by Harrison, S.
“Where are you taking us?” I demand, but there’s no answer from it. “I can walk on my own y’know.”
It ignores me like it’s leading a sack of potatoes instead of a disobedient teenage girl.
“This has to be some kind of human rights violation. My father is Dr. Blackstone. You’ll be a pile of scrap metal for this. Recycled into a toaster!”
My empty threat goes unacknowledged. It’s really no surprise. I know my father doesn’t give a damn what happens to me, and this robot probably wouldn’t care even if it could.
Suddenly without warning, the room drops and Bit steadies herself on the wall to keep from falling over. The wall that she’s leaning on slides sideways so quickly that Bit falls anyway, out onto the shiny white floor of a wide hallway. Its walls are curved and jagged and seem to be made of some kind of sparkling crystalline material. It really is quite beautiful. It’s how I imagine it would be inside a massive quartz geode.
The Drone walks on, still holding me tight, still pushing me forward, past Bit and onward down the hall. Bit jumps to her feet and springs after us.
“Finn, where do you think it’s taking you?”
“I heard Percy say something about a clean room?”
Bit frowns. “Why would they be taking you to a clean room? That’s a room where they make computer chips and stuff like that.”
“I don’t care where they take me, just as long as I’m not in that dome and one step closer to getting out of here.”
“What happened back there, Finn? You said that you didn’t faint. Did you do it on purpose? Of course you did. I knew it! That’s brilliant.”
I look sideways at Bit. Why would she think I would do that? Anyway, now is not the time to try and explain. I give Bit a tiny shake of my head, mouth the word “Later,” and look sideways at the Drone. She seems to get what I’m trying to say; she gives me a little nod and follows on in silence.
The Drone forces me down one passage which links to another and to another which turns a corner into another. It’s like I’m being taken into the heart of a maze of crystal caves. All the way through the labyrinth, the only sound is the syncopated tapping of the Drone’s silver boots on the floor and a low hum that emanates from every wall. I hadn’t thought about what it would look like beyond the boundary of the dome, but I did expect there to be people here. Workers? Staff? Someone? Anyone? We’ve been walking for a couple of minutes now and we haven’t seen another soul.
Eventually the Drone stops outside a frosted-glass door marked with a large gray number one. With a quiet “shush” it slides open before me. The Drone releases its hold, nudges me in the back, and I stumble forward through the doorway. As deftly as a mouse, Bit ducks through the doorway and scoots to my side. The Drone steps in after us and the door slides shut behind it. This new room is tiny and claustrophobic. It’s hardly a room at all—more like a small, white, walk-in closet with some kind of metal grating as a floor. There’s barely enough space in here for me to be comfortable, let alone Bit and that lady robot as well. Bit looks nervous and I have to admit that I’m not exactly feeling very calm, either.
“Y’know, you didn’t have to come with me, Bit.”
Bit shrugs her shoulders and smiles at me. “That’s what I’m here for. Want some gum?”
I smile and hold out my hand as she drops a piece into my palm. I pop it in my mouth and chew quietly as I take a good look at the tiny room. There’s not much to see. “What are we supposed to do in here?”
“Just wait I guess,” whispers Bit.
“Wait for what? Are the teen police gonna come and arrest me for passing out?”
Bit smiles. “They should arrest Brent for punching you. He’s seriously insane.”
“He hits like a girl. Next time I see him, I’ll show him how a woman throws a punch.”
Bit tilts her head to the side, looking from one of my eyes to the other. “Infinity?”
“Ahhh . . . yes, Bettina?” I reply, frowning. She’s being weird.
“Oh, nothing,” she says, giving me a timid smile.
She’s being really weird. I nervously smile back.
Suddenly the room switches color from stark white to blood red and our smiles instantly vanish.
“Finn.” Bit grabs my arm tight.
I’m about to say that everything will be OK, without even the slightest clue if it actually will be, when a voice that I’ve known since I was thirteen years old booms through the walls.
“You are entering a sterile laboratory. To maintain its clean working environment, dust- and foreign-particle evacuation will commence immediately. Please remain still.”
Bit and I look at each other wide-eyed. There’s no time to call out to Onix or even think about what’s going to happen when all of a sudden an intensely powerful gust of wind surges up from the floor, blowing our skirts and hair vertical. Bit shrieks and wrestles to retain her dignity as our school uniforms are violently flurried upward in the hard blast of air. The Drone stands as still as a statue. I instinctively shut my eyes against the rushing tempest—only for a split second—and when I open them again, the wind is deafening in my ears as I fall through the cold night air.
I see lights, scattered like twinkling diamonds across the dark cityscape, each tiny glow illuminating a different section of the streets and rooftops far below me.
My lips don’t move, but I can hear my own voice speaking in my head, muted but perceptible, like a whisper in the back of my skull.
“Twenty seconds to touchdown.”
I pull a cord on the harness and I’m jerked upward as my parachute opens. I drift on the breeze, pulling the toggles as I descend, expertly steering the chute through the chill of the night toward a group of four even-height, flat-topped buildings 160 feet below. I blink and my night vision flicks on, turning my sight grainy green but a thousand times clearer, replacing the shadowy angles and vague dark outlines with sharp-edged details of the rapidly approaching structures beneath me. Sixty-five feet above one of the rooftops, I pull a second cord. The parachute cuts away and evaporates silently into smoke above my head, like tissue paper touched with a lightless flame. I drop like a missile through the night sky and land hard. The sickening crack of my ankle breaking comes from inside my combat boot, but I don’t even wince as I roll smoothly into a low crouch. The pain signals shoot up my leg toward my brain where they’re recognized, processed, re-routed, and converted into a low-pitched pulsing warning tone in the back of my mind. Motionless, I wait a few seconds for the pain signals to quiet as my bones repair. The warning tone ceases and I take off, sprinting across the open, concrete-tiled expanse of the rooftop. I slide to a halt, pinning my body-armored back against the wall behind a rooftop-access door.
I cautiously peer around the corner and take in the layout. The concrete tiles end at the edge of a line of shrubbery surrounding a large circular area of perfectly manicured grass. There’s a rock water feature at the far edge trickling down into an inlayed pool of koi carp. In the center of the grass circle, I see the back of a beautiful wrought-iron park bench. Just in front of it, propped on a sturdy-limbed tripod, is a large telescope—the kind amateur stargazers own if they have a spare four hundred thousand dollars kicking around. Flickering torches on the perimeter cast a gentle firelight across the entire garden area.
I concentrate for a moment and the exact time pops into my head: 10:29 p.m. and fifteen seconds. In forty-five seconds, give or take, just like he does every cloudless Sunday night, a man will walk through the door opposite me.
“Infinity One. Report,” says a male voice in my head.
“Situation cool,” my own voice says in my ears, as I speak without speaking again.
“Cool?” the voice says with a tone of annoyance. “Is that how we talk when we’re in the middle of a mission?”
“No, sir. Sorry, sir,” I reply in my mind with
military terseness.
“You may only be sixteen years old, but if you’re not taking any of this seriously I’ll wipe your mind clean like a rag to a whiteboard. Do you understand, Infinity One?”
Same old empty threat. They’d never actually wipe my mind clean. They need a soldier who can think for herself in a situation like this, not a mindless zombie. In fact, I’m not totally sure they can even do it at all, but as usual I’ll play along.
“I’m completely focused on the job at hand, sir.”
“Good. Don’t forget that I could have Onix scan your mind back at base to get the truth. I know what a good liar you are.”
“Yes, sir; oh, and by the way, I’m seventeen years old today, sir.”
“Happy birthday.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Mind scans. That they can do. I’m not worried. Onix is on my side. He fakes every one of my mind-scan results. They still hurt like a drill to the skull, though.
I hear the quiet creak of a door opening and I quickly focus my attention. Footsteps tap on concrete tiles, then muffle into the soft rustle of shoes on grass.
I peek around the corner and see the back of a silver-haired man in a white suit taking a seat on the bench. I watch as he leans forward and adjusts knobs on the telescope, pausing every now and then to look up into the night sky.
“Eyes on subject,” I say in my mind.
“Engage target,” the voice replies.
I step from cover and move silently through the night like a ghost. Forty feet from the back of the iron bench I leap, an unnaturally high, arcing leap. At the apex I cock my arm back and give a short whistle. The man turns his head in surprise and looks up in startled horror as I land like a crouched cat behind him, perfectly balanced on the thin edge of the back of the bench. He doesn’t have time to cry out for help, or even blink for that matter, as my arm shoots forward like a striking cobra. My pointed index finger pierces through his eye socket and into his brain like the tip of a dagger, popping eyeball juice all over the back of my hand like the jelly inside a plump, round grape. His other eyeball looks at me in morbid disbelief before slowly rolling back in his skull like a weighted marble. His mouth drops agog and his arms fall limp. Blood and eye goop run down his face, through his thick wiry moustache, and dribble fast and thick into his open mouth. I wiggle my spear-tip digit in his eye hole, mulching his brain a little more just for good measure, and his arms jut out comically in stiff contorted angles as his body quivers and spasms. His final gasping breath becomes a gargling death rattle as he chokes on his own blood and ocular fluid. I smile like the cat from Wonderland. I withdraw my finger with an unceremonious shlooping sound and his lifeless body rolls off the bench and onto the cool grass.
His name was Bernard Munce, former member of the board of directors of Blackstone Technologies.
I called him Walrus Face.
I remember that day when I was six years old, you bastard. The day you tore my dress and tried to violate me. All for what? “Scientific curiosity?” I would have killed you even if I hadn’t been instructed to. This is a very good day. I couldn’t have asked for a better gift. Happy birthday to me.
I look down at his dead body and grin. He thought he’d deleted every trace of his former life. He thought that we would never find him. He was wrong. As it turns out, dead wrong. I laugh out loud at my own lame joke. Still perched like a crow on the back of the bench, I inhale deeply and take in the stars. It really is a lovely night to be stargazing.
“Task achieved,” I say in my mind.
“Well done. Come home, Infinity One,” responds the voice.
Time to go.
I’ll scale the side of the building and disappear into the night through the back streets of the city. From there I’ll rendezvous with the transport and be back in England before dawn.
The sound of porcelain breaking on concrete shatters the silence and I spin around. A dark-haired man in his thirties wearing a black suit and red tie is standing at the open-access door; shards of broken teacup lie in a steaming puddle at his feet. “Mr. Munce?” he asks in a graveled whisper.
It’s Munce’s bodyguard.
There’s a look of shocked astonishment on his face as the gravity of the situation sinks in. It would’ve been nice to have finished the job before he got here.
Oh well.
His gaze flicks across Bernard Munce’s corpse and his expression changes from shock to one of deep sorrow. “Bernie?” he whispers again, his voice cracking. His eyes shift directly to me and his demeanor flash-changes to utter rage. With one fluid, well-trained movement, he whips a gun from a concealed holster and points it directly at my chest.
It doesn’t make any difference. In three-point-two seconds, he’ll be dead as well.
I spring at him from the bench like a vampire bat and his gun lights up the night.
BANG!
I envelop his head with my arms, twisting and pulling upward in a manner so practiced that it’s second nature, separating the vertebrae in his neck with a succession of muffled popping sounds. I backflip off his falling body and land silently in a crouch on the rooftop.
Three-point-two seconds.
I look down and notice the hole in the center of my chest where his bullet pierced my body armor. Point-blank range. Went right through. I poke my finger into the hole and pull my pendant out through it.
“Damn it,” I say out loud.
“What is it, Infinity One? What’s happened?” the voice asks in my head.
“Bodyguard. Shot me.”
“Damage report.”
“It’s OK. I’m uninjured.”
“Good. Rendezvous with the transport. Report back when you’re there.”
“Yes, sir.”
I look down at my pendant and run my thumb across the black, diamond-shaped stone set in the silver circle. There’s a sizeable chip in the center and thin cracks splay across its entire surface.
Damn it to hell. I may not remember where I got this thing, but for some reason it means the world to me.
I walk over, pick up the gun from the concrete and point it at the dead bodyguard’s head. For cracking my pendant I’m going to empty every bullet in this gun right into your face. You can have a closed-casket funeral and we’ll call it even.
My finger tightens on the trigger. My hand begins to tremble. I feel very strange. It’s hard to describe the sensation. It almost feels like I’m sorry for what I’ve just done. Like it was wrong somehow. Like what I’m about to do is wrong, too. I look down at the pistol in my trembling hand and it feels like it doesn’t belong there.
I toss the gun aside and walk to the ledge of the building, trying my best to shake off the jitters. That felt decidedly unpleasant. What the hell was that?
I push it to the back of my mind and look over the edge into the street below. It’s an easy climb. I spot a police car turning down an adjacent side street. Its pursuit lights suddenly flash on red and blue and its siren wails into life, but it’s not heading toward this building. Guess I’m not the only one doing dark deeds in this city tonight.
I watch it drive away into the distance in the opposite direction, but strangely its siren is getting louder and louder. It changes in pitch, mutating in my ears until it almost sounds like a human scream. In fact, it sounds exactly like a human scream. A blood-curdling scream so loud that it feels like it’s coming right out of my own throat. It’s then that I realize . . . it is me.
Red light pours into my eyes and I’m cowering on the floor, holding my knees to my chest, screaming at the top of my lungs. With a loud smack, Bit slaps me hard across the cheek. The sting focuses my eyes on her scarlet-tinged face and I glare from side to side at the walls of the tiny room. With a computerized ping, they flick back to pristine white, as bright and clean as freshly fallen snow, mocking what I know to be true. Another stole
n memory has reared its gruesome head, and it’s smeared from end to end with the blood of two men that I ruthlessly murdered, on the night of my seventeenth birthday, on a moonlit rooftop in Paris.
CHAPTER TWELVE
All I can do is stare at Bit, kneeling there in front of me. My eyes are wide open but I’m not really seeing anything. I’m just staring at her, then right through her. Farther I reel, deeper into the abyss, blindly clawing in the dark recesses of my mind, searching for more. Hoping to find an answer, an excuse, any damn good reason, any reason at all why I would brutally kill two men in cold blood. Of course I don’t find what I’m looking for.
Wait! My pendant!
It’s physical proof that I’m innocent. I quickly loop my finger under the chain, pull the stone out from the top of my blouse, and cradle it in my palm. It looks perfectly normal, undamaged, no different from any other of the countless times I’ve seen it. I smile and almost laugh with relief as I rub my thumb across its smooth black surface. I may be losing my mind, but at least I’m not a killer. My fingernail catches the curve of the silver circle and as the pendant flips over I suddenly feel all the blood draining from my face. There, spanning out from the center of the stone like a sinister cobweb . . . is a lattice of splinter-thin cracks.
I let the pendant drop against my chest. There’s no rationalizing or denying it. It was me on that rooftop. Dressed like a soldier. Moving like a hunter. Killing like an assassin and smiling like a psychopath. The truth is a jagged knife in my soul.
I just saw myself commit murder. Twice.
It’s true. It’s all true, and yet I just can’t accept the fact that such horrific acts were performed with my own two hands. These two hands. They’re quivering, wet with perspiration. In my mind the sweat becomes rivulets of blood. Thick gelatinous fluid drips down my wrist from the punctured sac of the deflated eyeball perched on my fingertips. I groan and retch as my stomach churns and a shiver of disgust ripples through my entire body.
