Infinite(81)

“Then what do you want with me?”

“I told you. You’re leading the life I’m supposed to have. And I want it back.”

“What does that even mean?” He narrowed his eyes, trying to see me in the darkness. “Who are you?”

I almost stepped into the light and gave him the answer. I’m you. If I came at him, he’d know who was taking away his world. Before he died, he’d look into my eyes and see the truth. I tightened my grip around the knife handle, feeling it slip in my sweaty fingers. My mouth was dry with desire for what this man had. My legs tensed, ready to move.

But I couldn’t do it. This wasn’t me.

I was trying to take things that belonged to someone else. I’d lost my Karly; he’d kept his. I’d waited to have a child with her; he’d said yes. I could take those things for myself, but in the end, they still wouldn’t be mine. I hadn’t earned them, and this man had. He deserved to keep them, not to have them ripped away by a stranger. I couldn’t steal his life.

I stayed in the tunnel, where I was invisible. The silence between us dragged out.

“It doesn’t matter who I am,” I told him finally. “Go home. Get out of here. Go home to Karly. Go home to your little girl.”

He backed away, unsure whether this was a trick. I stayed in the darkness without moving, watching my one chance at happiness leave me behind. When Dylan got to the top of the slope, he turned his back on me. I knew he would run now, disappearing into the park.

“Dylan,” I called after him sharply.

He stopped, although he was far enough away that I wasn’t a threat anymore. “What is it?”

“Not that way.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t go through the park. Stay on the street. If you never want to see me again, stay out of the park at night.”

There was something in the sound of my voice that convinced him. He went the other way. He clambered up the grass away from the trail, and when he was out of sight, he ran. I heard his footsteps pounding above me, as he joined the lights and traffic and people on the street.

He was safe. He’d make it home now.

My grief tasted bitter in my mouth. I felt hollowed out inside. I’d come a long way and ended up back where I started, with nothing to show for the journey. The guilt, the loss, the shame, all distracted me. I wasn’t thinking about where I was, or the darkness of the tunnel that had been lit up when I came this way before. I’d missed the clues I should have seen immediately. I’d forgotten why I was in this world.

I turned around and saw my own shadow.

He buried a knife in my stomach.





CHAPTER 32

The blade sliced through tissue and muscle and severed my intestines. I felt an electric shock of pain and then a strange flowing warmth. My doppelg?nger was right in front of me, his breath on my face. He cut through my abdomen with the practiced hand of a butcher. The damage was done in seconds, and then he put his other hand flat on my chest and pushed me away. I stumbled backward. The knife slid out of my body. I clutched at my stomach and felt blood oozing between my fingers. I staggered out of the tunnel into the light, with a wet red stain growing on my shirt. The river slurped along the bank beside me, sounding loud inside my head.

Shock overwhelmed me. With my fingers numb, my own knife clattered uselessly to the sidewalk. I tried to hold the blood in, but I couldn’t. It pulsed out of my body.

Dylan followed me out of the tunnel, wiping the bloody knife on his leather jacket.

“I thought you were different,” he sneered. “When I saw you take out that knife, I really thought you might have the balls to kill him. But no. You had your chance, and you let it slip away.”

I fought down the dizziness in my head and charged at him. He saw me coming. Smoothly, he eased his weight onto his left foot, turned sideways, and lashed out with a jab of his right leg. His foot kicked like a piston into the wound in my stomach, and my brain turned upside down with agony. I stumbled, moaned, then collapsed to my hands and knees. My mouth spat up vomit. Blood dripped from my belly onto the trail, a constellation of cherry-red spatter.

I tried to forget about my panic. My fear. My pain. I needed to function, at least for a while longer. The blood on the ground became a kind of Rorschach test, centering me. I stared at the blood, and then my gaze shifted to the weeds and cracks in the bridge’s retaining wall, and then to the shadows thrown by the light post overhead, and then finally to the long steel blade of my knife. It still lay on the trail where I’d dropped it. The black handle was inches away. My body blocked it from the view of the Dylan standing over me. I could feel him there, like a boxer crowing over the adversary he’d knocked to the ground.

My fingers inched closer to the knife like the legs of a spider. In one jerky motion, I grabbed it and pushed off my knees. I slashed at him with the blade, and my knife landed in flesh, driving four inches deep into his thigh.

He howled with pain and twisted away, ripping the knife handle from my hand. Grimacing, he yanked the knife out of his leg and threw it like a boomerang into the river. I could hear the splash. He lifted his own knife high over his head, and his eyes boiled with fury. I expected him to bury the blade in my neck, cutting through arteries that would erupt in fountains of blood.

Instead, slowly, he brought his arm back down. I was on my knees on the sidewalk, and he limped toward me and slid the sharp edge of the blade under my chin. He pressed hard enough that I could feel the sting. Then he lowered the knife and jabbed it into the fabric of my shirt and tore away one of the sleeves. He backed up and tied the sleeve tightly around his leg. The cloth was crimson in seconds.