Hollowgirl

by Sean Williams

  “What does ‘far’ mean?” said Jesse in Clair’s ear. “D-mat girl?”

  Clair wanted to answer him, but there was no patch to respond to. The voice was a whisper from the past, not something she could actually talk to.

  “Anything is better than standing here waiting,” said Zep.

  “This is an Abstainer town,” Clair said, struck by a sudden idea. “There’ll be a car somewhere. We can drive away.”

  Clair One shook her head. “We can’t do that, either.”

  “Why not?” asked Tash.

  “Remember what Q said about cells in the Yard? We’ll just loop back where we started.”

  Clair bit the inside of her cheek. She had forgotten that.

  “Maybe that bike is a special one that can cross between cells,” said Ronnie.

  “At the very least,” said Zep, “we’ll be able to outrun it with our own wheels. If we have to.”

  No one argued that point. Together they headed south along the road in search of a car, Jesse’s voice coming almost constantly now.

  “D-mat girl . . . d-mat girl . . .”

  Maybe it was a ghost, Clair thought. What if Jesse was trying to warn her about something from beyond the grave and she was completely failing to get the message?

  “Q? Can you tell me what’s going on?”

  There was still no answer, and in two blocks the only vehicle with wheels they found was a child’s tricycle, lying on its side. The kid won’t be needing it anymore, Clair thought with dismay.

  Suddenly, as though a switch had been pulled, the electrical engine noise ceased. So did Jesse’s voice.

  “Oh,” Clair said, stopping in the middle of an intersection. Long tracts of empty bitumen stretched into the distance. “Now what?”

  The others stopped too. The silence quickly became too silent. It felt like something had changed, but they couldn’t see it yet.

  Then the hum of the electrobike returned. It came from the east, along the road leading out of town. This time it didn’t shift, although it rose and fell unevenly with distance.

  “Look!” Clair grabbed Kari’s arm with her left hand and pointed with her right.

  At the end of the road were fields, green even this late in the autumn. Silhouetted against them was a cluster of distant objects. It was hard to make out details through the hot air shimmering off the black road surface, but they seemed to be electrobikes, three of them, evenly spaced in a diagonal line across the road, getting closer by the second.

  “Who are they?” said Tash.

  “I don’t know.” The only people Clair had ever seen ride electrobikes were members of WHOLE, but that didn’t necessarily apply in the Yard. “We should get out of sight, just in case.”

  “Good idea,” Kari said. “Half take the south side, half the north. Wait just around the corner. Clair One, you still have that gun?”

  “Yes.” She held it up uneasily, as though wishing she’d left it behind. “An ambush?”

  “Don’t use it unless I fire first. Promise me.”

  Clair One promised, and they broke into two uneven groups—Clair and Kari hurrying out of sight behind an old redbrick church, Clair One and the others to an empty home.

  “Q? We really, really need you.”

  There wasn’t even a crackling whisper to indicate that Q had heard.

  The engine noise grew louder. Clair took her pistol out and held it in both hands, praying she wouldn’t have to use it.

  Clair’s mother believed that all of reality was connected. Prayers were answered by the entire universe, so no need was entirely ignored, nothing was ever entirely lost, and asking couldn’t hurt.

  All I want right now, she prayed, is for no one else to die. I’ll worry about the rest later.

  If her prayer was heard, it had exactly the wrong effect.

  “I am Nobody.”

  The whisper sent a cold shiver through her entire body.

  [11]

  * * *

  “OH NO,” SHE said. “He’s in here too.”

  “Who?” asked Kari, looking around in alarm.

  “Nobody. What if he’s thinking about me, looking for me—?”

  “Shhh. Get back.”

  The first of the electrobikes rounded the corner, engine snarling to a halt, leaving two long black streaks on the road behind it. Behind it, two empty bikes did the same. The sole rider on the first bike was long and lanky, wearing blue jeans, a T-shirt, and a helmet that obscured his face. He jumped off the bike, looked to his left, and then to his right.

  “Clair!” Jesse shouted. “Where are you?”

  She almost burst out from cover, filled with yearning at the sound of his voice. Kari held her back but couldn’t stop her from calling, “Jesse, you found us! Over here!”

  He turned to face in her direction. With one hand he pulled the helmet off, long, mousy brown hair swinging free down one side of his face. His eyes were bright green in the morning light, prompting a flood of remembrance that made her rock back on her heels, momentarily breathless.

  Really real. Thank you, universe.

  His expression, however, was far from relieved.

  “Clair, quick! They’re coming!”

  “Who’s coming?” asked Clair One from the other corner.

  Jesse looked behind him, looking for the source of the second voice, his confused expression so easy to read it broke her heart. A glitch, or two Clairs?

  His eyes widened, and he began backing toward the patiently whirring bike. “Oh shit, this was a mistake. I should’ve listened—”

  “Wait!” Kari let her go, and Clair burst out from cover, running toward him with the gun held high above her head. “It’s really me. This isn’t a trick. Don’t go!”

  For a moment she thought he might yet run.

  “Is that you, Clair?”

  “Yes, and it’s you.” She knew it in the core of her being. She wanted to throw herself into his arms, but he glanced up the road, back the way he had come.

  “The hollowmen will be here any moment,” he said. “We have to go.”

  She stumbled to a halt in front of him and looked up at his worried face. Hollow men. That was what the dupes called themselves, only Jesse said it as one word, like “salesman” or “chairwoman.” It sounded scarier that way. He hadn’t done that in the real world.

  “They’re coming?” she asked.

  “Of course,” he said. “They’ve been coming after us from the moment we appeared in here, just like they did outside. We know too much about Improvement and the other crap they’ve been doing.”

  Outside, he’d said. “You know where we are, then?”

  “Kind of, but we have to go, now.”

  “I am Nobody.”

  Clair spun around. The voice had come from behind her, and her shoulder blades were itching now. If Jesse had found her by following the glitches, then maybe Nobody could too. And Harmony had been a brief stopover at best. If Jesse took her to WHOLE, she would have the first of the allies she needed.

  “All right,” she said, waving at the others. “Let’s go!”

  Kari emerged from cover first, and after a moment so did the others. Jesse’s eyes grew wide at the sight of Clair One, but Clair pulled his attention back to her.

  “It’s a long story,” she said. “I’ll tell you later.”

  “Yeah, that’d be good. I’m pretty sure the hollowmen tracked me. I’m not as good at doing this as Ray.”

  Ray was a member of WHOLE who had briefly held her captive. He had been with Clair and Jesse in New York, the first time. That must be how he had ended up in the Yard.

  “As good at doing what?” she asked.

  He shook his head, hair falling across his face.

  “Get on,” he called to the others, indicating the two empty bikes. “I don’t have helmets—there wasn’t time—but at least there’s room for everyone. Doesn’t matter if you can’t drive—”

  “I can,” said Zep.

  “Gr
eat. The bikes will default to following mine anyway. Just hang on tight. And, uh, you might want to close your eyes.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Libby with a mock salute. “Hello, by the way.”

  A cry to stop came from behind them. Clair twisted to look, even as she got on the seat behind Jesse. People were stepping from doorways and through windows into the empty street as though they had been hiding in the empty houses. People dressed in black, holding guns.

  “They’re here. I knew it,” Jesse breathed, tugging his helmet quickly into place. “Are we all on?”

  Kari, the last one, clambered into the sidecar accompanying Tash and Ronnie. Zep and Libby rode the third bike, with Clair One the passenger. The engines whirred loudly. Tires screeching, all three bikes pulled away at the same time.

  Clair glanced over her shoulder. The people in black—men and women, all shapes and sizes—were running after them. One of them had a shock of blond hair. He shouted, but the wind snatched his words away.

  She had seen a picture of that youthful face in the muster.

  Cameron Lee.

  Nobody, she thought. Reset.

  A bump appeared in her infield as she roared up the road away from him.

  Steeling herself, she selected the bump and read what Nobody had to say.

  “There’re two of you now,” he said. “I’ve seen you. You’re the ones who got away.”

  He had called her that on the seastead, when he had offered her his gift of death.

  “So you remember,” she bumped back.

  “All of it. Every version of me who came back to the Yard added their memories to mine, the master version. We call it Renovating. I’m as up-to-date as you are.”

  “You know you tricked me, then,” she said. “This is all your fault.”

  “Yes. But I’m still here. I wasn’t expecting that.”

  “So put yourself out of our misery.”

  “Not yet. I have a plan.”

  Clair was about to tell him what he could do with his plan when Jesse’s voice brought her out of the conversation.

  “Hold on tight. It’s going to get hairy through here.”

  She put her arms around him. It was too easy to do. He smelled like him, felt like him, sounded like him, was him—but how much did he remember of them? Had his pattern been taken the first time he had gone through d-mat, or later? How much of their time had been lost forever?

  “Jesse—”

  “Hang on. Here we go.”

  They were racing hard for the end of the road and the fields beyond. The gate leading to the fields was closed. He couldn’t possibly be planning to go right through it, could he?

  Putting his head down, he accelerated harder.

  “Uh, Jesse?” If he didn’t stop, they were going to crash.

  “It’s okay. Trust me.”

  Clair did. It wasn’t as though there was time to do anything else short of tipping the bike over. She closed her eyes and gripped him tightly, hoping he knew what he was doing.

  There was a lurch as the bike left the road and hit dirt, followed by a sound like the air itself tearing. They were wrenched violently from side to side, and Clair felt all the breath leave her lungs in a rush, as though sucked out by a sudden vacuum. For a moment, they were falling.

  Then the wheels hit the ground with a squeal of rubber. The bike wobbled for an instant. Clair opened her eyes, wondering what had just happened.

  They were accelerating along an open road heading into a small town, passing a sign that said WELCOME TO HARMONY.

  “Shit,” said Jesse.

  “Isn’t that what happens in here?” asked Clair, forcing herself to ease off her desperate clinch. “You try to leave somewhere and the Yard brings you back?”

  “Yeah, but we weren’t trying it the normal way. They must have pulled us back.”

  “Who pulled us, and how?”

  “The hollowmen. Now they’ll be waiting for us. Shit on a stick.”

  Clair looked behind her. The others were still with them, looking shocked and afraid. Zep’s bike swayed as he took control and accelerated to come alongside theirs.

  “What happened?”

  “Too hard to explain now,” Jesse called back. “We have to try again.”

  “How?”

  “Just follow me. I can do it.”

  Jesse signaled with one arm and took the first right-hand turn they came to. Clair checked the Air for a map of the town. They had been on Third Street, heading east and out of town, and then suddenly they were on Route 52, heading from the west back into town. Now they were on Second Avenue, heading north and out of town again. Only this time there was a house in their way, not a field.

  Jesse gunned the engine anyway, crouching low over the handlebars and aiming right for the yard. Zep hesitated, then followed. They hit the curb with a bone-shaking thump and were airborne for an instant that lasted entirely too long. Clair’s eyes were open this time. She saw the fence posts go by on either side, then the world was turning around her, images spiraling and twisting too quickly to make sense of. Again, her breath was snatched from her, and she gasped in surprise when it returned, along with gravity, the squeal of tires slamming down hard onto tarmac, and another curse from Jesse.

  They were on Country Road 44, heading back into town, this time from the south.

  “What’s the problem?” Clair asked. “What are you trying to do and why isn’t it working?”

  “I’m trying to get us out of here.” he snapped, then shook his head. “Sorry, it’s not your fault. This should work. I’ve seen Ray do it dozens of times.”

  “You’ve seen it . . . ?”

  “Yeah, but I got here eventually, didn’t I? Maybe there are too many of you, or too many of them. I don’t know. Oh hell.”

  Black figures were running onto the road ahead of them, fanning out to form a cordon.

  Jesse wrenched the bike right up Fifth Street, then after a couple of blocks right again onto a road that petered out onto grass. They juddered across someone’s back paddock for fifty yards, then joined Seventh Avenue.

  “Kari, do you know what’s going on?”

  The PK answered Clair’s bump immediately.

  “No idea. But it’s better than stopping and asking for directions.”

  Nobody was bumping her again. Clair deleted every message as it came in, feeling them burning in her infield like brands.

  “How is it supposed to work,” Clair asked Jesse, “whatever ‘it’ is? Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “We need some kind of door,” he said, looking around, “and a run-up. I’ll take us where we went first. Third time’s a charm.”

  The bike surged beneath them. She held on to the waistband of his jeans.

  “But what is it?”

  “This place is cracked. Even before the glitches started, we noticed it. But you can exploit these cracks to get around without using d-mat. We call it ‘ripping’ because that’s what it feels like—ripping the world in half like a piece of paper and sticking the halves together, so two points that wouldn’t normally touch . . . do.”

  They turned right onto Third Street again and began picking up speed.

  “I am Nobody,” came the voice of Cameron Lee from a position right by her left ear.

  She jumped involuntarily, making the bike sway.

  “What was that?” asked Jesse. “Did you glitch?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked around. “They’re definitely trying to cut us off, then. Glitches increase when someone’s concentrating on you. Tell Zep to come in behind me. I can’t bump while I’m driving. I’ll bring the other bike in too.”

  Clair did as he instructed, and seconds later the three bikes lined up in formation, aiming straight for the gate at the end of the road.

  Something whizzed past Clair’s right temple, followed an instant later by the crack of a gunshot. There were two hollowmen on the side of the road, but only two, and they weren’t identical: Clair was
relieved to know she wasn’t facing a horde of dupes, not in the Yard, where people couldn’t be copied. Still, she pulled her head in. Bullets could be deadly enough.

  “Hold on,” Jesse shouted, “and think of Dad!”

  “Eww, what?”

  “Dad, before he was duped. Anything you can remember about him, doesn’t matter what—think it hard!”

  Clair shut her eyes as the hollowmen whipped by, gunfire cracking again. Dylan Linwood had been a member of WHOLE who wanted to be more involved in the cause—to bring down d-mat by any means necessary, because they thought it killed people. Most of her memories of him were tangled up with Nobody, after he had been duped, but Dylan had made an indelible impression in his own right.

  His workshop, cluttered with gears and old machines. His jeweler’s glass that made his eye look as big as a plate. His brusqueness. His grease-spotted hands. His voice, direct and rough and impatient and occasionally cruel—

  They left the road. She heard someone cry out—Tash, maybe—then the air was punched out of her with the force of a cannonball. Fearing that she was about to fall off the bike, Clair pressed her face between Jesse’s shoulder blades, not letting any sense of awkwardness stop her from clinging to him with all her strength.

  The lean muscles of his back flexed against her as he wrestled for control. When the bike hit the ground again, he straightened suddenly and wrenched the front wheel to the right, groaning with the effort. Gravel rasped under the wheels. A branch whipped past Clair’s head. She recoiled, feeling powerless to do anything but ride it out and trust in Jesse to keep them all safe.

  He twisted the controls one more time, and with a final rattle the bikes came to a halt. His ribs heaved against her, and Clair realized only then that she was panting too. She felt as though they had been through a terrifying carnival ride. But was it over now? Were they safe from Nobody and the hollowmen?

  Cautiously opening her eyes, she saw trees much taller than any in Harmony. The bikes had come to a halt at one edge of an artificially cleared area in what looked like a full-blown forest. There was vegetation all around them, with just one low brick building behind her at the end of a concrete path, near the beginning of their barely controlled skid. A selection of boxy trucks and jeeps was parked nearby.