Infinity Rises (4 page)

“WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?”

I press my back against the tree and swear under my breath. My Operations Commander has found me.

“How did you find me, and how are you transmitting a signal so far from base?” I reply in my mind.

The Commander laughs, but he’s clearly not amused.
“Is that all you’ve got to say for yourself? You’re supposed to be in Belarus, and yet I discover that the tracking software has been hacked and you convinced Onix to pilot a transport to Siberia! Now, tell me, how on god’s green earth do you think it’s in any way acceptable to undertake an unauthorized mission? What the hell are you thinking?”

“I just need to do this,” I say in my head.

“Shut up,”
barks the Commander.
“Ever since the mission in Paris last week, you’ve been lashing out at everyone in sight. I don’t know what bug you’ve got up your ass, and frankly, I don’t care, but you’d better get that insubordinate ass back here right now, or I’m gonna find a way to twist your brain until you do exactly what I want, exactly when I tell you to!”

“I’ll come back in when my mission is over,” I reply.

There’s a moment of silence before the Commander speaks again.
“I thought you might say that. That’s why I’ve sent someone to retrieve you. Stop what you’re doing, and head to the landing zone at the southern edge of the forest.
A transport will be arriving in six minutes. After that, we can discuss your punishment.”

“No. I’m resuming the mission,” I respond.

“Follow my orders, or so help me, I’ll stuff you right back into the test tube you came from!”

I ignore the Commander and peek around the tree. I can’t see the two guards. “I’ll see you when I get back,” I say in my mind as I dash from cover and sprint toward the cabin.

“Stop, Infinity One! We have new information!”
shouts the Commander as my shoes crunch through the snow.
“Harold Rachtman is not in that cabin! He only wanted us to think that so he could draw you out into the open!”

I keep going. If he thinks piping lies into my head is going to stop me from getting those files on Richard Blackstone, then he’s sadly mistaken. I’ve almost reached the edge of the clearing surrounding the cabin when a blinking red light at the base of a tree catches the corner of my eye.

“Get out of there!”
shouts the Commander.
“It’s a trap!”
The words echo through my head, but the warning comes too late as the blinking red light on the proximity mine becomes a ball of roaring fire.

BOOM!

I’m thrown through the air as splinters of wood and ball bearing shrapnel pelt through my clothes and into my body. I hit frozen dirt and roll, speckling the snow with blood. Warning tones of damage ping-pong back and forth through my head, and a rasping groan escapes my lips as I attempt to blink my wavering vision back into focus. I try as hard as I can to concentrate on healing my wounds, but the damage bells are blaring from every conceivable direction, and my rattled mind is having trouble wrangling them into any kind of manageable order. I’ve never been injured this badly before.

I can feel a voice transmission broadcasting into the back of my mind, but the words won’t formulate; they’re clashing and distorting with the thrumming tones of warning, and I can’t discern anything coherent from the chaotic jumble of gibberish. Contact with base has been lost. I try to get up, but my damaged body protests. I can hardly move.

The two men that I saw outside the cabin are shouting and running in my direction. The front door of the cabin flies open, and six soldiers with rifles come pouring out. All eight men hurry to where I’m lying, and soon I’m completely surrounded. Only two of them are pointing their weapons at me; the rest are gazing down with mixed expressions of pity and confusion.

“A farm girl?” asks one of the men.

“Perhaps. Perhaps not,” says another. “It doesn’t matter either way. She will not survive long from those injuries.”

“Someone should put her out of her misery,” murmurs one of the men.

“I will do it.” I see boots step toward me and hear the snap-clack of an automatic rifle being cocked.

“Wait!” calls a voice. Boots crunch through the snow, and the circle is broken by yet another man. He’s dressed in the same winter-camouflage uniform as the others, but this man is heavyset and older than the rest. His face looks weathered by experience, and his large belly makes his padded jacket bulge over his belt. He looks down at me and appears to be pondering my fate as he sips hot liquid from a steaming metal cup.

“Bring her . . . ,” he says in a low, gravelly tone, “and link the computer to the satellite. If they sent this girl, our employer may want to see her face before she dies.”

The fat man turns and walks away while I’m rolled onto my back and lifted into the arms of two men. I don’t have the means or the energy to struggle. It was a mistake to come here. I know that now. My new obsession with Richard Blackstone is going to cost me my life. I look at the sky while I’m being carried. As gray as it may be, it looks so clean and clear and beautiful. I wish I could rise out of the grasp of these men and fly away to safety. Fly into the air, free like a bird. Like the bird I see flying above me, its wings black against an expanse of gentle gray. I watch it move across the sky, and my heavy eyelids close for a moment. When I open them again, the bird has stopped in midair and, strangely, has doubled in size. In fact, it’s getting bigger by the second.

That’s when I receive another message.

I don’t hear it in my head like I do when the Commander transmits orders to me. This is different. This is a message that I
sense
with my whole body. It’s a stern feeling of reassurance, a feeling of hope, and an urgent, almost angry insistence to hold on and not give up. There’s only one person I know who communicates without words like that. I manage the faintest of smiles. My combat partner has arrived.

Zero is here.

I try to keep my eyes on the dark shape overhead, and as it steadily grows larger, a faint hum causes the men to look skyward. There are pointing fingers and heated questions as they discuss who the transport might belong to. Is it friendly or not? Is this their employer paying a visit? No one seems to know. Even the fat leader is unsure. Rifles aim warily toward the shape as the two men carrying me quicken their pace, jostling me roughly as they go. All of a sudden, the transport descends so quickly it seems to fall from the sky, and the hum of the engines becomes the droning roar of thrusters as the huge aircraft comes to a hovering halt just above the treetops. The men are still watching it closely when a flare of light erupts from the transport’s undercarriage and a thudding line of pockmarks drums across the frozen earth. Puffs of snow and dirt burst all around the soldiers, and three of them are instantly cut down in the hail of heavy gunfire. Through the sound of whining turbines, I can hear the panicked shouts and the rapid beats of machine guns as the remaining men shoot into the air.

Another feeling ripples through me.
“Hold on,”
it seems to say.

“Hurry,” I whisper out loud, and almost as if my plea has been heard, two points of light flash on the side of the transport, and two black dashes streak through the air.

One of the soldiers bellows, “Get down!” and my captors suddenly dive away, dropping me roughly onto my stomach as the missiles hit the cabin and detonate with a bone-shaking explosion.

TA-TOOM!

I feel the heat on my face. Wood and masonry fly in every direction. Soldiers shield their heads with their arms, and debris peppers the snow as the cabin is completely obliterated in a giant plume of fire.

As the echo of the blast subsides, I peer through the gap in my narrowed eyelids. All around me, men are prone on the ground. A few begin to move and get to their feet. From the corner of my darkening vision, I see a streak of white fall from above and land in the midst of the remaining soldiers. There are quick movements, pistol shots, grunts of pain, one plea for mercy, and then silence.

I hear boots crunching through the snow toward me. Someone kneels beside me, and hands grasp my shoulders, rolling me over onto my back.

I look up at the silver visor of a stark-white combat mask. He doesn’t speak a word. In the two years that I’ve known him, he never has, but I can feel a wave of angry concern radiating from him and washing through me.

“I know, I know. I should have told you,” I rasp.

He pulls me up into his arms, and as he carries me, groaning and bleeding, toward the lowered ramp of the transport, I let my heavy eyelids slowly close as I drift away into the blissfully silent darkness.

CHAPTER FIVE

I gasp. My heart races at a hundred miles an hour as my eyes dart wildly in every direction. The icy air of the forest has vanished as quickly as it came, replaced once again with the relentless rushing wind of the darkness. What the hell just happened? One moment, I was trying to focus on Infinity; the next moment, I
was
her!

In between measured breaths, I try to gather my senses, and it doesn’t take long to realize what I just experienced. That was one of Infinity’s memories. And judging by what she said, it happened only
three
weeks
ago. I let out a long exhale, trying to calm my nerves, which is easier said than done when I have questions stampeding through my mind like a herd of wild elephants. Why is Infinity so obsessed with my father? What does she know that I don’t? How did she hear that voice in her head, a voice that I swear I’ve heard before, and who saved her? The person dressed in white? The one she called . . . “Zero”?

I absolutely
must
know more—more about Infinity’s experiences and her memories, more about her life. It might be the only way to find her, and it could also be the key to waking her up and reasoning with her. I screw my eyes shut and do my best to order my thoughts.

Take me back into Infinity’s mind; take me back.
I repeat the words over and over in my head.
Take me back to her; take me back into her memories, back into her life.

Nothing happens.

With so few clues to work with, I decide to focus on details of the memory I just saw while it’s fresh in my mind. Maybe, with a little luck, it will lead me somewhere new. I try to remember what it felt like to be her again, to remember how strong and determined and capable she was to begin with, but then how vulnerable and afraid she felt when she was lying wounded, bleeding in the snow.

It seems to do the trick, because I’m not waiting for very long when an unfamiliar swell of raw emotion rears in my gut. The flurrying of the wind in my ears begins to ease, and the rippling void softens, gradually giving way to a mild breeze gently wafting over the bare skin of my legs.

I think it’s working.
Take me back.

I open my eyes and scan the darkness all around, hoping to notice some kind of visual change. Everything seems to be just as dark and boundless as before, but it feels
very
different, almost like I’ve hit a pocket of cool mist. I take another deep, focusing breath and try to distill the thought of Infinity even further. I remember her surrounded by trees, completely in her element on the field of combat, at home in the turmoil, at ease with her deadly purpose. I slowly breathe out, holding the thought in my mind, and with the very next inhale, I’m rewarded with the fresh, woodsy scent of pine needles.

It
is
working!
Take me back to her.

I try to feel her relief when the one she called “Zero” arrived. I picture the instance in my mind, and there he is, clad in stark white from his mask to his boots, dropping out of the sky to save her. He’s falling from the transport overhead, his body as straight as an arrow, but when he’s almost halfway to the ground, the transport suddenly vanishes, the sky disappears, and the snow on the forest floor beneath him turns as dark as volcanic glass, perfectly smooth and glossy black. The pure-white silhouette of his body slows and floats in midair before it bizarrely begins collapsing in on itself, silently folding and scrunching and condensing until it’s little more than a small, pale circle. The circle spins, slowly tumbling down farther and farther before completely disappearing into the liquid black below, rippling rings across its surface like a pebble plopping into a pool of water.

I can feel my frustration building. The image doesn’t make any sense and isn’t leading me anywhere. I screw my eyes shut and try again, but this time Zero doesn’t appear at all, only darkness and the same small, white pebble. I try to ignore it, wiping it away into the void, but the image persists, sharpening at the edges, becoming clearer and clearer in my mind with every passing moment. I snort into the dark, irritated, and when I open my eyes, to my bewilderment, the imagined pebble is
there
; I can actually see it in front of me. Small and smooth, it’s floating in the emptiness right beside me.

I slowly reach out and cup the pebble in my hand. I bring it to my face and study it, rolling it between my fingertips, and suddenly, like a cell dividing, the pebble splits into two, its identical twin dropping into the palm of my other hand. As strange as this is, I don’t feel surprised in the least; instead, and without really knowing why, I whip my arm out and throw one of the pebbles out into the void. It tumbles in a wide arc, curving through the dark. I can even see its shadowy reflection on the liquid black below, rising up in an opposite arc to meet its falling double. The pebble and its reflection collide without a sound, breaking the surface of the black water together, sending dim white ripples spanning out from the shining droplet where they met. What is this? What’s happening?

I watch the outer circle expand; I can’t help it . . . I’m mesmerized by it. The glowing ripple distorts as it softly laps an invisible shore, and its faint circle of light breaks apart, but it doesn’t disappear. The light carries on, spreading outward from where it broke, moving over a patch of darkened ground beyond the water’s edge like a pale flame widening a hole in a fragile sheet of paper. It quickly spreads in every direction, wrapping around me, behind me, and over me, painting silhouettes of twigs and leaves and rocks and earth in the hidden spaces between the shadows. The edge of light spreads farther, weaving and peeking in and out of tiny valleys in the darkness, tracing the bumps of tree roots, blades of grass, clumps of moss, and curling ferns. It splinters, shooting upward in pin-striped rocket trails, threading up the furrows in the bark of the ring of trees surrounding me. Their leafy branches, black against a dark-blue night sky, cast their long shadows over moonlit water and down across the dirt-smeared toes of my strangely small bare feet.

I realize that I’m not drifting in the void anymore; I’m standing beside a pond. Wait! This is not just any pond. This is
my
pond. The secret pond in the Seven Acre Wood on the grounds of Blackstone Manor! I love this special place so much, and I know it so well, but I don’t remember it like this because . . . I’ve never been to the pond at night . . . not once in my life.

I look up at the moon; it’s big and bright in the sky. I pick the other pebble from my palm and hold it up against the moon between my fingers. The pebble is big compared to my small, thin fingertips, my hand tiny compared to the moon. I throw the pebble on the dirt behind me and frown.
One day soon, when they’re bigger, these hands will move mountains.
I smile at the childish thought.

Be realistic, Infinity.

Mountains might be a bit of a stretch, but one day, these hands will leave their mark on this world, a mark painted in blood. I’ll make sure of it. I look down and make two tight fists. Even though I know that it’s just a matter of time before I’m big enough to prove myself, it doesn’t stop me from hating being only ten years old.

I shrug off my disdain for what I can’t change and get back to the task at hand. This may be only a training exercise, but that doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t take it seriously. I think of Major Brogan, and I’m reminded of his deep, stern voice. “Rule number one, this applies to life as well as combat. Stay sharp; always be mindful of your surroundings.”

That’s good advice. I breathe in deeply through my nose, smelling, then tasting, then separating the faint night aromas of the Seven Acre Wood. Every scent from when I checked the air five minutes ago is present and accounted for. No new ones. No change.

I listen to the sounds of the night. The chirping crickets, the trickling water, the slow breeze rustling the leaves in the trees overhead.

I decide that now is the perfect time to practice the little trick I discovered a month ago when Major Brogan was trying to teach me how to meditate.

I close my eyes and push the sound of the rustling leaves out of my mind completely. I do exactly the same for the sound of the water and every other stray background frequency until only the sound of the crickets’ tweeting chirps punctuate the blanket of silence in my head. I focus all my attention on the chirps, amplifying them in my ears a hundredfold. Their usually soothing tweets suddenly become a jostling babble of high-pitched noises; the closest crickets are so loud now that the cacophony crinkles the edges of my eyes. There are dozens of the chirpy little night crawlers within only a few meters of me.

Focus, Infinity.
Do this right, and the enemies out there in the dark will never know what hit them.

I take a slow breath and concentrate on separating the crickets’ trills and whistles, isolating their individual rhythms. I take careful note of the beats and pauses, starts and stops, tempos and pitches in the different songs of each cricket. As I do, I lower the volume of each song ever so slightly and move on to the next one. I repeat the process, one after another, for each and every cricket I hear. Recognize, reduce, and move on to the next one farther out. Recognize, reduce, and repeat until the edge of my hearing moves out between the trees in a creeping carpet of chirps, the sound of each cricket becoming a reference point on a map in my head, forming an auditory web stretching deep into the forest. Ten thousand chirps and whistles strung into a living lattice of sound. A sensitive web that I can use to tell if anyone is approaching from any direction . . .

There!

Five crickets, thirty meters to the south of my position, all went silent midchirp. Two others have done the same thing thirty-one meters due west, and . . . yes, there’s also a moving silence between those two points heading toward me, approximately twenty-six meters out. That’s three enemies, and they’re getting closer. I guess the bait of the pebbles plopping in the water worked just like I wanted it to.

They’re all heading straight for me.

I open my mind to the full sound of the night. The spear I made from a sharpened tree branch is lying at my feet. I hook my toes underneath it, kick it up into my hand, and dart away from the edge of the pond, leaping from patches of bare earth to the tops of rocks to fallen folds of bark to clumps of grass, using them as silent stepping-stones, deftly avoiding the telltale crunch of the fallen leaves and twigs around them. My skintight combat suit pulls at my body as I move like a shadow through the night, up the hill to my right, hugging the tree line.

I stop against the trunk of a tree and scan the ground that leads into the forest. The canopy of leaves overhead is blocking too much moonlight to see where I can step without making any noise, but that’s a problem with an easy fix. I close my eyes and quickly imagine each eye as a huge, sapphire-blue pool of water. In the center of each pool, I imagine black oil is bubbling up, spreading out farther and farther, until it almost covers the entire surface of them both, the blue in each pool of my eyes now only a razor-thin rim around the edges of two massive circles of black.

When I open my eyes again, I can see through the dark.

Every leaf, stone, stick, log, patch of earth, and blade of grass on the forest floor is sharp with green-tinged detail, as if rays of secret sunshine were being piped in just for me. I map out my foot placements for the next fifteen meters and leap out from behind my tree, turning my attention toward where the southern enemy should be. I spot him, shoulders hunched forward, his clunky body armor bulging on his frame as he stalks toward the pond. His arms are hugging his assault rifle to his chin as he does his best to softly crunch through the leaf litter. He’s doing a very good job. Most people would hardly notice the sound at all, but as Lieutenant Brash keeps telling me, I’m not most people.

My stare stays fixed on the enemy as my feet move on their own toward a big fallen tree trunk, hitting every noiseless step on the way from spatial memory alone. I vault onto the fallen tree without a sound and assess my options. The tree I’m perched on fell in a way that leaned it up against another. I slowly peek around the side of the upright tree and see him. He’s twenty-three meters away. I can jump really far, but that’s too far, even for me, and he’s walking parallel to my position. He’s not gonna get any closer. I have to make my move now.

I scan the forest floor between us and spot a solid patch of ground. That should do nicely. With my spear gripped tightly in my hand, I take off like a sprinter, running up the fallen tree and launching myself as far as I can. I sail silently through the night air, heading straight for the patch of earth halfway between the fallen tree and the enemy. I clutch my spear securely in both hands, pointed-end down, and jab it into the spot of bare dirt with a dull thud, swinging my body and kicking my legs out for extra momentum. He hears what I’ve done and turns just in time to see me pole-vault at blinding speed directly toward him. The spear spins in my fingers, and I thrust the sharp end forward, impaling the enemy right through the center of his chest as I knock him down to the ground with my flying knees. I crouch on top of him, pull his gun from his hands, sling its strap over my shoulders onto my back, and then leap three meters straight up into the crook of a sturdy limb in a nearby oak tree.

One down. Two to go.

“STOP!” booms a voice, echoing through the entire forest. All around me, there are loud chunking sounds as the flood lamps in the trees punch on from every direction, blanketing the whole area with a blinding white light, turning the night as bright as day. I blink my night vision away and squint down at the forest floor. The whirring of a sublevel elevator is soon followed by the sound of leaves crunching under approaching footsteps. It isn’t very long before I see the angry military stride and army-buzzed haircut of Lieutenant Simon Brash. With his fists set firmly on his hips, he turns his face up toward me and glowers.