Hollowgirl (30 page)

Clair Three

CLAIR WAS WATCHING.
For days now she had been striving toward this moment, enduring freezing conditions
as high as the balloon would go, squeezing every last ounce of thrust from the
Satoshige
, ditching every kilogram she could pry from Sandler's greedy hands, taking advantage of every favorable turn in the weather, all in order to get to Lake Baikal in time. And now they were so close. In fact, they would arrive hours ahead of schedule. She could practically taste the mountains on the lake's western shore. Once the airship was past them, it was just a matter of landing on the ice, directly above the borehole, and opening up the Yard to the wider world.

Clair Two and Jesse could come back, and she could watch from the sidelines, surplus to everyone else's needs . . . but alive, and secure in the knowledge that her loved ones were too. That would make up for what she had done.

Hope for the best, plan for the worst. Expect something in between.

When Dylan Linwood made his move, she gasped. This wasn't what she had expected at all.

“Devin, you're seeing this,” Clair said. “Is there anything you can do to stop him from there?”

“Let me think.”

The line to the South Pole went dead, along with every other communications channel. Her window on the Yard closed too. Clair turned to ask what was going on, and
found herself staring down the barrel of a pistol.

It was held by Sandler Jones.

Behind him, half the crew of the
Satoshige
had weapons drawn and trained on the other half, who were slowly putting their hands up and backing away from the controls.

“What are you doing?” Clair asked them.

“You didn't really think we were going to let any of those zombies out of there, did you?” Sandler said.

Shock turned to understanding, quickly followed by horror and dismay at her own gullibility. All along, Sandler had had his own objective in reaching the exit: not to help anyone escape, but to stop anyone from escaping, ever.

“Those containers you wouldn't let me throw overboard,” she said. “What's really in them?”

“The components of a bunker buster,” he said. “Something we found in a weapons store under the ruins. It'll drill down through the ice in a matter of minutes and take out the Yard servers in one bright flash. Clever, hey?”

She shook her head, feeling betrayed. They certainly hadn't
looked
like weapon parts, but what did she know? WHOLE was full of clever engineers. Scavengers and madmen, too, she was truly beginning to realize.

“You can't do this,” she said.

“It's the only way to be sure.” He winked at her. “No more Wallace, and no more peekers, either. Just real people, the way it should be, surviving on our own terms. You'd be glad if you were really an Abstainer.”

“She's an Abstainer if she says she is.” Embeth looked bitter. “Don't lump the rest of us in with you. This is murder, plain and simple.”

“You're forgetting RADICAL,” said Q.

“RADICAL and whose army? They're at the South Pole, and you'll find there's a lot more in that weapons store than this one bomb. All we have to do is take out that powersat breeder that's on its way, and your fake friends will have no one but penguins to play with. They'll stay away from us if they know what's good for them.”

Clair wondered if Nellie really was assembling an antisatellite weapon right at that moment, or if Sandler was just boasting. She couldn't tell what was bluster and what was real.

Q looked just as surprised as she felt. Her raised hands balled uselessly into fists.

“Let's get down to business,” said Sandler to the rest of his conspirators. “Tie these guys up and start assembling. I'll check the weather and lock the course. In an hour it'll be all over.”

Clair closed her eyes as the mutineers closed in. Clair Two was on her own now.

Clair Two

JESSE TOOK HALF
a step forward to where Clair stood next to his father, the barrel of the pistol burning her skin. She tried to pull away, but Dylan's other hand gripped her arm and held her close.

“You're hurting me.”

“No, I'm not. You don't exist. Ray, pull the plug.”

“What's going on, Dad?”

Around them, glitch-suits died without warning, returning to their basic gray and green. Clair's menus went dead before she could choose between the options she had been considering—a violent jump upward or ripping elsewhere, anywhere, in the hope that she could move before Dylan could shoot.

But not everyone wore a now-defunct suit, just Clair and all her friends, the Unimprovables, and everyone in Team RADICAL. The suits belonging to Team WHOLE were working fine.

Because Dylan Linwood had designed them, Clair realized. And they were designed to fail on his command. As angry as she was at him for his treachery, she was angrier at herself for not having seen it coming.

“This is unacceptable,” said Kari, striding forward. “I won't allow it.”

Dylan gestured.

An invisible force struck Kari from behind. She fell as though poleaxed, dropped by a camouflaged Yeti that she could no longer see. Clair gasped in horror, fearing she might be dead, her concern easing only slightly at the sight of the steady rise and fall of Kari's rib cage.

“Anyone else?” Dylan looked around, pulling the pistol away from Clair's jaw and pushing her so she stumbled and almost collided with Wallace. “Good. It'll be over soon.”

“What do you mean?” said Jesse. “Don't tell me you've betrayed us—”

“Never, son,” said Dylan, his expression softening. “I would never side with the monsters who make d-mat possible. No matter what they offer me. You know that.”

“So . . . what? You've just gone nuts?”

Dylan shook his head, possibly more in disappointment than sympathy. “You'll understand soon. It's time to bring this charade to an end.”

He pulled his face mask back into place. Clair saw his jaw moving but could hear nothing. He was talking through the entanglement.

At his command, Team WHOLE rounded up the others. Wallace stayed in the middle of the room with Clair. He looked as amazed by this turn of events as she was, but
with a calculating edge, as though wondering if he could somehow turn it to his advantage.

WHOLE began pushing the rest of their captives toward the pile of rubble, instructing them to dig. They were going to uncover the exit, Clair realized. But why the betrayal? Wasn't everyone after the same thing? Didn't everyone want to open the exit and put everything back the way it was?

Then it struck her.

Dylan Linwood wanted the exit, but not to open it. He wanted to close it forever, so the members of WHOLE on the outside could inherit what remained of the Earth.

Clair Three wasn't going to stand for that. Clair tried bumping the
Satoshige
, but all data from the outside had ceased in midflow.

That was either very bad timing or a very bad sign. Or both.

Clair clutched in vain for a way out of the situation, but her mental fingers found nothing.

“Is everyone all right?” She was still connected to the Air, so it was easy to bump her friends. Better augs was the one advantage she had over Team WHOLE.

“We're still breathing,” said Libby.

“While there are rocks to shift,” said Zep. “When that's done, I don't think we'll be interior decorating.”

Clair didn't think her sense of hopelessness could possibly have gotten worse, but it did.

“I should've seen this coming. I'm sorry.”

“It's okay,” Libby replied. “Your psychic powers are off today, that's all.”

“There must be something we can do,” said Ronnie.

“There has to be,” Clair said.

“Don't give up,” said Libby. “Let's just think. Surely we can come up with something. . . .”

“Guys? My suit is still working,” bumped Tash.

Sudden hope made Clair very conscious of every muscle in her exposed face. There had to be some way they could use this to their advantage.

“How's that possible?” asked Ronnie.

“They must have forgotten that I'm on Team WHOLE too. When you were all shut down, I was exempt.”

“Don't do anything to remind them you aren't one of them,” Clair told Tash. “Stay well out of the way.”

“I'm doing my best, and they're busy. They haven't noticed me yet.”

“Can you hear what they're saying?” asked Libby.

“Yes,” said Tash. “Jesse's dad just sent someone to get something from inside the glitch-mobile.”

“He never said
anything
about this before it happened?” asked Ronnie.

“Of course not,” said Tash indignantly. “I would've told you.”

“I never understood why you were on their team in the first place.”

“They were starting to make sense. I didn't know they were crazy.”

Clair let them bicker. She was watching Jesse, the person she most wanted to talk to but hadn't bumped. He was standing on his own in a suit that still worked, but he hadn't been called upon to do anything. He was turning in half circles from side to side, watching people move around him. His eyes caught Clair's and appealed to her helplessly.

She decided to take a chance.

“Is there any way to counterhack the glitch-suits?” she bumped him.

His eyes moved, reading the message. His fingers twitched.

“Ask Evan. He helped design them.”

That was a good thought. Team RADICAL might know something Dylan didn't.

“Tash is still entangled?” Evan bumped back in response to Clair's quick précis of the situation. “Great. That gives us a way into their entanglement.”

“Are you receiving anything from the
Satoshige
?” Clair asked.

“No. . . . Hold on a moment. We're thinking.”

“Don't take too long.”

Hope was shrinking in direct proportion to the size of the rubble pile. They didn't have forever.

“I'd find this all highly amusing, if not for the gun to my head.”

Wallace's voice distracted Dylan Linwood from supervising the unwilling volunteers.

“Your opinion means nothing,” he said, striding up and opening his mask. “You are the great enemy of humanity, responsible for more deaths than anyone else in history.”

“You can't blame me for destroying the world.” Wallace tilted his head, indicating Clair. “That was her doing.”

“I'm not talking about the unstable matter. I'm talking about d-mat.”

“Right, of course you are.”

“Decades of murder, whole generations destroyed. Minds robbed and bodies twisted—”

“Easy, now. I didn't invent it, you know.”

“But it was you who made it seem reliable, you who quashed all voices to the contrary, you who told our children that they would be
safe
.” Dylan Linwood was standing right in Wallace's face, and Clair realized for the first time that the two men were exactly the same height. She had always pictured Wallace as much taller. “Sixteen years you've been the figurehead of VIA. Do you know how many people you've killed in that time?”

“Do you know how many people I saved in here?” Wallace was unbowed. “Your son. Your wife. Your son's girlfriend. Her parents. Millions of others.”

“The only thing you've saved them from is the truth. This isn't life. It's a monstrous lie. Those creatures you made—the prize giants—they are the truth revealed.
Monsters.
This is what you promise. This is what must never be.”

“So you're going to seal us in here?” Wallace asked. “Lock us away forever and let us rot?”

Dylan turned away, either suspecting that he was being toyed with or simply reminded of the task at hand. He stalked back to the ever-shrinking rubble pile, his face a mask of anger and grief. Clair was dismayed to see that most of the wall had been exposed. It would be mere minutes before the exit was revealed.

A cluster of blurred shapes approached from Clair's left, carrying something heavy between them.

“Oh my God,” Tash bumped her. “That's a reality bomb—big enough to take out everything in this room.”

“The exit, too?”

“Yes!”

One strike,
Clair thought,
to sever all connections to the outside world.
Would that be enough for Dylan Linwood? His hatred of d-mat was so profound and all-consuming that merely isolating everyone inside the Yard might be only part of what he was hoping to accomplish. Was it possible that the explosion could feed back into the outer world somehow?

“A reality bomb plus the exit,” she bumped Evan Bartelme. “What exactly would that do?”

“It'd be a disaster.”

“How?”

“A reality bomb uses glitches to erase everything within range, but the exit is the biggest glitch of them all. Put the two together and you get a feedback loop. The bomb's range will increase to take out everything—and I mean
everything
—in here.”

Now, at last, Clair fully understood.

Let them burn,
she thought.

Dylan Linwood, in good conscience, was going to erase them all.

Clair Three

“WE HAVE TO
do something,” Clair bumped Q in desperation bordering on panic.

The bunker buster was being assembled in the middle of the bridge, just yards from where those who disagreed with the plan had been tied up in a line along a rail. Embeth was next to Clair, and she was still fuming at having had control of the
Satoshige
wrested from her. Behind them was nothing but the skin of the balloon and the frigid night air outside. Clair's hands were so cold that she was beginning to lose sensation in her fingertips, although the tightness of her bonds was also partly to blame for that.

At least they could still communicate, lens to lens.

“I am attempting to reestablish contact with RADICAL,” Q replied. “My signal is weak, but it's likely they'll be looking for us with everything they have.”

“What can they do from the other side of the planet?”

“I don't know. We will see.”

Clair watched as Sandler bossed his crew members around, strutting back and forth across the bridge. He was enjoying his new role as leader entirely too much, and she hated him for it, as she'd never hated anyone before. The knowledge that he had been playing her false all the way from New Petersburg burned in her like acid.

With friends like WHOLE, no wonder Abstainers were surrounded by enemies.

“You don't have to do this,” she told him. It felt wrong to go down without a fight.

“Well, that's a relief,” he said, swinging around to face her. “Let's all go home, shall we? What? Oh, that's right. Home doesn't exist anymore. You destroyed it.”

She flushed.
Don't let him turn this back on you,
she told herself.

“Two wrongs don't make a right.”

“I'm
doing
the right thing, Clair.” He came in close. “It's funny. You think you're Ezekiel, prophesying in the valley of dry bones. You think you can snap your fingers and all those bones will line up again, and walk and talk and dance to your tune. But they won't. Underneath, they'd still
be dry bones. I don't see anyone here dancing, do you?”

“If you do this,” she said, “you'll be as bad as Wallace.”

He laughed. “You can't murder
bones
, Clair. You can't kill someone who's already dead.”

“Why do you get to decide who's alive and who isn't?”

His smile vanished. “All my life I've been told that what my parents taught me was wrong. I've been picked on and mocked and called an idiot. Well, who's the idiot now? Who's the one who gets to decide? You lost, Clair. I've won. Deal with it.”

“You're wrong,” said one of the WHOLE volunteers Sandler had tied up. “That wasn't why you were picked on. It's because you're ugly as hell.”

Sandler's piebald face flushed no fewer than three different colors.

“That's not fair,” Clair said. “This isn't about the way anyone looks—”

“Shut it,” Sandler said. “The next one of you who makes a sound goes out the hatch. We'll make better time with less dead weight aboard.”

He stalked off, and Clair ground her teeth in frustration. If talking was no longer an option, what else could she possibly do?

“Gotcha,” said Devin in her ear. “Picked up your little buddy the PK and now we're piggybacking her connection to you. You okay?”

Bump by bump, Clair summarized her situation: tied up
while a Yard-busting bomb was being assembled right in front of her.

“Send us an image,” Devin said.

Clair did as he said, then waited. Without the Air, pictures took
so long
to arrive.

“See anything useful?” she prompted him after what she thought was a reasonable time.

“Not really, no. Hold on.”

She waited some more.

“Are you still in touch with the Yard?” she asked. He could at least reassure her on that score.

“No,” he said. “But don't worry. Mom—I mean Dad, whatever I'm supposed to call him—he or she will be on it.”

If Evan's still alive,
she didn't say.

“I want to live long enough to hear the story behind them,” she said.

“It's pretty simple. Not-so-humble techno-utopian decides to start his own master race. Doesn't trust anyone else to bear his clones, so changes sex and does it himself. Voilà: me and Trevin, at your service.”

“You're his
clones
?”

“Yeah. Turns out having children the normal way is too messy for the somewhat-humbled techno-utopian, so she turns her back on his plan. And now she's stuck with us, or we're stuck with her. We're still working that part out as well.”

“Birthdays must be a riot with you guys.”

“Don't even talk about it. Hang on.”

Clair waited, uselessly chafing her wrists in the hope that she might be able to slip free
this
time.

“Okay,” Devin said, “we're borrowing a trick from Q and ramping it up a little. Hopefully it'll work. The means justify the ends, right?”

At the moment they did, she thought. When they broke free, they could reestablish contact with the Yard, in the hope that Clair Two had similarly turned the tables on Dylan Linwood while they were out of contact.

“Whatever you've got, Devin, I'll take it.”

“We just need a while to dot the
i'
s. Forgive the pun . . . you'll understand later.”

“Not long,” said Sandler, the next time he went by. “Any minute now it'll be all over.”