Infinity Bell: A House Immortal Novel

  From that, I assumed she wouldn’t mind a little private-talk time.

  “Abraham woke up.” I pushed away from the table and took my dishes to the sink, rinsing them before leaving them in the sink for proper washing.

  “Oh?” Quinten sounded happy for the change of subject. “Did he seem lucid?”

  “Yes. Also, he hates you for what you did to Robert.”

  Quinten paused with a forkful of eggs dangling near his mouth. He set the fork down on the plate and sat up straight, stiff, his fingertips bent around the edge of the table.

  “I see,” he said.

  “He just doesn’t understand,” I said. “I know you didn’t do it on purpose. You had no intention or desire to hurt Robert. You were forced. I told him so, but he’s injured and not thinking things through very clearly.”

  “Don’t,” he said. “Just . . . don’t, Matilda. There is no excuse for what I did. I chose my life over another’s.”

  “You chose my life too. And the life of . . .” I almost said “all the galvanized,” but his eyes flicked up to me, pleading me to stop. “The life of many over the few. You aren’t the first man in history who has had to make that choice.”

  If he hadn’t told Gloria about his plan to travel in time—which I could only assume was true, since she hadn’t brought it up—I could also guess he hadn’t told her that all the galvanized would be dead in a few days. Maybe he didn’t want to leave her with information that would get her killed if our trail was tracked here.

  And I guess it was that—the look of panic and love on his face, the need to keep Gloria safe even as his own life was very likely about to end—that did it to me.

  I made a choice. A hard choice. Probably a stupid choice.

  But it was my choice.

  If it was the last thing I did—and, hey, less than two days left to breathe here, so last-minute was pretty much my middle name—I was going to make sure I was the one who went back in time to fix this mess.

  Alone.

  Quinten wasn’t the only Case who could save the world.

  10

  I try not to say your name anymore. They remember you with sorrow. I will always remember you with joy.

  —from the diary of E. N. D.

  “I just thought I’d warn you,” I told Quinten. “About Abraham. He knows you’re the one who sewed him up again, and I think he’s grateful for that. Truly. But . . . well, he’s not grateful for everything you’ve had to do.”

  “I wouldn’t expect it to be otherwise,” he said quietly. “How are you feeling, Tilly?”

  The way he said it told me he was worried. Probably wondering if this time-mending event was going to harm me slowly or kill me fast. Wondering if there would be signs or symptoms I would suffer the closer I came to death.

  “I’m good. A little tired, but too jumpy to sleep. I’m going to go splash some water on my face and pull my hair back. Don’t check in on Abraham until I come back down, okay?”

  “I think we can handle him.” Quinten sipped the last of his coffee, still not looking at Gloria.

  “Just because he’s injured doesn’t mean he’s not strong as a dozen men,” I reminded him. “Also, he’s in a lot of pain. Pain he can feel.”

  “Really? Huh.” Quinten scooped eggs on his toast. “Hurry, then. I’d like to check on him as soon as possible.”

  And with that, I had officially given them an excuse for a little alone time to talk.

  Gloria mouthed Thank you, and I nodded. Maybe Quinten didn’t think they needed private time, but it looked like she had other ideas.

  Plus, I had something I needed to do: find Grandma’s journal.

  Quinten was a hell of a researcher, but I’d always been our go-to person when it came to hacking into tightly locked data vaults. If Slater Orange had Grandma’s journal, I was certain he must have recorded those faded old paper pages in some fashion. It would be beyond foolish to have only one fragile copy of the information. And Slater Orange was not stupid.

  Quinten said he scoured the House histories for the info and hadn’t found it.

  Which meant Slater must have had some idea of what my brilliant brother was searching for. And if he knew, he wouldn’t have put the information anywhere Quinten would expect it to be.

  So where would he have stowed it?

  I jogged up the stairs, not bothering to be quiet. If Neds weren’t up yet, too bad. It was past time for sleeping.

  “Morning!” I called out. But Neds was not in his bed, which had been made up as if he’d never been there.

  I crossed the room, pressed my palm against the blanket. No heat. He’d been up for a while, then. I wondered where he’d gotten off to.

  I checked the bathroom. Empty.

  I used the facilities and then splashed cool water on my face and grimaced at my hair. Something would have to be done about it. I twisted it along my temples and braided it back in one thick rope that rested between my shoulder blades.

  That style gave my cheekbones an edge and made my brown eyes wider. While I wanted my hair out of my way, the problem with braiding it back was that my stitches showed. I didn’t need to draw more attention to myself.

  So I went back out into the sleeping area, looking for cloth I could use to hide my stitches. Finally found something that might have been a scarf or table runner. The rough cloth was a simple weave in an olive green, but wide enough and long enough it should do fine.

  I took a minute in front of the mirror again, wrapping the cloth over my head like a hood, then down around my neck, where I looped it a couple times before tying it in a knot and letting the ends hang loosely over my chest.

  I didn’t have gloves to hide the stitches on my hands, but there was an easy fix for that: pockets.

  I cleaned the brush, making sure to flush all the strands of hair down the toilet. I knew I couldn’t get rid of all the DNA evidence of us being here, but I could do the basics, including a quick mop of the floor with more dampened tissue and running the shower for a minute or so to clear the trap. Gloria said the room was set up this way for other people who had stopped by to be tended to by her, so there was a good chance any trackable evidence we were leaving behind would be covered, mixed, muddled by the people who had come before us and would come after us.

  Our beds were all made and I did one last search for any personal items left behind.

  Not that we really had anything to leave behind. I shifted the strap of the duffel hanging across my chest and started down the stairs. I had hoped Neds would have shown back up. I needed access to a computer and wasn’t going to risk Gloria’s safety by using hers.

  Neds leaned at the bottom of the stairwell, one boot propped on the first step. “You done getting prettied up?” Left Ned asked.

  “Where were you?” I asked. “Did you eat?”

  “Just headed that way,” Right Ned said. “Went out when you and Abraham were arguing. Had to secure us a means of transportation.”

  “You heard me and Abraham arguing?”

  “Yes,” Right Ned said.

  “You didn’t think you should step in on that?”

  “Why, Tilly,” Left Ned said with a smile that meant he’d just spotted himself a sucker. “Did you need us to ride to your rescue? Was that man who’s only held together by a string and a prayer too much for a sweet thing like you to handle?”

  “Shut up,” Right Ned and I both said at the same time.

  I gave Right Ned a grin, and he grinned back at me.

  “He might have fallen and hurt himself is all I meant,” I said. “My hands aren’t the best for catching him.”

  “He’d survive,” Left Ned said.

  “How’s he doing?” Right Ned asked.

  “Sleeping, last I saw. I need a favor.”

  They held up their hands in a “go on” gesture.

  “I want you to cover for me while I go out and find a computer.”

  “Pretty sure Gloria has a computer here,” Left Ned said.
>
  “Why?” Right Ned asked. “What are you doing, Tilly?”

  “It’s just something I want to check on. We need some information Quinten couldn’t get ahold of, and I have a couple ideas where it might be found. But I don’t want to use Gloria’s lines. She’s already in enough trouble, housing us.”

  “How not-legal is this?” Right Ned asked.

  “I’d think the most not-legal,” I said.

  They were still a moment, and I wondered, not for the first time, if they could hear each other’s thoughts. I’d asked them once, and they’d given me innocent smiles and spun a tale about how they always knew what the other was thinking, and then proceeded to prove it to me by declaring what thoughts the other was thinking. Which, of course, they swore was true.

  Liars.

  Still, I knew Neds had a way of seeing visions when he touched a person. It was an odd skill that he didn’t like to talk about much. It was possible those boys had other skills they didn’t like to talk about much.

  Or it could be just that they had spent every breathing minute together and had an innate sense of each other.

  “I’ll go with you,” Right Ned said.

  “No,” I said. “That’s not what I’m asking.”

  “Sure, but I know where you can patch a link,” Right Ned said. “It’s not far. Also, I have the car and the keys, and I’m going with you.”

  “When will you learn not to argue with us, Matilda Case?” Left Ned asked.

  Crap.

  “Okay, fine.” I started down the stairs. “Let’s do it fast, before Quinten comes looking for me.”

  We snuck out past the kitchen, then through the medical room, the storage room, and out the door we’d come through just hours ago. It was morning now, the sun pulling up from the east and catching the still-foggy world all aglow.

  I was grateful for the cover the fog offered, but kept my scarf up and head down, just in case there were cameras on us. Neds and I got into the van. Then he drove us down the main street for half a block, took a jag between buildings, rattled slowly through a couple tight alleys, and parked.

  He moved into the back of the van next to me, both of us hidden from sight, and pulled a palm-sized screen out of his pocket.

  “Seriously? You had it on you the whole time?” I asked.

  “Just since I went out this morning,” Right Ned said, entering a set of codes I’d never seen before. “You said you didn’t want to use Gloria’s line. So.” He shrugged.

  “What’s that all about?” I asked, pointing at the code.

  “Trust.” Right Ned handed me the screen. “Me trusting you. And you trusting me. I’ve linked you in to a very, very private line. Only one other person I know can access this. Which she will. And when she does, she’ll have questions.”

  “What? Why did you do that? I don’t need to answer questions. I have my own back-line servers.”

  “Yeah, we’ve seen them,” Left Ned said.

  “No matter how secure you think your lines are, these are even more so,” Right Ned added. “Get on it, Matilda,” he said. “You won’t have much time.”

  “Who, exactly,” I asked as I accessed back routes and bounced off so many signals, I’d be lost in the noise, “are you trusting our lives to?”

  “Someone worth the trust,” Right Ned said.

  “I sort of hate you making assumptions for me, Ned,” I said, furiously streaming contact points. “Placing my trust without permission.”

  “Are you accusing a man of betrayal before breakfast?” Left Ned asked. “Thought you gave folk the benefit of the doubt before you kicked them to the curb.”

  “Don’t turn my words on me. You were the one who said I was too trusting. So?” I prompted. “Who is she?”

  “Someone who does business strictly beneath House notice. Way, way beneath,” Left Ned said.

  “She owes me a favor,” Right Ned said.

  “She owes both of us more than that,” Left Ned said.

  I was surprised to hear sadness in his tone. Left Ned wasn’t the sort of man who had time for sentiments or regret. So whoever this she was, they had history with her.

  Seemed to be going around lately.

  I hated knowing that someone else could see what I was doing. Could maybe even guess who I was and what I was looking for. Which only made me want to work faster.

  “She won’t trace it, won’t track you,” Right Ned said, correctly interpreting my scowl as my fingers flew over the screen. “This is more off the record than anything else in the modern world. Safer than . . . anything we know.”

  “I do not like having to take your word for that,” I said, “but it’s not like I have time left to be fussy.”

  I didn’t have time left to search through much data for what I was looking for either. So I focused my crawlers in one place: Robert Twelfth’s private, locked files.

  If Slater had planned to have himself implanted into Robert’s body, he would have hidden away information that only Robert, the galvanized—who would actually become Slater—could access. And if he thought Grandma’s journal was important enough to keep away from Quinten, I had a good feeling he would have thought it was important enough to keep away from everyone else.

  I launched my precoded crawlers and cut them free so they wouldn’t be tracked back to this line. It wasn’t the fastest way to get into someone’s files, but I should have some kind of result in the next eight hours or so.

  “That’s it,” I said. “Done.” I handed Neds the screen.

  He put in another string of code, then shut the thing off and tucked it back in his pocket.

  The whole thing had taken us fifteen minutes, tops. Drive included.

  “Did you get what you wanted?” He crawled back up to the driver’s seat and got us on the road back to Gloria’s place.

  “I certainly hope so,” I said. “Did you find some way to get us across country?”

  “Yes,” Right Ned said. “It won’t be comfortable, but it will work.”

  “I don’t care about comfort,” I said as he parked the van back in the lot again. “I care about fast, and how close we can get to the farm.”

  “Fast won’t be too much of a problem,” Right Ned said. “Close is going to be the kicker.”

  The fog was burning off under the heat of the sun. Neds and I walked back to the door. I wondered how he’d gotten in and out of the locked door on his own today. Then he pulled out an electronically coded key and slipped it in the lock.

  We stepped inside the shipping and receiving room and shut the door behind us, the illegal scrubbers and locks engaging with a deep hum.

  “Did you steal that key from Gloria?” I asked.

  “A little bit, yeah,” Right Ned said.

  “Naw, we were just borrowing it,” Left Ned said.

  I shook my head as we headed into the medical area. “And you think I’m trouble.”

  “I know you’re trouble,” Right Ned said.

  I grinned back at him. “Maybe a little bit. I’m going to see if I can wake Abraham. Is there room for Abraham to be transported on the stretcher if he needs it?”

  “Won’t need it,” Abraham said.

  He sat on the table, the tubes removed, which I was sure Gloria and Quinten were going to be thrilled about. The bruising was still all shades of horror, but the swelling, over all of him, seemed to be a little less.

  “I’d rather not travel naked, though.” He waved one hand toward the blanket across his hips. “Boots too, if we have them.”

  “We’ll find something,” I said. “You’re . . . looking better than earlier.” I tried to sound cheerful, but it came out a little thin.

  “How long has it been?”

  “Since you and I were talking? Just over an hour,” I said. “You look a day better, at least.”

  “That is a good sign.” Quinten walked into the room from the kitchen area. He had his authoritative-genius attitude buttoned in place, and breezed through the room like h
e had all the answers.

  Abraham’s eyes flicked up to weigh and measure him, and then his gaze slipped to me. Darkness and anger roiled behind his eyes and hardened his silence into a killing thing ready to strike.

  I tipped my chin up just a bit in warning. We had a deal. No harming my brother. And if he broke his word . . . well, he was going to hate what I was willing to do to stop him.

  “It means the solutions were strong enough to reverse the effects of the Shelley dust,” Quinten went on as if his well-being hadn’t just been on the chopping block.

  Abraham raised one eyebrow, still holding my gaze. A sort of “you owe me” stare, then he turned his attention back to Quinten.

  “I understand I owe you my current state of health,” Abraham said in a clipped tone. “I thank you for your efforts. From here forward, I would prefer, and you would most certainly benefit, from keeping your hands and your attentions to yourself.”

  Such formal words. But said with enough of a primal snarl behind them that even my occasionally oblivious brother paused in walking any nearer to the man.

  “He needs to check your wounds,” I said.

  Abraham didn’t look away from Quinten. “Does he?” It was a threat, a challenge.

  My brother was no stranger to looking his own death right in the eyes.

  “Yes,” Quinten said. “I do. If you are coming with us, as my sister insists, then you need to move under your own power. I want to look over those wounds. Treat them if I can.”

  “For your sister?”

  “For all of us, Abraham Seventh,” Quinten said stiffly. “We are only as strong as our weakest member, and right now that member is you.”

  “What we also are,” I said, cutting off Abraham’s reply, “is in a hurry. We need to be going as soon as possible.”

  Abraham glowered at me. I crossed my arms and stared right back, unimpressed. Quinten stepped up near enough to study Abraham’s stitches and joins.

  Abraham made good on his promise and largely ignored Quinten while he did other doctorly things, like asking him to breathe while he listened to his lungs through a stethoscope.

  Gloria joined in the examination, and they made Abraham lie down so they could drape that diagnostic film over him again.