Hollowgirl

by Sean Williams

  “He’s with the other hollowmen we’ve captured,” said Dylan, “in the one booth we left intact. There’s a dead man’s switch. If any one of them so much as looks at us wrong, they’ll all be erased.”

  Too good for him, Clair wanted to say, but instead she just nodded.

  “And Mallory’s dead,” said Libby.

  The heat ebbed somewhat at that. Mallory was as much a victim of Wallace as anyone else. Libby had survived her. That was revenge enough.

  “Anything else I need to know?” she asked.

  There was a short, tense silence that told her all she needed to know about the missing Clair One.

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “When you’re ready.”

  “Let’s move forward,” said Kari. Clair had to remind herself that it was the real Kari talking, not Q inside Kari’s body. “Our goal is to break Wallace’s hold on the Yard, and to do that we need to get into the exit chamber. Agreed?”

  “Agreed,” said Evan Bartelme.

  “Agreed,” said Dylan Linwood.

  “Agreed,” said Clair Two. “But Wallace will know that. All he has to do is keep us out.”

  “Exactly, so we’ll have to go about it on more than one front,” Kari went on. “Here’s what I suggest. RADICAL works on getting the channel ready on both ends, inside and outside the Yard. WHOLE, since they were the first to get a handle on ripping, can make new hacks that will get them into the VIA building in some way that can’t be blocked. The rest of us will put together a conventional approach: attacking the front door, in other words. Wallace will definitely be expecting something obvious; it would be wise not to disappoint him, or he’ll look elsewhere.”

  “And you’ll be our backup plan,” said Clair Two to Clair outside. “What do you have out there, apart from a giant floating head?”

  “According to old records,” said Q-prime, “there’s diving and drilling equipment at the top of the borehole. Thanks to layers of snow and ice, it should have escaped the chain reaction. If we can’t access the exit via the interface we’ll find there, we’ll go ahead with our plan to hack into the hardware itself.”

  “It’s bound to be booby-trapped,” said Kari.

  “I know,” said Clair, feeling sympathy for the huddle of desperate people in the Yard, but what reassurances could she offer them when there were none for her? Except to say, “We won’t make any mistakes. This is the time we get it right,” and hope it was true.

  No one said anything in response to that, and eventually she realized that the picture was frozen. The sound was gone. The channel had closed again.

  Clair sighed. It was exhausting, juggling the reality of her world and that of the Yard. Outside, she had nothing. Inside, Clair Two had everything. But outside was real and inside was an illusion. And Wallace remained.

  Wallace, the master of the only door in and out of his kingdom. He would know that contact had been made, even if he couldn’t decode their signal. He would recognize a challenge when he saw it.

  “Do you think they’ve got a chance in hell?” Sandler asked.

  Clair turned her attention from the icy view to the inside of the bridge. Everyone was watching her, waiting to see how she’d respond. It wouldn’t help them to hear what she was thinking, she was sure.

  Any victory without Jesse would be hollow, for her.

  There were some things Clair 7.0 wasn’t allowed to hope for.

  “In hell?” she said. “No. But in the Yard, while I’m in there with them? Absolutely.”

  Sandler rolled his eyes. “Just because there’re two of you doesn’t mean you need to be twice as cocky. Or twice as annoying.”

  He went back to preparing patches in case they passed through another hailstorm. Clair chalked that up as a partial victory in the ongoing verbal battle between them. That was something.

  Swaying slowly from side to side, the Satoshige plowed on through clouds piled high like mountains.

  [41]

  * * *

  Clair Two

  WHEN THE IMAGE of Clair Three and the inside of the floating head froze for the umpteenth time, Clair almost sobbed with relief. The pain was coming and going in waves, crashing higher and arriving a little quicker each time. But passing out in front of her other self was not an option. She would rather die . . . and felt like she just might.

  “Back to the hospital with you,” said Kari. “No, don’t try to stand up. We’ll get you a stretcher. You remember what those are? Standard issue for sick people. Like wheelchairs. And hammers, for application to the head when patients don’t do as they’re told.”

  Clair didn’t protest. Kari was talking nonsense, which meant she was worried, and she only worried when things were serious.

  “Don’t knock me out,” Clair tried to say.

  “What?” Kari leaned in close.

  “Keep me awake. I promise not to get up again, but I need to know what’s going on. I don’t want . . .”

  “To be left out, I understand.” Kari nodded. “I’ll do what I can.”

  That wasn’t what Clair had been about to say. I don’t want to dream. That was what she didn’t want to do. She had enough nightmares and foreign memories in her head already without Clair One’s added to the mix.

  She could feel them now, crowding her. The whiteness of the exit chamber and the redness of her blood as it dripped to the ground. Wallace’s unreliable charm, and Kingdon’s calmly furious mien. The pain of being shot in the shoulder, so uncannily like her own. And then . . .

  Clair didn’t know why she was experiencing this now. Wasn’t Clair One dead?

  Maybe the memories, once part of a girl called Clair in the Yard, belonged to all Clairs in the Yard, whether they wanted them or not.

  Clair One looking in the mirror and seeing Nobody’s face reflecting back at her . . .

  She didn’t want that thought messing with her unconscious. She was Clair Hill, and at some point soon, she was sure, she would start to grieve.

  “You take her legs,” said Kari. Zep did as he was told. The mixture of colored lights in the hub shifted around her. She felt herself lifted and laid out flat, the scratchy woolen beanie that had belonged to a random Yeti slipping off her head. The tides of pain became confused and found new rhythms. Around her the world moved while she stayed still. Colors changed. She blinked—

  —and blinked again to find that time had passed, bringing her miraculously back to her bed in the makeshift hospital, as though she had ripped there through desperate force of will.

  But no. When she checked her lenses she saw that only ten minutes had passed. There was something stuck to her neck that hadn’t been there before: a patch delivering welcome numbness through her veins. The pain was manageable now, and yet her thoughts kept flowing. Kari was as good as her word.

  “Okay now?” Kari asked her, leaning into view. The yellow light caught her short hair, making it look like straw.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “Thirsty?”

  “God, yes.”

  Kari went away and came back with a cup and straw.

  “Have you ever had your palm read,” she asked while Clair tentatively drank, “or seen a psychic? Did they say that you were going to lead the weirdest life ever?”

  Clair smiled and shook her head.

  “Me either,” said Kari. “But here we are. Grand, isn’t it? Think of the stories we’ll tell our kids. They’ll never believe us.”

  Clair’s throat felt full again, but not from sadness. It amazed her that, despite the perils of the Yard and all the uncertainties of the world outside, Kari was thinking about the next generation. In its way, that was a more potent tonic than the painkillers, or even the water, pure and refreshing though it was.

  She let go of the straw with her lips and Kari leaned back into her seat.

  “Ray’s gone to get your folks, and everyone else connected to us,” she said, “Billie among them. Jesse told me how Clair One got past me. I’m angry at myself, and at h
er, but I know no one’s to blame, not really. I was stupidly tired and she didn’t know better. We should have . . . Actually, I don’t know what we could have done to stop her. She was as stubborn as you are, funnily enough, and you don’t like to believe that people are evil. Not even people like Mallory or Nobody. Hell, you probably still think Wallace can return from the dark side, don’t you?”

  Clair didn’t know what to say. She knew what her mother had taught her, which was that people usually knew the difference between right and wrong, and they usually tried to do the right thing over the wrong thing, no matter who they were. But there were different kinds of rights and different kinds of wrongs, and when someone was trying to juggle lots of things at once, it was easy to get them mixed up. One of the reasons people tied themselves in such knots of indecision, Allison Hill said, was because what they knew and what they wanted to think were often different things.

  That’s why, Clair reminded herself, people needed lawmakers and peacekeepers working in open consensus to remind them of how they should behave. That’s why people who thought they were above the law, like Wallace and Kingdon, could be so dangerous and had to be stopped. They wouldn’t listen to the people trying to untie the knots, so they didn’t see the nooses around their own necks until it was too late and the knots began to tighten.

  “I think Wallace is worried,” said Clair. “That’ll make him more dangerous than ever. We have to be careful he doesn’t wipe everything and start over again.”

  “If that was an option, wouldn’t he have done it already?”

  Clair didn’t know the answer to that question. Maybe there were risks associated with turning the Yard off and on again, himself with it. Maybe he was irrationally afraid of that moment of nothingness between being and then being again, just as some people were afraid of using d-mat or falling asleep at night, for the same reasons. That it didn’t feel like anything at all was maybe the most frightening thing of all.

  Clair One was dead, and apart from the cessation of the glitches, she still felt nothing.

  Someone stirred. Clair looked up, hoping it was Jesse, but it was a patient on one of the other impromptu hospital beds.

  “You have other people to look after,” Clair said.

  Kari nodded. “You’ll tell me if you need anything?”

  Clair promised. And she meant it. She wanted to get better fast. If there was going to be an attack on Wallace’s fortress, she had to be part of it.

  [42]

  * * *

  BEING CONFINED TO bed was no obstacle to her plan, not in the short term. Locked-in Agnessa had taught her that. Clair used her lenses to virtually visit all the places in the prison she needed to be. What she found was reassuring. There were arguments over core beliefs—Clair had never heard so many four-letter words in one string as during a philosophical argument over the soul that broke out in one of the prison’s increasingly crowded corridors—but on the whole, the idea of a common enemy kept WHOLE, RADICAL, and everyone else on the same page.

  It helped that they were working on separate areas of the plan. Evan and several other RADICAL activists, newly ripped in from locations unknown across the globe, occupied a corner of the hub, connected to Devin, Trevin, and Eve Bartelme at the other end of the exit, conducting tests back and forth. Now that the alliance knew there were booths in the real world, it was just a matter of getting the data out of the Yard fast enough. Clair watched for a while, not really understanding what they were talking about, but noting that not once did Eve or Evan talk directly to each other. Instead, they communicated via their sons or the others in their groups. They behaved like estranged parents, when in fact they were estranged selves, separated by much more than just memories. Clair wondered if that was because of ideological differences—the old RADICAL was different from the new in various small ways, such as Evan’s eagerness to work with Q versus Eve’s continued wariness—or if it was more about Eve and Evan themselves. Perhaps she and Clair One would have ended up just as distant, given more time to grow apart.

  The thought was an uncomfortable one but still didn’t touch her. Clair felt more moved by the sight of Cashile playing on his own, bouncing a ball back and forth in one of the dead ends. He was the last child on Earth, unless Kari Sargent had her way.

  Meanwhile, WHOLE commandeered the huge open attic at the top of the prison. It was empty apart from the wheeled vehicles that had brought them all there, and now served as a testing ground for various new hacks. RADICAL played a small part here, with Evan demonstrating a weapon they had devised and used for the first time in their attack on Wallace’s stronghold. It had a technical name that Clair didn’t understand, but it was quickly dubbed a “glitch-gun” from its basic principles.

  Glitches were like errors in a data file, Evan said. Sometimes those errors linked places or people in ways they weren’t supposed to be, through things like rips. Sometimes a glitch could be just noise. Glitch-guns turned something with an internal structure, like a target or an enemy combatant, into the noisy kind of glitch. It was like blowing up a tiny bomb inside something, turning it to scattered atoms. The guns worked on anything, including flesh.

  As Clair watched, the Yetis on the development team spent half an hour turning chunks of wall into crackling gas, accompanied by a distinctive popping sound. Soon it looked like the chamber had been nibbled at by a giant earthworm. They stopped when the weapon indicated that it was running out of glitch.

  Here Clair seriously began to lose track of how it worked.

  “The Yard has rules,” said Evan. “Break one rule, and that can lead to another one breaking somewhere else, like a chain reaction. That’s where the idea of using the exit as a means of powering our original attack came from: any kind of glitch is a broken rule, so we can use its existence to make more glitches of our own. Of course, it’s possible to have too many glitches, such as when Clair One came too close to the exit. That’s like putting two rods of enriched uranium next to each other: you get too much power, impossible to control, and an atomic explosion.”

  Again, the mention of Clair One brought regret but no grief, even though it was tragic that they had gone in such different directions, each thinking the other one was in the wrong, when in fact both had been trying to do what was right. Clair remembered her feverish fantasies about Clair One being a traitor with embarrassment. Sure, she had been shot and in a confused state, mistaking the glitch of an old conversation with Wallace for a new memory from Clair One . . . but still: as Tash had said, if she couldn’t trust herself, who could she trust?

  She trusted that Evan understood what he was talking about.

  “The generators in our batteries work by taking a small glitch and creating more small ones from it. They’ll recharge automatically, given time, as long as you don’t run them completely dry.”

  Evan went back downstairs, leaving WHOLE to bounce possibilities back and forth. When he was gone, Dylan Linwood joined them, encouraged by a slowdown of hollowmen attacks to put his engineering skills to use. Jesse was with him. Soon they had taken one of the batteries apart and discovered that it worked by creating copies of small things—they looked like tiny crystals—that were similar enough to confuse the Yard into thinking they were in fact identical, causing a tiny glitch. That led to discussions about the possibility of using the guns as fabbers, allowing them to create rather than destroy. Such devices could also be used to build short-lived portals that might allow someone to rip from anywhere, not just through whatever door or window happened to be available. They could also be used to create invisibility cloaks . . . and here Clair’s understanding became foggy again.

  She bumped Jesse in the hope that he might explain, but he didn’t reply. He hadn’t replied to any of her messages, and she was beginning to take the hint. She used me, he had said. Obviously he needed space to process what her other self had done. She could only give it to him and hope that Clair One hadn’t done any permanent damage.

  As WHOLE knuck
led down to fab a prototype of a new kind of glitch-gun, Clair distracted herself from her worries by moving on to the third group, whose existence largely depended upon the other two.

  If WHOLE’s mission was to make the means of getting to the exit, and RADICAL’s was to make sure the exit would actually open for them, the third group took upon themselves the important task of getting revenge.

  It started with a meeting in the mess hall. Ronnie, Tash, and Zep were there, and all the Unimprovables, too. They sat on the floor in a circle around Libby, who was still dressed in the armor WHOLE had made for her, with her hair pulled back into a bun. Libby had taken the diamond studs from her ears and wiped off her makeup. She didn’t look fashionable or jazzy. She looked tired, and tired of being tired. And that, Clair knew, made her dangerous to cross.

  “Clair died trying to save us,” she said from her position in the center of the group. “That’s sweet, but it pisses me off, like we needed to be saved—like we couldn’t help ourselves, or at least help her help everyone else. She should have trusted us to have her back. We would have, if she’d only asked. But she didn’t, and look what happened.”

  Zep was nodding, his expression utterly miserable. Like the others, he was hanging on Libby’s every word.

  “From now on,” said Libby, “no one does anything alone. We’re going to work as a team. Clair was a fighter, so that’s what we’ll be too, together, in her name: Team Clair. Okay? Okay.”

  I’m still here, Clair wanted to say, but that wasn’t the point. That Libby’s Clair, Clair One, had died was critical to the spell Libby was casting. Everyone stared at her with their full attention, attention that Clair always felt she had had to fight for when she was trying to bring a group around. Libby made it look easy. People wanted to listen to her.

  Clair had always suspected it would be this way, and here was the proof: Libby was better at knowing what to say when the world’s eyes were on her. If their roles had been reversed, maybe the end of the world could have been avoided, and no Clairs or Libbys need have died.