The Infinity of You & Me by J.Q. Coyle

Author:J.Q. Coyle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

CHAPTER TWELVE

A HAND on my jaw.

A dark room.

One eye is forced open wide, drilled with light.

Blinding.

Then the other.

My uncle’s face, blurred and doubling, leans over me.

My eyes sting and tear. I blink to clear my vision.

My wrists are still cuffed. The computer screen glows blue. My head aches, a deep unwavering pain.

The small windows are dark.

“Where’s my father?” My throat is rough.

“I’ll never understand it, Alicia. Your father’s been gone all these years, and I’m the one who’s been here all along.”

I lift my arms, cuffed to the bedrails. “It’s a relationship based on deep trust, right? Mutual respect? Honesty?” I hate my uncle for wasting years of my life, not telling me the truth—not preparing me. “I know what I am now. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I don’t expect you to understand, but I really have wanted the best for you. And I couldn’t tell you things before. I can now,” he says, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his white lab coat.

“I want to know where Dad is. I want to see him.”

“Your father’s dangerous.”

“He didn’t seem dangerous to me.”

“He’s dangerous to the prime. To this world we call our own,” Alex says. “Think about it. If you had access to all of these other worlds, wouldn’t you take advantage of the opportunity?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“These branches,” he says, “they’re useful, essential really, to scientific advancement. During World War II, we tested the A-bomb in the desert of the prime, Alicia. No one has to do that anymore. We have worlds for that. Weapons, alternative fuels, global economic market shifts, responses to emergencies of all kinds. We can test these things out in the branches, and when we do, we strengthen the prime. We’re saving lives.”

I remember the TV footage of the nuclear bomb going off when the old man was stitching up my gunshot wound in that old hotel room, and then the drone I saw in one of those worlds, the people in hazmat suits, the quarantine camp in the world where Jax is, where my mother is dying. “You think the people in those worlds are lab rats?”

“Do you want us to play out the apocalypse in the prime? Right now, for example, there’s a branch in which a vaccination called RO Two was tested on a virus. Heard of it?”

I shake my head no.

“The virus was developed in a test tube. Biological warfare. It only exists in two locations in this world. Well, as far as we know. And no one has any defense against it. If it fell into the wrong hands here, it would decimate the world’s population in three to four years. So we tested the RO Two vaccine in a branch world. It didn’t work. The company has developed another vaccine, and we’ll test it in another branch until we get it right. And the branches aren’t going to survive if the prime doesn’t. They depend on the prime as their main source. If we’re not healthy, they’re not healthy.

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