Crashland (10 page)

Clair wondered what the whispers in her ears would have to say about that, but they had ceased. And she had bigger things to worry about, like trying to think straight when every reflex was telling her to run around in circles, throw up, or scream.

“Are you all right?” Jesse squatted next to her and put one hand on her shoulder.

She shook her head. “Are you?”

“I will be when we get out of here.”

“I don't get it,” said the tech. “Where are we?”

Drader explained. Clair leaned into Jesse and he ran his fingers up her neck and into her hair. That felt good. She closed her eyes, wishing the images she saw behind her eyelids weren't of death and destruction all the time.

“This is where it started.”

Clair opened her eyes. Xia was standing in front of her and Jesse, looking at them with wide eyes. “This is where he told me what he could do. And this is where I came back . . .
after
.”

Xia wrapped her arms around herself, clutching her waist with the slender fingers that had performed such beautiful music. Clair shuddered. She would never be able to listen to Poulenc's double piano concerto again, or Satie's “Je te veux,” one of the most joyful pieces of music ever written. It was all ruined.

“I was afraid of what it would be like—living a lie, losing everyone I ever loved, being . . . what I am now.” Xia looked down at her body, and Clair was surprised to see loathing in her eyes. “This is not my body. It's stolen. It's
wrong
. . . but the temptation was too great. It wasn't anything to do with the music, although I tried to convince myself it was. I was simply afraid that dying would hurt. I was a coward.” She was weeping now, slow, silent tears that had none of the hysteria she had displayed earlier. Why she felt the need to confess, Clair didn't know. Maybe because of Libby.

“I feel her inside me, you know,” Xia said.

“Who?” asked Clair, sudden hope blooming. “Tilly?”

Xia nodded. “No thoughts or feelings . . . just the shape of her, the negative space where she used to be. It's like an echo I can only hear when I'm startled or distracted. Of all the things he did, that's the worst. I'm constantly reminded of what he did to her. If I could bring her back, I would. That's why I turned myself in. I hoped someone would know how to do that. But without
him
. . . if he's dead . . .”

There was such wretchedness in her expression that Clair almost felt sorry for her. Not as sorry as she did for Tilly, though. Or Libby.

“Are you sure you killed him?” Xia asked her, a faint flicker of hope visible in her eyes.

She understood now that
this
was why Xia was talking to her. Not to unburden herself, or to explain, but to confront the very possibility that Clair had been trying her utmost to ignore.

Are you sure you killed him?

“I mean, he could be behind all this,” Xia went on. “The dupes, the barrage . . . He could have made a copy of himself and stored it somewhere, a backup.”

“He could've done it in his sleep,” said Jesse, staring at the spot where his father had appeared briefly.

A black pit seemed to open in Clair's chest.

“Are you telling me it was all for nothing?” she said, her voice raw. “Everything I did?”

“Don't say that,” said Sargent. Clair hadn't realized she was listening. “You exposed Wallace for what he was. You stopped Improvement. You discovered Q. That's all something.”

The PK's expression was earnest. Clair wondered if she was thinking about reactivation, too.

“Maybe it is,” Clair said, fighting an urge to weep. “I don't know. But the dupes just won't stop. And now it looks like Wallace is still alive. What can we do about any of that?”

Forest and PK Drader had been silent until then, perhaps communicating via their suits' private networks. Her question interrupted the PKs' private conversation.

“We are doing everything in our power,” Forest said, “to find the source of the dupes.”

“That's just dandy,” said Devin, “but is it enough? You're stretched too thin. Without ready access to d-mat, and faced with an enemy who uses your own technology to its full potential, you're practically helpless. What's your plan if your best effort fails? Who's going to save the day if you can't?”

“Are you going to suggest RADICAL?” said Sargent.

“Well, we've already saved you once,” he said.

“If you'd all just listened to
us
,” said Jesse, “we wouldn't be in this mess at all.”

“I suppose that's true,” said Devin. “And I really would rather be starving to death in a sewer, if we had never used d-mat to stop the Water Wars.”

“Easy, you two,” said Forest. “What did you have in mind, Devin?”

He shrugged. “Nothing, really. I have no idea where the dupes are coming from or where Wallace might be hiding, assuming he actually is still alive. But I know who would.”

Clair groaned. “I keep telling you.
I don't know where Q is!
”

“You can help us draw her out.”

“So you can use her and then erase her? I don't think so.”

“Who said anything about erasing her? We just want to make sure she's safe.”

“On your terms,” she said. “Does she get a say in what those are?”

“You're looking at this situation all wrong, Clair. It's not about making new friends. It's survival of the fittest. She's an entirely new kind of being, as alien to us as bird flu virus or a god. If it comes down to her against us, who are you really going to choose?”

“Q isn't like that.”

“I'll never know unless you show me.”

“Let's just get out of here,” said Jesse. “We can argue later.”

“Agreed,” said the tech. “If the dupes are tracing our jumps, they could be here soon.”

“We should look outside before deciding anything,” said Sargent. “I don't want to walk out into anything dangerous.”

“If we open the Faraday shield, they'll definitely know where we are,” said Clair.

“So will we, in a strategic sense,” said Forest. “I too think it would be wise.”

There was a moment's silence as everyone looked at everyone else. The only person who hadn't offered an opinion was Xia, who had wandered away to sit listlessly in one of the chairs. She had nothing to gain either way, Clair supposed, with another guilty twinge of sympathy. If she stayed with the PKs, she would go to jail. If the dupes got her, there was no guarantee they would let her live. They had killed the other Improved in Crystal City, after all.

Clair had bigger problems, she told herself. And no one was making a decision, which made her blood boil. She didn't want to be cooped up in Wallace's cage any longer than she had to be.

“Just open it,” she told Devin. “At the first sign of trouble, we close up again and jump out of here, if we can.”

“We can. And you won't have to tell me twice.”

Something clunked in the walls. The shutters began to slide up the windows, letting in the golden light of sunset. From above, the devastation wrought by Q on the streets below was even more impressive. There were craters in the plaza and smoke still billowing from a nearby office building. Swathes of the lower, broader section of the VIA building had been stripped of its windows, exposing the metal beams and framework within. It looked like a giant dog had picked the building up and shaken it before dropping it back down again.

The only movement came from drones circling the VIA building, monitoring every approach. Presumably the route up from the flooded subway was also being watched, and Clair took some comfort from the thought that the building wasn't under attack. Yet.

Her lenses reconnected, flooding her infield with a rush of news grabs and bumps. There were images of the devastation in Washington, with estimates of fatalities in the thousands. Speculation on who was to blame was running wild. Some thought it was an accident exacerbated by the absence of structural engineers, thanks to the crash. Others thought it was terrorists, perhaps WHOLE, taking advantage of the situation. No one mentioned the dupes—but they were mentioning Clair Hill.

Her name appeared in a series of short pieces being forwarded widely through the Air. The main source was a gallery called “Clairwatch” that had sprung up in the last few hours. Its mission was simple. “She lied to you and now she's trying to hide from you,” said the information page. “We're not going to let her.”

Every page contained data relating to Clair's recent movements, activities, and communications, including blurry pictures captured from drones and PK feeds. From the climactic conclusion of her race to New York to the present, everything was covered. There was her removal from the plaza and parts of her interrogation by the PKs, lifted from the public record. There were details of Forest's and Sargent's careers, plus histories of Devin and RADICAL. There was her sudden appearance in Washington and the terrible flooding that had happened there. There was even a page on her current location, appearing within moments of the Faraday shield lifting.
She's back in the Big Apple!
was the caption.
What does she know that we don't?

“What
do
you know?” Ronnie asked Clair in a terse bump. She must have been watching Clair surf the Air, thanks to her close-friend privileges.

“Nothing,” Clair bumped back. “I'm as lost as everyone else is, I swear.”

“But you're part of it somehow. You're moving around like no one else can. What's going on? Are the PKs lying to us about d-mat?”

Clair didn't know how much she should say. She could see Ronnie sprawled on her bed, surrounded by empty chocolate bar wrappers she hadn't bothered to recycle. Both her parents had been on the other side of the world when d-mat failed. They were in constant contact with one another through the Air, and there were no fires or other disasters in the area. But still, Ronnie was trapped and alone. She didn't know her neighbors, her best friends were either missing, potential criminals, or currently stuck in a jungle valley picking off giant leeches. The photos Tash was posting to her infield were terrifying.

“Look up something called the shadow road,” Clair said. “That'll explain part of it.”

“What about Washington?” Ronnie reached for another chocolate bar. Anxiety eating had always been her greatest weakness. “And that space station? Are you a terrorist now?”

“No. If anyone tells you I am, they're lying through their teeth.”

“How can I believe you?”

“I don't know,” said Clair. She wanted to say that she was exactly the same person she ever was—even though she was a duplicate of the Clair who had killed herself in this very room—but how to explain that without sounding even crazier than people already claimed she was? If she could only go to Ronnie, she was sure she could convince her in person, but she doubted the PKs would let her do something so frivolous, in their eyes. In Clair's, it was of utmost importance. If her friends didn't trust her, why would Q?

“D-mat will start working again soon, you'll see,” Clair said, because it had to be true. “Everything will be fine.”

“Why should I listen to you? I don't know who you are anymore, Clair.”

Clair's eyes filled with unwanted tears.

“I'm doing my best,” she said, even though all she seemed to be doing at the moment was struggling to stay alive.

Right on cue Sargent said, “Movement.” Clair came out of her lens interfaces to join the others at the window. There didn't seem to be anything else she could do.

“WHAT?” JESSE ASKED,
looking around as though coming out of a daze. “Where?”

Sargent pointed down West Thirty-Third Street. A metal canister skittered along the road and exploded in a puff of thick brown smoke. Through the smoke Clair could make out indistinct figures in flickering urban-camouflage suits, moving fast from cover to cover, but she couldn't see their faces or tell exactly how many of them there were.

“Dupes?” Clair asked, wiping her eyes.

“One assumes so,” said Devin, keeping well back from the glass, even though it was undoubtedly bulletproof. Wallace had spared no expense in his inner sanctum.

“Definitely dupes,” said Jesse, still looking slightly dumbfounded. “I got a message, too.”

“Share it with us,” said Forest.

“No,” he said with a quick shake of his head. “Just Clair.”

“What's wrong?” she asked him. “Show me.”

Jesse didn't look at her as his fingertips danced against his leg, tapping out commands via his ancient augs. A moment later, a new window opened in Clair's lenses. It contained a video.

“What you see in the street below is one of two things,” said Dylan Linwood's dupe in the video, his left eye filled with bright-red blood from the original pattern. He was shown against a yellow desert backdrop that could have been anywhere. “An escort or a death squad, depending on how long it takes for you to hand her over.”

The image cut to another recording, this one taken in low light. Clair recognized Zep's room on the Isle of Shanghai. The camera was pointing at the bed. Audio hadn't been included. The images conveyed everything.

Clair closed the window as quickly as she could and deleted the message from her infield.

“That wasn't me,” she said to Jesse, cheeks burning. “I never . . . Honestly, we never. . . . I swear.”

He nodded, but still didn't look at her. “It's dupes. I figured. They're just messing with me now, so I've deleted it.” To the others he said, “They want us to hand over Clair or they're going to kill us all.”

“We're not doing that,” said Devin.

“Of course we're not,” said Sargent. “But at least they're talking to us before they bring the building down around our ears.”