Hollowgirl

by Sean Williams

  No, not hers. Clair Two’s.

  She felt dizzy for a second, unsure of herself. She tried to fight it. There wasn’t time for airs and vapors, like someone in a Jane Austen novel. She had to be strong. She had to fight.

  I’m Clair One, and no one else.

  “I’ve been studying how the glitches cluster,” said Ronnie, rising from her mattress and putting her glasses back on. She was wearing a bodysuit, open around her throat, the same as Clair. They had all fabbed armor for themselves after Clair Two and the others had been shot.

  Dylan made space for Ronnie next to Clair.

  “It’s like everyone is looking for you,” she said, “but most of the time they can’t find you. When they do, that could be for a lot of reasons. Maybe you and Clair Two are close to each other, bending the rules of the Yard just by existing. Or maybe you’re thinking of someone who’s thinking of you. Since information is real in the Yard, that makes a difference. It creates a potential, like the potential between a thundercloud and the ground. A big enough potential causes a lightning strike—only this kind of lightning can happen more than once. When one person gets through, it creates a channel the rest can follow. That’s why your glitches cluster. Does that make sense?”

  “I guess,” Clair said. “Does that mean I can’t think about anyone who isn’t here, ever again? Like Ant Wallace, or my mother?”

  In answer to her question, Ronnie just shrugged.

  “All I know is that the more hollowmen and peacekeepers come here, the more difficult it will be to keep them out. The lights might make it harder for them to get a reference, because everything looks different, but the channel they’re following only gets wider each time one more of them manages it. Let them keep on like this and soon they’ll send an army we won’t be able to push back.”

  “We have to push them back,” said Arabelle. “Quickly, before they get the advantage.”

  “Duh,” said Ronnie. “How?”

  “If we could find their source,” said Clair, “it would be easy.”

  “Double duh,” said Ronnie with a weary grin. It didn’t last long. “The best I can think of is trying to glitch them in return. You know, if they can get through to us, why can’t we get through to them? All we have to do, arguably, is think about one of them really hard, and the Yard will rip us right to them.”

  “The best person to do that is currently in a coma,” said Dylan, and Clair thought once more of the blood-spattered hospital and the feelings prompted by thinking of her.

  “It’s something we can work toward,” Clair said, not wanting to relinquish the possibility so readily. “The channel must go both ways. And they’re thinking of me too, right?”

  “You mustn’t attempt anything like this on your own,” said Arabelle, reaching across the table to grip Clair’s wrist in one ancient claw. “Promise me. We can’t lose both of you.”

  There’s no both of us, she wanted to protest. There’s just me and her. But she didn’t bother. Everyone thought Clair Two had it covered and she was just along for the ride. Well, she wasn’t going to let anyone tell her what to do—not even herself, not without explaining why. If Clair Two was wrong, someone needed to say so. If Clair Two wouldn’t admit it, someone needed to make her.

  “Who said anything about going anywhere?” she said, hearing a bitter snap in her voice. “You’re getting me mixed up with her. I was going to suggest that, if they insist on coming here, we should send something in return.”

  “Something more than a sternly worded note, I presume,” said Ronnie.

  “Exactly.”

  “A superb plan,” said Dylan Linwood, reaching under the table and rummaging in a bag at his feet. Metal clunked and rattled. When he sat up, he was holding a black sphere that he pressed on Clair. It was heavy. She had never seen a grenade in person before, but she knew what they looked like.

  One grenade, she thought, in exactly the right place and at exactly the right time, and the hollowmen might never bother me again.

  There was nodding around the table. They had come up with a plan, and it didn’t involve anything more strenuous than thinking. She might not even have to move from the chair.

  It gave her hope—tempered by the fact that maybe Wallace was attempting exactly the same thing, but hope nonetheless.

  It was spoiled only slightly by Dylan adding, “Take that and go practice somewhere else. Somewhere quiet, so you can concentrate . . . and in case it goes wrong, a long way from here.”

  [29]

  * * *

  BRUSHED OFF AGAIN but this time with no good reason to argue, since it had been her idea, Clair dressed in her armor, tucked her pistol into her hip holster, and left the hub, alone. Ronnie had wanted to come, but Dylan convinced her to stay and talk through her theory again. He assured Clair that someone would be watching at all times. She didn’t let that get to her, or give her any false comfort. If the hollowmen ripped into the prison right on top of her, she’d be kidnapped or dead long before anyone came to her rescue. It was up to her to look after herself. And that was just fine.

  She remembered the kick of the gun in her hands, and the glimpse of one of the hollowmen falling on the other side of the room, briefly lit up in the muzzle flash. She had really done that. She was sure of it. But it had been confusing. A lot of people had been firing at once. The memories were beginning to blur. . . .

  No, she had done it, and she wasn’t freaking out like Clair Two had been in the observatory. Shortly after, sure. That was only natural. But she was fine now. She had seen Clair Two freeze at least once when things really mattered. She wasn’t going to do that.

  The leaden weight of the grenade wouldn’t let her forget that promise. She couldn’t afford to. There was too much at stake.

  Her long-term plan was simple enough. Stop the hollowmen. Find their source, and presumably Wallace and the exit at the same time. Find a booth outside and escape with all her friends and family. Use the patterns inside the Yard to rebuild the world. Go back to her old life, inasmuch as that would be possible. Beyond that point, it got a bit blurry.

  About all that, she and Clair Two agreed. For a while she had wondered why they needed to escape at all. Why not live in the Yard forever, where people couldn’t be copied and ripping was something you could just do, without a booth or VIA or the Air to make it possible? But then she remembered Clair Two, and the glitches, and everything else that was making her life hell, and she knew that staying in the Yard wasn’t sustainable. She had to get out. Wallace and Kingdon could stay if they wanted, king and queen of their own virtual empire. Clair didn’t care about that, as long as they didn’t stand in her way. The real world was the only place where she would feel really herself again.

  Really Clair.

  Members of WHOLE passed her without a second glance as she headed to the periphery of the prison. Word had spread, clearly, to leave her be. But still she was being watched. Clair switched her lenses to private so they couldn’t spy on her that way, particularly if she failed in her attempt. She chose a corner where few hollowmen had been seen, and began the fruitless search for somewhere less institutional to hunker down and think. Didn’t this place have a library? All prisons did in old movies.

  As she passed another empty office, someone hissed at her. She stopped, startled.

  “Clair, in here.”

  A woman’s voice, one Clair didn’t recognize. She peered through the open doorway, but the office was dark.

  “Don’t turn on the lights. And be quick before someone notices you standing there like a dummy. Say nothing until you’re inside.”

  Clair hesitated. What difference did it make if anyone saw her or not?

  She checked the prison interface. The office in front of her was a dead zone, one of many places where surveillance had been knocked out by the hollowmen. Anyone could be waiting in there. Any one of the crazies from WHOLE who thought she shouldn’t exist, that she was an abomination who deserved to be erased . . .
<
br />   She opened her mouth to ask, Who are you? but a small, strong-looking woman stepped out of the shadows with a finger across her lips. There was just enough light to illuminate her face: Asian, in her forties, gray-black hair pulled back into a severe bun.

  “My name is Mallory Wei,” she said, “and I want the same thing you do: Ant Wallace, dead. So let’s talk. In here. Right now.”

  Mallory stepped back. Clair followed her until her eyes could no longer distinguish her from the gloom. The situation was so unexpected she could hardly process it. The Mallory Wei, whom Clair had never met. But she knew all about her, of course, from Clair Two and Sargent—and now she was inside the prison, wanting to talk. But why like this? Why to her?

  Because no one else would listen to Mallory Wei. Not Clair Two. Not Dylan Linwood. Not Libby. Ant Wallace, dead. If she was really trying to turn the tables on her husband, this might be the only way for her to make it happen. To rip in under cover of a hollowmen attack and wait for the right Clair to walk by.

  The woman had been tortured by her husband, forced to live against her will over and over again. Why wouldn’t she want him dead?

  It was at least worth talking to her.

  Clair took a deep breath to quell the feeling that she was jumping off a cliff into water of unknown depth, and stepped inside.

  “Good,” said Mallory. “Now, don’t freak out, because we’re not alone.”

  “Hello, Clair.” A voice came from close by, at her left shoulder. A man’s voice.

  She turned, and froze. This face she knew. She recognized him from Harmony and elsewhere. He was one of the hollowmen—the first one, in fact. Short, not much taller than she was, with blond hair and cool blue eyes.

  “I’m Cameron Lee,” he said, “but you’ll know me better as Nobody.”

  Her heart began to thump hard in her chest. Mallory and Nobody, together.

  “What are you doing here?”

  She was amazed at the steadiness of her voice. Inside, she was trembling. She’d heard the stories. She knew what they had done. And suddenly she realized how vulnerable she was. Mallory was on one side of her and Nobody the other. Her pistol was holstered. There was no way she could reach it without either of them stopping her. There was the grenade, but she didn’t even know how to prime it. She’d planned to look that up later.

  As though he was reading her mind, Nobody raised his hands and took a step away from her. Like Mallory, he was dressed in simple coveralls similar to a mechanic’s outfit, but entirely black. There were pockets, but they appeared to be empty. His right hand had a slight tremor. Motor neuron disease, she remembered. In this body he was dying.

  In the Yard, this body was the only one he had.

  “Don’t sound the alarm,” he said. “We don’t mean you or anyone else here any harm. We just want to talk.”

  Clair stepped to her left so she could see both of them at once.

  “Talking is not what you’re famous for,” she said.

  Mallory nodded. “We have the memories from previous Renovations. We know what we’ve done. We’re not proud of it. We want to make reparations.”

  “How?”

  “With your help,” said Nobody. “Take a seat.”

  Again, Clair hesitated. She knew what Clair Two would do: she would shoot them down, or try to. She would at least step out of the blind spot and call for help.

  That, she guessed, was why they were talking to her.

  Was there any chance at all that they were telling the truth?

  She remained obstinately standing.

  “Tell me where the exit is,” she said.

  “It’s with Ant,” said Nobody. “I can take you to him.”

  “You tricked everyone before,” she said to him. “You told the other me that you were helping, when you really weren’t. Why should I trust you now?”

  “The situation is completely different,” said Mallory. “Cameron’s not the person you have to worry about. Take Dylan Linwood: you might think of him as an ally, but he’s not. He’s the enemy of everyone in here. The man is already dead, in his own mind. He just wants to burn this place to the ground.”

  Clair nodded. That fit with what she had heard about him. He thought everyone who had gone through d-mat was a soulless zombie. Why would he strive to save himself or anyone else?

  “And that’s not what you want?” she asked them both.

  “Do you really think it ever was?” asked Nobody.

  “You tell me.”

  “It’s not,” said Mallory, shooting Nobody a glance. “Not now. Everything spiraled way out of control, before. Cameron understands that. Killing everyone doesn’t solve anything. We just want to kill one person . . . and you know who that is. Everything Ant did has to be undone before he goes even further. He’d be happy to stay here forever, you see, now that the world is pretty much destroyed outside—but what happens if one of the survivors finds a way to turn off the Yard? In order for him to feel safe, the world outside has to completely die.”

  That accorded with Clair’s fears. Mallory was making a lot of sense.

  “Between him and Dylan Linwood,” Clair said, seeing how it would be, “one wanting to destroy the Yard, the other wanting to destroy outside, we’ll be lucky if anyone survives.”

  “Exactly,” said Mallory. “And the other Clair, she’s itching for a fight everyone’s bound to lose. She gets her way and it’s game over. You’re the world’s last hope.”

  “Understand that we’re not thinking of ourselves,” said Nobody, holding up his trembling hand again as though it were evidence of his sincerity. “We know we’re not going to get out of this alive. We’ve had our time, many times over. But the dying should stop with us. We want to help you make that happen.”

  “Wallace is still your husband,” Clair said to Mallory. “Why would you betray him?”

  “Because Ant hates me,” Mallory said. “He says he loves me, and that’s why he won’t let me go, but I know that he enjoys having me trapped like this. He’s punishing me over and over again for trying to leave him the first time. The only way I can escape is by killing myself for good, which I can finally do in here, and I’ll take him with me, just you watch.”

  She accentuated her final sentence with a jabbing finger. Clair folded her arms and backed away, feeling as though she was the one being attacked.

  “It would help, uh, if you’d be specific,” she said, unwilling to be seduced by either a madwoman’s passion or a dying man’s sentiment until there was something concrete to back them up.

  “The exit from the Yard,” Nobody said. “That’s what we’re offering.”

  There was no obvious sign that he was lying, no matter how closely she studied him. If he was telling the truth, there would be no long, dangerous search with hollowmen looking for them at every turn. There could be just one decisive strike against Wallace, with minimum risk to everyone, after which they could all go home. It could be over in hours. Clair Two couldn’t offer that.

  Finding the exit was the key to finding her own place in the world. She felt a thrill of excitement at the thought.

  “You’ll really take me there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now?”

  “Not like this,” said Nobody. “You wouldn’t last a second, looking like you do.”

  Clair looked down at her undersuit. It was grimy and blood-spattered.

  “I’ll change,” she started to say.

  “Your clothes aren’t the problem,” he said. “It’s everything else.”

  Clair stared at him, an uneasy roll beginning in her stomach.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your face, your build, your skin.” He reached out to touch her hair, and she flinched away.

  “Don’t.”

  “Time to come full circle, Clair. The only way this is going to work is if you become me.”

  [30]

  * * *

  “WHAT?” THE SUGGESTION didn’t have the same impo
rt for her, she knew, as it would for Clair Two, but it was still a very strange one, prompting all sorts of uncomfortable thoughts. “You want me to become a dupe? I didn’t think you could do that in here.”

  “We can’t, not without breaking the rules of the Yard,” said Mallory. “But you can work around them. You can still change yourself by putting on makeup, for example. You can take medicine, or chop off an arm. Anything that can physically be done to a person’s body on the outside can be done in here, too.”

  Clair’s discomfort rose at the mention of lopping off body parts.

  “What difference would it make, me looking like him?” She pointed at Nobody, unwilling to call him “Cameron.” “Why would Wallace trust him after what he did?”

  “Ant won’t,” Nobody said. “But he will want us close, where he can control us.”

  “I’m not going to agree to surgery,” she said. “Not ever.”

  “Face sculpting,” said Mallory, “with some prosthetics and the right clothes.”

  “Do you know a face sculptor?”

  “Not personally, but you have a friend who does.”

  “I do? Who?”

  “PK Sargent’s partner was a man called PK Forest. The muscles of his face were frozen thanks to a d-mat accident. He used a sculptor to give himself normal expressions, someone he could trust. That sculptor was Billie Lane, PK Sargent’s girlfriend.”

  “Right.” Clair didn’t quibble the point that Sargent was Clair Two’s friend, not hers. “Do you even know if she’s still alive?”

  “In here? Yes, she is. She once unknowingly helped a member of WHOLE change his face, and Ant scooped up her pattern as a result. Furthermore, PK Sargent knows where she is.”

  “What good does that do us? I can’t just ask her to tell me.”

  “I know. That’s why you’re going to ask Q.”

  Clair stared at Mallory, unnerved by the ease with which the woman was shooting down all her objections. “How do you know all this? Is there a spy in here or something?”