Infinity Bell: A House Immortal Novel Read Online Free PDF

implications of bugging clicked through the tumblers of my brain.
    “That means House Silver knew you were out on my farm for two years,” I said.
    “He sent me there to keep an eye on you,” Right Ned said, as if admitting a guilt he would rather forget. “Didn’t take a bug to track me down.”
    “And every time Quinten came home, he was sending a signal to whatever House had last claimed him?”
    “Maybe. Maybe not,” Left Ned said. “Your place has scramblers like I’ve never seen before. I’ve told you this before: there’s something in the soil out there, Tilly. Something that messes with the laws of the world.”
    “Why, Neds Harris,” I said, putting a little grin behind my words. “I thought you said you didn’t believe in magic.”
    “I don’t. But there’s strange nanotech in your dirt and mixes of minerals that
do
things to things.”
    Things like Lizard, who was stitched up out of reptile parts the size of a house, wings included. Things like the pocket-sized sheep that never aged and grew wool that could catch up and save spare minutes of time.
    Things like the life thread spun out of the minerals and who knew what else in the creek, and onto spools in my father’s laboratory beneath our old pump house.
    The same thread that held me together and made it so I could feel.
    The same thread that was holding Abraham together.
    All of it coming from the land my parents had tried to keep secret and refused to give up, even when it meant their death.
    “Sadie and Corb were with us,” I said, catching a quick glimpse of Quinten stepping into the booth and lifting his arms out to the side, his stance wide. He still had his clothes on, so that was good.
    Gloria closed a door that became a screen and displayed his body as if it were made of a map of roads and twisted electrical wires.
    “And?” Left Ned asked, bringing me back to the conversation.
    “If anyone was tracking our bugs, they will find Sadie and Corb.”
    “You heard what she said,” Right Ned said. “Can’t track over water. And don’t worry about Sadie and Corb. They know how to lie low. They knew what they were getting into. It isn’t just your head that has a price on it, Tilly. Abraham is the one person the Houses will turn the world inside out to find. They’d like to get their hands on you, but he’s an accused murderer.”
    “He didn’t do it,” I said.
    Right Ned nodded, but Left Ned just looked down at his shoe the way a person does when he’s trying to be polite enough not to point out that you’re fooling yourself.
    “I’m sure you’re right,” Right Ned said.
    Which sounded like he agreed with his brother more than with me.
    Abraham was so still on that table, I couldn’t even see his chest rise and fall. My heart clenched in fear, in sorrow. I didn’t want him to die. Didn’t want to watch him suffer.
    What I wanted was to touch him, to wake him up and see that sardonic grin on his face and spark of humor in his eyes. I wanted to tell him it was going to be okay. I wanted to ask him if he really did go into House Orange and kill Slater Orange for the heinous treatment Slater had given Robert Twelfth, a galvanized who was Abraham’s dear friend.
    Abraham was the galvanized who had led the other galvanized through the Uprising that had put them at war with the Houses. He’d also been the one who had led the galvanized into the peace negotiations and the eventual treaty that had bargained away galvanized rights for the chance for human freedom—House Brown freedom.
    I’d seen him angry. I’d watched as he casually cut off a man’s ear just for talking to him wrong.
    So, yes, I could imagine he could be pushed to killing someone without suffering a lot of regret. Especially that sadistic prick Slater Orange.
    But if Abraham were found to have murdered Slater, it would dissolve the treaty between the galvanized and the Houses they served. It would send the galvanized into prisons, or, worse, they could