James Dashner - The Hunt for Dark Infinity

“What do you mean?” he finally asked.

“My name is Renee,” she replied, ignoring his question. “But right now he is in my head, and I will do whatever he says.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Sato said, taking a step back.

Renee stood up. Her beauty shined despite tattered, dirty garments. She was short and thin, but held herself with confidence-back straight, shoulders square, chin up.

“Why has George sent you here?” she asked.

Sato took another step backward, this time bumping into the stone wall across from the woman. “How… how do you know-”

“Stop acting the fool, young man. I know everything. I’m Reginald Chu, and I find it very interesting that you’ve come here, to this strange place, with a syringe in your hand. Why? ”

Sato pulled his right hand from behind his back, looking down at it as if ashamed. He didn’t know which felt worse right then-his head or his stomach. “I don’t understand. What do you mean you’re Reginald Chu?”

“I think I’m the one who doesn’t understand,” Renee replied. “George seems to know so much about my project, yet here you stand, without the slightest clue of the danger you are in. How can you trust such a leader?”

“Nothing you say makes sense.”

“Everything I say makes sense.” Renee crossed the short span of the tunnel, stopping directly in front of Sato. “Once I have my partner, once Dark Infinity is fully functional, you’ll understand. The Realities are about to have a great change, my friend.”

Sato swallowed, trying to build his courage. “You’re crazy, lady. You think Reginald Chu is controlling you somehow. Don’t you see how crazy that is? You need help.”

“I told you,” Renee said with a sneer. “We’re not crazy until he leaves our heads.”

“My boss-he thinks he can find a cure for you. If you’ll just let me…” He held the syringe up, raising his eyebrows in question.

“A cure?” Renee backed off two steps, shaking her head. “A cure? Does that man think I’m a toady research assistant at some under-funded university? He thinks he’s going to stop me with a cure? He’ll sooner cure cancer, Parkinson’s, diabetes, and regenerate amputated limbs before he’ll stop Dark Infinity.”

Confusion swarmed like a pack of bees inside Sato’s head. The lady really and truly thought she was Reginald Chu. And it worried Sato that he was sliding toward that same belief as well. “What is Dark Infinity?”

Renee folded her arms. “As they say in your Reality, that’s on a need-to-know basis and you don’t need to know. A cure. Ha.” She barked a laugh.

“If you’re so confident, why not give me a blood sample? And then I’ll leave.”

Renee held out her hand to him. “Come with me,” she said. “I want to give you a taste of what Dark Infinity will become. And then I want you to go back and report it to your buffoon of a leader. All the Realitant do-gooders can then have fun dreading the day I take over their lives.”

Sato shook his head. “Give me a sample first. Then I’ll go.”

Renee stared at him for a long minute, her blue eyes seeming to glow. “You’re brave for someone so young. Maybe you should have been included in my special trials. Of course, I need a lot more than bravery-too bad you’re not more like your friend Atticus Higginbottom.”

Sato almost fell to the ground at the mention of Tick. This lady had no way, absolutely no way of knowing anything about Tick or the strange ability he’d displayed in the Thirteenth Reality. “How do you know about him?”

“Come with me.” She beckoned again with her hand.

“The sample first.” Sato wiped sweat from his brow, thinking too late how much weakness the action probably showed. “You said yourself there’s no way George can find a cure.”

“Yes, I did say that. But I’m not an idiot-I won’t take chances. This isn’t some lame movie from your Hollywood.”

Sato steeled his nerves. “I’m not going anywhere until you give me a blood sample. You may think you have Reginald Chu inside your head, but I bet he won’t be much help in a wrestling match between us.”

Renee laughed, such a pleasant sound in the otherwise dreary place that it disturbed Sato.

“A compromise, then,” she said. Or Chu said. “I’ll give you your sample, but you let me carry the vial until we’re done. I want-no, I need you to report back to George what you see here today.”

“No way,” Sato said. “I’m not giving you the vial.”

Renee’s face creased into a scowl so frightening that Sato would have melted into the stone at his back if he could have. “You tire me, boy. Do you really think I’m going to let you leave here alive with a sample of my blood? You’ll be signing your own death warrant.”

Sato felt his own blood chill. George will get me out, he thought. George will get me out.

“I’ll take my chances,” he said. “Give me your blood and I’ll go with you.”

Renee stuck her arm out. “Do it, then.”

Sato stepped forward and grabbed her thin arm, leaning over to look at the soft skin in the bend of her elbow. A big vein pulsed, purple in the faint light.

“This might hurt,” he said, not sure why he showed any compassion. “I’ve never done this before.”

“Just do it. Nothing you do to me will be worse than when he leaves my head.”

As Sato readied the syringe, the needle only an inch from the vein, he looked up at Renee’s face. “Sometimes you talk like you’re this Chu guy, and sometimes like yourself. You really are crazy.”

“You wouldn’t understand unless you were infected. Stick me.”

Sato held his breath, then jammed the needle into Renee’s vein. He quickly pulled back on the syringe pump, relieved to see dark red fluid fill the plastic vial. He finished, pulled out the needle, then replaced the plastic cover. He put the whole thing into his right pocket. He put a bandage on her arm to stop the bleeding.

“Done,” he said, finally taking in a huge breath like he’d just surfaced after diving for oysters.

“That blood will never see the light of day; you understand that, right? The only way you will leave this mountain is by giving it up.”

“Just show me what you wanted to show me.” Half of him wanted to push her down and run for the elevator, but he knew he couldn’t. George would desperately need any information he could gather in his quest to find a cure or antidote.

“This way.” She walked toward a branch of the tunnel leading to the right, but paused after a couple of steps and turned toward Sato, her face devoid of expression. “What you’re about to see, you’ll never forget. Never. I promise you.”

With each step down the wet and musty passage of stone, the noises around Sato grew in volume. The screams and wails and shouts and piercing cries for help made him feel as if invisible bugs were crawling across his skin, trying to find a place to burrow toward his heart. His stomach clenched into a tight wad of tissue. He braced himself for the sight ahead, wondering if he’d ever see George or Mothball or Rutger or his other friends again.

They reached a place where a dirty curtain was stretched across the entire width of the hallway, swaying slightly from a breeze behind it. The awful sounds became ear-piercing, no longer muffled by distance. Sato was now only a few feet away from discovering whatever was wrong with these people.

“Prepare yourself,” Renee said. Then she reached out and yanked the curtain to the side.

For the second time in the last hour, Sato’s knees buckled. He fell to the ground, his shins slamming onto the hard stone as he stared at the chaos in front of him.