Twinmaker t-1

by Sean Williams

  Gemma came into the kitchen to wash her hands. Her curly hair was full of scraps of plaster and plants, like urban camouflage. Tiny drops of blood matted the front of her shirt.

  “Your boyfriend will be all right,” she said. “Just a scratch.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” said Clair emphatically. “Why are we here and not in a hospital?”

  “We’re avoiding the peacekeepers.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re nothing but glorified security guards in the service of the OneEarth government. And what does OneEarth rely on to keep the peace? D-mat. If you think they’ll have our best interests at heart, you’re living in a dream.”

  “You think VIA killed Jesse’s dad because he said bad things about d-mat?” Clair said. “That doesn’t make any sense. He was paranoid but he wasn’t dangerous.”

  “You’re not the only one who thinks we’re terrorists,” said Arabelle. “That gives the PKs carte blanche to do whatever they like to us.”

  Clair refused to let the matter go just because someone told her to.

  “So what happens now? Do you expect me and Zep to hide in here with you?”

  “It makes sense to sit tight until the cleanup’s over,” Gemma said in a businesslike fashion, as though people being blown up was all in a day’s work. “When we can, we’ll move out in ones and twos. Hopefully, there’ll be no reprisals.”

  Arabelle leaned forward and touched Clair lightly on the shoulder. “You go see to your friend. I need to talk with Gemma alone. Jesse, don’t worry. You’ll be looked after, I promise. We won’t abandon you.”

  He nodded and walked like a robot out of the kitchen. Clair hesitated, then followed. The way the two women from WHOLE were looking at her, it was clear they wanted her gone so she wouldn’t overhear. Zombie girl, she thought. They obviously weren’t telling her the entire truth, but that look was hard to contend with.

  21

  CLAIR AND JESSE walked back through the dining room, past the stairs and the old telephone, into the living room. Zep was sprawled uncomfortably on the couch with his legs stretched out before him. His right thigh was bandaged tightly. There was blood all over what remained of his pants. He was staring at the man with the big ears, who stood in a corner of the room, watching him back. There was no sign of the taller man. They both looked up as Jesse and Clair entered.

  “I was beginning to wonder if you were ever coming back,” Zep said. He looked wan and weak.

  “Whoever Gemma is, she says you’ll be okay,” said Clair, coming to sit at his side. Not my boyfriend. “How are you feeling?”

  “I’ll be a lot better when the painkillers kick in.” He sketched a rough smile. “Now I’m wishing Libby’s drugs hadn’t worn off so fast.”

  Clair didn’t laugh. Neither did Jesse. He collapsed into a chair and retreated into himself, as though he hoped everything would disappear if he ignored it hard enough.

  Clair turned to the man with the big ears. Her hands were shaking again, and her mouth was desperately dry.

  “I could really use a drink,” she said. “We all could. Is that possible?”

  “Sure,” Big-Ears said, but not before glancing up the hallway to the front of the house. Clair knew then that his tall companion was watching the front door. Was he a sentry or a jailer?

  Big-Ears headed into the back of the house. His feet beat a tattoo down the stairs to the lower floor.

  “Have you tried your lenses?” Zep whispered when they were alone. “Mine are dead, and every time I access the Air, I get an error message.”

  Clair discovered that she had the same problem. Every field of view was clear of patches, even from the creepy “q.” She’d lost access to her family and friends, her blogs and grabs, her media and shows, her wardrobe and meals. Every pattern she had ever saved was cut off from her. Her whole life. God, her books! Her Tilly Kozlova recordings! She had never once been deliberately disconnected from them.

  Jesse spoke from deep in his funk. “The house is a big Faraday shield.”

  “Which means what?” Zep prompted.

  “Nothing electromagnetic can get in or out. No one can spy on what goes on in here. I think we’re in some kind of safe house.”

  “Safe from who?” asked Clair. “Have these guys done something we should be concerned about?”

  “If you’re in WHOLE, you’re automatically on the PKs’ watch list,” said Jesse.

  “Yes, but we’re not in WHOLE. Why are we hiding?”

  “They’re WHOLE?” Zep asked, eyes wide.

  Big-Ears came back with bottles of water for the four of them, and a fifth for Ray, who appeared from the front of the house to give a status report.

  “Drones still flying,” Ray said. “The fire’s out, though. So that’s something.”

  “My father is dead,” said Jesse. “That’s something.”

  There was a moment’s awkward silence.

  An image struck Clair out of nowhere, perhaps inspired by Arabelle’s crippled feet. It was from a cheap-scare story Clair had been told when she was younger, about a girl who’d gone into a booth but not arrived at her destination. Her pattern had gotten hung up in the back end of a file system and wasn’t discovered until someone stumbled across it during a routine cleanup twenty-five years later. VIA brought her back perfectly well and whole, but by then her parents had died and all her friends had young families of their own. The girl found herself in an entirely new world, cut off from her life like a time traveler. So the story went.

  Clair was beginning to feel that way. This shadow world of broken families, sabotage, and conspiracy wasn’t the world she wanted to live in. It wasn’t even supposed to exist. The world she knew had regulations and AIs to make sure of that. Billions of people traveled by d-mat every day without evidence of harm. Arabelle’s feet were horrible to look at, and it made Clair shudder now to think of them, but they weren’t evidence of anything, really. Maybe she had been conceived near one of the old radioactive waste dumps before they were cleaned out. Maybe the feet were fakes.

  WHOLE was the one with the track record of social disruption and violence, not VIA. And now we’ve seen their faces, added the part of Clair that enjoyed too many bad horror movies.

  But it didn’t make sense. Why would WHOLE blow up Dylan Linwood when he had gone to such efforts to expose Improvement? If anything he had said was true, it actually made more sense, crazy though it seemed, that VIA might have been behind his death.

  Clair wasn’t willing to go that far. She had enough to trouble her as it was. If improvement was hurting people, and someone was trying to cover it up . . . and if Dylan had been targeted by this someone because of his stunt . . . why hadn’t Clair been too?

  The question rocked her. Dylan Linwood might have masterminded the stunt in the principal’s office, but she had been part of it as well. She had been asking questions. Was there a bomb waiting at her house too?

  Not since childhood had she felt such an intense yearning to see her parents. It was like an adrenaline hit times ten.

  She drank heavily from the bottle and swished the water around her mouth to get rid of the taste of vomit and ash. Ray resumed his watch at the front door. No one seemed in a hurry to go anywhere, except Clair.

  She wanted to find out more about Improvement, but that wasn’t worth anyone else getting killed or hurt. Looking after herself and Zep had to be her first priority now. She would decide what happened to them, not Gemma and Arabelle.

  “How are you feeling, Zep?” she asked. “Up for a walk?”

  “I can’t feel my leg at all now, so I guess that’s a yes.”

  “Good.” She stood up and held out her hand.

  “About time,” he said.

  22

  “YOU’RE LEAVING?” ASKED Jesse, blinking at her in surprise.

  “Come if you want to,” said Zep. “But we’re not sticking around any longer. You’re not going to stop us, are you?”

  Big-Ears looked u
p at Zep, who was easily a foot taller and wider than him.

  “Uh . . . wait.”

  Clair and Zep were already on their way to the front door, where Ray barred their way with his arms outspread.

  “Come on,” said Zep. “You’re not doing your reputation any favors.”

  “We are the good guys. You don’t want to meet the bad guys.”

  From behind them, deeper in the house, came a shrill, electric tone. Ray turned to stare up the hallway, eyebrows bunching in puzzlement.

  “It’s too early,” he said.

  Clair understood. That sound came from a telephone. The antique landline she had seen earlier was probably the only way to get signals in and out of the Faraday shield.

  But that wasn’t her concern. While Ray was distracted, she ducked under his arm and lunged for the door. It opened smoothly.

  “Hey—”

  Zep pushed him to one side and followed Clair out into the light. The smoke-dimmed sun was bright. Daylight hues stirred in her lenses: greens, blues, and whites. Patches winked and flashed as she reconnected to the Air. Out of the Faraday cage, into the fire.

  “Which way?” asked Zep.

  “We came from the left,” she said, leading him up the path and onto the street. Ray didn’t follow, and neither did Gemma and Big-Ears, who had joined him. Jesse craned past all of them, curious or concerned enough to come see what was going on.

  “You’re making a mistake,” Gemma called.

  “I really don’t think so,” Clair said.

  Gemma stayed just inside the door, where the sun barely touched her, and where, presumably, there was no possibility of a drone seeing her. There was a pistol in her hand, held close to her chest. It wasn’t pointed at Clair, but there was no mistaking its meaning.

  It’s just a bluff, Clair told herself, even as she wondered why Gemma needed to bluff. What did it matter to WHOLE if she and Zep left right then?

  “Let’s split up,” said Zep. “I’ll go that way.”

  “Clair!”

  She hesitated. That was Jesse’s voice.

  “The phone call was for you!” he shouted.

  “So take a message!”

  Zep was already limping away from her, raising his middle finger to Gemma as he went.

  Gemma raised the gun. She didn’t fire, but now Jesse had seen it. He stared at the gun in shock and horror, which reassured Clair that Gemma had to be bluffing. The gun was out of character, or at least something Jesse had never seen before.

  “Go after them,” said Gemma to Ray and Big-Ears. “Don’t let them do something stupid.”

  Clair ran. Away from WHOLE and away from Zep.

  The nearest corner was three houses away. She reached it in seconds and turned hard, skidding on the ash-slippery pavement.

  Something whined in the sky far above. Clair glanced up and saw an eye-in-the-sky drone hanging in the air above her. Drones ran on crowd sourcing, directed from place to place by community service volunteers who tapped into EITS feeds as the whim took them. Events of interest, criminal or not, drew in watchers until a threshold was reached and peacekeepers were summoned.

  Clair waved her hands above her head to attract the attention of the drone. It noticed her but didn’t raise any audible alarms. Someone running along a straight road was much less interesting than the fire burning a couple of blocks over. Lots of people waved at drones.

  Clair turned right instead of left on Jesse’s street and ran away from the smoldering wreckage as quickly as she could. Her second sprint for the day was taking its toll, thanks in part to all the soot in her lungs. She threw a quick glance over her shoulder to check if anyone was following her and saw Big-Ears take the corner behind her, head down, eyes glaring under furious brows at her.

  Why? she asked herself, even as she somehow found the energy for a new burst of speed.

  There was a peacekeeper patch in her infield. Her parents had insisted she install it, but she had never had to use it before. She winked on it now and was put straight through to an operator.

  “Hello, Clair,” said a broad-faced woman with short blond hair, identified as PK Anastas. “How can I assist you?”

  “I’m being chased,” she said.

  “Have you been physically threatened? I can send a Rapid Response team if you feel you are in immediate danger.”

  “Just tell me how to get away from him.”

  “May I access your location?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  The woman examined the information scrolling down her lenses.

  “You are approaching a d-mat station, Clair. Any destination you choose will be untraceable.”

  Clair knew that. She also knew that Big-Ears wouldn’t follow even if he did know where she was going, since using d-mat wasn’t an option for him or any Abstainer.

  She pushed people out of her way and threw herself bodily into the first open booth. There she turned, put her back against the mirrored wall, and saw Big-Ears just four yards behind her. He was shouting something—a warning, perhaps—but she couldn’t tell if it was intended for her or the crowd of people milling in his way.

  “Home!” she ordered the booth.

  The door hissed shut on Big-Ears’ scarlet face.

  Clair slumped forward against the mirrored surface, forehead-to-forehead with her own reflection. She looked awful, a mad thing running wild in the ordinary world. She barely recognized herself.

  The sound of her breathing was loud in the booth. Big-Ears couldn’t follow her now. The only way he could get to her was by physically crossing the continent from California to Maine, and without d-mat, that could take days.

  sssssss—

  Her lenses lit up with another emergency flash, exactly the same as the one her mysterious caller had sent her at school.

  —pop.

  The flash was still there when she arrived, and so was the window to PK Anastas, which she closed now that she was safe in the gloom of her Maine apartment block. Cool East Coast air was a blessing against her overheated skin. She was almost home.

  Clair walked up the familiar corridor, with its wood-paneled walls and hideous green carpet, finally able to bump Zep as she went. Hopefully he had made it to a booth as well.

  A second emergency flash joined the first, then another, and another, until her entire vision was strobing so violently, she could barely see.

  She stopped and put her hand against the nearest wall to steady herself.

  From somewhere nearby came the sound of raised voices.

  More flashes. She clicked on the qqqqq link accompanying them. It was either that or stand where she was, blind, until they went away.

  “Leave me alone,” she said, “or I’m calling the peacekeepers again.”

  “That is an excellent idea,” said the young-sounding voice. “There is a man in your apartment holding your parents hostage. I believe he intends to do them harm.”

  “What?”

  “I said, there is a man in your apartment holding—”

  “I heard you the first time. Are you serious?”

  “I would not lie about such a thing, Clair. I want you to trust me. I am providing you with a reason to trust me.”

  A cold feeling swept through her. What new trick was this? “You leave my family alone, whoever you are.”

  “It is not I who threaten them. That responsibility falls on the man WHOLE is trying to kill. I believe it is his intention to harm you in turn.”

  “Okay, I’m calling the peacekeepers.”

  “Please do. And do not enter your home until they arrive. It is far too dangerous.”

  Clair’s lenses cleared. She hit the peacekeeper patch again, even as she approached the door to her apartment. The sound of raised voices was getting louder. Someone was shouting over a babble of protest.

  “Hello, Clair,” said another peacekeeper, a man. “How can we assist you this time?”

  “Hang on,” she said.

  She was close enough t
o the door to her apartment to hear what the voices inside were saying. The Thanksgiving wreath she had made in junior school was still hanging under the peephole, looking dustier than ever.

  “I said call her. Tell her to come home now and make her listen to you. If she doesn’t, there will be consequences.”

  “Don’t hurt her . . . please don’t hurt her.”

  Clair stiffened at the sound of her mother’s voice. Her heart swelled up inside her, threatening to burst inside her chest like the bomb that had killed Dylan Linwood.

  “We’ve been nagging her all day.” That was Oz, her stepfather. “What makes you think she’ll answer us now?”

  There was the sound of flesh hitting flesh.

  “You figure it out.”

  Clair’s fingernails dug into her palms as she fought a powerful urge to burst in and hurl herself at the man in her apartment, armed with nothing but teeth and nails. The voice behind the emergency patch was right. That would be the action of someone with a death wish.

  She backed up a step, feeling shaky in the knees, and spoke silently to the peacekeeper.

  “I need a . . .” What had PK Anastas called it? “. . . a Rapid Response team at my home in Maine. Quickly!”

  “What is the situation, Clair?”

  “My parents are in trouble. They’re being threatened. Send someone, now!”

  “All right, Clair,” said the peacekeeper. “We’ll have a team there shortly. Keep this window open and don’t go anywhere.”

  Behind her, the door to the d-mat booth slid shut.

  A new bump flashed in her lenses: it was a nag from her stepfather, flagged as urgent.

  Clair highlighted the bump and without reading it sent him a quick message.

  “Stall. Help’s coming.”

  “!!” he shot back immediately. “Stay away! Not safe!”

  The apartment went quiet. Even her mother was silent. Clair held her breath, wondering what had changed.

  When the voice of the man in the apartment came again, she was struck by a feeling of impossible recognition. She couldn’t know who he was. No one in her world was capable of something like this.