Twinmaker t-1

by Sean Williams

  “But how do you know Libby’s definitely affected? She’s been under stress, using drugs—”

  “You know that’s not what this is. You saw the files I gave Dylan in the video feed. Libby’s brain has been damaged, altered, changed. Call it what you want, that’s what it boils down to. That’s what Improvement has done to her. She’s not herself. Not anymore.”

  Zep had used exactly that phrase. Not herself.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “She’ll commit suicide within a week. It’s inevitable.”

  “Libby isn’t going to kill herself. I won’t let her.”

  “How are you going to stop it?”

  “If Improvement has changed her, I’ll find a way to change her back.”

  “How?”

  “There must be a way.”

  “There doesn’t have to be anything.” Gemma shook her head firmly. “Better get used to the idea. The Libby you know is gone forever. “

  “How can you say something like that?”

  “Because this is what Improvement does. That’s what d-mat does. It reaches into you and guts you and you don’t even notice until it’s too late. Don’t you think that makes a difference? Don’t you think it adds up eventually?”

  Gemma was still bent over the bike, not looking at either Clair or Jesse, keeping her face carefully averted from them. Something splashed onto the smooth skin of the bike, and Clair was shocked to realize that it was a tear. Gemma was crying. She didn’t blink or gulp or even seem to notice it herself, but Jesse was staring at her with his water bottle raised halfway to his mouth.

  “Improvement killed my child,” Gemma said in a hoarse whisper. “Don’t you think I know what I’m talking about?”

  Clair’s mind flew back to the first questions she had asked the Air about Improvement, and her shock redoubled. “You wrote that! I found your message, but it had been defaced. All the details were gone—”

  “Erased, just like they tried to erase what happened to him. What happened to Sam, my beautiful Sameer. But they can’t erase me. Not if I don’t use d-mat. Not if I stay one step ahead of them.”

  Gemma stood up and faced them. The tears trickled down her face into the grim lines around her mouth and dripped from her chin onto her chest.

  Clair wanted to ask where she had found the files on the dead girls, but Jesse spoke before she could.

  “How can dad have been a dupe? He never went through d-mat, not even once. There’s no way anyone could have changed his pattern because it never existed.”

  Gemma flexed her injured shoulder, raising it like a defense against them.

  “Time is up,” she said. “On your bikes, boys and girls.”

  “Answer my question,” Jesse said.

  “Later, I promise. It won’t help you now.”

  “But I want to know.”

  “I know you do. When we’re with Turner, I’ll tell you.”

  He looked startled. “Turner Goldsmith? We’re meeting Turner Goldmsith?”

  “Who’s that?” Clair asked.

  “Not now,” Gemma insisted. “Get to the airship and then you’ll learn everything we know.”

  Jesse let himself be shooed back toward the bike, and Clair followed, wondering what she’d just missed. There was so much disturbing new information in her head, she couldn’t begin to parse it all. Jesse somehow fitted his hair into the helmet and climbed on first, steadying the frame with both legs as Clair clambered awkwardly aboard behind him. The pillion seat was broader than it looked, but it molded comfortably to her thighs. The suspension hummed and settled.

  Jesse took his feet off the ground. The bike somehow balanced itself and turned at his command. Clair swayed and put her hands awkwardly on his waist, nervous of falling off the seat. She leaned backward as they juddered down a step or two to street level. The night was just as still as it had been before. The same lonely lights shone a block or two away. The same light wind blew. She felt removed from it inside the padded cocoon of the helmet.

  Then, without warning, the bike surged beneath her. She flung herself forward, wrapped her arms around Jesse’s middle, and held on for dear life.

  32

  THE ACCELERATION WAS incredible, like being on a roller coaster but without the restraints. One hapless wobble, she feared, and they would go skidding and tumbling across the rough road surface—a road surface that was moving under her with terrifying speed. She closed her eyes as tightly as she could, feeling hollow inside, as though she had left half her critical organs behind.

  “Lean into the corner, will you?” came Jesse’s voice through her helmet.

  She didn’t know what that meant, so the shift in momentum caught her off-balance. She stiffened, felt the bike sway alarmingly. Somehow things steadied. They accelerated again, even harder than before. She moaned in fear, hoping that if she stayed still, Jesse would never know how afraid she was.

  “Clair, you’re hurting me.”

  She drew in a sobbing breath and forced herself to ease off a little. At least they were moving in a straight line now.

  She jutted out her jaw. Found something hard that gave way with a click.

  “Don’t you think we’re going fast enough?” she said.

  “What? I haven’t even opened her up all the way.”

  The bike throbbed and accelerated again until the air whipped and batted at her like a physical thing. Clair pressed herself as close to Jesse as she could. The bike moved with the irregularities of the road beneath its wheels, suspension smoothing out the worst of it. They might have been skimming over waves on Sacramento Bay, sitting at the nose of a motorboat. That was something she’d done once with some friends in high school. The memory calmed her somewhat, although she hadn’t enjoyed it very much at the time. It had taken them far too long to get anywhere, putting everyone in a bad mood.

  She opened her eyes and found that they had left Escalon far behind. The bike and its two passengers were rushing past empty scrubland, low and flat, dotted with trees and bushes. A map of the area revealed that they were back on Route 120, cutting west across the county for a place named Adela, right on the edge of Oakdale. The distance to their rendezvous at the Maury Rasmussen airfield was around fifty-five miles.

  Clair could have been there in an instant by d-mat, but this felt much faster.

  “Is it safe to talk over these things?” she asked.

  “Of course. The range is barely a yard or two on this channel.”

  “Why are you heading for Oakdale? That’s not the most direct route.”

  “Gemma said to split up, so that’s what we’re doing.”

  “Which way are the others going?”

  He didn’t answer. All she needed was some reassurance, but he wasn’t providing it.

  “Listen,” she said, “I want you to know that I’m not happy about being here either.”

  “That doesn’t make me feel any better about it.”

  “So what are you going to do? Ditch me here and ride off on your own?”

  “I could,” he said. “It’s not too late. I could leave you and the others behind. It’s not like I owe any of you anything. Sure, they used to babysit me, but they blew up my home, they kept me prisoner, they . . . you . . .”

  Killed my father, he didn’t say. Clair could hear the words straining over the airwaves like a wire on the verge of snapping. Why wasn’t he running from all of them, as she had considered in Escalon?

  She shifted awkwardly on the pillion, deciding that it was probably better if they didn’t talk unless they had to. Her fingers were freezing in the frigid night air. He wasn’t slowing down any, and she took that as a sign she wasn’t about to be dumped. She curled her hands into fists and kept her arms tight around him. His shoulders were bony. She ached for Zep’s muscular solidity, made a deliberate effort to think of something else.

  Jesse turned abruptly. Clair had been watching the map and was ready for it this time. A patch of lights was growing ahead
and to their right, and over Jesse’s shoulder she could see how the road curved toward it. Adela swept by in a flash. Thirty seconds later, they were juddering over a bridge. The river was narrow and as black as oil, but Clair could smell the water and the plants that thrived on it.

  The next landmark was Oakdale itself, which was bigger than Escalon but looked much the same. Jesse avoided clusters of well-lit structures near the d-mat station. They took a series of right-angle turns through the town, Clair becoming more proficient at leaning each time. They crossed a train line that still had its tracks. They passed a cemetery. Then they were heading west again along an empty road into a California Clair had never seen before. She knew the Bay reasonably well, and she had visited some of the touristy places as a kid, but the spaces between were utterly unknown to her.

  A patch came through from Q, and she took it immediately.

  “Clair, an odd thing just happened.”

  “Odd how?’

  “Dylan Linwood just arrived in the station at Oakdale.”

  A chill went down Clair’s spine.

  “It can’t be him. He’s really dead this time.” You helped me shoot him.

  “There’s no doubt at all, Clair.”

  Q sounded hurt and puzzled, as if the universe had personally reached out and slapped her.

  Dupe, she thought, feeling much the same. Someone’s body with someone else’s mind. It seemed impossible, but what if it was true? That would explain how Dylan’s behavior had changed so radically, from someone who hated d-mat to someone who used it to try to hunt her down and kill her. It also explained how he had escaped the explosion that had destroyed his home, and how he could be chasing her again now after having been shot in Manteca.

  “Wait,” Clair said as a more believable explanation occurred to her. “That trick you did when I was running from him—giving me an alias—could someone be using that back at us?”

  “I suppose so. That would explain why I can’t trace his origins.”

  So would duping, Clair thought, but she kept that to herself.

  “Show me where he’s supposed to be now, in my lenses.”

  A red dot appeared in the map she had open. “Dylan Linwood” was pulling out from the d-mat station in Oakdale and moving very fast. He must have fabbed a bike or had one waiting for him there.

  Clair kicked out with her chin to talk to Jesse.

  “Someone’s coming after us,” she said.

  He sat straighter and glanced back at her. The bike slowed minutely. “How do you know?”

  “My friend Q told me. You know, she’s the one who called me in the safe house.”

  “We’re supposed to be off the grid, Clair.”

  “I know. But she’s given me a mask so I’m invisible. That’s not the point. It looks like he’s on the same road as us.”

  “What do you want to do? Outrun him? Ambush him?”

  Clair pictured herself sitting in the dark, waiting for someone to come into the sights of her gun. Shooting at someone shooting at her was one thing. Premeditated murder was another thing entirely.

  “I’m not a murderer, Jesse.”

  “Really? You seem pretty good at it to me.”

  She ground her teeth on a reply that would have seen her tumbling into the dirt for sure.

  “Let’s get off this road,” she said. “If he’s just going to check out the airfield and isn’t actually following us, he’ll never know we were here.”

  “I don’t have time to stop and map out another route—”

  “So let me do it,” she said. “You drive, I’ll navigate. Deal?”

  He thought about it for a second.

  “Deal, I guess.”

  Clair called up maps in her lenses. The countryside was an inconvenient mess of reservoirs, irrigation trenches, abandoned train tracks, and minor roads that never went in a straight line. There didn’t seem to be any easy way to get where they needed to be. It was like a puzzle or a maze, hypnotic in its complexity. . . .

  “Clair?”

  She forced herself to focus. If they went to Jamestown, from there they could go north on Route 49 to Angels Camp. The Maury Rasmussen airfield was only six miles farther after that point.

  “Take Route 108 on the left,” she said. “That’ll get us out of Oakdale.”

  “And then?”

  “We’ll go off road. I’ll tell you how when we get there.”

  He grunted.

  “Bet you’re thinking this’d be easier with d-mat,” he said.

  “The thought had crossed my mind.”

  And my ass, she thought, sure that cross-country riding was going to be a lot less comfortable than it was by road. It could take all night to get to the airfield at the rate they were going.

  A series of clicks came over the open line, followed by Gemma’s voice.

  “Hail Mary” was all she said.

  The engine snarled, and Jesse propelled the bike even faster than it was already going. She could feel wiry sinews under his top, taut with tension. He was shaking.

  “Want to tell me what that was about?” Clair asked him.

  “Gemma . . . Gemma gave me some codes before we left Escalon, while we were testing the helmets.”

  Clair quashed a momentary resentment that she hadn’t been told. Zombie girl. Jesse’s voice was choked, as though something horrible had happened. “What did she say to you?”

  “They got Arabelle.”

  “‘Got’?”

  “Killed.”

  Clair saw a flash of Zep’s broken face.

  “For real?”

  “I wouldn’t lie to you about something like that.”

  She believed him. This was the woman whose shoulder he had wept on, who had told him to be brave. Clair had trusted her and put her hopes for answers and safety in her hands. A crippled woman in a wheelchair . . . and now she was dead.

  Clair’s insides roiled, but she didn’t have time to dwell on it. Q was flashing her.

  “Clair, I have multiple targets radiating out from the center of Oakdale. Two of them are coming in your direction.”

  She nodded. Forewarned was forearmed, she supposed.

  “What happened to ‘Dylan Linwood’?”

  “He is in transit again, and I can’t tell where he is going. He’s moving around in a way I can’t explain.”

  “Maybe he’s just a decoy, designed to distract us,” she said, taking inspiration where she found it. “Maybe we can use the same trick against him.”

  “What do you mean, Clair?”

  “We’re supposed to be meeting an airship,” she said, reaffirming her faith in Arabelle’s plan. “Can you see it the same way you’re seeing all this?”

  “There is air traffic over Stockton. One of them is heading in the direction of Maury Rasmussen airfield.”

  “That must be it.” She hoped it was. “If you copy its profile and send copies in different directions, anyone watching the same data as you won’t know which one is the real one.”

  “Clever! They’ll either have to chase all of them down or concentrate on some at random. I’ll try it, Clair. If you maintain radio silence, it should give you some time.”

  “That’s all we need.”

  “Clair?” said Jesse, opening the line between them again.

  “What?”

  “Lights behind us. We might have been seen.”

  They were just coming out of Oakdale. She didn’t want to look behind her for fear of losing her balance.

  “Shit. The turnoff is still over a half mile away.”

  Jesse switched off the headlights, and the bike roared beneath them along the suddenly invisible road.

  33

  “ARE YOU CRAZY?” Clair shouted. “Don’t forget you’re risking my neck too.”

  “How can I forget? I can hardly breathe with you strangling me.”

  Clair didn’t dare let go. All she could do was close her eyes and hope he knew what he was doing. There were no streetlights. An a
ccident in the dark would kill them as surely as a bullet from “Dylan Linwood.”

  “Keep your fingers crossed there aren’t any potholes,” he said. “I’m using an infrared HUD, but it’s still not easy to see anything.”

  She didn’t have any spare fingers to cross. They were gripping him too tightly.

  “Two hundred yards to the next turnoff,” she said, keeping a close eye on the map despite her terror.

  They swayed sickeningly to avoid something.

  “What was that?”

  “Cat,” he called back to her. “Where’s that corner?”

  It was on them with unexpected speed. “Here, Jesse—turn here!”

  They barely braked, then took the corner with a screech of rubber.

  Orange Blossom was a minor old road that shook and juddered them.

  “Slow down!”

  “Just want to make sure we lose whoever’s on our tail.”

  “You sure there was someone?”

  “I don’t know. But someone got Arabelle, and I’m not going to wait until someone else starts shooting at us.”

  “No, let’s not do that,” she said. “I’m the one sitting on the back. . . .”

  They followed Orange Blossom for 5 miles, running parallel to another river as it snaked and crawled across the dry land. The vegetation was marginally more lush, and the air felt damp. Clair was thirsty. She would have given anything for a drink.

  “These people,” Jesse said over the intercom. “They can’t be PKs, or there’d be drones everywhere. So who are they? What do they want?”

  “Whoever they are,” she said, “they’re organized, and they’re fast. The first time we saw them was just after your dad started his anti-Improvement thing.”

  “Lots of people already know about Improvement. The invite has gone to thousands, maybe millions of people.”

  “Yes, but no one thinks it’s real. Without evidence, it’s just an urban myth.”

  “Do you think it’s real?” he asked.

  Clair thought of Libby, who had made no attempt to contact her since declaring their friendship ended.

  “It must be real,” she said. “Or why would the people shooting at us be so upset? Your dad found evidence proving it did something, and there is such a thing as bad publicity.” She spoke from experience.