Hollowgirl

by Sean Williams

  Clair had seen it happen too often to forget. On one of those occasions a dupe in Arabelle’s body had been walking, thanks to Improvement.

  “I’m glad you’re okay,” she told the old woman.

  “This?” Arabelle looked around. “This isn’t okay. But I’ll take it if it allows us to do what needs to be done.”

  Clair nodded awkwardly, feeling that her gesture of goodwill had been rebuffed, and left Arabelle to the book.

  It was night, but still seemed bright to Clair’s cave-adjusted eyes. The scent of living trees was very strong. Somewhere in the undergrowth, an animal called plaintively, persistently.

  Kari was sitting in the shade on a low stone wall, staring into the distance with tired eyes. Her lenses showed complex geometric shapes coming and going in rapid succession, indecipherable from the outside. Clair didn’t realize that Kari had noted their presence until her lenses abruptly cleared and she looked up at them, blinking to focus on the real world.

  “What are you doing up here?” Clair asked her.

  “I’m watching Billie,” Kari said. The silver spot where PK Drader’s bullet had struck her gleamed in the moonlight.

  “We’re supposed to be keeping a low profile,” said Jesse, tapping the corner of one eye.

  “PK protocols,” Kari explained, “plus a little help from Q’s mask. Ordinarily I would never abuse my power to access information I’m not supposed to have, but I figure since I’m the only honest PK in here, I can give myself permission.”

  “Is Billie all right?” Clair asked, seeing through her chatter.

  Kari nodded. “Safe as long as I don’t try to talk to her. Turns out I do care about her staying alive, after all.”

  Clair sat down next to her and took her hand.

  “It’s okay,” Kari said. “Wallace has found other cards to play.”

  A video feed appeared in Clair’s infield. She winked on it. The face of a familiar woman appeared—middle-aged, stern-jawed, big-haired, with a British accent: Lawmaker Kingdon.

  “Serious catastrophes demand severe sacrifices.” LM Kingdon wasn’t wasting words on a soft opening. “While lawmakers and peacekeepers struggle to determine the nature of this situation, we have made the extraordinary decision to suspend the Consensus Court—temporarily, but necessarily—until the cause and those culpable can be found. Every resource available to us—every drone, every algorithm, every able volunteer—will be required to mete out justice. We beg your patience during these trying times, and your forgiveness. We all bear the brunt of this unforeseeable calamity with dignity, dedication, and determination. The rot will be rooted out. The lost will be avenged. A new day will dawn.”

  “And she’ll be in charge of the sun,” said Clair, groaning under the weight of a burden she hadn’t yet shrugged off. Either inside the Yard or out, Kingdon was determined to be on top, and to stamp down anyone who would resist her along the way. “What’s she talking about? Behind the flag-waving, I mean. What’s she actually going to do about us?”

  “She’s called a census,” said Kari. “Everyone is required to go through d-mat within the next twenty-four hours in order to create a global roster of survivors. They’ll weed out any suspects along the way. Anyone refusing will be arrested.”

  “So we keep our heads down,” said Clair. “How does that change anything?”

  “Drone production is up ten thousand percent. They’re searching the areas around Harmony under the assumption that you can’t have gone far from where you were last seen.”

  That was a good assumption. The Mystery Caves were only twenty-odd miles from the town.

  “Okay, this is bad,” Jesse said. “We have to move.”

  Clair agreed, but she wasn’t ready to run just yet. Not until she knew where she was going.

  “Have you heard from Q?” Clair asked.

  “Yes. She wants to talk to you.”

  “Well, that’s a change.”

  Kari looked down at Clair’s upturned face.

  “Q isn’t avoiding you deliberately,” she said. “The glitches interfere with her, just like we thought.”

  “Sure, but . . .” Clair was embarrassed to be talking about this with Jesse listening. “Look, I spent so long thinking about her and wanting to find her, but she was there the whole time . . . in you . . . and although I get why she went away again . . .”

  Kari put an arm around her.

  “Q is massively important,” she said, “to you and me. To everyone. When she was inside me, in a strange way I was inside her, too, which gives me some insight into what she felt like then. But that’s nothing compared to what she’s like now. She’s a goldfish, you know—growing as large as the container that holds her? The Q I knew was a me-sized version of her. In here I barely know her at all.”

  “But she still talks to you.”

  “Not as often as you probably think,” Kari said. “She’s the same with me as she is with you, like you have to drag her away from something much more important just to answer a simple question.”

  “I still can’t believe Q was you,” said Jesse. “Isn’t that as bad as being duped?”

  “No, because Q promised me she was going to give me back.” Kari smiled at him. “I believed her.”

  “How do you know she didn’t make you believe her?”

  “She promised me that, too . . . and I guess I just wanted it to be true.”

  “If wishes were fishes, my dad says,” said Jesse, “we’d be up to our ears in goldfish.”

  “Yes, but make enough wishes and one of them is bound to come true eventually.”

  [17]

  * * *

  SHE WANTS TO talk to you, Kari had said. There was only one way to test that theory.

  “I’m right here,” Clair bumped Q while Jesse and Kari talked about the politics of duping.

  A chat patch instantly appeared. Clair winked on it.

  “I tried bumping you, but you didn’t answer,” Q said. She sounded far away and distracted, but it was her.

  “Earlier? I was underground, not to mention asleep.”

  “So Kari told me. I forgot all about sleep.”

  “Didn’t you do that when you were inside her?”

  “Reluctantly.”

  Kari and Jesse’s discussion was a distraction. Clair moved farther along the wall.

  “Where did you go, Q? Where were you when we needed you?”

  “I didn’t go anywhere, Clair. I was busy.”

  “Doing what?”

  “There’s no easy way to explain it.”

  “Please try.”

  Clair worried that she was pushing too hard, but Q didn’t sound annoyed.

  “I mentioned earlier that breaking parity in here might be causing the glitches. That was indeed the case. Outside, breaking parity crashed the d-mat network. In here, where all matter is information, the d-mat network is a fundamental part of the Yard, and the problem got worse very quickly. I took some steps . . . drastic steps. Only time will tell if what I did will work permanently.”

  The glitches were markedly less intrusive, although Clair still felt as though the shadows were watching her sometimes.

  “Well, that’s good. Thank you. You said something about Qualia earlier. How does she fit into this?”

  “She doesn’t. Not anymore.”

  Clair waited for an explanation, but that was apparently all she was going to get. Probably for the best, she thought; it was unlikely she would have understood anyway.

  “I overheard your conversation with Sarge,” Q said, using PK Sargent’s nickname, and suddenly she sounded like her old self again, chatty and open, not the new, distant Q. “I’m sad you feel like you don’t know me anymore, because I feel the exact opposite. Isn’t that what friendship is? It’s not just helping each other, or testing each other, but understanding each other better and better as time goes on. Isn’t it?”

  “There’s a quote like that,” said Clair, warily calling on the earliest thing th
ey had shared, a love of words.

  “Yes, from Seneca: ‘One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood.’ I find it interesting, the way he phrased it. Why not the other way around?”

  “I guess understanding someone doesn’t always mean you’ll be friends,” Clair said. “Sometimes you can know too much about someone.”

  “Was that the case with your birth parents?”

  The question took her by surprise. Q’s tone had shifted again, back to direct questions and unsentimental inflection. “What do you know about them?”

  “Only that they separated before you were born. I’ve yet to determine why.”

  Clair knew very little about her birth father. He was an engineer, her mother had told her once, who worked in space. For all they knew, he could have died years ago.

  “You’ve looked into my family’s history?”

  “Of course. Did you know your mother’s mother was an Abstainer?”

  “Seriously? Mom never mentioned that.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter, I guess.” She rubbed one hand along the cool, rough stone next to her thigh. “Who cares about what some old lady I never met did, or my real father? Oz is my dad. Even if he and mom split up over something stupid, he’ll always be that to me.”

  Cheerful Q returned. “And you’ll always be my first friend, Clair. No matter what happens.”

  Clair wished Q had a face. It was so hard to read what she might mean beyond the words.

  No matter what happens sounded almost ominous.

  “I’m glad,” Clair said. “Just don’t ever call me Clair Two.”

  “I will never do that,” Q replied. “Although both of you are Clair Hill, which raises serious philosophical questions. Does the fact that I’ve known you longer mean that you and I are better friends? Does the fact that she is more akin to the Clair I first knew mean that I should feel closer to her?”

  “Ah, I get it,” Clair said, understanding how it felt to have divided loyalties. “You’re my friend, remember? Clair One has no idea who you are. She didn’t meet you until a few hours ago.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way. Experience must be shared, so people can change in tandem.”

  Just like Jesse and I did, Clair thought, with another knock to the heart.

  She told herself to concentrate on what she had, not what she had lost.

  Q wasn’t a human being. She had all of human knowledge in her mind, but the understanding of an entirely new being, one who had none of the usual assumptions that Clair herself had been raised to have. One who was still learning.

  Clair said, “You’ll always be my first friend who’s . . . who’s something entirely new. We need a word for what you are, don’t we?”

  “I have come up with several, but none of them sound very good. I’m happy being just Q. The one and only.”

  “That you are,” Clair said, wishing she also had better words to express her gratitude. “If we’re ever going to beat Wallace and Kingdon, it’s thanks to you.”

  “And to you,” said Q. “They fear you because you should not be here. You are breaks in parity and you also know the truth about them. That makes you dangerous.”

  Clair looked down at her hands. They were scuffed and scratched and looking very different from Clair One’s, who was still wearing the nail polish she had put on the day of the crashlander ball.

  It was all very well to know that she, Clair Two, had been brave once. The thought of doing it twice . . . It was almost too much. But what choice did she have? If she had to run, she had to run. One day soon, she swore, it would be time to turn and fight.

  “I will be here to help,” Q told her, her new, distant tone returning somewhat jarringly midsentence, “barring any further unforeseen circumstances.”

  There were too many qualifications to that statement for Clair to take much reassurance from it.

  Q ended the chat and Clair turned her attention to Jesse and Kari Sargent, taking in everything she had just learned.

  “Is everything okay?” he asked. “You look . . . frowny.”

  Clair rubbed the bridge of her nose. The saving-the-world part of her plan was proving elusive. “You’re right: we’re going to have to move somewhere more secure,” she said. “Do you want to tell your father or should I?”

  Jesse made a face. “He’s already pissed off at me for bringing you here. So I vote you, but I’ll come with you for moral support.”

  He pulled her to her feet, and there was something more than just muscle memory in the way his fingers gripped hers. Alive. Really real.

  “I’m going to sit this one out,” said Kari. “Plenty more spying to do out here.”

  Clair wished she could join in. After talking to Q about her mother, nothing would have made her happier than seeing with her own eyes that she and Oz were okay.

  “If only Kari could see out of the Yard,” Jesse said as they headed back to the cave entrance. “I’d give anything to know what it’s like outside.”

  “You don’t want to know,” Clair said. What we accidentally did.

  He stared at her for a long time, as though seeing right into her, then said, “Right.”

  [18]

  * * *

  IN THE END, it wasn’t as harrowing as Clair feared. Dylan Linwood listened to the news and her reasoning, then said that he already knew about the announcement of Kingdon’s crackdown. What was more, he fully agreed with Clair: he had been scouting for an alternative location since they’d arrived, knowing that the caves would be discovered eventually. That was the “solution” he had mentioned that he was working on earlier.

  “We have one particular location in mind,” he said.

  “Where?” Jesse asked, as much in the dark as Clair was.

  Dylan hesitated.

  “What, you still don’t trust me?” Clair asked, feeling genuinely hurt. She had done everything Dylan had said and told him nothing but the truth. It wasn’t her fault there were two of her. If he was going to let his ridiculous prejudice get in the way of their working together, then he was a bigger fool than she realized.

  “It’s not that,” he said. “You’re a seventeen-year-old girl, and WHOLE doesn’t operate by consensus. You need to accept that your opinion will be noted, but the decision won’t be yours. It’ll be mine.”

  His attitude was so old-fashioned and tedious she couldn’t help but roll her eyes. The world had long ago abandoned the idea of absolute leaders after they had made such a mess of things—that was what made the thought of someone like Kingdon so terrifying. Consensus was the way everything worked now, wasn’t it?

  Then Clair realized that WHOLE’s old-fashioned hierarchical structure sat naturally alongside its Luddite approach to technology and general paranoia. They’d drag the world back to the twentieth century if anyone was crazy enough to let them.

  “All right,” she said, figuring this was an argument for later. “Whatever. But don’t think I’m going to blindly follow your orders. I’m an Abstainer, not a member of WHOLE, and my friends are neither.”

  “I understand that very well.”

  “And as to your secret solution—you’re going to tell us at some point, so why not now?”

  “All right, all right.” He rasped one hand across his stubbled chin and made a pained expression like Clair’s stepfather, Oz, did when she won an argument. “Ever heard of the White Man’s Pit?”

  Clair shook her head and looked at Jesse, who shrugged.

  “It’s the one ultramax prison ever built,” his father explained. “Kupa-piti is the proper name. It’s about a mile under the old opal mines in South Australia. Secure, a long way from anywhere, and has all the facilities we need. The only way in is via d-mat. There are no physical entrances at all.”

  “What about the prisoners?” asked Jesse. “You must be crazy if you think they’re just going to let us move in.”

  “There a
ren’t any prisoners,” Dylan said. “I’m sure of it. These criminals are the worst imaginable. Not even a lunatic like Wallace would want to save the patterns of such monsters, unless he has plans for them elsewhere. Either way, the prison will be empty. That goes for guards, too—why would you guard an empty space? So we can just walk in and take it for ourselves. No one will ever know. It’s the safest place in the Yard.”

  In theory, Clair thought, it sounded good. From somewhere secure they could make concrete plans to find the exit without fear of being discovered in turn. Maybe from there they could find RADICAL, too, and then together they could bring down Wallace and Kingdon.

  “Are you sure it’s even in the Yard?” she asked.

  “The Yard contains everything recorded by the Air. The prison is listed in the Air here, so it must exist here too.”

  “Australia . . .” Jesse sounded as though he was warming to the idea. His mother’s family had come from there, Clair remembered. “It’s going to take us a lot of rips to get there. We’ve never traveled that far.”

  “That’s why we’re not there already. We need a rock-solid anchor before we try anything like this. And that’s where your tame PK is coming in very handy, Clair.”

  She cocked her head. What did Kari have to do with this? To get anywhere through the rips, Jesse had said, they needed to think of something from their destination, be that an object or a memory or a person. Kari had never mentioned anything about prison duty. . . .

  Then she remembered what Kari had said about abusing her power. Obviously, she had been doing more than just spying on her girlfriend, or else Dylan would never have let her put the entire hideout at risk by accessing the Air.

  “You’re looking for a guard,” she said. “Or an ex-prisoner, using Kari’s protocols. Once you’ve found them, they can get you in, just like Ray brought you here.”

  Dylan nodded.

  “How are you going to convince them to help us?” asked Jesse.

  “Leave that to me.”

  Clair was uncomfortable with that suggestion. WHOLE had a reputation for brutality that preceded her experiences with them—and she personally had seen people kidnapped, shot, and blown up for getting in their way. But maybe that wasn’t what Dylan meant. She could only hope.