Hollowgirl

by Sean Williams

  “We’re still six hours away,” said Clair Three. On a map the airship was passing a place called Zhigalovo. She had shown them the tools they had recovered from the muster and Evan had walked them through what they might need to do in the case a manual hack was required. Clair Three had taken notes and talked very little. She didn’t answer when Libby asked how things were on the outside for her personally. Damaged, Clair thought.

  “You’re sure you’ll be able to make the channel work when you’re at the exit?” she asked Evan from her hospital bed.

  “Yes. I’m positive. Once Wallace is out of the picture, we’ll have full access to its parameters and the time we need to gain full control.”

  “What about the hostages?” Tash asked. Her mother was among those taken into custody. Roberta Sixsmith had run from Ray right into the arms of the hollowmen.

  “They’re protected by what’s left of the law,” Kari said. “Kingdon won’t kill them ahead of the scheduled execution.”

  “What if she changes her mind?”

  Kari didn’t back down. “There’s nothing we can do about that.”

  “Moving along,” said Dylan Linwood. “Jesse?”

  Nothing happened for a moment. Jesse was staring at his father with a look that might have been mistaken for anger . . . but Clair knew that was too mild a word. “Hatred” would have been closer. His jaw was locked like stone. He looked as though he didn’t dare open his mouth for fear of what might come out of it.

  “Moving . . . along?” he ground out. “I remember everything you said in Wallace’s station. And now you’re willing to let Mom go?”

  Clair had to think hard to remember. Dylan had been brought out of the Yard in an attempt to weaken Jesse’s loyalty to Clair. They had had a short conversation, but it had revealed that Clair’s mother had been offered to Dylan as a bribe long ago in an attempt to turn him against his friends in WHOLE. For a moment, it had seemed as though he had entertained doubts about the hard-nosed beliefs that had led to him turning down the offer, but there was no evidence of that uncertainty anymore.

  “I told you, Jesse,” he said. “This isn’t a good time to talk about that.”

  “Will there ever be a right time?”

  “No,” Dylan suddenly shouted, “because she’s dead! She died fourteen years ago and that apparition parading before you is a lie. A vicious, cruel lie, and the sooner you accept that the better!”

  Father and son glared at each other for a long second, then turned away. Their unwilling audience shuffled, uneasy witnesses to a family crisis they wanted no part of.

  Clair broke her silence and bumped Jesse quickly.

  “Ignore him,” she said. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. We’re going to save your mom, both of us, and if he won’t accept her that’s his loss.”

  Jesse’s face hardened. He didn’t reply, which made her wish she had said nothing at all. But she couldn’t have said nothing, could she? Whatever was going on between them, it would’ve been inhuman to stay silent.

  Wiping his eyes, he returned to the briefing.

  “The glitch-mobile is ready,” he told the crowd. “As for . . . as for the rest, we ended up deciding that there would be too many gadgets for people to juggle, particularly when things get crazy, so we took it one step further.”

  Clair had seen some of this already, but she was eager to focus on something positive. It was impressive, achieved mostly through sheer perseverance and willingness to take terrible risks. She had felt several aftershocks reverberating through the stone walls from the testing ground, and she knew that at least two people had been killed.

  Ray stepped forward. He was dressed in a green-and-gray suit that covered him from the soles of his feet to the top of his head. There was a face mask that was currently pulled up to expose his face. The suit incorporated a thick, rectangular pack that bulged from his shoulders to his waist. The sleeve of his left arm hung empty from the elbow down.

  “The pack contains the generator,” said Jesse, voice level now he was talking about something technical. “It’s bulky, I know, but it’s the best we could come up with on short notice. The battery takes five minutes to recharge. A full charge gives you a number of options. The glitch-suit can interface with your lenses, allowing you to do stuff like this. . . .”

  There was a small ripple in the reality of the Yard. Ray was suddenly holding a pistol, identical to those RADICAL had used in the exit chamber. He raised it, sighted along the barrel at a human-shaped target on the far side of the room, and fired.

  Pop. The target’s shoulder vanished in a cloud of swirling smoke, turned instantly to random noise.

  The pistol dropped to the ground, and another one appeared in its place. This time when Ray fired, the target’s midsection exploded with a piercing crack, blown apart from the inside.

  “Glitch-gun mark two,” explained Jesse. “As many as you need. The suits are basically walking fabbers, able to re-create anything in their memory.”

  Ray dropped the second gun to the ground and a third instantly appeared in his hand. He dropped that one and made a fourth.

  “But here’s the thing,” Jesse went on. “Why have a gun at all? The Yard doesn’t care. It’s more for our sake, because that’s what we’re used to. And what we’re used to could put us at a disadvantage. Guns get dropped or taken away. They can even be used against us. So . . .”

  Ray dropped the fourth gun to the floor with the others, raised his empty hand, and pointed at another target, which exploded as though by magic, prompting a surprised reaction from the crowd.

  “The trigger can be anything you like,” said Jesse. “A word, an image. When you’re interfaced with the suit, it’ll do whatever you want, whenever you ask it to. It’ll also keep you in touch with anyone inside any other suit, instantaneously, without using the Air. All the suits are entangled via their generators, so you can rip from position to position without having to look at maps or ask for directions. Be careful of draining the batteries, though. Each time you use the suit, you use up some of your reserve, and some of the suit’s functions are quite a drain. Remember those camouflage transforms I was talking about?”

  Ray pulled down his face mask. The moment the suit was sealed it turned sky blue.

  “Next,” said Jesse.

  The suit turned red, black, gray, then vanished entirely.

  “Next,” said Jesse again.

  Ray moved. Clair could see the faint outline of the suit rippling across the stone wall behind him if she concentrated really hard. He reappeared five paces to his right.

  “Ray’s draining his suit pretty fast right now,” said Jesse, “but there’s still a lot he can do.”

  Ray ripped from one side of the room to the other and back again. He jumped into the air—and stayed there, hanging motionless above the ground for a second before dropping back down.

  “That one takes a lot of charge,” said Jesse. “This one’s even better.”

  Ray held up the empty sleeve of his ruined arm. Reality twitched, and suddenly his missing hand and forearm were back. He bent it at the elbow and flexed his new fingers, turning his wrist to show the front and back.

  “That’ll last as long as Ray’s wearing the suit,” said Jesse. “All we needed was a pattern for the replacement, which we took from a scan of his right arm. The idea is for everyone to be scanned before getting into their glitch-suit. That way, if you’re injured the suits will repair you on the run. Maybe even stop you from dying, although we haven’t tested that, obviously.”

  The reaction from the people watching was one of shock and awe, feelings Clair echoed in the hospital.

  “You’ve done it,” said Libby in amazement. “You’ve made Improvement real.”

  “No, no,” said Jesse, looking alarmed. “This isn’t cosmetic, and it’s not permanent. That’s not what we were aiming for at all.”

  “But you could do it. In theory.”

  “I wouldn’t. . . .” He t
urned away from her. “Anyway, we should have the suits ready within the hour. It’ll take longer than that to scan everyone into them, so we should get moving.”

  Clair hadn’t really been listening to their argument. She didn’t care about what the suits shouldn’t do. She was thinking about what they could do, for her.

  “I want one,” Clair said over the prison network.

  “That’s not possible,” said Jesse, looking up at the ceiling as though she was floating there, invisible. His voice was brusque. “It won’t work for you. Your injuries are too complicated, and we don’t have a scan of you before you were injured. I’m sorry, Clair, but that’s the way it is.”

  Frustration boiled inside her. She had done everything Kari had told her to do. She had stayed still. She had tried to heal. But she knew she wasn’t ready, not without one of those suits. She couldn’t even get out of bed without help. “All I need to be able to do is walk—”

  “There will be fighting, Clair,” said Dylan Linwood. “Walking won’t be enough.”

  “So I’ll rip everywhere. The suit can do that for me.”

  “Yes, but what about hand-to-hand combat, if it comes to that?” said Arabelle. “There’s no shame in staying behind. No one will think less of you.”

  I’m not you, Clair almost said, but she caught herself in time.

  “What if we had a scan of Clair before she was injured?” Kari asked.

  “You’re thinking about Clair Three?” Jesse asked. “It’d take us years to get the data through the channel.”

  “But if we had one?”

  Jesse glanced at Dylan, almost daring him to agree.

  “Yes, if we had such a scan we could repair Clair using a glitch-suit. As we don’t, however, I suggest we move on. Everyone intending to take part, form a line over here and we’ll commence scanning. . . .”

  Jesse nodded, looking satisfied. Father and son agreed. They had won.

  Libby bumped Clair a quick “I’m really sorry” as she and the Unimprovables took their positions. There was a hollow thud-thud in Clair’s ears that made it hard for her to follow what was going on. She stared into her lenses without really seeing. They were leaving her behind.

  “Welcome to the club,” Clair Three bumped her from outside. “All we can do is watch.”

  That didn’t help either. She couldn’t get the look on Jesse’s face out of her mind. Like he was glad she wasn’t going. She felt as though he was punishing her for something she hadn’t even done.

  Clair clicked out of the prison network.

  “Q? Is there anything you can do?”

  No reply, though she hadn’t really expected any. Q thought they were breaking too many rules as it was. But that was her last hope, and it was dashed along with the others.

  She buried her face in her hands.

  [47]

  * * *

  IT WASN’T JUST about revenge, she told herself, although that was definitely part of it. She wanted to see Wallace and Kingdon fall. She wanted to see their faces when they realized that all their power-mad schemes had come to nothing. Following the action through her lenses wouldn’t be enough. She wanted to smell Wallace’s failure.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t trust the others either. She knew they were committed. In very real terms, her being there might not make much difference. The plan would succeed thanks to the combined effort of WHOLE, RADICAL, and everyone else, or the plan wouldn’t succeed at all, and there was very little she could do to change it either way.

  And therein lay the problem. The plan could yet fail. She didn’t want to sit in bed and wait for the hollowmen to come.

  But what could she do? Everyone had made up their minds, and for once they disagreed with her. She couldn’t very well argue that they were all wrong. . . .

  No, she thought, but she could go down to the staging area and see them off, to let them know she wasn’t sulking like a child.

  Grinding her teeth, she sat up and swung her legs off the bed. That much she could do now without too much effort.

  Jamila spotted her right away and came over to give her a hand.

  “Do you need the bathroom?”

  “No. I’m going for a walk. I must have real clothes here somewhere. . . .” Clair was in a standard hospital gown, open down the back. She wasn’t leaving the room again in that.

  Jamila found a set of loose-fitting scrubs and helped her into them. Clair’s every movement was stiff and painful. The time it took her to dress convinced her that everyone was right on that front. If she couldn’t even get out of bed without help, what hope did she have of surviving a single second against the hollowmen?

  “Thanks,” she said, tugging on her beanie. “I’ll be okay from here.”

  Jamila was reluctant, but Clair insisted. Standing was easier than bending and flexing, and Jamila had the other patients to think of. Clair would make her way painfully but steadily by leaning one hand against the wall and taking great care not to trip.

  For the first time, she walked out of the hospital on her own steam and entered the hallway, watched by Jamila, who still looked uncertain. It came as no surprise to see the giant peacekeeper turn into the corridor ahead and come striding resolutely toward her. She was dressed in one of the green glitch-suits with only her face visible. It was set like stone.

  Clair straightened as best she could and squared her shoulders.

  “I know, I know—”

  “No, you don’t,” Kari said. “You’re coming with me.”

  She took Clair’s elbow in a powerful grip, but instead of turning her around and marching her back to bed, Kari helped her up the corridor in the direction she had been heading.

  “Where—?”

  “Shhh. Through here.”

  Wherever they were going, it wasn’t to the staging area. They passed a row of open offices, then stopped at one that seemed no different from any other.

  Except Billie was in there. She wasn’t dressed in green, but there was an empty suit draped over a chair next to her.

  “This is where the other Clair met that bitch Mallory,” Billie said, waving them inside. “No one can see us here.”

  Clair stepped inside and looked around. There was nothing in the room but them and the suit.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Do you really want to come with us?” asked Kari, stepping in behind her.

  “Yes, of course,” she said.

  “Then let’s get this thing on you.” Kari picked up the glitch-suit and held it in front of her. “Time’s ticking.”

  The short walk had left Clair exhausted. She blanched at the thought of getting undressed and then dressed again.

  “What’s the point of pretending?”

  “Don’t worry,” said Billie. “It’s going to be okay. Think of us as your fairy godmothers, without the frocks.”

  Trying not to get her hopes up too high, certain they would be dashed, Clair began to undress while Kari explained.

  “Remember when I asked about the pattern? They told me that if I could find one, the suit would make you as good as new.”

  “Yes, but the channel outside—”

  “I wasn’t talking about Clair Three. There’s a pattern right here in the Yard, taken within the last two days. All we had to do was get it. And that’s where my criminal girlfriend came into the picture.”

  Billie grinned. “It was supposed to be a secret, but I should’ve known better. There are no secrets when you date a peeker.”

  “The only problem would have been if the hollowmen had trashed the surgery. That’s why I didn’t mention it before. Luckily they left the surgery alone when they found it empty. . . .”

  “And the rest was easy. All I had to do was transfer the data.” Billie’s expression sobered. “Usually a complicated sculpting takes days. If a client is in a serious hurry, though, like Clair was—the other Clair—there are certain deep-tissue fixes that can be applied using a private network. Illegal, of course.”
r />   “Very illegal,” Kari clarified. “I’ve been turning a blind eye for years.”

  “Only because I used my powers for good. You know, complete makeovers to help people hide from violent exes . . . that kind of thing. Anyway, I have a booth in my surgery that I use in those cases. It takes scans of the body, everything except the brain. The other Clair went through it.”

  Clair paused with one foot in the air, half out of her pants and half in. Now she understood.

  “The suit can use her pattern on me?”

  “Yes. We’ve loaded it already. All we have to do is get you zipped up tight.”

  Clair bent her head down and resumed undressing, ignoring the stiffness and twinges. They would soon be gone, if Kari and Billie were right.

  Thank you, Clair One, Clair thought, with real gratitude. She had died finding the location of the exit, and now she was helping bring Clair back to full health, for at least as long as she wore the suit. She didn’t for a second question whether Clair One would want this to happen. Clair would want it in her shoes.

  The suit was heavier than expected, and tight, too. Her still-healing chest and shoulder protested against being confined. She forced herself to resist the impulse to hyperventilate, telling herself that it wouldn’t be for long.

  As the hood went over her head, and then the face mask, she closed her eyes. Her lenses automatically found the interface. Through it she could see the office around her, and Billie and Kari watching her expectantly. A display in the upper right corner of her lenses showed how much glitch was in her battery.

  “Are you ready?” Kari asked her.

  “Yes. How—?”

  Reality twisted. The suit’s charge dropped by 75 percent. Clair’s entire body kicked as though a bolt of electricity had shot through her, and her heart skipped a beat. She cried out behind the face mask. It sounded like someone else.

  “Are you all right in there?” asked Billie, pulling up the mask to look at her.