Hollowgirl

by Sean Williams

  A cry went up—“Drones!”—and gunfire chattered angrily in the trees.

  “Mom says hang on,” said Cashile. “We’re going right now.”

  [20]

  * * *

  THE ELECTRIC ENGINE of Theo’s vehicle hit a higher pitch and its wheels spun on the gravel. Clair fell back into her seat, clutching Jesse’s hand. Past Theo and Cashile she could see a cloud of billowing dust into which electrobikes and four-wheeled vehicles were steadily vanishing. There was no road that way, just the closed gate. Clair gritted her teeth and tried not to worry about drones, thinking about Ray as hard as she could instead.

  Ray in the Manteca safe house, where she had also met Aunt Arabelle.

  Ray in their camouflaged ride, when she had first heard the word “dupe.”

  The world twisted around her and the cab filled with dust, Clair closed her eyes and coughed, and wondered how Theo was possibly steering in the right direction. They bounced, they shook, they turned in what felt like a complete circle.

  Twist.

  They hit the ground and roared forward.

  The air cleared. Through the windows Clair could see fields of golden wheat stretching to distant, snowcapped mountains. It didn’t look like Australia. Vehicles careened around them, barely missing each other. They quickly straightened up and formed another line, with greater distances between vehicles this time, and raced in a convoy for the door of a falling-down barn. The world twisted again.

  “Nothing can stop me, unless I want to be stopped.”

  The glitch hit her out of nowhere, Nobody’s words lingering like an unwelcome smell. He was thinking about her, she realized. Don’t think about him in return, she warned herself. The last thing she wanted was to drag them to wherever he was, through the uncanny tangle of the rip.

  Clair closed her eyes tight and concentrated.

  Ray in the Skylifter, listening to Turner Goldsmith’s sermon.

  Ray in the Farmhouse singing a folk song with Arcady, his baritone a quarter tone flat.

  Twist.

  They were skidding headlong down a steep mountainside, whipped by branches. Cashile screamed. A jagged rock sideswiped them, throwing Clair bodily into Jesse, making him curse. A bottomless drop appeared ahead of them, framed by two dolmen-like spars. Clair sucked in a breath, dreading the weightlessness and the awful impact that would surely follow.

  “You’re a tough girl to get hold of.”

  That was Kingdon, another dangerous lure.

  “Don’t stop!” she managed to gasp out.

  Ray on the train, smirking as she and Jesse returned from a private moment, the first time they had ever kissed.

  Ray crammed in with all the others on the submarine, heading to New York.

  The car ahead of them passed between the dolmens and vanished.

  Twist.

  They were speeding across a smooth, white surface that looked like nothing so much as ice. For an instant Clair feared that they would break through and drown in the water below—but then she saw the parallel tire tracks of those ahead of them, the blueness of the sky, and the fiery whiteness of the sun. Heat blasted at her from the windows. Summer heat in November.

  They were in the Southern Hemisphere, driving across the smooth, white, perfectly flat expanse of a salt lake.

  “You’re making my choices for me, Clair.”

  Wallace, this time. She gritted her teeth. Would they never leave her alone?

  Ray’s arm spraying blood on the day another version of her had died.

  Ray in the Yard, with her and everyone else.

  She was running out of memories. For a moment she panicked—needlessly, because of course she could simply repeat any memory at will. Once she realized that, she concentrated on the one that was most vivid in her mind—Ray guarding the door in Manteca. He had been trying to keep her in the safe house, and she, fearing that he was one of the bad guys, had done everything she could to get away, including practically running into the arms of a dupe waiting for her at home. If Q hadn’t helped her, she would be dead now, and so would Libby.

  But maybe, a treacherous voice whispered to her, just maybe, if she hadn’t gotten in the way of Wallace’s plans, everyone else would still be alive.

  Two bleached-white trees raced toward them with dead branches meeting high above the salt pan.

  Twist.

  Wherever they were this time, it was dark and silent. The only lights were those Theo quickly flipped on at the front of the vehicle. They picked out nothing through the gloom. If there was anything to see, it was too far away.

  Ahead, two red dots flashed: the taillights of the vehicle in front of them. The moment Clair saw them, they winked out, heading off on the next stage of their journey, she hoped.

  The loss of that faint glimmer made her feel very alone, even surrounded by her friends. There had always been someone to help her or agree with her, or at least willing to listen to her and talk her out of her worst mistakes—and she had made mistakes, more than once. Maybe she had just been unlucky. After all, there was always going to be some girl or boy whose path Improvement crossed, who decided to protect their best friend and found themselves sucked along a course that, looking back on it, seemed inevitable from the very first step. The chain of events might not have played out exactly the same way as hers, but the end was inevitable: Wallace’s hold on the situation would have been threatened, and his unstable-matter bomb would have gone off. The world had been hanging under the threat of destruction for years without knowing it. One way or another, someone would have ended up inside the Yard, fighting over what remained.

  It could have been anyone. But it had been her. How was she ever supposed to make amends?

  “I love you, dearest child of mine. Please be safe.”

  Clair gasped with surprise. That was her mother’s voice. Of course: she was in the Yard and thinking of Clair too. The simulation didn’t contain only villains and people who wanted to kill her. There were people who loved her as well. That was how she would survive. With the help of the people who didn’t need her to make amends or atone for anything, who loved her for who she was, and nothing more.

  Restored, she dredged up a final memory of Ray and brought it as vividly and powerfully to life in her mind as she could.

  Ray looking puzzled as she ran away from the only people in the world willing, at that moment, to help her.

  Twist.

  Light flared again and Clair raised an arm to cover her eyes. Echoes assaulted her—engines and urgent voices calling from all sides. Theo slammed on the brakes, throwing Clair forward against her seat belt. Tash cried out in surprise. Rubber shrieked as the wheels locked and they screeched to a halt, just yards from a yellow compressed-earth wall dotted with bright, utilitarian lights, strung out in a line. The sudden stop threw them back into the seats, and Tash cried out again.

  Someone appeared at Theo’s window, knocking against the glass to get her attention and then pointing urgently to one side. Theo turned the wheels and accelerated out of the way just as space twisted behind them and the next vehicle appeared. It immediately braked hard, as theirs had.

  Their car rocked to a halt.

  “That’s it?” asked Ronnie. “We made it?”

  Theo nodded, and a bump from Q confirmed that she had successfully tracked them through the rips and glitches to the prison.

  Zep said in a shaky voice, “Come back, d-mat. All is forgiven.”

  [21]

  * * *

  THE CEILINGS OF Kupa-piti ultramaximum-security penitentiary were low and made of stone. Powered like the Yard by geothermal energy, the prison was completely isolated from the outside world, apart from cables leading to and from d-mat booths. The administrative section was on the upper level of the underground complex, a dozen yards of solid stone from the prisoners’ cells—each a self-contained “control unit” that kept the absolute worst offenders on Earth isolated twenty-four hours a day. Food, air, and water were delivered via
fabbers; the doors to the cells were literally welded shut and opened only in the case of medical emergency. Offenders had one-way access to the Air and were excluded from any kind of consensus—treated as nonpeople, effectively.

  Clair had read that 100 percent of ultramax prisoners chose euthanasia over life imprisonment. It might take them years, but they always got there. The longest-serving prisoner died after seventeen years in his cell, never once stepping outside, never once seeing another human’s face except through his lenses, never once exchanging more than a few words at a time with his guards. At the end, the story went, he simply stopped eating and drinking, never once expressing remorse for his crimes.

  Now Clair was inside the same prison that had held him—and more deadly criminals than she cared to imagine—for so long. If even one of them remained and managed to get out . . .

  She shivered from more than just the cold.

  WHOLE’s convoy had arrived in an empty chamber that had once held the construction equipment responsible for digging out the complex. The staging area was dusty and sterile, yet still well lit and closely watched, as no doubt every space was within the prison walls, thanks to beady, black-eyed cameras everywhere. Q sent a businesslike bump assuring Clair that she was interrupting the camera feeds and keeping a close eye on incoming transmissions. Nothing but clock data was descending from the distant, unseen surface.

  A pair of large doors rolled back at the input of a very long password, leading into the prison itself. Ray and Lalie, now unhooded, guided everyone through.

  “Home sweet home,” said Libby, looking around.

  “Could use some color,” said Tash.

  “Maybe a potted plant or two.”

  “At least there’s no Muzak,” said Zep. “That would be cruel and unusual.”

  The administration center comprised a series of offices radiating outward along six arms from a large central area. The color scheme was mainly light browns and grays, but there were personal effects at several workstations, tiny, brightly colored tokens of the people who had once worked in the prison—a handmade coffee mug, several crystals, a football jersey draped over the back of a chair. The people themselves were gone, but otherwise the prison was exactly as it had been when the world ended.

  A patch appeared in her lenses, an interface allowing Clair access to the prison’s surveillance and control systems. She searched for the d-mat booths, and found them down the southernmost arm of the center on the other side of a locked door.

  The interface opened the door. Clair stood staring at the dozen booths, efficient, angular machines with none of the beige blandness of the room containing them.

  “These particular killing machines,” said Dylan Linwood from behind her, “are particularly good at killing. Every prisoner’s DNA is hardwired into the code. If they try to escape this way, their patterns are automatically erased. Try to bring in another booth, even if you’re the warden, and you’ll be erased with it. Same with any kind of weapon or poison or chemical more corrosive than toothpaste. Clothes are automatically removed in transit and replaced with templates guaranteed to degrade within eighteen hours. In the case of an emergency, this entire room is a booth that will erase everything inside it and then self-destruct. The person who designed this place knew where its weak spot was.”

  Clair was watching him. He sounded almost admiring of that unknown engineer, which wasn’t so strange, she supposed, since he was something of an engineer himself.

  “How do you know so much about it?”

  “This is where terrorists come to die,” he said. “The ones who get caught.”

  His eyes were almost the same color now, but in his bright gaze Clair saw a bloody history stretching back to the first booths and the people who had protested their existence, not just with words but with actions, too. She wondered how many people he had known personally who had died for the cause.

  “We’ve got more in common than you think,” he said.

  So he had figured that part out: how Wallace’s satellite and space station had been destroyed. Or Kari had told him. Clair’s death in the first explosion was supposed to end the dying. Instead, thanks to the crash and the unstable-matter trap, it had been among the first of many. Too many to think about.

  “If you think I’m happy about that . . . ,” she said to him.

  Dylan shook his head. “No one sane would be.”

  He turned and began issuing orders to the people who had followed them up the passageway. “Sabotage the booths in here. All of them. But leave the room intact. Post guards and keep the door closed at all times, with charges laid. Anything emerges, blow up the lot.”

  People nodded and began to get to work.

  Clair understood. Leave one booth open and the hollowmen would try to come in that way, if they were going to. If they didn’t, then everyone was safe.

  Maybe, she reminded herself. There were no certainties when it came to Wallace and his hired killers, especially not in a world of his making.

  “Wallace belongs here, not us,” she said.

  “I’m not arguing,” said Dylan.

  “Afterward, when all this is over, there has to be a trial. Held in public, with as many honest lawmakers as we can find. We have to make him pay for his crimes.”

  “Don’t worry, he will.”

  “I have some thoughts on how to go about finding him,” she said. “We could get started right now.”

  Dylan turned to her. “First, I want you to take a search party down to the lower levels. They’re supposed to be empty, but it pays to check.”

  “Why me?”

  “Access is by a closed-circuit d-mat loop that we’ll shut down as soon as you’re done.”

  “You don’t think it’s safe? Is that it?”

  “I’m sure it is safe,” he said, stooping to inspect the seal between the floor and the booth. “I just don’t want to ask any of my people to use it.”

  That she could understand, given WHOLE’s longstanding antipathy to d-mat—even here, as Arabelle said, where everything was already a simulation. But if Dylan was right and the prison was completely isolated from the surface, there was no way Wallace could interfere with them.

  “All right,” she said. “But then we make plans.”

  “Of course. One thing at a time.”

  Swallowing her frustration that once again the hunt for the exit had been delayed, Clair went back to the others and asked if anyone wanted to join her.

  “Turn down the chance to tour the most badass prison ever made?” said Tash. “Not on your life.”

  “Yeah,” said Zep. “Count me in.”

  “And me,” said Ronnie.

  “I’ll stay and help out up here,” said Jesse.

  “Me too,” said Kari.

  Clair One said, “I’ll make sure Dylan doesn’t turn off the loop until you return, while you look for a back door. If you find one, make sure it’s locked.”

  “Will do.” Clair couldn’t deny that it would be nice to spend time with her friends without her other self getting in the way. The thought of Dylan locking her in the lower levels was a perturbing one, though. That hadn’t even crossed her mind. Two Clairs were better than one, it seemed.

  “I’ll stay too,” said Libby, flipping back her blond hair. “Bring me back a souvenir.”

  [22]

  * * *

  THE SUMMIT OF the closed-circuit loop consisted of a single-occupant booth and a swathe of security checks that Q patiently unraveled. With a sound not unlike the crackling of popcorn, the loop delivered them safely to level Z, where the air was still and tomblike. The booth opened into a central area that opened outward in six directions, just like the admin level except the corridors were shorter. Each contained two cells that could be sealed behind its own door. Two of the twelve cells were open. When Ronnie arrived, Clair and her friends went to investigate.

  It was depressing. The cells where the world’s worst mass murderers and torturers had been imprisoned
were made of molded plastic with no edges or protrusions. There was a sleeping nook containing a single slab of foam, a toilet that was little more than a mirror-finished bowl with a lid that sealed shut to create a recycler, and a fabber barely large enough for a closed fist. When Zep tested the menu, he found a limited selection of food and drink, and nothing, of course, for “pistol,” “knife,” or “flamethrower.”

  “Only one flavor of taco?” he said. “For the rest of your natural life?”

  “Serves them right,” said Tash, peering up at the cameras in every corner. There were no scratched graffiti on the walls, no names or numbers on the closed doors, no discarded clothes or meals. The only light came from point sources buried safely within transparent plastic. Clair had no doubt that the walls were thick enough to keep prisoners from communicating with one another. “It must’ve been horrible, being trapped in here.”

  “I’m with Tash,” said Ronnie with a shrug. “No one got in here by mistake.”

  Clair hoped not. Some might say that she was responsible for the death of billions. Would she end up in a cell like this one day, next door to Ant Wallace?

  Zep wandered across the hall to the sealed cell. He thumped on the door twice with the palm of his hand, provoking a dead, muffled sound.

  “Anyone in there?”

  “It’s empty, you big lunk,” said Ronnie.

  Clair took a quick glance at the inside using the prison interface, to make sure. With the door shut, the space seemed even more cramped and depressing. The prisoner who had lived here was a man called Laughland Rhodesia Lane, convicted of multiple sexual assaults on minors and more than a dozen murders. A quick glance at his offenses made Clair feel physically ill.

  He was gone now, she told herself. From this world, at least . . .

  “Let’s try level Y,” Ronnie said.

  “Why?” asked Tash.

  “Yes, Y,” said Zep.