Dr. Margo Pullman couldn’t stop staring at the tiny baby lying all alone in his industrial-looking metal crib. The company hadn’t even gotten around to setting up the room to look like a nursery. It had the same design as the other two, plastic floors with a drain in the center.
But this room looked even more heartbreaking with dusty cardboard boxes shoved against the opposite wall labeled “Archives Case M1 through 24.”
The baby was crying so hard, his lips quivered with the effort. His tiny arms were in the open, startled position. Every ounce of Margo’s humanity screamed in pain for that innocent baby. She wanted to reach in there and steal him away.
“The subjects we treat here are expendable in the grand scheme of things. We’ve lost dozens already and these three cases are no more likely to survive, but their lives will have saved millions. The Infinite Project was named because the possibilities are just that, infinite!”
Margo tried desperately to contain her rage as she realized all the years of effort she spent thinking she would be helping children. Instead, she was part of a machine that was torturing and killing them!
That’s when she snapped.
Chapter 1 Meet the Winter Family
The three of us shuffled around the kitchen yawning, half asleep as we gathered the fixings for breakfast. We’re obviously practiced at this task. Alik grabs the milk and pours just enough into the bowl of eggs I’m stirring with a whisk and Evan sets a pat of butter into the pan as it gets hot. Yummy breakfast smells filled the air.
A soft whimper came from under the kitchen table. Apparently, Maze wanted us to be quieter as he finished his beauty sleep. Silly animal.
I’m Meg, the oldest at fifteen. Fixing breakfast for the family is our usual chore. That’s why we’re all so automatic about it. We can almost do this in our sleep. Almost.
I grabbed a spatula from the drawer and began stirring pieces of ham into the sizzling pan. I’m sure I looked a mess standing there in my fuzzy pajamas with my dark, curly hair in a knot at the back of my head, but I really didn’t care. Who was I trying to impress?
We were homeschooled and the nearest neighbors lived twenty-five miles away. I loved living on the ranch, but lately it was starting to feel a little stifling. Okay, a lot stifling.
Slumped in his seat at the kitchen table was my younger brother Alik. At fourteen, he was the middle child who had an easygoing way about him. Alik stood at least six feet tall and naturally carried a lot of muscle mass so he outweighed me by sixty pounds. Next to his size, it was his crisp blue eyes that were his most striking feature. Not that I could see his eyes this morning. Apparently, he was looking for cracks in his lids. The poor kid was exhausted.
Evan, the youngest in the family at twelve, was setting the table with drinks for everyone. He is my height, about 5’6” and growing fast. His sandy blonde hair hung into honey-colored eyes. I was more than capable of cutting his hair, but it was a rare day that he’d hold still long enough for me to trust myself with scissors around him.
Evan was very well read. That kid has read every book in mom’s huge home library. Come to think of it, he’s probably read half the books twice just out of boredom. And here I think I’m feeling cooped up on the ranch. Poor Evan was itching to devour more knowledge but there just wasn’t anything left for him to learn inside these walls. Mom couldn’t bring home enough books to satisfy him.
A quick glance at Evan’s concentration as he filled each cup with the same amount of orange juice had me shaking my head in wonder. I remember him as a baby and even then he seemed so much older than he was.
What will he do when he grows up? Maybe he’ll be some kind of engineer. His brain seems to understand how things work. He can build anything. He can take things apart, use pieces of various things and put them together to make other things. He’s amazing.
And Alik? He has an awe-inspiring photographic memory. He’s agile and quick, too. I suppose he could do about anything with those skills. For some reason, he was really interested in law. Specifically, law enforcement. He would make a great investigator or detective.
As for me, I have to get out of here soon, but it’s a little scary. Mom has always been super protective of us. We live in a bubble, and I’m not exaggerating. We don’t own a television or a radio. We only listen to mom’s old records. So we’ve grown up listening to Elvis, Neil Diamond, The Bee Gee and ABBA. We get no mail, newspapers or magazines. Like I mentioned before, mom has a huge library of books for us to read and she does homeschool us so we’re all really good at history, math and literature.
Personally, I’d just like to eat at a restaurant and go shop at a department store. Sounds like a simple dream, but what can I say, I’m a simple girl.