by Harrison, S.
I try to visualize the sound, imagining the noise as a ribbon in my mind, starting from the top of my head, flurrying down over my body.
It’s working.
I can almost see the ribbon in my head, and the noise is twice as loud again. I push deeper into the sound, and it gradually begins to spread apart, the individual strands of the ribbon separating from one another until soon there are thousands of them, each one a slightly different tone. I’m beginning to get excited. I try to imagine that the sound doesn’t exist, that the void is passing through my body instead of over and around it. Nothing changes.
Don’t give up, Finn. If Infinity can do this, then so can you.
I try to imagine the polar opposite of the sound, hoping that the two will cancel each other out like opposing colors of light, but the sound only roars on, undiminished. Now it’s almost deafening, as the howls of a multitude of separate threads rampage through my ears. This is nothing at all like chirping crickets.
Think, Finn. Focus.
Then it occurs to me. The sound of the wind is made up of thousands of threads of vibrations. And what do you do with an unwanted thread? The answer is simple. You cut it.
I imagine the ribbon again, weaving in and out through my ears in a streaming torrent of noises. I gather all the strings together in my mind, guiding them to a single intersecting point and . . . snip.
Silence.
I’ve done it. I allow myself a little victory smile. Now, if I can do that, then maybe I can learn Infinity’s other Seven Acre secret. I think back to the memory of her alone among the trees, the forest floor shrouded in shadow, two eyes becoming two perfectly circular pools of blue.
I will a tiny hole in the bottom of each pool and summon the same inky droplets of oil I saw in the memory. I’m encouraged when they appear, slowly at first, bubbling up to the surface of each blue circle, gradually widening farther and farther toward the edges, until at last the sapphire rims bordering the pools are only the thinnest of lines surrounding two round slicks of purest black.
Her eyes are my eyes, and when I open them . . . I gasp in absolute wonder. The endless darkness was never an empty void at all. The black was only a veil concealing the truth behind it.
And now, at last . . . that veil is gone.
CHAPTER SIX
On the night of my seventeenth birthday, I awoke inside my own mind for the first time, and every night since then, I’ve been lost in a void of nothingness. But now, thanks to Infinity, I can see behind a curtain I didn’t even know was there, and the true nature of my subconscious has finally been revealed to me. I stare, wide-eyed and gaping in amazement, like a little kid marveling in wonder at mystery beyond comprehension. I gulp and utter one breathless word that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of conveying the amazement that I’m feeling.
“Whoa.”
Laid out before me, stretching far into the distance, is an immense concave circle of thick, undulating clouds. Light flickers in dancing patches beneath the misty skin of the clouds as they slowly revolve around a softly glowing central point. I can’t judge the size of the disc, but it’s huge. It reminds me of pictures I’ve seen of cyclones that were taken by satellites orbiting over the Earth, except instead of the Pacific Ocean beneath it, there’s a gently pulsing, green-tinged expanse broken up by shifting lines of intricate geometric patterns. I feel like I’m seeing a secret that wasn’t meant for my eyes, as if I’m an astronaut discovering a forbidden galaxy.
I glance over my shoulder, and my mind is blown open even further. There, tilting at a strange and awkward angle, is yet another enormous spiral of clouds. It’s as wide as the first one and stretches out just as far in the other direction. With my gaze darting every which way, I try to calm the thrumming inside my ribs with a string of full, heaving breaths.
This is incredible.
I quickly notice that the two gigantic discs of twisting vapor are rotating in opposing directions, the edges overlapping and combining at a massive and turbulent intersection. I thought I was being dragged through the darkness, but I was wrong. Now I can see that I’m fixed to one point, in the midst of the overlap, and the wide gaps between the countless rows of the nearest clouds, as well as the clouds themselves, are rushing past me.
The pocket of mist that I felt before must have been a cloud passing over me, and every cloud must be a memory. These two huge discs probably contain every experience Infinity and I have ever had. I feel a sense of panic rise in my stomach, my breaths becoming quicker with every passing second. Even if I can wrench myself free and find a way into Infinity’s memories, there are so many, and I know I don’t have enough time to search them all to find the ones that might save us. I’m stranded between a storm of Infinity’s secrets and the swirling clouds of my own stolen life, and I don’t know what to do.
I open my mind to the full sound of the rush and call out into space, “Graham! Bit! Can you hear me?”
There’s no answer, just the horrible noise of the wind in my ears. I’m on my own.
I reach up and grab at my hair. I pull at it, grunting with frustration, tugging it as hard as I can, but it doesn’t give. I scream and yank at it, furiously kicking out with my legs. “Let me go!” It doesn’t budge at all. In fact, the only thing I succeed in doing is sending my body into a slow spin, tightening the hair at my scalp even further. I feel useless, foolish, twisting in the wind, heaving to catch my breath from the futile struggling.
I close my eyes and try to focus my thoughts. “Infinity . . . I need you,” I whisper. “If you can hear me, if any little part of you is there somewhere, please . . . help me; help me save us. Send me a sign that you’re not giving up. Show me a way. Help me find you.”
There’s no answer. I don’t know why I expected one. If she could hear me, she would be fighting to survive. She would have screamed out across our mind. What good am I? Why did I think I could do this? Even ten-year-old Infinity would have a better idea of what to do right now. The moment I think of her, a spark flashes through my head, an echo of colors at the back of my mind. The blurred picture sharpens, and I can see her. Her eyes are closed, and blood is streaming down her little face, but the image fades as quickly as it came; then it’s gone.
“Infinity?” I whisper.
At the mention of her name, her young face flashes into my mind again. Her forehead twitches, and she groans softly.
“Is that you, Infinity? Can you hear me?”
I see her fingers, covered in blood, moving in a creeping motion, crawling like a dying spider across blood-soaked earth.
I scrunch my eyes tighter and try to make the picture clearer. Her fingers begin scratching at the ground, her eyes still closed. It’s an absentminded action, as if her hand is moving on its own accord, a reflex without any purpose. At least, that’s how it seems to me until I suddenly notice something under the dirt, a shiny black surface peeking out from beneath the soil. Her weak fingers scrape a little more earth away, and I can make out a shape; it’s curved and blunt, rounded at one end.
What is that?
A feeble, gurgling breath bubbles out from between her lips. It sounds like she’s dying. Ten-year-old Infinity’s hand suddenly stops moving, and her face goes limp as the image in my mind fades away into nothing.
I scream out, “Infinity!”
She wasn’t really there—she was only a picture in my head—but, in her own way, she was trying to tell me something; I’m sure of it. I thrust my hand out in a futile attempt to get the image back, and my fingers plunge into cold, crumbled earth. My arm recoils in shock, and when I open my eyes, I’m gripping the shiny black handle of a silver-bladed knife.
She heard me . . . and she helped me.
With my heart thumping in my chest, I quickly reach up and snatch a fistful of my hair. I tighten it across the blade and forcefully swipe the knife away in one sweeping stroke, slicing
completely through it. The knife vanishes, and the rushing wind is immediately silenced as I’m swept into the whirling streams of memories. I know that I’m moving; I can see the long black strands of my hair speeding away, but it feels as if I’m standing still. If I couldn’t see the two expansive circles swirling against each other, carrying me away, I would swear that I wasn’t moving at all.
I close my eyes tightly and whisper into the silence, “Where are you, Infinity? Please . . . let me find you.”
I look up and around in every direction, sharpening my hearing in the silence and focusing my newly enhanced vision on the nearest clouds. There’s no answer, and the knife turns to dust between my fingers. I try to think of Infinity again, but there’s nothing there; the connection is lost.
This is pointless. I can’t just drift here, waiting for Infinity to send me a message that may never come or hoping that the next memory I accidentally pass through will help in any way at all. I need a place to start looking. I still don’t remember how I ended up lying on a table, bleeding and broken. I don’t remember anything that happened since I was locked in the clean room with Bit and Ryan and the others. If I think of that moment again, the last real thing I saw before Infinity took our body, then maybe I can get somewhere.
I close my eyes and take myself back. I was in that horrible, sterile white room with my back against a wall. There was a Drone walking toward me. I was so scared. I remember the sound of Margaux’s sobs. My heart was racing in my chest as I held my hand up in futile defense. “No. Please,” I begged as the Drone bent down and grabbed me, crushing my fingers. I wince at the memory of the pain I felt as the bones popped and broke. I feel the morbid shock of helplessness again as I watched my fingers splay out in unnatural angles in the Drone’s brutal grip. A chill runs down my spine. It makes me sick to remember all of this. I take a sharp breath, open my eyes, and there, floating just to my left, moving along with me, is a small cloud. Tendrils of mist are spiraling out from it like thin ropes of smoke, twisting toward me and ending on a spot on my forehead.
Is this what it looks like when I remember something?
I try to recall what happened next, and another tentacle of smoke instantly forms between my forehead and the cloud. I see the Drone’s black oval mask morphing its shape, sculpting into the wrinkled, leathered flesh of Nanny Theresa’s face. I see Brody coming to my rescue and Ryan thrown clear across the room like a rag doll. I remember Nanny Theresa taunting me, enjoying my rampant confusion as she threatened to rip my head from my body.
The new string of mist suddenly thickens and swirls faster. Theresa’s gleeful smile sneers into my mind as her hands wrap around my neck, her grip winching tighter and tighter until my breath is squeezed out of me and everything finally, silently, goes black.
That’s all I remember. I watch the lines of smoke dissolve and evaporate as the cloud lazily begins drifting away from me, rejoining the others in their rotation. I’m wondering what else I can possibly do when I notice it from the corner of my eye: a cloud on the right, at the edge of the other vast circle, seems to be following me. I stare at it curiously. It’s very large and dark, like a storm cloud. Some of the clouds closer to the center of the circle of memories are misty, like fog; they’re smoother and longer, more spread out and fuzzy at the edges. But this dark one is thick with undulating billows; it seems newer, more vibrant than the others. It slowly shifts out of its orbit and drifts toward me. There are no tiny tornadoes of smoke reaching out from this one. I don’t know why, but for some reason, the thought of a large dog warily approaching a beckoning stranger comes to mind. Could it be the memory I’ve been searching for? Will it tell me how I came to be bleeding on a metal table beneath Blackstone Technologies?
“C’mon, just a little closer,” I coax. The memory cloud seems to pause, and then, ever so slowly, it begins moving away. If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear it had realized that I’m not its owner and was going back to join its pack in line.
It’s one of Infinity’s memories. So what would she do?
I quickly clench my fists tightly and focus pure anger at the retreating cloud. With narrowed eyes and gritted teeth, I will it to come to me. I more than will it . . . I command it.
All of a sudden, a tentacle of smoke spirals out from my forehead and shoots toward the cloud, snaking across the space between us and spearing deep into its side. I feel my anger grow, and the swirling tendril attached to my head thickens as the dark cloud begins to shrink. Murky bursts of color strobe all around me, and there are crunching pockets of pain and blaring alarms in the back of my mind. The writhing python of smoke is getting bigger and bigger, swelling into a giant smog that completely envelops my torso.
Half-heard words from cracked sentences of garbled voices swarm in my ears. I scream out in confused frustration, desperately trying to decipher any piece of this sensory assault, swiping at the distorted images with my hands, trying to clear a path to something I can understand. I feel the cloud engulfing my entire body and compressing against me. There’s a momentary flash of gray eyes, wrinkled skin, and silver fabric stretched tightly over the shape of a Drone’s upper body. I’m suddenly filled with rage and power.
The image of Nanny Theresa’s face pasted on a Drone’s body becomes vivid and solid. Bewildered, I reach out again to swat the strobing pictures aside, but instead, my arm straightens like a steel rod, and my fingers spear forward on their own. My hand harpoons through the Drone’s chest, through its innards, punching right out its back in a splatter of thick, synthetic blood. Theresa’s face is an inch from my nose. Her eyes roll back, her cheek twitches, and then her face vanishes, flattening into a shiny black plastic mask.
I forcefully pull my hand out from the hole, and the Drone’s inert body flops to the ground in an orange-goop-leaking heap.
“Finn?” says a weak voice from across the room.
I look over and see a rather pathetic-looking, tousled-haired boy leaning on a chair with an obviously dislocated shoulder.
Out of battlefield reflex more than anything else, I stride over to him, grab him tight before he can complain, and pop the ball joint of his shoulder back into its socket. He grits his teeth and jerks his head back, but he doesn’t make a sound.
This one may have potential.
He looks up at me with a strained smile, and I can’t help but notice his eyes. They’re hazel amber with tiny flecks of gold, but there’s much more to them than that. There’s focus and fearlessness, and a quiet strength deep inside them that I’ve only ever seen in the emerald-green eyes of one other.
The boy stumbles. I quickly move around to his other side and grab him under his good arm. “Thanks, Finn,” he says, gritting his teeth in pain, trying his best to put on a brave face.
“Don’t call me that,” I order the boy as I scan the room, properly taking in my surroundings.
“Finn is gone. My name is Infinity.”
“Finn? Hello, Finn? Can you hear me? I can’t hear her anymore, Dr. Pierce; what’s happened? Is something wrong?”
“You’ve got eyes, girlie; there aren’t many things that are right at this particular juncture in time. Finn has multiple cuts, abrasions, breaks, and fractures; she’s hemorrhaging internally, and there’s a good chance that I’m gonna find a lot of other nasty surprises waiting for me if it comes to the point where I have to perform any kind of serious surgery. Now take that blasted thing off your head and bring me those clamps, gauze, and sutures!”
“Sorry, of course, it’s just that . . . what does it mean if she’s not responding to the Neural Interface?”
“I’m not sure. It could mean a lot of things. Finn might have lost contact because of her head injuries, she could have gone into an irreversible coma, or, cross your fingers and hope like hell that I’m right, she might have gone even deeper into her own subconscious to find Infinity. I don’t have the proper equipment to tell, b
ut I’m hedging all my bets on the last option, and I suggest you do, too. Because otherwise . . . well, otherwise, Finn is simply not going to survive this. And, if Finn dies, then I’m afraid there’s gonna be a lot more people who’ll be following right behind her.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
A stark-white room from ceiling to floor, no windows. A frosted-glass door in each wall, one of which has been smashed.
This place looks like some kind of empty laboratory. There are five more Drones, all seemingly inactive. One of them appears to have shut down while holding a rather husky teenage boy in a bear hug on the floor. A crying blonde girl, approximately seventeen years old, is crouching by a puddle of vomit, and over there, sitting against the wall and staring into nowhere, is Finn’s private-school roommate and my very own little computer-hacking accomplice . . . Bettina Otto.
I flick a fallen chair upright with my foot, help the boy with the damaged shoulder into it, and stride over to her. She doesn’t look very happy. In fact, her nowhere-stare looks a lot like shock to me. I tie my hair into a quick ponytail, kneel down beside her, and wave my hand in front of her face. “Hey, Otto, wakey wakey.” Her expression doesn’t change at all. I remove her glasses, make a flat palm, and, with a loud smack, backhand her across the face.
Her eyes flutter reflexively as her cheek twitches and turns a bright shade of pink, but the still semigormless glaze behind her stare tells me that I didn’t quite get through to her. I raise my hand again, right in front of her face this time, so even without her glasses, she can’t miss it. “Speak up now, or I’ll just keep smacking you around until you do.”
She blinks a few more times, a tear trickles from the corner of her eye, and she looks up at me, squinting. “Finn?” she asks croakily. I drop my hand and push her glasses back onto her nose.
“Nope, try again.”
“Infinity? Is . . . is that you?”
