Infinity Bell: A House Immortal Novel (25 page)

I ran, counting seconds with my stride, minutes slipping away to the rhythm of my fearful, pounding heart.

Down the winding road, down the hillside, down into town.

By the time I reached the first houses, I had lost my hat and was exhausted, my feet too slow for my racing mind. I sucked down gasping, wet lungfuls of air, pushing this small, strong body to keep going. I looked into the faces of everyone I passed, hoping for the familiar features of a friend, a galvanized, Abraham.

Hoping for a miracle.

How long had I run? A half hour? An hour? How many minutes were left before time broke and the ringing of the infinity bell ended my chance of saving Abraham, my hope of saving the galvanized?

That’s him,
Evelyn said, startling me.
On the corner.

I followed her direction. And then I saw him: Slater. He walked into a building at the end of the street, a revolver in his hand.

No, no, no,
I thought.

I ran for him, fast, faster down the wooden sidewalk. The sky flashed with blue-white lightning, and thunder pounded across the heavens.

Over that great noise I heard another sound: gunshot.

I skidded to a stop in the open doorway of the building. This wasn’t a house; it was a jail.

To my left was a holding cell, the old-fashioned kind that was just metal bars creating a box on one side of the room.

To my right was a desk, coat rack, chair, and chest of drawers.

In the center of the room were two men. The taller man must be the sheriff. He was slumped down in a pool of his own blood.

The man who stood above him, revolver still gripped in his hand, was Slater.

“Go!” a familiar voice yelled.

That’s when I noticed the other man in the room. Behind the bars stood Abraham. I wanted to cry out with joy. He was alive, whole, strong, not a stitch on him.

Then Slater lifted the revolver, a grin hardening his face. “Filth,” he yelled. “This time you will die forever, Abraham Seventh.”

“No!” I yelled. “Slater, stop!”

I threw myself at his knees. I was only eight, but he wasn’t fully grown either.

We fell, tripping over the dead sheriff. The gun fired. The shot went wide as we hit the floor. I knocked my head and yelled at the pain.

Lightning flashed; thunder rolled.

How many minutes did I have left? I scrambled to get to my feet, searching for the gun. Slater already had it. He was marching over to the cell.

Abraham stood with his hands out to his sides. “You don’t want to do this, son,” Abraham said evenly. “Put down the gun. Everything’s going to be all right. Let’s talk this out.”

I knew Slater would never listen to him. He could never be talked out of killing Abraham. Hell, he’d already tried to kill him in the future.

But maybe Slater wasn’t the only person in that body, in that mind.

“Robert,” I said. “Don’t let Slater do this to you. You can stop him. You don’t want to kill a man. Don’t listen to the voice in your head, Robert. Fight him!”

Slater’s hand shook, and confusion shadowed his face. “I don’t understand,” Slater, or maybe Robert, whispered.

Abraham took the moment’s hesitation and reached from between the bars, grabbing the gun out of his hand.

The boy stumbled away, pressing both palms to the side of his head.

I didn’t know why there weren’t other people here already. Was the sound of gunfire so common in this town?

Lightning flashed. There was no pause before thunder growled, shaking the windows.

A bell began ringing.

And there was no more time. For anything.

I ran to Abraham. “Listen to me, Abraham Vail. My name is Matilda Case. I’m from the future. You must find me on my farm in Pennsylvania in the year 2210, or the world will end.”

“What?” he yelled over the building, growing, roaring sound of the great bell. “When?”

“Twenty-two ten. Matilda Case. I am a galvanized. So are you.”

He shook his head.

“You will live a long life, but you must find me. Foster will know. Foster Sanders. He will understand. He will be a galvanized too.”

“Watch out!” Abraham yelled.

I turned. Just in time to see Robert—no, Slater—stepping up behind me, a nightstick in his grip.

There was no time to duck as he snarled and slammed it into my head.

I screamed.

A bullet exploded through the air.

And then there was nothing but falling and falling, the world rushing away forever, as the infinity bell rang and rang and swallowed me whole.

In case you see this, in case you read this before I can tell you, I had a good life—your life. Thank you for letting me live it. Now it’s your turn. Good luck, Matilda. Save the world.

—Evelyn Natalie Douglas

M
y hands were in the sink. Warm, soapy water lapped up to my wrists. I gasped, and the air felt new in my lungs, as if I’d been holding my breath for too long.

“You okay there?” Right Ned asked.

I turned.

I was in my kitchen. Neds, both of him, were sitting at the table, sharpening that machete of theirs they called a pocketknife. And in the corner, Grandma was knitting, the little pocket sheep nibbling at the laces of her shoes.

Was I okay? Neds had been bloody and half-dead when I last saw him.

Images flashed behind my eyes. A jail cell, a gun, blood, lightning, Abraham.

And through it all, a bell rang.

“What?” I whispered, feeling a little faint. I had been there in that jail, but at the same time a life’s worth of memories poured through me.

I had woken stitched, afraid. I had been accepted into a family who had lost their little girl named Matilda.

But I was Matilda.

“Evelyn?” Left Ned said, “you gone deaf?”

Evelyn, that was my name too. I sorted through those memories, but with every thump of my heart, they faded and faded, as if they didn’t belong to me. As if the life I had lived and loved wasn’t mine, had never been mine.

There was a moment, fleeting, where I almost thought I could hear her voice, a moment where I felt Evelyn’s joy at having a childhood, at having the love of parents, of living until she was a woman, with a family who loved her—my family, who had taken her in as their own.

And then the sense of other that was Evelyn lifted, and with a last, gentle warmth, was gone.

Leaving me just me: Matilda.

“Matilda,” I said.

“Better not bring her up,” Right Ned said. “You know how your brother gets.”

“How does her brother get?” Quinten strode into the room.

“Quinten!” I rushed over to him and wrapped him in a tight hug. He was wearing a cotton shirt with a heavy flannel overshirt, and I could feel the gun holster he wore under that.

“Ev, are you all right?” he asked.

“Matilda.”

Every inch of him stiffened. He pushed out of the embrace and took two steps back. “What about her?”

“Me,” I said. “I’m Matilda. I’m your sister.” I checked my hand. My familiar stitches were there, damp from the dishwater. I held them up as if it would prove who I was.

“Don’t, Evelyn. That’s not funny. It’s cruel.” He walked the rest of the way into the room and pulled a beer out of the fridge.

That was my brother; that was Quinten. He looked stronger, a little unshaven and tanned, as if he’d spent more years on the farm than in the city reading books, but otherwise, everything about him was my brother.

I was so confused.

“The lizards are fed,” he said, “but we lost power to the pump house.” He popped the beer, took a drink. “Fences will be down. Neds, you want to handle the pump house? Ev and I can run fences and send a back-link signal on the down line so the Browns don’t panic.”

“Can do,” Left Ned said.

“Matilda,” I repeated.

Quinten shook his head in warning. “That won’t ever be funny. Drop it.”

“You implanted my thoughts into Evelyn’s body when I was sick, right? And . . . and this is crazy, but I’m guessing something changed when I got thrown back in time to change the settings on the Wings of Mercury experiment. You remember that, right? You tracked down the calculations for time travel, you built a . . . I don’t know. Portal, I guess. When time mended from the original break, you were going to go back in time, thread the loop. but I did it instead because this body—Evelyn’s body—was alive back then and survived the initial blast when time broke. Tell me you remember that. You have to remember that.”

He was holding very still. So was Neds. It seemed the only thing in the world that was moving was Grandma, who softly sang her knitting song, and my pounding heart.

“Wings of Mercury?” he asked softly. “What do you know about that?”

“It was triggered in 1910; killed hundreds; and created the galvanized, thirteen infinitely repairable, immortal people.”

Silence, from him and Neds.

“Ten,” Quinten finally said. “There are ten galvanized.”

My stomach dropped with dread. Slater must have killed three people before I could stop him. “Who?” I asked, “Who did Slater kill?”

Please don’t say Abraham. Don’t let it be Abraham.

“Who’s Slater?” Quinten asked.

“The head of House Orange.”

“Uh, no,” Left Ned said. “Head of Orange is Barwick. Well, was Barwick.”

Quinten nodded. “For the past ten years.”

Dread and confusion were mixing up into a rising fear in me. If this was my time, my reality, my world, things had changed. A lot of things. I’d broken it. I’d screwed up reality.

Abraham could be dead. Foster too.

Because of me.

I swallowed hard, trying to calm my shaking. “Okay, that’s not how it was. In the world, the time I lived through. I’m Matilda Case. I was born Matilda Case. And all my memories are of a life I lived—Matilda lived.”

“You think you’re Matilda?” Quinten asked, his voice softened by the futility of hope.

“I
am
Matilda. Evelyn . . .” I shook my head. “She was here with me for a moment, but then she just faded away. Just now.”

“Oh,” he said, letting out a breath. “Oh.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know you loved her . . . I could feel how much she was loved, how happy she was. She loved you too.”

He pressed his fingertips against his lips, processing information in that genius brain of his faster than I could imagine.

“Matilda?” he finally said.

“Yes.”

A knock at the door broke the moment.

Neds were on their feet, picking up the rifle leaning against the wall. Quinten pushed past me, drawing his gun and holding it at his hip, and aimed at the door.

I didn’t think a knock on the door was a reason for full alert, but, hey, this wasn’t exactly my world anymore. Anything could be on the other side of that door, and if my brother and Neds thought it was dangerous, then I was inclined to follow their lead.

My revolver was holstered on my thigh. I pulled it free.

“Matilda Case?” a voice said from the other side of the door.

Quinten and Neds looked over at me.

I was frozen in place. I knew that voice. I knew who was on the other side of that door.

“Put the guns down,” I said, already moving to the door. “Put them down.”

“Evelyn, don’t—” Quinten started.

Too late. I threw open the door.

Abraham stood there, rougher, more scarred, wearing
layers of well-worn, travel-hearty clothes and carrying a rifle and something that looked like a sword hilt over his shoulder.

Behind and to the side stood the galvanized Foster First, and a woman—no, not just a woman, but Sallyo.

She’s running with the galvanized?

“Are you Matilda Case?” he asked, flicking a gaze at my brother and Neds, as if he were noting and dismissing the color beige.

“What are you here for, galvanized?” Quinten said, his gun trained on Abraham’s head.

“Matilda,” he said, searching my face.

I wondered who he was looking for there: the little girl who had begged him to find her on the farm three hundred years ago, or the woman who’d fallen in love with him.

“I’m Matilda,” I said.

Abraham took a step.

Neds racked a round, and then all of us inside and outside the kitchen held perfectly still. “Not a single step closer,” Left Ned said, his voice always a little colder and meaner than Right Ned’s. “You have not been invited into this home.”

“Do you remember the jail cell?” I asked Abraham. “And Robert?”

“Yes,” Abraham said. “You told me to find you. It hasn’t been easy.” He glanced at Quinten and Neds with sharper eyes this time, noting every detail.

“We’re all on the same side here, right?” I asked. “House Brown?”

Abraham’s eyes flicked back to my face. There was no recognition of our time together; there was no hint that
he cared for me. This Abraham, in this now, was hard as stone and steel. “We might be,” he said.

“You want us to trust a galvanized?” Right Ned said. “I don’t think so.”

“
I’m
a galvanized,” I said. “Okay, here’s how this is going down: Quinten, Neds, lower your weapons. Abraham, Foster, Sallyo, keep your hands off your guns and knives, and come in the house so we can talk this out. Someone needs to tell me why House Brown—” I paused and looked over at Quinten. “We do still stand with House Brown, don’t we?”

He had the most incredulous look on his face, as if he were having a hard time understanding the language I was speaking. “Yes,” he said.

“Good. So someone’s going to tell me why House Brown and the galvanized are at odds, and we’re going to do it indoors, at the kitchen table, like civilized people.”

“I already miss the other, less-bossy you,” Left Ned muttered.

“Just sit yourself down, Harris,” I said.

He threw me an odd look, then glanced over at Quinten, waiting for him to make the call.

“Quinten, this is important,” I said. “Please. Let them come in.”

Quinten lowered the gun but didn’t welcome them into the room. “Why are you here?”

“There’s a price on her head.” Abraham nodded toward me. “And on yours. Death.”

“So what’s new?” I said.

Everyone in and out of the room looked at me.

“Okay,” I amended, “maybe this is new for you, but not from where I came from. What else brought you out
here? I can’t imagine you coming all this way to make sure we’re still breathing.”

“There’s that price on your heads,” Sallyo said.

Neds swung the barrel of the gun her way.

“Stop,” I said to him. Then to her: “You’re here to collect it?”

From the looks on the faces around me, I could guess the answer to that. “Okay,” I said. “Let me get this straight: House Brown exists on its own without the benefit of befriending the galvanized, and the galvanized are all . . . standing on their own, or with mutants, against the Houses, including House Brown and us?”

“All the galvanized stand alone,” Quinten said rather patiently, considering the situation from his perspective, which was that his sister Evelyn had just gone crazy . . . or been replaced by his sister Matilda, who, for all he knew, might also be crazy.

“They hire themselves out to the highest bidder, no matter which House or individual is paying.”

“Which makes the galvanized—”

“Murdering bastards,” Right Ned said.

Abraham tipped his head down and gave Ned a dark, heated look that, yes, I could imagine belonged to a murderer.

Holy shit, things were not the way they used to be. Not at all.

Neds smiled and lifted the rifle again.

“No. No guns,” I said. “Fine. Galvanized and House Brown don’t get along. And House Brown and all the other Houses don’t get along. And, hell, galvanized and galvanized don’t get along. But we have resources. We have options. We have clever minds. We can find a way
to resolve this price-on-our heads mess and keep all of us breathing by the end of it.”

“You think they came here to discuss this at our kitchen table?” Quinten asked.

“I don’t see why not. We’re all here talking, aren’t we? No one’s gotten shot yet.”

“We’ll talk,” Abraham said.

Quinten shook his head and walked away from the door. I motioned for Abraham and the others to enter.

“I’ll make tea. Have a seat.” I moved over to the stovetop, picked up the kettle, and filled it with water from the tap. At least we still had indoor plumbing. That was going in the plus column.

“What are you doing?” Quinten whispered.

“Making tea,” I whispered back.

Yes, things hadn’t gone exactly as planned with fixing the world. But I was home, my brother was alive. My grandmother was knitting in the corner, and my two-headed friend was glowering at our guests.

Foster was alive, and so was Abraham. My pulse settled just a bit knowing that I had them. All of them. That I wasn’t alone.

Abraham might not remember me, but that didn’t matter. Not right now. There would be time to fix that. To know each other again. Maybe to love each other again.

“You’ve just invited the galvanized into our home,” Quinten said. “Our
home
, Evelyn.”

“It’s Matilda,” I said. “And I think we all need a cup of tea before we get down to planning how we’re going to fix this misunderstanding and save the world.”

“Galvanized don’t want to save the world,” he said, “they want to take it over.”

“All right. Then we need a cup of tea before we take over the world. What are you so worried about?”

“You—whoever you are, whatever you are—don’t know what you’re playing with,” he said. “You have no idea of the dangers you’re dragging us into. The Houses are on the brink of war, and paid mercenaries just walked through our kitchen door.”

“What I know is there is a price on our heads. We should do something about that. The paid mercenaries have information we need. We should do something about that. And if there’s a way to stop the war, we should be a part of it. A part of making sure House Brown and innocent people are safe, no matter what the Houses do. We are Cases. We’ve got a world to save. Again. We happen to have a pretty good record on that so far. So we’ll figure it out. Get the cups, will you?”

Quinten studied me for a long second, then turned to the cupboards to retrieve the mugs.

I wasn’t at all certain I was doing the right thing. I wasn’t even certain I was in the right time. But what I did know was that this was my world now. My family, my friends, my home, and maybe my mercenary lover walking into the room, carrying that murderous look and an arsenal of weapons.

If anyone could fix the world, if anyone could make this mess we’d made right again, it was going to be us. It was going to be me.

“So.” I took a deep breath and turned with the cups in my hands. “Who wants some
tea?”