Twinmaker t-1

by Sean Williams

  Clair stood over Zep and told herself to do as the woman said. Her legs felt as unreliable as saplings in a storm, though. She could feel the world turning, rotating, uncaring. Her hands were still numb from firing at Dylan Linwood. The numbness was spreading in a wave to encompass her entire body.

  Ray pushed past her, practically dragging Jesse to the lane. Two new people dressed in black came the other way, lifted Arabelle from her chair, and carried her after them.

  The spotlight clicked off, leaving Zep’s and Dylan Linwood’s bodies in darkness.

  As though the same switch were connected to a circuit in her head, Clair found herself moving, not consciously noting where or how, but moving all the same, tucking the pistol into her pocket and hurrying after the others. She didn’t want to be left behind.

  The vehicle she had glimpsed before was still in the lane, a narrow, segmented, many-wheeled contraption the sides of which were slippery with illusions. Clair might have walked right into it but for the door open on its side. The space within was matte black and crammed full of people. Ray grabbed her under one arm and shoved her to the front. There was a space next to a young brown-haired boy who looked barely ten. He stared at the blood on her with wide eyes.

  “Let’s go!” called Ray, slamming the door shut and falling into a space of his own.

  The vehicle shifted beneath her and whined quietly through the darkness. The patches winked out. The vehicle was a Faraday cage like the safe house, safe from everyone outside. A trap for everyone inside.

  “See any drones?” asked Ray, his voice carrying clearly over the electric engines.

  “Clear,” said a small, thin-faced woman driving at the front of the cabin. She was dressed in black like the rest of them, with a close-shaved scalp visible under a full-vision helmet. Clair’s lenses synced automatically to a feed from the driver’s point of view, the only feed available. The vehicle was moving smoothly through suburbs covered by the eye-in-the-sky drones, weaving and curling around trees, benches, and water features. Dark colors and shapes swept down its sides like an urban waterfall, decreasing the likelihood that anyone outside would notice its passing.

  “We’ll get away, don’t worry,” said the boy next to Clair. “The ATAC is camouflaged and the drones are dumb.”

  Through the numbness of her senses she heard attack and must have looked confused.

  “All-Terrain Active Camouflage vehicle,” he explained. Maybe he was talking out of nerves. He must have heard the gunshots. He could certainly see the blood. “Jesse’s dad designed it for us.”

  “And now you’ve killed him,” said Jesse to everyone in the vehicle, breaking the silence of his emotional shutdown. “Really killed him. What happened—he got away the first time? One attempt wasn’t enough, so you had to have another crack at it?”

  “He was firing at us,” said Ray. “Remember that?”

  “Did you see him with your own eyes? It was dark.”

  “He was the only one on the roof.”

  “Well, wouldn’t you fire at someone who tried to kill you?”

  Zep didn’t set any bombs, Clair wanted to say. Zep wasn’t part of this.

  Her throat was so raw and tight, she struggled to breathe, let alone talk.

  “We didn’t kill your father,” said Gemma to Jesse through teeth clenched against the pain. Her face was very pale, and with her good hand she pulled the silver cross from under her sweater and held it tightly. “It’s not what it looks like.”

  “I was right there,” Jesse said. “Both times! I know exactly what it looks like.”

  “But you’re still wrong.” Gemma leaned her head back against the ATAC’s interior bulkhead and closed her eyes. “He was a dupe.”

  “Never. He would never have sold you guys out.”

  “That’s not what I meant. Jesse, it wasn’t him. It was someone else inside his body. A duplicate. Dupe.”

  Jesse stared at her as though she had gone completely mad.

  Behind them, the safe house was a nest of converging peacekeepers. Someone had called in the gunshots. The bodies would soon be found.

  Distantly, dismally, Clair wondered who would tell Zep’s parents.

  And suddenly, all the emotions she had been keeping at bay came crashing in. Her parents had been attacked. She had been chased across the world. She had shot someone who might or might not have been Jesse’s dad. She was in the company of terrorists, and the only person she could rely on was a stranger whose name she didn’t even know.

  Zep was gone. Because of Improvement, because of Libby, and because he had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. With Clair.

  The kid left her alone as she wept.

  30

  THE ATAC SPED them through the night as though all the peacekeepers of Manteca were on their tail.

  Route 120 had a single lane remaining for wheeled transports, leading into areas that had once been entirely rectangular fields and farm lots but now contained little other than wild things, as far as Clair knew. She had stubbornly resisted all attempts by her parents to camp in order to get her closer to them.

  Everything she cared about was behind her, in the light.

  The boy next to her wasn’t talking anymore. No one was talking. It was as though Gemma’s impossible declaration had pushed them into a zone beyond words. It was too insane. Too far gone ever to come back to reality.

  With a sudden lurch the ATAC turned to the left onto a different road. The rough asphalt surface stabbed perfectly east, rising and falling with the contours of the land beneath.

  Clair dried her eyes with the backs of her hands and wiped her hair from her face. The kid was watching her. Zep’s blood had left a sticky red mark on his arm.

  “You’re Clair,” he said. “I’m Cashile.”

  Her voice was hoarse. “That’s . . . that’s an unusual name.”

  “It’s Zulu. My mom is from Africa.”

  That reminded Clair that she had been in Cape Town a couple of hours ago, just before “q” had told her not to use d-mat. She didn’t mention that, in case it made Cashile think she didn’t have a soul, that she was a zombie who only thought she was real. She didn’t think she could handle that accusation on top of everything else.

  “I’ve never seen you before,” he said, braving her silence. “You’re not one of us.”

  “I guess not.”

  “But you killed him.”

  “Who?”

  “The dupe.”

  There was that word again. It might have been short for duplicate, but it also meant someone who had been tricked or fooled.

  “You mean Dylan Linwood?”

  “You shouldn’t call him that. It wasn’t him anymore.”

  So the kid believed it, too. Maybe it was a form of mental self-defense, Clair thought. Jesse’s father wasn’t responsible for everything he’d done because it wasn’t him at all. Clair couldn’t blame them. If he was dead to them already, it would be much easier to live with his blood on their hands.

  Or her hands, as the case may be. Unconsciously, she put them under her thighs and pressed down on them with all her weight.

  She had shot Dylan Linwood because he had tried to shoot her. It was self-defense, not murder.

  Would she see it that way in Jesse’s shoes?

  “Our place in Escalon has lots of stuff,” the boy said, as though to cheer her up.

  “What kind of stuff?” she asked, trying to imagine what terrorists might hide in their secret caches.

  “Electrobikes, for one,” said Arabelle from behind her. “We’ll be riding the rest of the way.”

  “The rest of the way where? I thought we were stopping there?”

  It was Gemma’s turn to speak, slowly and painfully thanks to the gunshot wound in her shoulder. Ray had roughly dressed it during their flight from Manteca, but the bandage she pressed against the wound was already sodden with blood.

  “It’s too soon to stay still. We’ll talk later. The new plan is to s
plit up and regroup at the old Maury Rasmussen airfield. It’s not the closest, but it’s designated for hobbyists and won’t draw the kind of attention we’d get at Oakdale.”

  “What kind of hobbyists?” asked Clair, feeling the darkness thickening around her like tar.

  “People who fly aircraft. In this case, airships.”

  She didn’t know such things still existed. “Why an airship?”

  “Well, they’re more mobile than vehicles and safer than d-mat,” said Arabelle, “and they’re both highly visible and impossible to sneak up on. We’ll be safe there.”

  “If we get there,” said Gemma.

  “Hope for the best,” Arabelle said, “plan for the worst.”

  “Uh . . . I’ve never ridden an electrobike,” Clair admitted, unsure for the moment whether she would be going anywhere with anyone. All she wanted was answers, not de facto membership in their clique.

  Jesse broke his long silence to say, “Then I guess you have two choices: stay behind or learn.”

  Arabelle glanced at him. Her lips pursed.

  “We’re not leaving anyone behind,” she said. “Clair, you can ride pillion with Jesse.”

  Clair didn’t know what that meant, but she knew a reprimand when she heard it.

  Jesse looked down into his lap again and didn’t say anything.

  Escalon wasn’t quite a ghost town, but it showed few signs of life. Most of the buildings were abandoned, their windows broken and roofs slowly collapsing inward. Even at night everything looked desert brown. Clair watched the d-mat sign go by with longing. Who knew when everything would go back to normal and she could travel that way again, without fear of being tracked down and murdered?

  There would be no normal, she thought with a dull heart, without Zep, without Libby, without being able even to go home. . . .

  The cache was in a squarish Art Deco building that might once have been an old movie theater. The ATAC trundled between the theater and the church next door and swung around the back, where there was a large clear space overhung by shabby eucalyptus. The vehicle came to a halt with a barely perceptible jerk, and its motor’s steady hum ceased.

  “Okay, people.” Gemma hauled herself out of her seat, moving wearily, gingerly, protective of her injured shoulder. She was drenched in blood like Clair, but Gemma’s was all her own. The rear door unsealed with a squeak. Clair’s menus returned the moment the cage was broken. There was a patch from “q,” and she answered it by text only, hoping her mask was still in place.

  “You’re in Escalon, I see,” said “q.” “It’s lucky no one else can find you. You’re a wanted person now.”

  “Murder?” she sent back, misspelling the word twice before sending it.

  “Not yet. Get the pistol into a booth so I can dispose of it and no one will ever match it to the bullet that killed Dylan Linwood.”

  “Can’t get to a booth right now,” she said, still sick to her stomach at the thought of killing anyone, whether he was Dylan Linwood or not. “These guys are WHOLE, remember? It’s not really on their agenda.”

  “Understood. Are you friends with them now too?”

  Clair didn’t know how to answer that. The voice sounded more childlike than ever, convincing her that it really did belong to a kid somewhere. A kid who was for some reason obsessed with her and her friendships—but Clair could accept that for now, just so long as “q” continued to help her.

  Everyone piled out into the still, cold air. Clair scanned the urban nightscape around her, expecting gunshots at any moment but hearing nothing out of the ordinary. This was her chance to run, she thought. She could head for the scattered lights of Escalon, those faint glimmers of civilization, and leave the mad world of WHOLE behind her forever.

  The memory of Dylan Linwood’s body falling from the roof made her stay. She wasn’t part of civilization anymore, and until she understood why, she was stuck with Gemma and her disheveled band. It was either that or be pulled in by the PKs . . . or worse, she thought. How many other assassins were roaming the night, looking for her right now?

  They would be safe at the airship, she told herself. She had to believe that, or she might as well give up now.

  A stocky, silent woman with long black dreadlocks took Cashile to a small door at the back of the hall, and the rest followed. Although the walls looked on the verge of collapse, the lock on the door worked just fine. The hinges gleamed in the starlight.

  The old theater was a garage, a word Clair had never had cause to use before. Inside the main hall were a dozen sleek electrobikes not dissimilar to the one Dylan Linwood had driven to school that morning, except these were more solid and had larger, spokeless wheels. They resembled ink-stained quicksilver cheetahs, frozen in midstretch. Cashile climbed over them like a hyperactive cub.

  “Fully charged and ready to go,” he said with a grin.

  “We’ll leave one minute apart,” said Gemma, doing a credible impersonation of someone able to stand on her own.

  “I get my own bike, right?” broke in the kid.

  “But you still ride out with your mom. No radio contact unless it’s an emergency. They’ll be hunting us. You can count on that.”

  31

  THE FRONT DOORS opened, and the ATAC trundled inside, looking like a low-backed, eyeless lizard with eight lumpy wheels for legs. Its chameleon skin shifted and changed as it entered its new environment, taking on the appearance of straight lines and flat surfaces with remarkable effectiveness. When it stopped moving, it very nearly vanished.

  “Ammo over there,” said Ray, pointing Clair in the direction of a chest near the ATAC.

  Then he mounted his electrobike and throttled it into motion. Without a word, he steered it to the front doors and disappeared into the night. Motor noise rose and fell at his command, and then all was silent again.

  Clair opened the ammo chest and stared blankly at a sea of casings and magazines. How would she know what fit her empty pistol? Did she even want to reload it? Hadn’t enough people died that night?

  A strong tap on her shoulder alerted her to the presence of the dreadlocked woman at her side. Cashile’s mom wrote her name with a fingertip in the dust on the top of the chest: THEO. Theo held out her palm for the pistol. Clair gave it to her and watched as she expertly handled it. Sections opened, closed, came off, and went back on like some kind of magic show. Then Theo turned back to the chest. She produced a box of bullets and loaded the magazine. It held fourteen tapered copper-sided shells that seemed enormous to Clair’s eyes.

  Theo also filled a second magazine, which she handed over, along with another box of bullets and the gun itself. Clair juggled them all, wondering when she might possibly need so much firepower. Was this her life now?

  “Uh, thanks,” she said, feeling like a child.

  Theo just nodded.

  Clair carried her lethal armfuls to where Jesse was waiting next to one of the electrobikes with a bottle of water in each hand. Wordlessly, without meeting her eyes, he gave her one of the bottles. She put the ammo in her backpack and worked out on her own where to stow it in a baggage compartment. Clair put the loaded pistol back in her pocket, hoping against hope that she would never have to use it again. Part of her still resisted the idea that she was about to go riding anywhere.

  “Are you armed, Jesse?” asked Gemma.

  “No,” he said.

  “You should be.”

  “Dad didn’t hold with guns, so I won’t either.”

  “Maybe if he had, he’d still be with us.”

  Jesse glanced at Clair, and she could see naked confusion in his eyes. What was he telling himself had happened back at the safe house? That Clair had shot his father for breaking a lifetime of not using guns and shooting at her, or that she’d shot an impostor in his father’s body? Either possibility seemed ghastly and unlikely.

  She looked away. Half an inch lower, she wanted to say, and I’d be the one lying in a garden with my brains hanging out. But she couldn’t
even think that thought without grief hitting her full force again, blinding her to anything other than the single, terrible certainty of Zep’s death.

  The only person who could hold Jesse’s liquid stare was Arabelle. She was on the back of a bike, sitting sidesaddle, her useless legs hanging alarmingly close to the rear wheel. Both she and her driver, who had also been the driver of the ATAC, were wearing black helmets like Ray’s.

  “Godspeed, all of us,” Arabelle said, ending the conversation with gentle finality.

  She put her arms around her driver’s waist. Together, they followed Ray out of the theater and rode off into the night.

  Gemma gave Clair a helmet and brusquely explained how it worked. There was a microphone on the jaw guard and tinny speakers inside, both activated by clicking forward with her chin. Gemma tested one radio channel with her, then another with Jesse. Clair couldn’t hear the second conversation, but they seemed satisfied.

  “Need to ask you a question,” she bumped “q” while they were busy.

  “Of course, Clair. Ask away.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Why?”

  “Can’t keep calling you ‘q’ in my head.”

  “Why not? It works for me, Clair.”

  “Okay.” Clair was too tired for this coy evasiveness. Wannabe spy-kid or not, having a name other than Q wouldn’t change anything, she supposed, since it would almost certainly be false.

  “Gotta go.”

  Cashile and Theo were just heading off, riding two identical bikes. The kid looked even smaller than usual stretched out across the back of his. He waved at her as he disappeared through the doorway, and Clair waved back.

  Then it was just Jesse, Clair, and Gemma, and the clock slowly counting down the next minute.

  Gemma was looking pale, but if she considered herself well enough to drive, she was well enough to answer questions.

  “You said people affected by Improvement live just seven days,” Clair said. “How do you know?”

  “Because that’s the way it works,” Gemma said, fiddling with something on her electrobike. “We’ve seen it before.”