Zhi, Trea, and Lorem flew up next to Jack, keeping pace with him. “Where are we going, Jack?” Zhi asked. “What’s the plan?”
The WarHawks fired missiles past Jack’s car and blew up huge chunks of the road. Jack swerved to avoid the massive potholes as HoverCars crashed to the left and right of him. “We have to lose them. Follow me—and stay close!”
Jack drove straight, even as the road ahead turned hard to the right. He jumped the curb and busted through the guardrail. Allegra screamed as the car sailed out into the air and fell. Luckily, Noteworthy’s HoverCar came with all the options included. Jack switched out of hover mode and dropped down four wheels, just as the car hit the brick-laid streets of Cognito. He drove head-on into the moving borough as the landscape shifted all around.
Cognito was a labyrinth that was hard enough to navigate while it was standing still. The smart thing to do during its daily scrambling of the streets was to stay put and wait it out. Jack had no intention of doing the smart thing. The very road he was driving on was moving. Buildings flipped over in front of the car, blocking its path, and wide-open streets instantly became dead ends. For every roadblock Jack swerved to avoid, fresh new ones rose to take its place. Trying to drive through Cognito’s daily metamorphosis was a good way to get yourself killed, but with at least twenty WarHawks firing laser blasts and exploding shells at him, there was no safer place Jack could think of.
Jack drove under a bridge that was lowering itself into the ground, narrowly avoiding getting crushed in the process. He shot a quick glance over his shoulder and saw a pair of WarHawks get clipped by a spinning building. Two down, he thought. Jack watched Zhi fly a slalom path through a series of newly erected towers and swat a WarHawk into the last one with his dragon’s tail. When Jack turned back around, a wall had shot up in front the car, less than fifty feet away. Jack pushed the pedal all the way down and drove straight at the wall.
Roka grabbed Jack’s shoulder and clutched it hard. “Jack, we’re running out of road here. . . .”
Jack didn’t slow down and he didn’t turn. Just before the car hit the wall, the building it was attached to flipped over and the road was cleared. The landscape kept changing as Jack barreled down the street, nearly hitting more buildings, and then turning to drive down a flight of stairs as it formed in front of him. The car was quiet as Jack continued to anticipate Cognito’s movements and avoid certain death.
“How are you doing this?” Roka asked.
“I spent a year living here before the Rüstov grabbed me,” Jack explained. “The Secreteers put a map of these streets in my head so I could get around. I’m just following my instincts and trusting the memory implant they gave me.”
“Trusting the Secreteers,” Roka grumbled. “Great.”
Jack came up on an unfinished bridge and kept driving.
“Let’s hope memory serves,” Allegra said.
Jack drove off the end of the bridge and right onto the other half as it swung by on its way to connect with a completely different road. A WarHawk in Jack’s rearview mirror held up a heat ray, and red beams chased him across the bridge, nearly taking out his tires. Jack jerked the wheel to the right, taking the car off the bridge and over Cognito’s rooftops as they rose up to form a makeshift road beneath the car. As soon as his wheels were back on the road, Jack drove in an erratic, serpentine pattern to keep from getting hit. He couldn’t give the WarHawks a straight shot at him. That was the key to getting through this. In Cognito, the WarHawks’ firepower didn’t matter half as much as maneuverability. The WarHawks kept pace flying after Jack, but the changing landscape was slowing them down. So were Zhi’s dragons. Trea and Lorem were mainly focused on keeping Jack in sight, but Zhi had called the last two of his seven dragons into the fray. Using his mirrors, Jack saw them swirling through Cognito’s moving skyline, catching Smart’s mechanized soldiers in their claws and ripping them apart. They quickly cut the WarHawks’ numbers in half, but the handful that remained were dangerous enough all by themselves. Jack couldn’t be sure, but it looked like one of them was carrying someone on his back.
A thought struck Jack, and he shouted, pointing at an empty street corner, “Allegra, grab that lamppost and hold on tight!”
“What lamppost?”
A lamppost shot up from the ground, and Allegra stretched out a hand to grab it. She wrapped her arm around the pole several times and strained to hold on as the car swung around a hairpin turn. A WarHawk that had almost reached Jack’s car started its turn too late and rammed straight into a wall. Trea, Zhi, and Lorem nearly shared the WarHawk’s fate. They looped up and around to avoid the wall at the last possible second.
Checking the rearview, Jack saw the handful of remaining WarHawks turn the corner and keep coming. They were gaining on him. A flash of light twinkled in the rearview mirror and Jack cringed as a laser blast buzzed by his right ear, burning a hole in the windshield.
“This stopped being fun about five minutes ago,” Allegra said.
“I’m with her,” Roka agreed.
Jack couldn’t argue with either one of them. It was too dangerous to stay in Cognito any longer. His friends on the dragons couldn’t anticipate the borough’s movements like he could, and it was only a matter of time before one of them got hurt. Jack’s eyes darted around, looking around for the way out. The WarHawks torpedoed the ground in front of him, creating a massive crater in the road. Jack used a flight of stairs as a ramp and jumped it, hitting the ground with a screech. Sparks shot out from below the HoverCar as it scraped against the pavement. Jack saw the edge of Cognito up ahead. He was on a straightaway path out of the borough, but it wasn’t going to be there much longer. The street was narrowing as he drove down it. The buildings on his left and right—every one of them—were sliding toward each other like the walls of a hallway closing in.
“This is it,” Jack called out to his classmates. “Pull up! I’ll see you on the other side!”
Zhi and the others nodded and took their dragons up above Cognito’s shifting landscape. The WarHawks stayed on Jack. With Smart’s soldiers right behind him and the walls closing in all around, Jack pushed the pedal all the way to the floor. At this point, speed mattered above all else. He couldn’t waste even one mile per hour swerving to dodge bullets. “Allegra, cover us!” Jack shouted as the WarHawks opened fire. Allegra spread out her hands to form a large flat shield that deflected their shots but also caught the wind like a sail, costing precious seconds in the race toward Cognito’s border. “Angle it down!” Jack yelled. “Angle it down!”
“Sorry!” Allegra said, morphing into a hardtop roof for the convertible and covering everyone without sacrificing the car’s aerodynamic shape.
“Kid, when you said, ‘I’ll see you on the other side,’ you meant the other side of the street out there, right?” Roka asked, pointing up ahead. “Right?”
Jack didn’t say anything. He just pushed the car as fast as it could go, aiming for the shrinking gap between the last two towers at the end of the road. Stone walls scraped against the sides of the car as it passed the last two buildings, and Jack just made it through before they met with a heavy thud.
As soon as Jack and his friends burst out of Cognito, he slammed on the brakes to avoid flying out onto a busy MagLev highway. Noteworthy’s HoverCar ground to a halt just short of a speeding mass of cars. Jack switched back into hover mode and looked at the wall that had just closed behind him. A WarHawk battle drone was trapped in between the last two buildings. It was still functioning . . . still reaching out, trying to get at him. It tried to shoot him, but its wrist cannon was too damaged to do anything but misfire. Jack felt something rather unexpected as he looked into the dying machine’s eyes. Before he could tell if it was just his mind playing tricks on him, the WarHawk’s power source burned out, and it was gone.
“I’m gonna file that under ‘too close for comfort,’” Roka said. He gave Jack a light punch on the shoulder. “Starting to be a habit with you, kid.
”
Jack laughed and looked up at Zhi, Trea, and Lorem, who were flying down toward him. Squinting through the sunlight, he saw only silhouettes, but he could tell that Trea had reabsorbed her multiple selves, as there were only three people coming down on the backs of dragons. Then Jack saw a fourth person sprinting across the rooftops. He knew in an instant who it was—the same person who’d been crazy enough to hitch a ride through Cognito on the back of a WarHawk.
“Is that Skerren?” Allegra asked.
Jack got the car into gear as Skerren leaped off the edge of the last roof. “Unbelievable,” he muttered. Jack mashed down the accelerator pedal with his foot, and Noteworthy’s HoverCar surged onto the freeway. Jack forced his way into a lane of traffic and crisscrossed up the street, cutting cars off left and right. Behind him, Skerren grabbed onto the tail of Lorem’s dragon, swung his legs out, and let go. He landed on Trea’s dragon, ran a few steps toward her, and jumped again. This time he landed on the hood of a moving HoverCar.
Trea made a run at Skerren, aiming her dragon straight at him. “Back off, Skerren, I mean it!”
“I can’t do that, Trea,” Skerren said as he drew out a sword. He ducked down and cut the strap of her saddle as she flew past him. Trea fell off her dragon and would have hit pavement if not for Lorem Ipsum. She swooped in to catch Trea, and Skerren ran forward, jumping from car to car until he was right behind Jack.
Allegra stepped out onto the trunk of the car to face Skerren. The cars changed lanes, and Skerren took an off-balance swing that Allegra easily blocked with a super-strong shield arm. “Skerren, you’re being ridiculous. You know how this is going to end.” Jack was impressed with how good Allegra had gotten at being indestructible, but Skerren’s attack was just a feint. He spun around and sliced a paper-thin sheet of metal right out from under Allegra’s feet. As Jack swerved left to avoid a car in front of him, Allegra went sliding off to the right.
“Allegra!” Jack called out. Her body slammed into a car, caving in its hood. Thanks to her liquid metal body, she was okay, even if the car she hit was not. Skerren took her place in the backseat of Noteworthy’s HoverCar, and Roka put up his fists. “All right, punk, off the car. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You won’t,” Skerren said. He planted a sword in the backseat for leverage and kicked Roka’s jaw hard enough to make him see stars. The space-pirate staggered back a step.
“Ow.”
Zhi came racing toward Skerren as Jack turned the HoverCar around a corner. Everyone inside the car swung to the right, and Skerren leaned into the front seat to open the passenger-side door. He gave Roka a gentle nudge and called out to Zhi: “Catch!”
Zhi shot forward on his dragon as Roka fell out of the speeding car. Zhi wasn’t strong enough to catch Roka, but the dragon he was riding was. Zhi pulled up, and the flying beast latched onto Roka with its talons. Roka was saved, but Jack was left alone with Skerren. The young swordsman reached for the blade he had stuck into the backseat.
“Skerren, don’t,” Jack said, turning around to look back at him. “C’mon, you can’t do this. . . . We’re friends.”
Skerren pulled his sword free and shook his head. “We were friends.”
Jack shot a quick glance at the road and saw that he was about to hit a car. He slammed the brakes and Skerren tumbled forward into the seat next to him, losing his grip on the sword. Jack swerved to avoid another collision and Skerren nearly flew out the open passenger-side door. “Skerren!” Jack shouted as he grabbed him by the collar and pulled him back in.
The two boys sat next to each other in silence for a few seconds. Jack kept driving. “Just in case you’re keeping score, I saved your life back there,” Jack said.
“If you really wanted to save lives, you’d do the right thing and lay down your own. That’s the only way to guarantee you won’t turn into the enemy’s ultimate weapon.”
Jack grimaced. “You don’t think there’s any chance I make it? Not even a little?”
“You lied to me.” Skerren flipped open Jack’s collar to get a look at the glowing core in his chest. “You lied about that thing inside you. You don’t get another chance.” Jack could see that the friend he once had in Skerren was gone. It was as if he never existed. Skerren reached for the sword in the backseat. “Any last words?”
Jack nodded as he pushed down on the gas. “Buckle up.”
Jack fired the car up a hill, and the wall surrounding Machina came into view. He was coming up on a fork in the road. A floating holographic sign laid out his options: Hightown to the left, and Machina to the right. Jack aimed for the divider in the middle.
Skerren forgot about the sword for a second and gripped the armrest. “Jack . . .”
Khalix forced his way to the front of Jack’s consciousness, crying out with the same fear Skerren felt. “JACK, NO!”
Skerren tried to grab the wheel, but Jack fought him off and drove right at the wall. He knew this one wasn’t going to move, but thanks to his powers, he also knew something Skerren and Khalix didn’t. The safety features in Noteworthy’s HoverCar were state-of-the-art. Seconds before impact, extra seat belts shot out of the cushions, connecting around Jack’s and Skerren’s waists and chests. That was nice, but the car’s real value became clear when its front end put up three separate layers of force fields to soften the crash.
When the car hit, it still hit hard. It hurt, just like Jack knew it would, but aside from a sore head and a ringing in his ears, he was fine. And if not, he’d be fine with a little rest. That was all he needed. Just a second to catch his breath. He blinked his eyes, and time seemed to jump forward. Zhi, Trea, Lorem, and Roka had all caught up to him. They were talking, but Jack didn’t hear a word they said. He locked eyes with Skerren and couldn’t help but notice that his former friend looked a little out of it. He almost felt bad for him. After that, things got fuzzy. Jack leaned back in his seat, and the world faded to black.
CHAPTER
8
Head Games
“Jack. Wake up, Jack . . .”
Khalix’s voice crept into Jack’s ears like a spider. He came to in total darkness. It could have been an hour after the crash or it could have been a week. Nothing would have surprised him at this point. The last time he closed his eyes, he lost a full year. Jack looked around. Why couldn’t he see? Where was he? Where had everybody gone?
“You gave me quite a scare back there,” the Rüstov prince told Jack. “For a moment I was afraid you’d decided to follow your friend’s advice and do the ‘honorable’ thing. I should have known better. That’s not your style.”
Jack ignored Khalix and took a second to concentrate on once again shutting the royal parasite out of his mind. Royal pain is more like it, Jack thought. Once he was satisfied he’d silenced Khalix, he got up on his feet. He found it odd that he didn’t feel any aches and pains after hitting the wall like that. He moved about cautiously in the pitch-black void, reaching his arms out in front of him as he went.
“I suppose he’s really more of a former friend, isn’t he?” Khalix asked Jack. “He doesn’t seem to like you very much now that you’re one of us.”
Jack nearly jumped out of his skin when he heard Khalix pop up again, undeterred. “I’m not one of you,” he shot back. Then he walked into a wall. His face rammed into a hard steel plane, and Khalix laughed at him in the darkness.
“You don’t know what you are, Jack. Not anymore.”
That was when Jack realized the Rüstov prince’s voice wasn’t in his head. It was there in the room with him. Jack spun around, half expecting to find Khalix standing right behind him. “Where are you?”
“Where am I? Where do you think? I’m here. I’m always here.”
The power core in Jack’s chest lit up, flashing on and off with a faint red glow. Jack’s shoulders tensed up and the hair on the back of his neck stood on end. He’d almost forgotten about the core. Just the thought of Rüstov machinery in his body gave him goose bumps all ov
er. The fact that it had become so much a part of him that it escaped his notice absolutely filled him with dread. Jack’s first instinct was to try and turn it off, but he couldn’t do that. He decided instead to use the light to look for Khalix. He sounded like he was close by. How was that even possible? Jack panned around the room, using his chest like a flashlight. The walls had all the characteristics of Rüstov design. They were a disorganized assembly of various metals welded together without rhyme or reason. It was if someone had told a mason to craft a wall using broken machine parts instead of bricks. Jack inched around the room, keeping one hand on the wall, as the light blinked on and off. He saw a dim red light that held for a few seconds, then nothing . . . a dim red light, then nothing. Then the light blinked back on and Khalix was two inches away from his face.
“Boo.”
“Aah!” Jack jumped back. He tripped over his feet and fell to the floor. Khalix stood over him, laughing. He was enjoying himself immensely. Jack stayed on the ground looking up as red light washed over his parasite a few seconds at a time. His blood ran cold when he realized what he was looking at—a vision of himself in the final stages of Rüstov infection. Khalix had his body . . . he had his face! The Rüstov mark around his eye was pronounced and metallic. Circuits ran all along the surface of his skin. Cybernetic growths protruded out from underneath.
“So you’re the famous Jack,” Khalix said with a smile. “I’m so glad we finally have the chance to meet . . . face-to-face.”
Jack shook his head. “This isn’t happening. You’re not here.”
“I’m not?”
“No. You’re a hallucination. I’m woozy from the crash. Or maybe I’m out cold.” Jack snapped his fingers. “That’s it. This is a dream.”
Khalix smiled like a boxer who knew the fight had been fixed in his favor. “Whose dream, Jack? Yours or mine? In case you haven’t noticed, you’re not in control here. You might be able to shut me out while you’re awake, but that requires concentration. When you sleep . . . that’s my time.” He leaned down and tapped at the glowing light in Jack’s chest. “Soon, all your time is going to be mine.”
The End of Infinity Page 7
