Hollowgirl

by Sean Williams

  It felt different, and so did her face. Her armor didn’t feel the same. Zep, Billie, and Mallory swung into view. They were watching her closely.

  “What?” she said. “Oh!”

  Her voice was so much deeper than it had been, which shouldn’t have surprised her, but did, so much so that her knees gave way beneath her and she would have fallen if Zep hadn’t lunged forward and caught her under the armpits.

  “Easy,” said Mallory, reaching past him and gripping her chin so tightly it hurt. “Don’t wimp out on me now, Cameron.”

  Who? Right. She had better get used to being called that, even if it was only going to be for a short time.

  “I feel . . . not right,” she said. She was never going to get used to that voice.

  “Try standing again,” Billie said. “You’ll get your balance when the patch clears.”

  Zep took one hand away, and Clair got her legs working properly. She could feel the lifts in the soles of her shoes making her taller, and indeed Zep didn’t seem quite as enormous as he usually did. When she straightened, her eyes could see clear over Mallory’s and Billie’s heads. The view from her peripheral vision was different too. Her shoulders were broader, and her breasts—

  Involuntarily, she raised both hands to touch her chest.

  “I’ve only bound them,” Billie said with a reassuring twinkle in her eye. “Don’t worry. Everything below the neck is au naturel.”

  But above the neck . . . ?

  “Mirror,” Clair said.

  “You know what you’re going to see,” said Mallory.

  She did, but she needed to see it to believe it.

  “Mirror,” she repeated, snapping her fingers.

  Billie already had one in her hand. She had probably been through this thousands of times. Raising it, she placed it between Clair and Zep and showed her the reflection.

  Only it wasn’t her reflection. It was Nobody looking back at her. Until she blinked.

  The blond, blue-eyed, white-skinned boy in the mirror blinked too.

  She recoiled automatically as every muscle in her body went into spasm, denying the reality. Her knees buckled again on the table behind her, and she almost sat back down. Her eyes didn’t leave the mirror, though. She wasn’t trying to run. It was just a reflex, a deep, fundamental part of her crying out, That’s not me!

  But it was her, for a while. She was Cameron Lee.

  Some Improvement, she thought. And then she laughed.

  “What now?” asked Zep, pushing the mirror aside.

  “Still want to kiss me?” she said, and wasn’t surprised by the fleeting look of disgust he gave her in return.

  But then he did kiss her, and that surprised her more than anything. Surprised her so much that she kissed him back. And for a brief moment, it was everything she wanted it to be. He kissed her not because she was Libby’s best friend. Hell, she didn’t even look like a girl anymore. He kissed her because she was her.

  Then he ruined it by pulling away and saying, “That’s for the safe house. You’re still my hero, Clair-bear.”

  He was referring to experiences she hadn’t shared. He’s thinking of Clair Two.

  “This isn’t the prom,” Mallory said. “Show me that you can stand on your own. Talk to me the way he talks. Stop wasting time we might not have.”

  Clair felt her face go warm. There would be no hiding that behind her new pale skin.

  [35]

  * * *

  “FASTER, BUT NOT carelessly.

  “More cocky, like you’re the only person in the room who matters.

  “Pause at the beginning of every sentence. That’s what he does, so you’re going to have to do it too.”

  Clair had thought the sculpting would be the hard part. After an hour with Mallory, she was beginning to wonder if it would ever end.

  Zep watched with hooded eyes as she walked around the operating room one more time, addressing Mallory’s concerns as she went. She had done it so many times she was getting dizzy.

  “The walk is much better,” Mallory declared. “Remember, that hand is the one that shakes, not the other one. Make sure you look people in the eye, and keep looking long after it’s comfortable. And when you talk, try not to say anything the easy way.”

  “Why would I?” she said after counting to three in her head.

  Mallory nodded. “Much better.”

  “So are we ever doing this?” asked Zep. “It’s beginning to freak me out now, to be honest.”

  “I think we’re almost ready.” Mallory performed one last armor check, and Clair did the same. She was wearing something similar to the gear she’d been given by WHOLE, but bulkier, and she still had her pistol and the grenade both securely stashed away. There was no way she was going into Wallace’s inner sanctum unarmed.

  “But first,” said Mallory to Zep, “what about you? You have to be believable too. You’re betraying your friends. Why?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” he said. “I’m not betraying them. I’m rescuing them.”

  “How?”

  “Well, they’ve been kidnapped by terrorists. WHOLE says Wallace is in charge, so that’s why I’ve come to him for help setting them free. First I escaped the prison, then I was picked up by you guys because obviously you’re keeping an eye on things down there, and here I am.” He held out his hands as though completing a somersault.

  “What are you offering Ant in return?”

  Zep looked flustered. He hadn’t thought that far.

  “Information,” said Clair. “How many terrorists, where they’re deployed in the prison, what weapons they have . . . and so on. You don’t have to be accurate. In fact, the more you make up, the better.”

  “I’m good at inventing random numbers.” Zep nodded gratefully. “That’s what my math teacher wrote on my last paper.”

  Clair checked the time. Six hours had passed since they had left the prison. There had been no word from Q or any of the others on the rare occasions she’d checked the Air, so her cover story was holding. Billie had fabbed some protein bars and shakes to refuel them while they rehearsed. She saw no reason not to leave immediately, apart from the butterflies in her stomach telling her to run like hell.

  “Just a teensy thing before you go,” said Billie. They turned to face her. “I get that you have your reasons for keeping Kari out of this, but that doesn’t mean I like it. I’m posting a message to the Air that will be automatically delivered to her in one hour. That way if anything happens to you, or me, she’ll know. Are we clear on this?”

  Mallory looked as though she might argue, but then she nodded.

  “Understood. One hour.”

  Taking Clair and Zep by the hand, she turned them to face the closed doorway with Zep in the middle.

  “Let me do the talking,” she said, “unless there’s no alternative.”

  Clair nodded. So did Zep.

  “Open the door, Billie. Hold tight.”

  Mallory surged forward, dragging Zep after her. Clair’s arm wrenched in its socket as he jerked her forward in turn—then they were ripping, twisting, turning through the interstices of the Yard, and Clair held her breath, hoping her new face wouldn’t come off before she wanted it to.

  They touched down in Manhattan, instantly recognizable even though its graceful bridges and walkways appeared to have been torn down. Clair’s lenses told her that they were in Bryant Park, near the Grand Central Terminal Museum of Transport. She had been there once on a school excursion and remembered it full of people, a lively green space. Now it was dark and cold and empty, apart from a dozen people in black uniforms holding rifles, surrounded on two sides by barbed wire. For the first time it truly occurred to her that they were going deep behind enemy lines.

  “Names,” barked a voice from behind them.

  “Wei,” said Mallory, making a show of dusting herself down. “Recruit escort. Zeppelin James Barker.”

  Zep saluted with excellently faked nonchalance, Cl
air thought.

  My turn, she told herself.

  “You seriously don’t know who I am?”

  That did the trick.

  “Continue.”

  Mallory took Zep by the arm and led him across the square. Clair fell in behind them, taking in everything around her. She didn’t know what she might need later as a reference point in case of a hasty escape, so she kept her eyes open, noting checkpoints, gun emplacements, and several armed drones whining above them. The buildings were all lit up by floodlights, but the windows themselves were dark.

  Where is everyone? she wondered.

  Mallory led them out of the park, heading southwest. They crossed Fortieth Street and Sixth Avenue, then walked down to Thirty-Ninth Street, where they headed west. Broadway was deserted. At Seventh Avenue they turned left. There was a bank of d-mat booths standing open on Thirty-Seventh, and guards on Thirty-Fourth, but otherwise the city could have been empty of all life, which was too peculiar even for the Yard. Could there be a curfew?

  They turned right at Thirty-Fourth, and the only building showing any sign of life appeared before them.

  VIA headquarters, the One Penn Plaza building, was a black monolith set back barely a block from the water’s edge. A scattered pattern of bright blue lights shone from the inside, casting into sharp relief the craterous damage caused by Q to some areas of the building. Clair had heard about that, but this was her first chance to see it with her own eyes.

  She was impressed: maybe Q was more than a clever machine after all.

  It also struck her as uncanny that something so recent in the real world could be re-created in the Yard—but not as uncanny as the fact that Manhattan appeared to have been turned into a police state overnight.

  They approached the base of the building and were stopped a second time. While Mallory brusquely explained the purported reason for their presence, Clair became conscious of a rotting smell that seemed to be coming from the water but didn’t smell like dead fish.

  Zep curled up his nose. “Gross.”

  “You don’t like it,” said one of the guards to him while the other conferred with someone inside the building, “you tell the boss, if he lets you in. He needs to clear them out of the Garden or burn them. It’s a health hazard, leaving them there like that. Maybe that’ll be your first job, rookie.”

  Zep looked like he might be about to throw up.

  Clair didn’t know what she was more afraid of revealing—her ignorance or, when the meaning of his words became clear, her revulsion. Either way, she was glad when the guards waved them through, and she forced herself to stop wondering about the missing inhabitants of the Manhattan Isles.

  She put her hand in the small of Zep’s, pretending to guide him but actually for reassurance. Strength, she thought, for both of them.

  They had been accepted into the inner sanctum.

  [36]

  * * *

  THE FOYER WAS an empty expanse that seemed somehow larger than the footprint of the building. Clair’s fake skin crawled as she walked with Mallory and Zep toward a distant bank of elevators. The doors loomed vast and ominous. Inside was a cage large enough to hold a squadron of soldiers.

  As the elevator lurched beneath them and began to rise, she became increasingly sure that there was something wrong with the perspective. No ordinary building needed elevators this large. Was space out of whack inside Wallace’s headquarters? Could its proximity to him, the creator of the world, be twisting things out of shape?

  She glanced at Mallory, ignoring Zep between them. The woman’s gaze was fixed straight ahead. Her jaw was clenched.

  Clair felt as though she was falling down a pit, rather than rising to her fate at the top of the elevator shaft. Was this how it had been for Clair Two?

  The floor shuddered beneath them. The doors rumbled open, and for a moment Clair saw double: another version of herself was walking toward her with another version of Nobody through the multicolored chambers of the prison. But then she blinked and the vision was gone.

  Glitching, she thought. She couldn’t let that distract her, although it did seem odd, since she was nowhere near Clair Two. . . .

  Mallory stepped out into a cathedral-like room with a high, domed ceiling and sweeping glass windows in a semicircular arc that admitted a view of dark skyscrapers and infinite stars. The space was opulently furnished, almost bizarrely so, with chairs so ornate and twisted that there barely seemed space for a person to sit in them.

  Nowhere did she see anything that looked like an exit from the Yard. Maybe it was concealed or just out of view.

  Far away, in the hazy distance, she made out something that looked like an altar.

  Mallory stopped, turned, and looked pointedly at her at her. Her eyes said, Nobody wouldn’t stand there gawking.

  Clair forced herself to move, grabbing Zep by the shoulder and pushing him ahead of her. Their feet made hard sounds on the bleached white floor. The curved walls were so far away that no echoes returned.

  Mallory headed for the altar, which resolved as they came closer into an absurdly huge desk big enough for a game of racquet ball. Behind the desk was a chair so baroque it could have been a throne, with complicated spires and gyres. A woman was standing nearby with her back to them, staring out at the night sky. She didn’t turn as they approached, didn’t acknowledge them at all until Mallory stopped, three yards from the desk, and said, “Where is he, Kingdon?”

  The woman turned. “He says he’s on his way. I choose to believe him.”

  “Things still frosty between you two, then.”

  It wasn’t a question, but Kingdon answered it anyway. “Destroying the world was not part of the plan.”

  Clair filed that information way. If Kingdon and Wallace didn’t see eye to eye, that could be used against them.

  “Where have you been?” Kingdon asked Mallory.

  “I don’t answer to you.”

  “Neither does he,” Kingdon looked at Clair. At Nobody. “That’s new.”

  Clair thought fast. Adopting her most disaffected tone, she said, “There’s nothing new in here. Just variations on a theme.”

  Kingdon laughed without humor. “And who’s your friend? Another for the cause? It’s not like you to do the dirty work of recruiting yourself. . . .”

  Space warped with a sound like distant thunder, sparing Clair the need to answer. A handsome, middle-aged man appeared in midstep behind the desk, walking toward them with even, self-assured paces. He was wearing a gray business suit and no tie. His patent leather shoes squeaked softly underfoot.

  “That’s Clair’s friend Zeppelin Barker,” said Ant Wallace. “And this is a most unexpected visit . . . from all three of you.”

  Clair was taken momentarily off guard. Here he was, the man everyone said was the enemy of the human race. The liar, the mass murderer, the stooge of ambitious would-be dictators . . . Somehow he was smaller than she’d expected, radiating an air of likeability and charm that she knew had to be a mask like hers.

  Mallory’s expression was borderline hostile.

  “You know I’ve been sniffing around that hole of theirs,” she said, pushing Zep forward. “The things you find.”

  Zep stumbled, and glanced over his shoulder at Clair for guidance. She felt a cold premonition of disaster.

  “Don’t look at me,” she said in her coldest voice. He had to understand. They couldn’t afford any mistakes, not until they had found the exit. “You wanted to come here. Tell the man why.”

  Zep swallowed, comprehending.

  “You’re hurting my friends,” he said to Wallace. “I want that to stop.”

  Wallace reached the desk and leaned over it, both hands flat and fingers spread wide.

  “Well, I don’t want to hurt anyone,” he said, like a schoolteacher forced to be stern.

  “It’s the people we got caught up with. Dylan Linwood. WHOLE. All of them. They’re crazy. Clair . . . I don’t know what she’s thinking. But she’d be gl
ad I’m here, I bet, if she knew. She’d want me to tell you how to stop this.”

  “How do I stop this, Zep?”

  Zep rattled off the lines they had rehearsed before leaving Billie’s exam room, as Clair watched Wallace closely. Zep would take the hollowmen to the prison, and the hollowmen could take out WHOLE. It was a simple lie, which made it more believable, Clair hoped. Was that eagerness she saw glittering in Wallace’s eyes, or suspicion?

  Clair’s hackles raised on realizing that she was being closely scrutinized by Kingdon in turn.

  Something about Clair’s impersonation of Nobody wasn’t right.

  What am I doing wrong?

  Frantically, she refreshed her memory. Cameron Lee was the first dupe, with a twisted sense of loyalty. He was above reproach, or felt that he was. He wouldn’t wait around like hired help.

  Clair unlocked her limbs and walked in a long, slow circle around the desk. Prowl, she told herself. Everyone in this room knows that you’re edgy and unpredictable. Wallace may have built the weapon that destroyed the world, but you’re the one who made sure it went off.

  Kingdon’s eyes followed her, then slid away.

  “That’s all very generous,” Kingdon said, interrupting Zep’s interrogation. “But it doesn’t solve anything.”

  “I’m afraid my friend here is correct,” said Wallace. “You should understand that I have higher goals. My objective isn’t just WHOLE, Zep. It’s Clair herself. Both Clairs. I’m not going to stop until they are mine. What do you say to that?”

  Clair was behind Wallace now. She could see Zep’s internal struggle, large on his face. It didn’t matter what he said now; he wasn’t really planning to betray Clair. But it still felt like it—and that was good. His indecision made the lie more believable.

  What he said next took her by surprise.

  “I’ve been thinking about the crash,” Zep said, “and how your space station was destroyed. Clair never explained how the two things were connected, but I’ve figured it out. She killed herself to blow up the station. Then Q brought her back, and that broke parity. She died and she didn’t stay dead—that’s what ruined d-mat for everyone.”