Hollowgirl

by Sean Williams

  Their cheeks touched for a moment, and then they separated.

  Zep’s mouth framed a silent No! as Evan pulled him away. Clair turned her back on both of them, steeling herself for what might come next. She had no plan to get out of the VIA building. She had only the barest hint of what a plan might look like. Kingdon obviously thought Nobody was responsible for the attack, and if Wallace believed her, Clair might not last more than ten seconds. If their obvious discontent with each other ran deep enough, however . . .

  A handful of men and women in red were already running toward her across the room, converging on the exit, firing their pop guns over their shoulders at the hollowmen who followed. They were vastly outnumbered, and were being picked off one by one. Clair leaned out from under the cover of smoke to fire at them, winging one of the black-clad figures. She felt no qualms about doing so. Her memory of one of them firing at her in the prison was clear.

  Space flexed nearby. She acknowledged with a satisfied nod the distant echo of the Yard ripping as someone got away. How many, she didn’t know. She could only hope that Zep was safe. Exhaling through pursed lips, she lowered the gun and came around the other side of the chair. She would emerge from cover as the last of the hollowmen went by, to join them and lead a chase for nonexistent fugitives elsewhere.

  A black-clad figure was waiting for her.

  “He’s here!” the woman called.

  “Have you been looking for me?” It was hard to pretend to be Nobody with so much else in her mind and heart, but her life depended on them thinking she was who she looked like. “I need to talk to Wallace.”

  “You will.”

  The woman raised a pistol and pointed it at her. Clair stared down the barrel, thinking, She’s not really going to fire. Then the woman did fire and Clair was kicked down and onto her side, pain flaring in her shoulder. The round had penetrated her armor and burst brightly in her flesh.

  For a moment she couldn’t think. She was a creature of nerves and blood and shock, and it was all she could do to reason around a simple three-word phrase, singing along with the agony.

  History repeats itself.

  She thought of Clair Two in a makeshift hospital bed, half dead from gunshot wounds of her own.

  But here she would have no Jesse to sit at her bedside, or Sargent to guard the door.

  More black figures joined the woman who had shot her. They leaned over Clair, their voices rising and falling through the drumming of her pulse.

  “But that’s—”

  “What have you done?”

  “Winged him. Boss wants him alive.”

  Lucky for Cameron Lee, Clair thought. Not so lucky for Clair Hill.

  She had hoped to appeal to Wallace’s good nature. It was true, after all, that she had had no idea about RADICAL’s attack, and that truth might have saved Nobody’s life. But now that wouldn’t work. It was an even bet whether the disguise would hold out another minute. She could feel the prosthetics hanging loose against her face. They might fall off with her next breath. She wasn’t going to be able to talk her way out of this one.

  What would Clair Two do? The question flashed across her mind, closely followed by images of Zep, Libby, her mother . . . and Jesse, his green eyes far away now but somehow still at the center of her universe. It’s not fair! she wanted to scream, but she knew she only had one option, and just one chance to pull it off.

  She rolled over, reaching for her pistol. One of the hollowmen kicked it away. The one who had shot her picked it up and pointed it at her. Groaning, Clair fell back with her left hand in her thigh pocket, where she had put the grenade. That move the hollowmen didn’t notice.

  The grenade, tucked safely away and forgotten. Until now.

  It was ironic, really. Dylan Linwood had given her a mission, and in a roundabout way she had succeeded.

  The heart of Ant Wallace’s empire? Check.

  One grenade? Check.

  It would’ve been funny, almost, but for the thought: I guess we’re the same, after all.

  There was no time to wait for Wallace. One of the hollowmen was already peering at her a little too closely.

  “Hold on a second,” he said.

  Clair closed her eyes.

  History repeats itself.

  [38 redux]

  * * *

  Clair Two

  CLAIR WOKE WITH her heart hammering, feeling as though a whole army had just run across her grave, firing pop guns and being chased by monsters she couldn’t see. . . .

  A thought was ringing in her mind.

  Outside . . . There’s another Clair Hill, outside the Yard.

  For a moment, she couldn’t tell what was a dream and what was reality.

  She was definitely in the prison. According to her lenses eighteen hours had passed since the hollowmen had attacked. Since she had been shot. The thought struck like a soft punch to the gut.

  That much she knew.

  But nothing else was clear. Nothing else made sense.

  Something had woken her up. Some ripple in the Yard, some tear in the fabric of the world.

  “Q, what’s going on?”

  There was no answer to her panicked bump, and she wondered if that might be connected to her strange awakening.

  “Kari?” she called aloud.

  “Easy, I’m right here.” A large shape detached itself from the shadows and came to loom over her. “You shouldn’t be awake. We took off the cast only an hour ago—”

  “Something’s wrong.” Clair could see another version of herself standing at the end of the bed, flickering and silent, her expression one of dismay and resignation. A glitch. Data ghost. She remembered seeing something like that just after she’d been shot. Could it really be an echo of the Clair on the outside? A Clair who thought she should have died in the blue dawn?

  She blinked and the vision disappeared. “Something’s very wrong.”

  Distantly, an alarm began to sound.

  Clair lurched into an upright sitting position, amazed at first by how easy the movement seemed, but then undid that personal triumph by making herself sick. Putting her weight on her right hand—her left was bound tightly to her side, with her forearm flat across her stomach—she leaned over the edge of the mattress and vomited onto the floor, chest burning with every heave.

  Kari stopped her from falling out of bed, but then tried to press her back down onto the mattress.

  “Lie still, Clair—”

  “I can’t.” The sense of panic she had woken with wasn’t going away. “I need to get up.”

  “Why? There’s nothing going on we can’t handle. That alarm . . . it’s almost routine now. The hollowmen have been attacking on and off ever since you were shot, trying to wear us down. But the Yetis are a match for them. They’ve laid traps everywhere. You have to rest, Clair. You were seriously injured. You almost died.”

  “But I didn’t die,” she said, thinking, The other me, trying to get in touch . . . maybe that was what caused the most recent glitches. Rescue coming in the form of a giant floating head . . .

  What exactly had woken her up?

  A lanky, long-haired figure skated to a halt in the doorway.

  “Sarge, this time it’s different,” he said. “It’s . . . Oh, you’re awake. How are you?”

  Jesse smoothed out his urgent expression with a visible effort and hurried to Clair’s side. He reached for her free hand, but stopped at the last instant, as though afraid of hurting her. She caught his hand before it could escape and gripped it tightly, perhaps too tightly, but she was beyond holding herself back. The other Clair’s sense of all-pervading grief was still in her mind. Being around him calmed her a little on that front.

  “I feel terrible.” Her injured shoulder was covered in a stiff fabric wrap that smelled of menthol. The pain was a distant ache, her stomach settling now that it was empty. But there was something new about her head. Letting go of Jesse briefly, she discovered that her hair had been shaved to the skin. P
atches of glue remained where sensors had been stuck to her scalp to monitor her brain waves. You almost died.

  She shivered, feeling suddenly cold. Even that small movement caused her pain.

  My hair is gone.

  “I really am damaged now, aren’t I?”

  Jesse sat down on the edge of the bed and squeezed her hand tightly. “Bullshit. I’ve never seen anything like the patches Sargent used. Peacekeepers always keep the best stuff for themselves.”

  “You’ll be as good as new in a couple of days,” Kari said. “If you do as you’re told.”

  Clair felt tears gathering at the corners of her eyes. Nothing would ever be the same again. She had been shot. The world outside was almost completely gone. Humanity was hanging on by the thinnest thread, a thread that could snap at any moment.

  She couldn’t meet Jesse’s eyes. He looked so worried. But when she looked away, she saw shapes turning and twisting ominously in the dark corners of the room.

  “You said something’s different about this alarm,” she said.

  Kari shook her head before Jesse could reply. “There’re two of you now, remember? You don’t have to do everything.”

  Clair remembered Clair One’s face suddenly looming at her out of the darkness right when the bullet ripped into her shoulder.

  “You trust her?” she asked Jesse. “After what she said to you?”

  “Uh, actually, we can’t find her,” he said, glancing apologetically at Kari. “She’s been missing ever since she said she was going to get Billie—”

  “She said what?” said Kari, rounding on Jesse in alarm.

  “I know, I know, she made me promise not to tell you. But now Zep’s missing as well, and when the Yetis went looking for him, they found someone else.”

  “Who?” asked Clair.

  “Nobody,” Jesse said. “That is, Cameron Lee. He was lurking about in one of the empty offices. We’ve taken him to the hub, where . . . Wait, you can’t do this.”

  She could and she was, but swinging her legs around in order to stand was taking more strength than it turned out she had.

  “Help me up,” she said.

  “What? No. I’m in enough trouble already.”

  “Kari’s all talk. There’s too much important stuff going on for me to stay here.”

  She gripped his T-shirt with her right hand and pulled at him, forcing him to take her weight or be yanked forward. Kari sighed and assisted from the other side. Clair’s head spun when she was on her feet, and for a moment she wished she wasn’t so stubborn, that she could just give in and let someone else sort it out, but then her balance returned and she felt able to stand without falling over.

  The room was full of beds. It looked like a field hospital in a war zone. She took a step forward and something tugged sharply in her chest. She tried not to show how much it hurt. Sitting back down was unacceptable. As she took a second step, the ghostly vision of another Clair returned, this time covered from head to foot in blood. That was even more ominous. “Cunctando,” said Devin in her ear, which didn’t help. At least she could guess what that meant, now.

  Assuming the dream of another Clair outside the Yard was real.

  It had to be, didn’t it?

  She was gambling a lot on not being stone-cold crazy.

  One slow step at a time they passed an office that was now a morgue. The door was open. She counted thirty body bags lined up on the floor and on desks. She tried not to wonder who was in there. Ronnie? Tash? Libby? Any of the Unimprovables? She couldn’t think about that now.

  The morgue was lit with red light. The next room was entirely in blue, and the hospital had been yellow. That could have been to help people sleep, but then the next room along was green and she knew there was more to it.

  Before she could ask about the party atmosphere, the alarm cut off, then started again.

  “Glitches are up,” said Jesse. “Maybe because you’re awake. That could be why Q has gone quiet again.”

  She thought there was more to it than that, but she didn’t want to tell it twice. The dream had contained another Clair, another Kari Sargent—and another Q, too. What kind of knots was the Yard tying itself into in order to accommodate the reality of the message she had received? That must be why the glitches had gotten worse, earlier: information was real in here.

  Letting Jesse’s theory stand for the moment, Clair searched her memories of the dream for a way to reply, some means of telling the other Clair that she had been heard. That would test the truth of it, once and for all.

  The dream, however, felt less like something that had happened to her than something she had put together from a series of fragments—dialogue, images, descriptions, names. Q and her other self had compiled this jumble and with Devin’s help fired it into the Yard, hoping she would understand it when it arrived. The fact that she had been unconscious at the time might have made the message easier to absorb, but the dreamlike quality it retained made it slippery, hard to pin down. If they had ever said, Do so-and-so to reply, unfortunately she didn’t remember it.

  The hub was lit in purple and a wash of other colors. She kept hold of Jesse’s shoulder as they entered, feeling like everyone was staring at her. The room was full of people, and they all looked tired and stressed, and annoyed at her, although she didn’t know why. She hadn’t done anything.

  “The prodigal Clair returns.”

  The comment came from a huddle of Yetis on the far side of the room. Or rather, Clair realized, the man they were holding prisoner. He was small, blond, and young, and immediately recognizable even though she hadn’t met him in that body before.

  Nobody.

  Clair did her best to stand straight without wincing. “You don’t get rid of me that easily.”

  “Do you think that’s my intention?”

  “Someone tried to kill me.”

  He shrugged. “You will keep putting yourself in the line of fire. . . .”

  She couldn’t banter with him and stand at the same time.

  “Chair,” she said, shuffling toward the agglomeration of desks in the middle of the room.

  “You shouldn’t be up,” said Dylan, standing to give her his seat.

  “You’re probably right.” She eased herself down and fought the urge to keep on going to the floor. Sitting was uncomfortable, but there was no way she was lying down in front of anyone in this room. “That’s never stopped me from disagreeing with you before.”

  “You wake up the same time he appears,” Dylan said, managing to look worried about her and suspicious at the same time. “Is there a connection?”

  Between those two things, Clair wasn’t sure, but something was definitely going on. She could see it in the shadows and taste it in the back of her mouth.

  “I think . . . no, I’m sure of it. I’ve received a message from outside,” she said, choosing her words with care. She didn’t want to reveal too much while one of Wallace’s agents was in the room. The possibility of a third Clair was something she definitely wanted to keep secret. “There are survivors, and they’re trying to communicate with us.”

  Nobody was suddenly paying very close attention. “There are?” he said. “That trumps what I came here to tell you.”

  “You didn’t come here to tell us anything,” said Dylan. “We found you—”

  “I wanted to be found, because something went wrong,” Nobody said. “I received a message too. It was a bump that was only to be sent in certain extreme circumstances. You’ll want to know about that—but now I want to know about this instead.”

  He grinned at Clair, taunting her. She wasn’t going to rise to the bait.

  “What was your message?” she asked him.

  “Let’s trade.”

  “No.” The last time they had done that, the world had been destroyed. “Tell me.”

  “It said, ‘The barn burned.’”

  “Which means?”

  “That Mallory Wei didn’t die the way she wanted to.”r />
  Mallory . . . dead. Clair didn’t know what that had to do with anyone here, but she felt satisfaction nonetheless. That was one problem solved, if Nobody was telling the truth, since dead was dead in the Yard.

  “She wanted to die with you,” Nobody added.

  Clair laughed to show she wasn’t riled by his posturing. “Well, she missed her chance, didn’t she?”

  “Maybe not. You were with her when she died, after all.”

  Clair felt her face lock up, although she tried to act naturally. Clair One was missing on a secret mission involving Billie, presumably with Zep, and now Nobody was telling her that Mallory had been with her. And Mallory was dead.

  “We need to find Clair One,” she said.

  “Libby, Ronnie, and Tash are searching the prison as we speak,” said Arabelle.

  “They won’t find her,” said Jesse. “I’ve already looked. She’s not here.”

  “I’ve bumped Billie,” said Kari. “She’s keeping quiet about something, but I’ll get it out of her.”

  “Tell me about the outside,” said Nobody, leaning eagerly forward. “Tell me what I got wrong.”

  “Everything,” said Clair, feeling a rise of hatred for the man who had made her life a living hell. “Everything you do is wrong.”

  “Cunctando!” said glitch-Devin again. Space rippled like a funhouse mirror. And into that moment, bursting through a hole in the air trailing smoke and a smell of ripped space, fell Zeppelin Barker and a blood-spattered man Clair had never seen before.

  [39]

  * * *

  ALARMS SQUALLED. YETIS reached for their weapons. Zep raised his hands and dropped to his knees, tears streaming down his black-smudged face. The man steadied himself and said, “My name is Evan Bartelme, and I want to know what the hell is going on.”

  Bartelme, thought Clair. Was he connected to Devin, Trevin, and Eve? Finding RADICAL was high on her list of things to do, but it seemed RADICAL had beaten her to it.

  “Cunctando regitur mundus,” she said, trying to stand but falling back into the seat when it turned out she didn’t have the strength. “We’re friends. You can trust us.”