Twinmaker (32 page)

There wasn’t time to hesitate. Q needed her to be strong, or they would both die. Clair took the gun from her and hefted it in her right hand. A red crosshair appeared in her vision, just as it had in Manteca. She swung the pistol behind her as they rounded a corner, blasted a couple of times at Jamila, but didn’t stop to see if she hit her target. Already she could hear raised voices and alarms in response to the gunfire.

“Through here,” she said, pushing Q ahead of her, back into the kitchen. Lights were coming on all around her, which would make it harder to hide. Someone was still following them. Definitely female, judging by the glimpses Clair got over her shoulder.

“Come
on
, Q.”

“It
hurts
.”

“I know, but there’s nothing we can do about it now.”

“Why does it go on hurting? How do I make it stop?”

“Be quiet, Q, or they’ll find us.”

Too late. A bullet missed Clair by millimeters, and she dragged Q down behind a heavy stainless steel bench. Slugs slammed into it in quick succession. Clair put her hands over her ears. The sound alone was painful.

Then a deeper note joined in,
boom-boom
, and suddenly everything was quiet apart from the ringing in her ears.

Clair lowered her hands and raised her head slowly over the edge of the bench. Arcady was standing in the doorway, as hairy as a bear, wearing nothing but a shotgun and a worried expression. She left the pistol on the floor and stood up. He pointed the rifle at her, then lowered it. There was gunfire coming from elsewhere in the Farmhouse.

“Back to the hall,” he said, unashamed of his nakedness. “Safety in numbers.”

Clair reached down and pulled Q to her feet. She was whimpering and limp. Arcady’s rifle came to bear again.

“It’s okay,” she told him. “She’s a friend.”

“She’s dressed like one of them.”

That was true. The uniform of the dupes was a thick black bodysuit with hood pulled back. Maybe that was how they had gotten past the security systems: some kind of infrared camouflage.

“Q duped the dupes,” Clair said in a steady voice that barely sounded like her own. “She can explain for herself.”

BY THE TIME they were in the hall, Q’s hands were shaking, and her teeth were chattering. Arcady put her on a table at the center of a growing audience. Clair tore a sleeve off her farm shirt and tied it around Q’s bullet wound. The cloth immediately turned a bright, sodden red.

“Shock,” said Ray, examining her.

“Are you a doctor?” Arcady wasn’t watching anyone living. He was staring at a double line of bodies: dupes on one side, sentries on another. The body count was about equal, eleven in total. No Dylan Linwood among the dupes this time: his cover was blown. “That’s a flesh wound, nothing serious.”

“This has nothing to do with the bullet,” said Clair, finding it easier to argue with him now that he’d put on some pants. “I’ve seen it before. Her mind doesn’t fit Libby’s body. She needs to go back into a booth and d-mat out of here.”

“Sorry,” said Arcady, “but that’s not going to happen.”

“If she doesn’t, she might be permanently injured,” said Jesse, pressing through the crowd to stand on the other side of Libby’s body, opposite Clair. Her face grew warm. He was wearing pajama pants and no top, and his chest hair looked very dark against the paleness of his skin. “Just look at her. You can tell she hasn’t done it right.”

Arcady said, “What I mean is she
can’t
leave. We have no way of connecting to the outside world, even if we wanted to. No way at all.”

“Not true.” Q tried to sit up, but the pain was too great. Jesse helped her onto her elbows. “That’s how we got in here. By d-mat.”

“Aren’t you listening to me?” said Arcady again. “Our system is closed.”

“All systems are leaky. You receive weather reports and software updates, don’t you?”

“Yes, but—”

“The thin end of a wedge. One crack is all it takes. One line of code to widen the crack . . . one executable in your private net, one custom chip built from scratch in a booth, one transmitter to widen the bandwidth. . . . Step by step, they get in deep. It took them fewer than eight hours to slave your booths to their data. If I hadn’t been watching, I would never have been able to piggyback on their signal.”

“You led them to us,” said Arcady, rounding on Turner. His voice quivered with fury. “You brought them right to our doorstep.”

Turner was standing to one side with a blanket over his shoulders. He had been quiet ever since the principal purpose of the breach had been revealed to him.
I’m looking for Turner
. “I’m sorry. We had no idea they would respond so quickly.”

“And you could have stopped this,” Arcady accused Q. “You did
nothing
to warn us.”

“She’s here, isn’t she?” said Clair, taking Q’s hand in turn and holding it tightly, trying in vain to still the dancing muscles.

“Clair is right,” said Turner. “Q put herself at risk. Without her, we might all be dead now.” He shivered and pulled the blanket tighter around him.

“Or worse,” said Arcady. Then he shook his head. “Whatever. We’re pulling the plug on the damned machines. I’ll take an ax to them myself.”

“Not yet,” Jesse insisted. “First, she needs to go back into the booth. Otherwise, she might . . . I don’t know . . . die or something.”

A ring of worried, puzzled faces stared down at Q as she quivered and shook on the table. She was very pale, and her eyes were barely open. Jesse brushed sweat-dampened hair back from her forehead.

“How come the dupes can do this,” Ray asked, “and she can’t?”

“They’ve had more practice,” Clair guessed.

“I’ll give you . . . ,” Q started to say, but the twitching of her jaw muscles made it hard for her to continue, “. . . give you the woman . . . who was supposed to be here.”

Clair gripped her hand tighter. “Yes, of course. Someone must have been on their way already, in Libby’s body, otherwise Q couldn’t be here now. There’d be a parity violation.”

“So what?” asked Arcady.

“The dupes were expecting this other woman. They called her . . .” It was on the tip of her tongue. “
Mallory.
They deferred to her. She might be the one giving the orders.”

“All right,” he said, cautiously. “We’ll trade your friend for one of theirs. Then we use the ax.”

“On her?” asked Jesse.

“On the machines, of course. We’ll worry about the rest when we have her.”

TWO FARMERS LIFTED Libby’s body and carried her through the Farmhouse. Clair stayed close, still holding Q’s hand. Q’s grip was getting limper by the moment. Her eyes were now completely closed. When they reached the booth—a big industrial machine shaped like a water tank with a curved, sliding door—they laid her on the floor inside and stepped back.

“Are you okay from here?” Clair asked, the last to leave.

Q’s head nodded fitfully. “It h-hurts, Clair. I j-just want it to s-stop.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

Q shook her head.

Clair lingered a second longer, still troubled by this broken vision of Libby’s body. Then she let Q go. The door slid shut behind her. The machine hummed and hissed, cycling matter and data in furious streams. It seemed an age since Clair had last been near a booth, let alone standing inside one.

“The dupes Improved Arabelle,” she said to the others, “and Theo, too. The dupes fixed the errors in their patterns before bringing them back. Gemma said that Improvement is like duping . . . and now we know it’s the other way around, too.”

“Is that how you knew they were dupes?” asked Jesse.

“That and the guns they pulled on me.”

Gemma was pale and staring at Clair in horror. Her fists were clenched.

“They won’t get a second chance,” said Arcady. “Not here. That I promise you.”

The booth chimed and the door began to slide open. Farmers and members of WHOLE alike raised their weapons. Clair stepped closer. Finally, she had a real shot at finding out who was behind all this. She tried to stand tall in her one-sleeved shirt and willed herself not to flinch, no matter what she saw.

Inside the booth stood a lone girl dressed all in black. It was as though d-mat had rolled back time. Libby’s body was uninjured and showed no signs of trauma. There was no sign of the birthmark, either.

“Hello . . . Mallory,” said Clair. The name felt strange on her tongue, directed at someone who looked
exactly
like Libby.

The woman tensed, but the pistol at her side stayed where it was. Her head tilted slightly to the right.

“So you know my name,” she said. “Don’t think that makes you special. It won’t change anything.”

The woman spoke with a voice that was neither Libby’s nor Q’s. The inflection was harder, more controlled. Confident, even when she was staring down a dozen angry men and women.

“Tell us about Improvement,” Clair said. “Tell us about the dupes.”

“Or else?”

Mallory raised the pistol and placed the barrel under her own throat. Before Clair could move, Mallory pulled the trigger and folded to the floor like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

Arcady rushed into the booth, calling for a medical kit. Clair stared in shock. It was too late to do anything. She had more blood on her face and hands—Libby’s blood, this time, and the face of her best friend was ruined in her memory forever. No amount of effort was going to get Mallory to tell them her secrets now.

Jesse turned away, looking as though someone had punched him in the stomach.

Clair wondered why she didn’t feel more shocked. Mallory had been a living being, a person as vital as any other. Even if she was a dupe in a stolen body, even if other versions of her could be created a thousand times over, identical to the version that had been standing in front of Clair just moments ago,
she
had been alive. Now she was dead. She had thrown her counterfeit life away without a moment’s hesitation, as she would throw it away no matter how many times they tried to bring her back. That made the dupes seem only more formidable.

Yet Clair felt calm and focused. Clarified, like she had crossed some kind of emotional threshold—or
saturation
, perhaps, after too many shocks in a row—and emerged stronger on the other side.

Or else it would hit her later, when she could afford to let her guard down.

“Are you going to be okay?” she asked Jesse, putting a hand on his shoulder.

He nodded once, a bit too quickly, like he might be about to throw up.

“Secure the body,” said Arcady, giving up any thought of resuscitation. “It’s time to make plans.”

THE COUNCIL OF war took place in the Farmhouse’s main hall.

“We’ll leave immediately,” said Turner. “We’re putting you all at risk.”

“I think that’s for the best,” said Arcady without hesitation. “We’ll help you as much as we can, but this isn’t our fight.”

“They murdered your people too,” said Jesse.

“They died defending our turf. That’s what we do. If the dupes come back, we’ll be ready.”

Clair imagined an army composed of infinitely replaceable, Improved dupes and said nothing. What could she say? Hunkering down wouldn’t solve anything. Libby, the
real
Libby, was still out there somewhere, frozen in a data server even after Mallory had destroyed the copy of her body. The dupes made making bodies look easy, as long as parity wasn’t broken. The mind was the hard part.

Clair wasn’t going to give up on Libby, no matter what Libby had told her to do. Clair was going to
finish
Improvement, one way or another.

“What is your intention?” Arcady asked them. “Where are you planning to go?”

No one spoke for a long moment. Clair was waiting to see what Turner would say. Presumably WHOLE had other hideouts like the Skylifter, where they could slowly rebuild their numbers. It couldn’t be easy assembling any kind of operational core when Abstainers were scattered all over the world, steadfastly refusing to make use of the main means of getting around.

“I still like Clair’s plan,” said Jesse. “Take it up with VIA. It’s their problem, ultimately. They’ll have to fix it.”

“You’d be exposed all the way,” said Arcady. “Who knows what would be waiting for you in New York?”

“And VIA is toothless,” said Ray. “The watchdog hasn’t even barked in years.”

“You obviously haven’t smuggled any illicit molecules recently,” said one of the farmers. “Or tried to sell a bootleg Mona Lisa.”

“And we have evidence,” said Jesse, glancing at the rows of bodies.

“If the dupes try to attack us,” Clair said, “we could end up with several of the same body, which would really clinch it.”

“But we couldn’t take them all with us,” said Ray.

“I know,” she said. “We’d just take Libby.”

Libby was where it had all started. It would end with her, Clair swore.

“You don’t really think VIA’s going to let us walk up to the front door with a corpse over our shoulders and stroll right in?” Ray held his hands above his head as though someone had stuck a gun in his back. “There’ll be security sweeps, background checks, the works. Look at us. If you were VIA, would you let any of us in?”

Clair did look. They were still in pajamas and shirts, except for Gemma, who must have slept in her clothes. They were splattered with blood and stained with pasts no ordinary citizen would boast of. Ray was right. They wouldn’t get near the place.

But why was Ray asking
her
this? She might have proposed the plan to Turner, but Jesse had been the one to suggest VIA in the first place. Why weren’t they looking to him as well?

Because she had stopped the dupes, she supposed, and because she was doing most of the talking now. That made a kind of sense, but it didn’t mean she had the answers.

Gemma and Turner were suspiciously quiet. Maybe they had already made up their minds, and it didn’t matter what anyone else said.

Then an idea came to her that blew all her doubts away.

“They’ll let us in,” she said, “because we’ll make it impossible for them not to.”

Everyone was looking at her now, not just Jesse and the surviving members of the Skylifter.