

  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.

  8

  POISON

  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 an
d 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.

  9

  PATH

  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.