Infinity Read online

  He shook his head. I could tell he was frustrated. That made two of us. “I’m explaining this badly. Not you exactly, but a different version of you.”

  “A different version of me?” This kept getting better and better. Next he’d tell me he was from Mars, and that I, unaware of my super-secret one-of-a-kind heritage, was from Venus. Together, we could save the world.

  “The device Cora built allows—”

  His words were like thunder in my ears. Everything froze and my breath hitched, catching in my throat like month-old bread. I clamped a hand across his mouth and silently counted to ten. When I was finished, all I could feel was an allover tingle. An almost overpowering sense of surreal trepidation. “Cora? As in my mother?”

  He took a deep breath and slowly peeled my hand away. As he knotted his fingers through mine, his expression changed. Not really a frown, but not a smile, either. If I had to guess, he wasn’t happy about having to justify his fantasy world. With a slow, deliberate nod, he said, “The Infinity Division is the brainchild of Cora Anderson.”

  The flirting theory got axed, because I’d just officially decided the jury was in. He was nuts. “You’re trying to say my mom worked for the government?”

  He shifted from foot to foot. Apparently in his delusional scenario this was classified intel that he was hesitant to share.

  “Please,” I said, stalling for time. The commander would be out soon. I just had to keep Cade busy. Then, when I was surrounded by sane people with weapons, I would tell them all how he’d lost his ever-loving mind. “Tell me.”

  It was like a two-ton weight lifted from his expression. His posture loosened, and the tight set of his shoulders relaxed. Like he’d been waiting to spring his brand of crazy on me from moment one. “She and your dad spearheaded the whole operation. Cora is brilliant. One of the most amazing minds science has ever been graced with.”

  “So, my mom was some kind of super brain?” I said it with as much sincerity as I could muster. Why? Why were all the cute ones either taken, gay, or teetering on the edge of sanity? I was trying to keep my cool in light of his declarations, but I wasn’t sure I would last until the commander returned. Every time he said my mother’s name it was like a knife twisted in my gut. The way he kept referring to her in the present tense made my blood boil. He spoke as if she was a person he knew and spent time with as opposed to the mother who was stolen from me two years ago.

  “The brightest,” he confirmed. “That device I was talking about, the one she created, allows access to different dimensions. Parallel Earths. The Kori Anderson Noah and I knew was from our Earth.”

  I stood and took a small step toward the door. Parallel Earths? Yeah. That was my limit. “Oh. Okay,” I said as neutrally as possible. “You’re from a parallel Earth. That explains it all.” My plan to humor him was starting to seem impossible. I opened my mouth to tell him to screw off, but thought better of it. Would he take offense to my sarcasm and attack? He was clearly unhinged, and there was no way I could take him in a fight.

  No… He wasn’t violent. I could tell by the sullen expression on his face that he really only wanted me to believe his delusions. “Kori, please. I know this is messed up, but you have to listen to me. Your brother and I, we—”

  “My brother?” I half laughed, half cried, letting go of the charade completely. This was more than I could handle. My acting chops weren’t good enough to sustain a ruse of this magnitude. “Noah? Is that who you’re talking about? You think Noah is my brother? I think my parents would have remembered to mention something as important as a sibling.”

  “You don’t have a brother, but our Kori did. Noah is—”

  “Stop it!” I screamed. Screw it. If he was violent, let him come at me. Anything would be better than sitting here listening to this. “Just cut the crap.”

  “He’s telling you the truth, Kori,” Commander Simmons said, appearing in the doorway of his office. “Though he shouldn’t be telling you anything at all.” He stepped into the main room and his gaze fell to Cade, tinged with disappointment. I knew that look. Had been subject to it in its many forms throughout my time here. Cade, in turn, hung his head.

  “I can prove it,” he prodded gently. Like he was afraid I would crack or something. I didn’t know what was more unnerving. The crap they were both spewing, or the fact that the commander’s entire demeanor had changed. He was softer. More gentle. Not at all what I was used to.

  Where was the hulking bear of a man with the ornery attitude? Easy. He was still in his office at Fort Hannity. It was me who was displaced. Maybe Dylan had killed me up in my room. He’d killed me and this was my own personal version of hell. I reached around and pinched myself—hard—and it hurt like hell.

  Okay. Scratch the dead theory. Dead people couldn’t feel pain, right?

  “How? Take me for a ride in your spaceship? Hand me a tiny little bottle with the words ‘Drink Me’ on the label?” If this were a normal situation, talking like that to a high-ranking officer—any officer—would land me in water hot enough to poach an egg. But this wasn’t a normal situation. The world seemed to have turned itself inside out. The commander was telling me Cade was dead on? Surely somewhere in the world pigs were tap dancing and cows were doing ballet.

  “I’m not an alien,” Cade said, exasperated. He paused, giving Simmons a sideways glance. It was only when the commander nodded that he continued. “And we don’t want you to drink anything.”

  Disappointing, because maybe a drink would help the believability of their story… I could certainly use one for my nerves right about now…

  “I believe I can clear all this up for you, Kori.” Simmons stepped aside, giving me a wide berth, and gestured to the hallway. “If you’ll follow me…”

  “Follow you where?” The last thing I wanted to do right then was follow any of them anywhere. “Because I gotta be honest…right now I don’t think I’d follow you into a church full of little old ladies giving away free baked goods and puppies.” Could I realistically make a break for it? Clear the building, and then the gate before they took me down? Doubtful.

  His lip twitched with the smallest hint of a grin. It was so fast that I wasn’t even sure it’d been there at all. He gestured toward the door. “Down the rabbit hole, of course.”

  ...

  Simmons led us into the hallway and through another door. In fact, he led us down a lot of hallways. Through a lot of doors. Everyone we passed offered a stiff-armed salute, and I briefly thought about calling for help—this was something like a mass hallucination, right?

  The air. There’s something in the air. Biological weapons or something funky in the food source…

  But thanks to indecision, my chance came and went. The farther we got, the fewer people I saw, until there was no one but the three of us, standing in front of an office door with the words Authorized Personnel Only on it.

  Simmons punched an eight-digit code into the dimly backlit pad beside the door, and with a soft whooshing sound, it breezed opened. He stepped aside and gestured for me to go in. I hesitated, not really sure I wanted to know more at this point, but he gave me a small nudge.

  Don’t do it. This is how most horror movies start…

  “It’s okay, Kori. I promise.”

  I didn’t have the heart—or maybe it was the guts—to tell him that I didn’t really buy that. Anyone who believed they could travel between dimensions had a screw or two loose. But I sucked in a breath and did what Dad would have expected of me. I squared my shoulders, held my head high, and walked into the room.

  Except, it wasn’t a room. It was an elevator.

  Instead of big buttons with the numbers one through nine, there was a single red square. A scene from a Bugs Bunny cartoon—Mom’s favorite—flashed through my head. Never, ever push the red button. Bugs Bunny knew that.

  Daffy Duck on the other hand…

  Cade stepped in beside me, followed by Simmons. He pushed the button and the doors closed with
a soft click. A second later, the bottom dropped out from my belly as the car lurched downward with a massive jerk.

  The seconds turned into minutes. Tick tock. Tick tock. But the elevator didn’t stop. We just kept going down. Like, subterranean mole people kind of far. I wasn’t claustrophobic by any means but, as the minutes ticked by, I started getting antsy. When the doors did finally open, it was all I could do not to rush for the door and fall to my knees to kiss solid ground.

  As I crossed the threshold, I half expected to step out into the center of the Earth. That would have made this all okay. Proved that these people were nuts—forgetting of course that the elevator existed in the first place.

  Simmons stepped off behind me, and in a very official tone, said, “Welcome to the Infinity Division, Kori.”

  “No,” was all I could muster. I closed my eyes and shook my head. For a minute, I stayed that way. If I didn’t open my eyes, didn’t see the cavernous room spread out before me, didn’t acknowledge the unlikelihood that the commander was insane, I wouldn’t have to accept the inevitable. It was real. All of it. Every crazy, insanity-tainted word that had come from Cade’s remarkably skilled lips.

  I opened my eyes. To my left were a group of men and women, all in mid-length white coats. They were bent over what looked like a large circuit board. I shifted my gaze to the right. A large machine—it looked like a refrigerator to me, but I was fairly certain it wasn’t—sparked and crackled. Two men stood in front of it. One punching buttons into a silver keypad on the front, and the other jotting something down into the notebook in his hands. They glanced up at us, momentary surprise in their expression, then went back to work as though we weren’t there.

  Simmons rested his large hand on my shoulder. The weight of it, or maybe it was the reality of what I was seeing, nearly crushed me. “If you will follow me, I’ll have you briefed.”

  All I could do was nod. Speech was impossible at that point. Hell, putting one foot in front of the other was a trick. My body seemed to have forgotten how to function. The nerves sending impulses from my brain to each limb had gone on strike. Even my lungs weren’t working right. Every few steps I’d hold my breath, only letting it out when the corners of my vision began to swim and the pressure in my chest became too much to bear.

  “You must be Kori,” an older woman said, coming up to us. She held out her hand and, numb, I took it. “It’s wonderful to finally meet you. My name is Elaina. Cora spoke of you all the time.”

  And there it was again. The inclusion of Mom’s name in this rapidly growing conspiracy—which, despite the obvious unfolding facts, I was still having a hard time buying. Mom was my best friend. My only friend, really. We knew everything about each other. I knew about her secret Don Knotts obsession, and she knew about my irrational fear of frogs. I found it hard to believe that she’d accidentally forgotten to mention something as big as a specialized uber degree in weird science. “You knew my mom?”

  Elaina smiled. It was warm and genuine and almost made me forget about the insanity I was knee-deep in. “Very well.” She put her arm around my shoulder and gently guided me forward, farther from the elevator. Farther from reality. “I realize this must be very jarring, but I’m going to answer your questions to the best of my ability.”

  Cade came up beside me, and I glanced back the way we’d come. The commander had abandoned me. Spreading my arms wide, I said, “My mom did this? This is all because of her?”

  Elaina nodded. Her face beamed with pride. “Everything you see here stems from Cora’s work. Though she wasn’t here to see the fruition of years of accomplishment, everything we are, and can do—everything we will eventually be able to do—is because of her notes and research. The world, though it may not know it yet, owes her so much.”

  “So it’s true then?” I couldn’t believe I was actually going to say this out loud. “She invented a device that makes it possible for people to cross…dimensions?”

  “Very sci-fi, isn’t it?” Elaina laughed. “But, yes. That’s the gist of things.” She gestured to Cade. “Private Granger is from a different multiverse. Another timeline, if you will.”

  “A different timeline,” I said, rolling the word—and the idea—around.

  Her smile widened. “Parallel timelines. Alternate realities. Quantum universe. Interpenetrating dimension—”

  My head was starting to spin. “Why?”

  She tilted her head to the side, light brown hair spilling sideways. “Why, what?”

  “I mean, aside from the obvious sci-fi awesomeness, why travel to other dimensions?”

  There. You said it. How hard was that?

  “Think of the applications this technology has,” she said, starry-eyed. Like she was talking about fairies or unicorns. Yeah. I’d hit a geek nerve big time. “The possibilities are, quite literally, endless. As far as we can tell, there are an infinite number of alternates out there. Unlimited resources, different advances in medical and technological sciences. This is the biggest breakthrough in history.” She grinned. “And, of course, the obvious.”

  “Obvious?” There was nothing about any of this that screamed obvious to me.

  She winked. “To prove we can.”

  Cade tugged up the leg of his jeans. On his ankle, over the top of his sock, was a cuff that looked exactly like the one Dylan had snapped on me. “And this is what makes it all possible.”

  I lifted my wrist. The black leather strap looked so benign. Maybe a little new agey if you flipped it over, but capable of transporting you to a parallel universe? I just had a hard time buying into that.

  But, what if? If what they’re saying is true, then maybe she’s out there somewhere. Alive and well. Thriving…

  I wasn’t ready to jump on the insane-train just yet, but the wheels started turning in my head. The possibilities this opened up… “So you’re saying this thing will let me visit another dimension?”

  Elaina frowned. “Not let. Force. The cuffs are made in sets of six. Five drones linked to a master. This particular one, like Cade’s and Noah’s, is linked to the master on Dylan’s wrist. When he skips—moves from one dimension to the next—the others will as well, only on a short delay.”

  “Okay,” I said carefully. There was a “but” in there someplace. A big ugly one. “So couldn’t I go and just come back?”

  Cade sighed. “I know what you’re thinking, Kori. And theoretically, yes. While there’s no way to control where we go, the main cuff does have a way to return you here.”

  Elaina’s frown deepened. “The molecules in our bodies are always in flux. Always vibrating. I’ve been talking to Noah at length—the whole thing is absolutely fascinating!” Her eyes took on that same starry gleam, and she tilted her head back, smile spreading from ear to ear. “The cuffs work by changing the…frequency, if you will, of how a person’s molecules vibrate. Each parallel world has its own signature. Think of it as not necessarily traveling to another version of Earth, but more phasing. Like taking a step from one room into another. There’s a button on the main cuff that will return all users to their original vibrational state, therefore phasing them back to their rightful places.”

  “But your body needs preparation before the first trip,” Cade said cautiously. He looked from me to Elaina.

  She nodded. “There are measures that must be taken or the consequences are…unfavorable.”

  “Unfavorable?” And there it was. The kink in the line. “How unfavorable are we talking here?”

  “There are three possibilities,” Cade said, taking over. He glanced from Elaina to me, nervous. “If no preparation is taken, you’d never survive the skip. When the cuff activates, it would just confuse your body and scatter your molecules all over the place. Full prep takes, at minimum, seven days. Seven days we don’t have. The third possibility is called quick-prep. It has a slightly better prognosis.”

  I swallowed the growing lump in my throat. “Slightly better?” The news just kept getting brighter and bri
ghter. In my experience, slightly better didn’t usually amount to hopeful.

  “The quick-prep method will let you survive the skip without full prep, but it could destabilize the molecules on a more permanent basis. There’s a chance you could be caught in a kind of limbo.”

  “Limbo?” Something told me he wasn’t talking about dancing with sticks…

  “There’s a fair chance that you wouldn’t be returned home if the fail-safe button was pushed. You might simply be grounded where you stood. Stuck in whatever reality you were currently in.” Elaina hesitated for a moment. “Or, a more likely theory is that you would return home, but continue to phase randomly—and uncontrollably.”

  I balked. “Randomly? For how long?”

  She looked down, refusing to meet my gaze which, really, told me all I needed to know. “As I said, it’s a permanent alteration.”

  Cade pushed past her and lifted my chin so that we were eye to eye. “We used the quick-prep before following Dylan. It hasn’t happened to Noah or me. The truth is, there’s no way to know for sure. The fail-safe button has never been used. There’s no proof anything negative will happen.”

  “Yes.” Elaina nodded. “From what I’ve come to understand, we know only that it changes your molecular makeup. There’s a chance it could have no serious effect whatsoever.”

  A sick feeling bubbled in my gut. “How long do I have?”

  “If Dylan stays true to his word, then a few days,” Cade whispered. “But Dylan hasn’t always proven to be a man of his word, so the truth is, there’s no telling.”

  “Okay,” I said, trying to let it all soak in. No freaking out. Soldiers didn’t do that. “So, what you’re telling me is, if we don’t get this thing off, I’m going to be dragged along when you guys leave, which will kill me?” That wasn’t an option I was willing to accept, and I was pretty sure Dad wouldn’t be thrilled with it, either. I might drive him crazy on a somewhat daily basis, but total vaporization seemed extreme. “Well, just to be safe, since ya know I kind of like surviving, quick-prep me. There’s obviously not enough time for the whole shebang, but I’d rather continue breathing somewhere else than stop altogether. Dad can figure out how to get me back once this is all over, right?”