Hollowgirl (29 page)

“HELL,” SAID JESSE.

“That hole is much bigger than anything a grenade could've done,” said Libby.

“The entire place was twisted in there,” said Zep. “Everything was bigger. Why not the explosion, too?”

That made about as much sense as anything else, Clair
thought, ripping with Zep to a different position. The hollowmen were everywhere. No hiding place was safe for long.

“So how will we get to the exit?” Jesse asked.

“What about the elevators?” Clair asked. “Zep and Clair One went that way—”

“We took out the elevator shaft,” said Evan.

“The foyer?” said Zep. “At least we'll be behind those big assholes.”

“It might work,” said Dylan.

“Let's try it,” said Zep.

Clair nodded. “All you have to do is get me in there and out again, and then both of us will have the reference. We can show the others the way.”

“Okay.”

“Wait,” said Kari. “I'll come with you.”

“Stay here,” Clair said. “You're a bigger target.”

She took Zep's hand. He squeezed it tightly, as though afraid she might slip away like Clair One had.

Then reality twisted around them, making her head spin—and they were standing inside the building, staring out into the plaza at the backs of the prize giants.

“Got it?” Zep said.

She looked down at her suit, which had adopted the colors and shades of the foyer, and nodded.

He took them out again.

“I'm low on juice,” he said.

“The others can meet you here,” she told Zep, then let go of him and ripped back inside, alone.

The hollowmen hadn't noticed her brief appearance a moment earlier, and they didn't react to her return. She ducked down into the nearest corner, a tiny blurred shape on the edge of a combat zone, and got her bearings.
There
were the prize giants.
There
were some hollowmen she hadn't noticed before, occupying tactical positions that would come into play if the attacking forces made it through the front doors.
There
were the elevator shafts, larger than she remembered, now blackened chimneys full of tangled cables and metal.

Run to the bottom,
she thought.
Fly to the top. Rip back out with the reference. Easy.

It was utterly without doubt better than the alternative. Fighting their way up the mangled elevator shaft would trap them in a bottleneck. They'd be picked off from both ends.

She braced herself to run, but reality twisted and a hand caught her elbow.

“Just what do you think you're doing, Ms. Hill?” hissed a voice in her ear.

Libby.

Clair tugged up her face mask so she could talk without anyone hearing.

“You can't be here,” she said. “This is dangerous.”

“Gee, I hadn't noticed.” Libby's face was flushed and sweaty. Her birthmark stood out on her cheek like war paint, proudly displayed. “No one goes in alone. That's the number one rule of the Unimprovables. Did you skip that class? Let's see your doctor's note, young lady.”

Clair shushed her, but grinned at the same time. “How did you get in here?”

“I used you as a reference, like we did with Ray, coming to the prison. Don't think you can escape me again.”

“I'm not trying to escape. I just . . .”

One of the hollowmen glanced their way. They retreated deeper into the shadows and waited until gunfire from outside covered their voices.

“I get it,” Libby whispered. “You're going to Frodo your way in, but you forgot something very important: Frodo didn't actually work alone.”

“You're Sam Gamgee?”

“In my version of the story I'm both prettier and more in charge, like Galadriel, but whatever. You get the point. And I get yours.” Libby pointed at the elevator shaft, jaw set in a very un-elf-like line. “Up there, is it? Let's go before the others get here and spoil the party.”

“Wait.” Libby had given her a better idea. “I just figured out why Wallace has been so eager to get rid of me.”

“Besides the fact that you ruined his entire life?”

“Because I
know
him.” Clair pulled her face mask back
down and took Libby's hand in hers. In her other hand she called up a glitch-gun.

“What are you doing?”

“Trust me,” she bumped her best friend. “And get ready.”

She wished she had thought of this sooner. It was the one advantage she had that no one else did, but they couldn't have used it before because she was injured. Then, when she had been healed, Jesse hadn't wanted to put her in danger, so the plan stayed unchanged. Evan, too, although he was probably more worried about landing in the wrong spot and her accidentally destroying the Yard. . . .

Clair promised that wasn't going to happen.

She knew exactly where she was going.

Anthony Reinhold Wallace, with his slick, graying hair and pleasantly charming smile. That was the mask he presented to the world, but unlike PK Forest's mask, which had concealed dignity and humor, Wallace's hid self-interest and brutality. Clair knew both the mask and the man behind it. She knew that she could find him, wherever he was hiding.

“We're going straight to the top.”

CLAIR PICTURED WALLACE
as she had last seen him, his face a mask of confident cruelty as he threatened her family and
friends in the hopes of weaseling Q's secret out of her.

“You only get one second chance,” he had said.

That wasn't even remotely true. Both of them had had many chances to do the right thing since then. Neither of them had entirely managed it, but life would keep throwing chances at them while they still had breath in their lungs.

Now was her chance to finish it for good.

Clair's suit ripped her and Libby through the fabric of the Yard and deposited them on a cracked marble floor, where their feet crunched on broken glass and the air was cold and smelled of smoke and ashes. Shattered furniture lay in piles all around them.

Wallace was standing in the ruins of his magnified office just a dozen meters away, staring down at the ground. His arm was in a sling. In his right hand he held an old-fashioned revolver. He didn't look up as their suits adjusted to the new surroundings.

He was so close, Clair thought. It would take little more than a gesture to shoot him down. . . .

“Who's there?”

Clair and Libby whipped around. Kingdon appeared to their left, leading a trio of hollowmen, all heavily armed. It was she who had spoken, she who was looking suspiciously about. The lawmaker was wearing armor and carrying an automatic rifle. She looked like she knew how to use it.

“Go,” bumped Clair to Libby. “Give the others the
reference. I'll make sure he doesn't go anywhere.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“No one's here,” said Wallace without looking up. “It's an illusion.”

Kingdon gestured for her hollowmen to split up and look around. Clair waited until Libby ripped away, and under cover of that small disturbance ducked behind a stand of splintered wood that might once have been a high-backed chair. Clair couldn't see the exit from there, but if she moved carefully, when no one was looking . . .

“There's something,” said Kingdon. “Can't you feel it?”

“There's nothing,” said Wallace.

Kingdon tsked. “You should be paying closer attention to what's happening around you. If they get in here—”

“If they get in here it'll make no difference at all.”

“This is getting tiresome, Ant. You promised this was only temporary. If you can't deliver, at least stop being such a—”

A single gunshot rang out. Something thudded heavily to the floor. Clair peered around the burned chair and saw Kingdon sprawled in a pile, shot just below the neck through a gap in her armor. Blood pooled across the marble. Wallace's gun was smoking.

Clair stifled a gasp. Sara Kingdon, crooked lawmaker and wannabe tyrant, was dead, killed by the man who had made her entire plan possible. Without her, everything
changed. Clair believed Kingdon when she claimed that she had been trying to keep Wallace in check. He had no qualms about robbing the bodies of teenagers and turning them into killers. He had no qualms at all.

Without Kingdon, the fight for the Yard was no longer a political fight. It was a fight for survival.

Wallace looked at each of the hollowmen in turn. None of them made a move in retaliation.

“This is the gun my wife used the first time,” he told them, hefting the pistol in his hand. “She had a good eye for deadly things. I'm saving the next bullet for someone special.”

The words sent a cold feeling flooding through Clair.

“Okay, we have the reference,” said Jesse over the connected suits. “We're on our way.”

“Kingdon's dead,” she bumped back.

“Did you . . . ?”

“No. It was Wallace.”

“One down,” said Libby. “Hold tight.”

Clair looked around for the exit. It would help everyone if they knew which direction they had to go, once they arrived. Leaving Wallace to his morbid contemplations, she retreated in mouse steps, checking carefully behind her before putting her feet back down. The walls were deeply fissured and stained black, courtesy of the grenade, Clair assumed. Once she found the half-melted elevator doors, she was able to get her bearings. The exit,
according to Zep's images, would be to her right, just behind that stand of half-crumbled stone. . . .

She froze in shock. Where the exit should have been was a mound of rubble. The ceiling had come down in the blast, burying the exit under fifteen feet of debris.

Don't panic,
she told herself. They wouldn't actually need the exit until the channel was open and RADICAL's booths were ready on the other side. They would have all the time in the world to dig once Wallace was out of the way.

Shapes moved in the corners of her eye. Even through the layers of stone, Clair could sense the exit's presence. She quietly put some distance between herself and the doorway. The last thing she needed was a series of random glitches giving her away.

“Three,” said Jesse.

On light toes she ran back to where she had last seen Wallace.

“Two.”

He was still there, looking down at his feet as he had been before. Had she not known the full story of his relationship with Mallory, she might almost have felt sorry for him.

“One.”

The hollowmen were elsewhere. As far as she could tell, he was armed with nothing but the old handgun.

He wasn't going to get a chance to use it again, Clair swore. He wouldn't escape justice that easily. She raised
her glitch-gun and sighted carefully along it. Knowledge was real, she told herself, and she
knew
her aim would be true. . . .

“Go,” said Jesse.

Reality twitched.

Clair pulled the trigger. Pop. Wallace's pistol disappeared, along with the fingers of his right hand. He snatched his arm back with a gasp of pain, and looked wildly about him.

Glitch-suited figures stepped out of thin air, weapons at the ready. More poured from a hole in the wall that had appeared to Clair's right. Camouflage rippled and shifted as they moved through the chamber, circling Wallace and seeking out the hollowmen. Glitch-guns went off in quick succession as reinforcements ripped in from elsewhere in the building.

Clair left the fighting to them. She crept up on Wallace where he stood with his bleeding hand clutched across his injured sling-bound left arm, looking surprised but not cowed. The innate confidence he had in his own authority was unchecked by this sudden reversal.

Clair tugged off her mask, deactivating her suit's camouflage.

“Impressive,” he said, turning to face her, eyes taking in the details of the suit. “What do you do for an encore?”

“Try you for conspiracy, genocide . . . the lot.”

“Why not just kill me now?”

“Because we're not murderers.”

Jesse appeared beside her, and then Kari.

“Not murderers, you say? This dead lawmaker would disagree,” Wallace said, indicating Kingdon's corpse.

“You shot her with Mallory's gun,” Clair said. “I caught it on my lenses.”

His eyes narrowed. “Then you're smart enough to know that it doesn't end here. For every Sara Kingdon, there are three more waiting in the wings. Are you going to fight all of them?”

“And everyone who helps them,” said Kari. “There are no excuses for tyranny.”

“Spoken like a good peacekeeper,” he laughed. “What do you think you are—a superhero?”

“I have the authority to deputize. It won't take me long to rebuild the PKs.”

“When we tell people the truth,” Clair said, “your volunteers will realize how you deceived them.”

“The ones you haven't already killed, you mean.” Wallace cocked his chin toward the elevator shaft, where the sound of fighting was dying away. “Are you going to tell them that they'd be dead if it weren't for the Yard? That I saved them from the terrorists who destroyed the world? Are you going to tell them that it's
your fault
we're in this fucking mess in the first place? The girl who killed d-mat,
the girl who can do no wrong
.”

His expression was furious now, and Clair felt reflexive
shame, even though she knew he was only trying to get to her.

Before she could think of something to say, an utterly unexpected sound came from Clair's right: Libby's laughter. Space rippled and suddenly her best friend was standing right next to her, her mockery reserved entirely for Wallace.

“If that's what you think,” she said, “you don't know Clair at all.”

His expression smoothed into blankness on seeing her.

“You're one of Mallory's,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “There are a few of us here.”

Isolated figures began to appear around them, six in all, all blond, like Libby. All young. All beautiful. All Unimprovable. All triumphant.

“Tell us,” Libby said, “why we shouldn't torture you like you tortured our families. Like you tortured
us
.”

Wallace had gone pale. His voice was weak. “Stay away from me.”

“Oh, I will.” Libby laughed again, but with no humor at all. “I don't want to know what you did while Mallory was using us, but we'll make sure you get what you deserve. And on that day, deep underground, when you decide to take your own life, we'll cheer.”

Wallace, at last, looked thoroughly beaten.

“It's over,” Clair said, barely able to believe that she was saying the words. The hostages were saved. They were all saved.

This meant more to her than victory.

It was the moment in which everything they had done wrong could be forgiven.

“Give us control of the exit,” she said, wondering how it would a work: a code word, perhaps? Some kind of custom interface? “We need to get out of here and start rebuilding the world. Help us do that and life will be a little easier for you in the ultramax.”

His gaze flicked back to her. He looked almost confused, and she wondered if something in him had broken. Could defeat have been so unimaginable to him that even now he was questioning its reality?

Wallace's eyes widened. He opened his mouth.

Someone twisted into the space directly behind Clair and pressed the hot barrel of a gun firmly to her cheek.

Her shock could not have been greater until Dylan Linwood spoke through his open face mask, “Sorry, Clair, but that's not the way it's going to be.”