Hollowgirl

by Sean Williams

  With a clunk and a rattle, the carriage halted and the doors opened.

  Clair stared out in disbelief.

  [7]

  * * *

  THEY WERE BACK where they had started, in the Observatory, with PK Drader’s body and the unconscious forms of his three companions lying exactly where they had been left. A low-pitched howl of wind came from outside: the storm Q had mentioned was rolling in. It was only a simulation, numbers interacting with other numbers, but it sounded perfectly ominous.

  “That’s impossible,” said Clair One, staring hard at the bodies as though defying them to move.

  “Did we come back up again?” asked Tash.

  “No,” said Ronnie. “We definitely only went down.”

  “So how did we get here?” asked Zep.

  “What did Wallace do to us?” asked Libby.

  Clair stepped out of the carriage and looked up, mystified. There was no way the elevator could have come down from anywhere. Above the observatory was only sky.

  “Did Wallace do this, Q?” she asked, feeling despair. “Can he just move us around wherever he wants?”

  “I have a different theory,” said Q. “Wallace knew this was going to happen, but he didn’t do it to you. The Yard did.”

  “How?” asked Kari.

  “The Yard appears to be a continuous space without seams or edges. It is, in fact, a series of discrete cells that are simulated when occupied or observed. They are not actually connected. What I mean by this is that you are currently within a section of the Yard that contains the observatory, and only the observatory. For you, at this moment, there is nothing beyond this cell. Try to leave in a way that is not allowed, and you loop back upon yourself.”

  “And the elevator isn’t allowed?” asked Ronnie.

  “That is correct. You cannot move to the next cell by climbing, either, or walking. The only permitted means of moving from cell to cell appears to be d-mat.”

  Clair tried to wrap her head around this concept. It wasn’t easy. She pictured the world like a cup of bubble tea, with the pearls pressing together at the bottom. They were inside one of the pearls. “So you’re saying we’re trapped here?”

  “Only if we don’t use d-mat,” said Ronnie.

  “Why didn’t you tell us this before?” asked Zep. He banged the inside of the elevator, making it shake.

  “I didn’t know.” Q hesitated, then said it again, sounding as puzzled as Clair felt. That was as unnerving as her by-the-numbers delivery before. “I didn’t know. My exploration of the Yard is incomplete. I need time to fully comprehend it.”

  “So we are trapped,” said Tash. “If the booths aren’t safe to use because Wallace controls them—”

  “Q can keep us safe,” said Clair as calmingly as she could. She didn’t want anyone to panic, least of all herself. Friends first, then the world. “Q can keep us masked and make sure we won’t be altered or diverted.”

  “But Wallace will know that anyone leaving here is us,” said Clair One. “He’ll be waiting for us at the other end no matter where we go.”

  “Unless we pretend to be PK Drader and his goons?” said Zep.

  “Seven of us,” said Ronnie, “four of them.”

  “So we pretend to be the four of them with three prisoners,” said Libby. “Oldest trick in the book.”

  “But where will we go?” asked Tash. “How will we stop him from following us?”

  “I have an idea,” said Clair One.

  Clair looked at her in surprise. She suspected she had just had the same one. “Lucky Jump?”

  “Exactly.” Clair One almost grinned.

  “Just like old times.”

  “Just like twenty minutes ago. Let’s do it.”

  Before Clair could stop her, Clair One strode through the blood, picked up PK Drader’s fallen pistol, and wiped it on a clean patch of his uniform.

  “Just in case,” she said. “Got a problem with that?”

  Clair couldn’t argue, although it made the momentary camaraderie they had shared evaporate. Clair 1.0 had never fired a gun before. She had never wanted to. Were these circumstances changing her already? Damaging her?

  None of the others went in search of a weapon. They gathered by the four-door booth to go over the details of the plan. Since they couldn’t fit into a single booth, their escape needed to be carefully coordinated, and quickly, before Wallace tried to capture or kill her again.

  “Four groups, five Lucky Jumps,” Clair suggested over the sound of the rising storm. “Q, can you track us and make sure we end up in the same place, without letting Wallace follow?”

  “I can,” said Q. “Clair, you should know—”

  “Somewhere in particular?” asked Clair One.

  “I don’t care,” Clair said. “If you think of somewhere along the way, let Q know so she can redirect the rest of us; otherwise, let her decide. As long as we all end up together, that’s the main thing.”

  “Clair—”

  “What if we don’t?” asked Tash, cutting off Q. “What if we get there and no one else arrives?”

  “Call Q and do what she says,” Clair told her. “But don’t worry. That won’t happen.”

  “Don’t make any promises you can’t keep, Two,” Clair One said. “Nothing much has gone right so far.”

  True, Clair thought, but that wasn’t her fault.

  “We’re going to need allies, moving forward,” she said. “Whatever happens now, the next step is to look for Jesse Linwood. He must be in here somewhere. He can help.”

  Clair One’s skeptical look only grew more pronounced. “The Lurker? How can he do anything?”

  “You’d be surprised.” Clair felt herself beginning to flush, but no one commented on it. “Or Devin Bartelme and his brother Trevin. They’re with a group called RADICAL. I haven’t seen any sign of them in here, but if they are here they’re bound to know something about Wallace and maybe even the exit—”

  Red flashed across her vision. Q was using her lenses to get her attention.

  “Clair, the drones!”

  Clair realized then that the rapidly rising thrum was not entirely the storm.

  “Quickly, get in the booths!”

  Glass shattered on three sides of the observatory’s main hall as drones swooped in on gusts of howling wind, sending spears of bright light through the air and booming harsh, artificial-voiced orders.

  “Stand still and place your hands above your heads! Failure to comply will be interpreted as active defiance!”

  Clair ignored them. She grabbed someone’s arm at random and pulled them with her into the nearest booth, crying, “Lucky Jump!” as she went.

  One of the drones rushed toward them. There wasn’t time to raise her pistol and aim at it. Its gun barrels were pointing right at her.

  The drone jerked to one side, firing a spray of bullets in a curving line across the floor. Sparks flew from its fans as Q seized up its electric motors. With a heavy, metallic crunch it dropped to the ground, inert.

  The door slid shut on the chaos outside. Clair sagged in relief. Only then did she realize who she was gripping with all her strength.

  “You’re breaking my arm,” said Libby.

  Clair let go and backed up as far as she could go. The space was barely large enough for the two of them, but not as cramped as it had been with Kari. Libby was both smaller and more slender.

  “Sorry.”

  sssssss—

  “That’s okay,” said Libby, putting a hand to her chest, which was rising and falling after the hit of adrenaline. “You saved my life back there. I froze like an idiot.”

  Clair shook her head. Once upon a time, Clair would have frozen too. Neither of them was an idiot.

  —pop

  The booth expanded to a standard size. Clair didn’t bother to check her lenses. It didn’t matter where they were: if Q had successfully masked them, they were safe. But that didn’t mean they could stand still.

  “Luck
y Jump,” Clair said again.

  “So you’re from my future. . . . ,” Libby started to say.

  “It’s not like that. I’ve just lived a bit longer than you.”

  “But you know what happened next . . . I mean, before for you but next for me.” Libby put her hand palm-forward in the air, like she was swearing an oath. “Zep is right. This is such a mind-fuck.”

  Clair couldn’t argue with that.

  sssssss-pop

  “What else happened?” Libby asked when they arrived at their next destination. “I got the feeling we skipped a lot of information. Improvement fixed my birthmark, but what else did it do to me? Did I die when d-mat broke down? What aren’t you telling me?”

  “Improvement . . . duped you,” Clair said, choosing her words with care. “It put someone else in your place.”

  “And the old me, inside? Where did I go?”

  “Here.”

  “So if you hadn’t triggered Wallace’s trap and woken up the Yard, I’d just be a pattern in a file, waiting to be deleted.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s twice you’ve saved my life, then. And here I was thinking you were trying to steal my boyfriend.”

  Clair stared into Libby’s cool, blue eyes, so surprised she didn’t know what to say.

  Fortunately, Libby did. She always did.

  “Lucky Jump,” she said. “Don’t forget that part.”

  sssssss-pop

  “It’s true,” Clair confessed, her face hot. “I did like Zep. It was a stupid thing, and I didn’t want it to happen. But it did.”

  “What happened, exactly?”

  “We kissed . . . just once, at the crashlander ball. You went home with a headache from using Improvement. While you were gone Zep and I went up onto the roof, and he almost fell off saving some guy. It was . . . intense.” Clair didn’t shy away from telling the truth, even though it seemed like a mixture of ancient history and something that had happened only hours ago, scraped raw and scarred over at the same time. “Afterward, I tried to tell you. I wanted to say that I was sorry. But Improvement . . . everything else . . .”

  Libby brushed that aside. “Who started it? Was it you or him?”

  Clair wished she could look somewhere else, but the mirrors held uncountable Libbys, all staring at her. “I can’t really remember.”

  “Don’t protect him, Clair. I want to know.”

  “And you deserve to know. It’s just . . . I don’t think it was anything either of us thought about, at first. There was just a spark, and then he . . .”

  “Tried his luck?” Libby nodded. “You don’t have to say any more. I’ve seen him in action. With me, remember?”

  Clair remembered Libby telling her that Zep had been cheating on someone else when they’d gotten together.

  “I told him no way,” said Clair. “But then it was me who kissed him, after he had this big, stupid hero moment. I thought I’d die if I didn’t.”

  To her surprise, Libby broke into a wide grin. “That’s the first ‘Clair’ thing I’ve heard you say since you walked out of the booth.”

  Clair couldn’t help it. She put her arms around Libby and held her close. After a moment, Libby hugged her back. Clair cried like she had in the Yard’s version of San Francisco, gasping sobs beyond her control. It felt so good to have her best friend back, and to be acknowledged as herself, and to forget, just for a moment, everything she had lost in the last few days. Her original goal had been to apologize, and now she had. That felt like real progress. That felt real.

  “Jeez Louise, you’re ruining my dress.”

  “Sorry. You must think I’m such a dork.”

  “You are a dork.” Libby put her hands on her shoulders and held her at arm’s length. “I’m not sure I forgive you yet, either of you, but I know you’re telling me the truth, and that means a lot.”

  “The other Clair hasn’t done anything,” Clair said. “The ball didn’t happen, so Zep isn’t properly kissworthy for her.”

  “But she still wants him, I bet. Leave it to me to sort her out. What about you? Are you over him now? Fighting over boys is stupid, especially when I’m outnumbered.”

  “God, yes,” said Clair, wiping her face. “That’s something else I need to tell you. After the ball . . . when everything else was going on, I—”

  “Don’t tell me. You hooked up?”

  “Yes. And it’s serious. Or it was . . .” She didn’t want to think too hard about where Jesse might or might not be right now or else she might start crying again.

  “Who? Spill the beans!”

  Clair braced herself. “Jesse Linwood.”

  “No way.” Libby shoved her in the shoulder, her face a mask of scandalized delight. “This I have to hear all about.”

  “Lucky Jump,” Clair said.

  “Are you changing the subject?”

  “Yes.” She was trying to, anyway. It was easier not to think about him than to remember what had happened.

  “Are you embarrassed by him?”

  “No!” Jesse was smart and honest and loyal, qualities she had been slow to recognize but badly needed now.

  “Then why? Are you, like, seriously in love or something? Because if that’s true, then one, he’s an impressively fast worker, and two, I can get used to anyone, as long as they treat you right. But you have to tell me everything, or it’ll just be awkward when he shows up.”

  sssssss—

  “He died,” Clair said, the hollowness in her voice matching the way she felt inside.

  —pop

  “Oh crap,” Libby said, brows knitting together. “I’m sorry. I didn’t even think. Now who’s the dork?”

  They stood awkwardly together for several seconds, too close to avoid each other. A gulf seemed to have opened up between them again.

  “Lucky Jump,” Clair said, for the fifth and last time.

  sssssss—pop

  “Listen,” said Libby, “before we get there, I want to say that I’m sorry I called you what I did. You’re not damaged. You’re just different from the way you were. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The other you wasn’t straight with me, and it changes everything that you have been. Really, it does. If I can’t trust him and I can’t trust you, who can I trust?”

  Clair nodded. There was a vulnerability in her best friend’s face that had never been there before.

  “Do you trust me now?”

  “Of course.”

  Raising her right thumb to her mouth, Clair wetted it and reached out to wipe the last of the makeup from Libby’s cheek, the makeup covering her birthmark.

  Libby’s eyes widened, and her hand flew up to stop Clair, but then she froze and let her finish.

  “God,” Libby breathed, staring up at the mirrored ceiling, “you can be such a pain.”

  “You know it. But only because I’m right.”

  [8]

  * * *

  A BUMP ARRIVED from Kari, masked as Zali Pepper.

  “The rest are worried,” she said. “You two okay?”

  “On our way,” she bumped back. She was surprised that she did feel relatively okay. The cry must have helped, combined with the feeling that she had her best friend back, even if things were still complicated.

  “Q?” she said aloud. “We’re ready to join the others.”

  The booth activated immediately.

  sssssss—

  “Do you trust this Q?” asked Libby. “She sounds really weird sometimes.”

  Was there a hint of jealousy in Libby’s tone? “I trust her with my life. She’s saved it so many times I’ve lost count.”

  Even as she said it, Clair wondered. Q had been behaving oddly since they had arrived in the Yard. She wondered if it was more than just being distracted by their strange new environment. Did Q resent Clair and the others for being so dependent on her? Could she be worried about her future, if the Air in the Yard wasn’t as stable as the Air outside? Clair promised that she would try to talk to Q la
ter, and at least ask if there was a problem.

  Add it to my list, she thought. But at least they were moving now. Waiting in the observatory for Wallace to pounce had been a nightmare.

  —pop

  Her lenses told her that they were in a tiny town called Harmony on the southern border of the Minnesotan Protectorate. It was compact and clean, with roads that were still being used for wheeled traffic. In the real world, it was surprisingly well populated, thanks mainly to some nearby Amish communities. There was an old church, an overgrown park, and a single line of shop fronts. Maybe the Amish traded their foodstuffs there. Maybe, Clair thought, they used actual money.

  An extensive cave system justified the booth’s existence: tourists would travel that way, but the Amish never would. Clair doubted there would be any tourists now. And given that the Amish never went through d-mat, they wouldn’t even exist in the Yard. In Harmony, they would probably be alone.

  The door hissed. Clair went to walk through it and collided with the mirror in front of her. Blinking, disoriented, she recoiled into Libby.

  “Are you all right?” Libby asked.

  “Yes,” she said, rubbing her temple. “Just got turned around. Sorry.”

  “You look like you haven’t had any sleep for ages. You should think about getting some.”

  Clair had to think to remember the last time she had closed her eyes. Maybe Libby was right, and her mental glitches were actually just signs of utter exhaustion.

  “Come on out,” called Kari’s familiar voice.

  Cool, clean air hit them, carrying the smell of fried food. Clair’s stomach turned over, suddenly awake.

  Libby looked around with her hands on her hips and a disdainful expression on her face. “From crashlander ball to the middle of nowhere. I should’ve stayed home.”

  Kari came around the booth to greet them. “Q picked a good place. The one person left insists on making us breakfast.”