Infinity Bell: A House Immortal Novel (21 page)

I didn’t want to tell him. That I remember the infinity bell. That I remember time breaking. That I know he gave up everything to change the world.

—from the diary of E. N. D.

“Q
uinten, you have to get out of here,” I said.

“No.”

“I can make you leave.”

“No, you can’t. And there is a chance, a small one, that if we are close enough to the time event, we might survive.”

I did not believe him. “How?”

“Think of it as the eye of a storm,” Quinten said. “Time will mend around us, but the repercussions from that event will radiate outward. Destroying half of the people on this side of the country.”

I didn’t know where Reeves had taken Abraham and Grandma. But it hadn’t been enough time for them to be thousands of miles away.

Which meant Grandma and Abraham were in the blast zone too.

And so were all the people—families—who were a part of House Brown, and all the other people who worked for the Houses and were trying to make their way through the world as best they could.

Billions of peoples will die.

Unless he went back in time to try to change the experiment.

Except I was the one who was going to go back in time. I couldn’t let him die. But we weren’t going to have a chance to fight about that if we didn’t get the device of his up and running.

“What can I do?” I asked.

“Here,” Welton stood stiffly from the chair and walked over to kneel next to Quinten. “This will be faster.” He reached into the cabinet and adjusted something while Quinten nodded and continued soldering.

“Is there something I can get you?” I asked. “Either of you?” I hated standing here with my figurative hands in my figurative pockets, while the world not so figuratively came to an end.

“Nothing,” Quinten said.

“Now, if you had the journal . . .” Welton said.

“Or our grandmother,” Quinten said.

“For what?” Welton asked. “Cookies and milk?”

“No. It’s her journal, and since she wrote it, we thought we could get the information from her.”

“Your grandmother had the equation all along?” Welton asked. “Why didn’t you just stay home and talk to the woman?”

“She’s very old,” Quinten said. “Her memories are scattered. We’d hoped . . . well, it doesn’t matter.”

Except that it did. We needed the journal or someone
who had read it. Quinten and I had never read it, but Slater owned it. He must have read it. Somewhere in that head of his might be the information we needed.

“Slater!” I said, running for the stairs.

I rushed into the kitchen, where Foster stood in the exact same position, staring at the unconscious Slater as if waiting for him to wake up so he could punch him out again.

Neds rested one shoulder against the wall where he could see into the living room and out the kitchen window at the same time, shotgun still in his hands.

“Touch him,” I said to Neds. “Touch Slater and see if you can get the vision of what he read in the journal.”

Right Ned frowned. “I don’t think that will work, Tilly. I can’t pick and choose what I see.”

“Try. Please try. All we need is the calculations, so Quinten can check his against them.”

“Which could be pages and pages of formulas,” Left Ned said.

“Please.”

They held my gaze for a moment, maybe as surprised as I was at the desperation in my voice.

“Get a piece of paper,” Left Ned said.

“Thank you.” I opened a drawer, the wrong one, then opened two more before I found paper and a pencil. “I know you don’t like doing this. I know what I’m asking you. If we get out of this somehow, I want you to know I’ll pay you back.”

“And if we don’t?” Right Ned said, taking the pencil.

“I want you to know that I’ve always considered you my friend even when I was angry about you spying on us.”

He smiled and set the paper on the table, switching the
pencil to his right hand so Left Ned could write, and then reaching out with his left hand to touch Slater, who was trussed up tighter than a ham hock, his eyes still closed.

Neds touched Slater’s hand. I knew skin-to-skin contact worked best for him to see the visions in other folks’ minds.

Right Ned jerked his head back and grunted, scowling like he’d just caught a whiff of something rotted and foul.

Left Ned swore under his breath and clenched his fingers around the pencil, not looking at Slater, not looking at anything but the visions in Slater’s mind.

“Are you okay?” I asked, but he wasn’t paying attention to me.

A loud crash from outside the house had me running to the window, Neds’ shotgun in my hands.
Lizard?

Not Lizard.
There was an army coming this way, fronted by vehicles that crashed over our fences like they weren’t even there.

The vehicles were black. The soldiers wore black.

Dozens of trained fighters moved out to surround the house with more weapons than I’d seen in my life. Reeves Silver hadn’t called off the troops. The lying bastard had called them in.

Shit.

“We have company,” I said, glancing at the clock on the wall. Five minutes left. “Neds,” I said. “Anything?”

“It’s . . .” Right Ned said in a strained voice, “impossible to sort a mind in seconds.”

“Keep trying.” I ran into the living room and gathered up all the guns I could carry. Then I ran back to the kitchen and handed Foster the semiautomatic. “You know how to use this, don’t you?”

His expression didn’t shift, but he handled that weapon like he’d been born with it. All those wars he’d fought, all the lives the Houses had made him take had left their mark on him. His hands and his eyes were steady as an assassin’s.

“I’m going to flip the house locks, if they haven’t been cut yet,” I said. “That will take care of doors and windows.”

I ran back to the pantry on the far side of the kitchen, where one of our main lock stations was set up. There was another control in the basement and one in Dad’s lab below the pump house.

Abraham had said he’d never seen scramblers and blockers like those my father, genius brother, and Neds had built, improved, and installed on our house.

I just hoped they’d be enough to buy us five minutes.

I triggered the locks, then the emergency feeds.

A blast my dad called dark static, which had something to do with cosmic physics and good, old-fashioned nuclear electromagnetic pulse, exploded about thirty feet out from the house.

That blast disabled weapons and weapons systems, and would knock a man unconscious for a good five minutes.

I rushed out of the pantry and glanced out the window. A lot of soldiers were on the ground, some of them moaning.

They’d be on their feet soon. Too soon.

“Are you done?” I asked Neds as I grabbed the rifle out of the broom closet. “Did you get the calculations?”

“No,” Right Ned said.

“Did you get anything?”

“Tilly,” Left Ned turned the paper so I could see it. I took it and the pencil from him. The paper was blank.

“It’s a mess in there. What I saw . . . it’s not going to do any of us any good.”

I nodded, even though everything inside me went a little numb and my ears were ringing. That was it: our last chance to make this right. We had no calculations. My crazy brother was going to try to save the world on a guess. If he could get the machine running in time.

“Thanks for trying,” I said. “And, Neds, I’m glad you’re my friend.”

He nodded. “You too, Matilda,” Left Ned said.

“More like family,” Right Ned agreed.

I handed him the rifle. “So don’t die.”

“Back atcha,” Right Ned said.

I left the kitchen and started down the stairs. We’d just have to make the best of this.

Something was chiming. A sweet, electric-bell sound. I looked down. The wrist screen Welton had given me was lit up. The chime had been ringing off and on for a half hour; I just hadn’t heard it in all the commotion.

I paused, halfway down the stairs, my heart beating hard. That chime meant my crawler had found something. My hack into Robert’s records had a hit.

But had it found Grandma’s journal?

I coded the unlock sequence.

One item located.
I keyed that up. It felt like it took a day, a year, a forever to download the file. I opened it.

Scanned pages in my grandmother’s looping handwriting that appeared on the screen. Slater had scanned the journal and copied it to Robert’s files!

I let out a whoop and ran down the stairs. “Quinten!”

In the very short time I’d been away, Welton, Quinten, and Gloria had piled a wild array of mismatched instruments and equipment into three stacks, with the timetable cabinet in the center.

Wires of every kind strung out from the cabinet and knotted and looped into and out of the piles of things. It looked like a mechanical spider had gone mad in a junkyard.

“What?” he asked, not looking up.

Quinten and Welton were both sweating hard, hands shaking as they crimped, strung, and shoved things into place, all the while reminding and correcting each other as they rattled out half sentences involving ratios and oscillation rates and words I’d never heard before.

“Is this it?” I jogged to them and shoved the wrist screen in front of him.

“I don’t have time,” he started angrily. Then his words trickled away.

“Where did you get this?” he demanded. “Where?”

“It’s her journal, isn’t it?”

“I think so. I think it is. Welton?”

“I’ll keep working on this. Look for the calculations.”

Quinten flipped through the document so quickly, I was sure he had already missed the information. We didn’t have enough minutes for him to read through it a second time.

“Oh,” he said softly. “Oh.”

He pulled a grease pencil out of his back pocket and grabbed the blank paper I still had clutched in my hand. “This, no.” He scratched out a line of letters and numbers and replaced them. “It’s this. Easy. Much easier than I thought.”

Welton leaned over to look at the paper.

“Yes?” Quinten asked, turning so Welton could better read the paper.

Welton took it out of his hand, his eyes scanning across the page in record time. “Yes. Though it will kill you, Quinten.”

“What?” Gloria asked. “We’ll be safe in the eye of the storm, right?”

“
We
will,” Welton said. “Quinten wants to thread that loop and travel back in time. It will kill him. Any of us humans, actually.”

“That’s inconclusive,” Quinten said. “There’s every reason to expect I’ll live.”

“No,” Welton said. “Hardly any reason at all.”

“It doesn’t matter anyway.” I said as I pulled the paper out of Welton’s hand. “I’m going instead of you.”

“Give me the paper, Matilda,” Quinten said.

“I’ll live, right?” I asked Welton.

“Don’t—” Quinten warned.

“It’s more likely that you will, yes,” Welton said.

“You son of a bitch,” Quinten said. “Don’t listen to him, Tilly. I’m going to fix this. I’m going to change this. I’m the one who should risk it. This is my problem to solve.”

From that reaction, I knew he’d known all along that my going back was the best chance for survival. He just couldn’t stand putting me at risk to do it.

“No,” I said, “it’s our problem, and I’m going. If I die going back in time, well, I was gonna die here anyway. But you’re not going to die now, and I’m not going to let you die in the past. Stay here—stay alive. Love Gloria, if she’ll have you. And if everything works out, then we won’t even remember this argument, right?”

“She’s making sense, Quinten,” Welton said. “You know that she is.”

“Matilda, please . . .” Quinten searched my face, looking for hope. Everything in my heart was breaking to give it to him, but it was my turn to put my life on the line. To do the right thing for us, the galvanized, and the world. There was no bend in me on that.

“Alveré just needs to see this paper to understand what to change, right?” I asked.

He swallowed and nodded. “Alveré Case should know what to do. It’s not a large adjustment. You’ll need to find him before he triggers the experiment. Give me the paper,” he said. “We need to make sure it can go back with you.”

I hesitated. If he took it away, would he give it back?

“I need to put it in this.” He pulled his pocket watch out of his pocket and twisted it, revealing a space big enough for the paper if we folded it down tight.

I held out my hand for the watch, and he pressed it into my palm.

“This is the countdown,” he said while I folded the paper into a small square and slipped it into the watch.

“It’s calibrated with . . . never mind—that isn’t important. Press the button when I say
one
, and it will trigger the force to catch the break in time. When you cross back into the past, it will reset and begin a countdown to when the Mercury Wings experiment is triggered. Get to the tower and Dr. Case before time runs out, and show him the paper.”

“I will. I promise. And if I don’t . . . well, even if I do, I want you to know I love you.”

He placed one hand on the side of my face, his
fingertips curling at the edge of the stitches tracing the curve of my cheek. “Just look for the tower. It will be huge and somewhere to the west of here. He built his lab beneath it. That’s where he’ll be.”

Then he pulled me into a hard hug, and I hugged him back, wishing I could stay here, wishing my life had never come down to this moment. This might be the last thing I ever did before I died.

“I love you too,” he said in a fierce whisper near my ear. “Never forget that.”

I nodded and bit the inside of my cheek so I wouldn’t cry.

“Time,” Welton said. “Now, Matilda. Now.”

Quinten stepped to the side, and Welton motioned me toward the center of the contraption.

“Anything else I should know?” I asked, suddenly panicked that I hadn’t gotten enough specifics or details about . . . well, anything.

“You know what I know,” Quinten said. “But you . . . well, your body was alive back then. You need to avoid her. She was young. Still a child.”