Twinmaker t-1

by Sean Williams

  He shrugged under her tight grip. “I guess so.”

  She felt nothing but weary acceptance, perhaps even relief. Fighting the idea of Improvement had been exhausting. Now it was time to accept it and start fighting the people responsible for it.

  Clair wanted to ask Q if she could find the source of the data Gemma had given Dylan Linwood. There might be more of it, and there might be other people she could call for help—if they weren’t already in trouble too, maybe running for their lives like Jesse and Clair.

  But she said nothing, remembering Q’s warning about maintaining radio silence. The longer they stayed quiet, the greater their chances of slipping like ghosts into the night.

  The next town was approaching. Orange Blossom became Sonora Road, which led into the tiny, abandoned hamlet of Knights Ferry, where they turned left.

  Jesse glanced in his mirrors, checking what lay behind them. Clair’s shoulder blades itched.

  “Eyes forward,” she told him. “There’s another turnoff coming up.”

  “I don’t see one.”

  “The map says it’s right there, supposedly.”

  “Here?”

  Jesse swung off the tarmac and onto a dirt track. The wheels slipped for an instant, then found traction. There was a road, but it was gravelly and rutted, barely there at all.

  “Whoa,” said Clair, hanging on tight. The bike almost slipped over as they took the first corner. “The map said it was a road. Is this a road?”

  “It’ll have to be.”

  “Well, keep following it until it runs out. Then I’ll tell you where to go.”

  “It runs out?”

  “The map is not my territory, okay? Go easy. I’ve never done this before.”

  Jesse drove punishingly hard, trying to put distance between them and whoever he thought was behind them. They had to reach the airship before their pursuers caught up or found a way to cut them off. Clair swore she wasn’t going to end up like Arabelle, dead in a ditch somewhere because she hadn’t gone fast enough.

  It was rough going, though. What should have been a quick mile-long stretch of straight road was in fact a nightmare of switchbacks and whipping branches. The night was clear and full of stars, but there wasn’t enough light to see what lay in the scrub to either side of the track, and Jesse kept the headlights carefully off.

  “That way,” she said, pointing northeast over his shoulder.

  Tulloch Road was paved, but it had fragmented over time. Jesse frequently cursed and jerked the front wheel to avoid potholes and jagged cracks in their path.

  “There’s a dam ahead,” she said, mazes and puzzles shifting in her mind. “We’re supposed to go east when we reach it and head from there to Jamestown. That would be the sensible thing to do.”

  “Nothing about this is sensible.” Jesse sounded weary and impatient. “Are you sure we’re not completely lost?”

  “Are you sure we’re being followed?”

  “We are. I’m positive now. They’re not using headlights, but I can see their exhaust in the HUD. A long way back, but definitely tracking us.”

  “So quit griping. We need to do something about that, and fast.”

  “Like what?”

  “Let’s call the others. Tell them we’re on track for our rendezvous, but say it’s Columbia airfield, not Maury Rasmussen. The people looking for us are bound to be listening in, so they’ll go northeast to Columbia while we go north across the dam. From there, we’ll be back on paved roads and making better time.”

  That was a slight exaggeration. It would be paving all the way if they skipped Jamestown and went instead through an exotic-sounding place called Copperopolis five miles to the north. She hoped they could make it work. Everything below her navel felt compacted and numb.

  “Okay,” he said. “And if you’re so sure . . . you make the call.”

  Clair took a deep breath and held it for a second, reviewing the plan to make sure there was nothing she had forgotten.

  “All right.” Emptying her lungs in an anxious gust and drawing another deep breath, she prayed the nervousness she felt wouldn’t show in her voice.

  “Halfway to Jamestown,” she said over the radio. “On schedule for Columbia.”

  She waited, hardly daring to breathe. Gemma, she was sure, would work it out if she was still alive. Gemma was grating, but she was nothing if not smart. . . .

  The airwaves crackled.

  “Confirmed” came Gemma’s voice. “I’m in Chinese Camp.”

  “On our way to Telegraph City,” said Ray. “Got ambushed, so we’re coming the long way around. Don’t leave without us.”

  “Don’t you take too long,” said Gemma. “What about you, Theo and Cashile?”

  No answer.

  “Theo? Cashile?”

  Nothing on the airwaves but crackle and hiss.

  “Continue as discussed. Maintain radio silence.”

  Gemma clicked off, and Clair felt a sudden rush of fatalism. If Theo and Cashile had been caught as well, there could be no reasoning with the people following them. Not even a kid was safe.

  “Do you think they fell for it?” asked Jesse, sounding as sick as Clair felt.

  “Maybe.”

  “You’re not sure?”

  “I’m sure we’re not in the clear yet,” Clair said, worrying at the situation as she would a ragged hangnail. “Whoever’s following us must be using infrared, like you. That means they’ll be able to see us, no matter which way we tell them we’re going.”

  “Right. The motors on this thing are the brightest heat sources around.”

  “Could we cover them up? Dig a hole or something?”

  “We don’t have time.” Clair felt Jesse shake his head.

  “How much time do we have?”

  “For them to catch up if we stop? A minute or two, max.”

  “We’ll have to think of something else, then.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Give me a second.”

  She didn’t need a second. She already knew what they had to do. Saying it was the hard thing.

  Of the two of them, she had the most left to lose. She still had a life out there, waiting for her to escape the people chasing them and reconnect. He, on the other hand, had lost almost everything—which made what he did have left all the more precious.

  There was no point stalling any longer in the hope of coming up with another solution or of someone else making the decision for her. The road, such as it was, wouldn’t last forever.

  “We have to ditch the bike,” she said.

  34

  “DITCH THE . . . WHAT? You can’t be serious.”

  “I am, Jesse. It’s the only way.”

  “And then you expect us to walk to the airfield, Clair? You have no idea. It’ll take us days!”

  “We won’t walk . . . I hope. Hang on.”

  She clicked off the helmet-to-helmet radio. They had already broken radio silence once; a second time wouldn’t make a difference.

  “Where’s the nearest d-mat booth, Q?”

  “Copperopolis” came the instant reply.

  “Okay, I need you to do something for me. It’s a big favor, but I don’t have any alternatives. I need you to send some kind of vehicle to that booth, then drive down to meet us. It’ll take us all night to get to the landing field otherwise, and we’ll miss the rendezvous.”

  “Me?” asked Q. “Come join you? In California?”

  “Yes,” she said, mentally crossing her fingers. “You’ll have to fake a solo d-mat license, I guess, but you should be able to do that. You changed my name and everything before. Isn’t it about time you got your hands dirty?”

  “I don’t know,” Q said. “I mean, I’m not sure I can. But I’d like to. I really would. I just think it might take more time to organize than you have available . . . for reasons that are hard to explain right now. . . .”

  “You don’t know what you’re capable of until you try. That’s w
hat my mom always says. Right?”

  Q fell silent, and Clair waited her out, mentally chanting Come on, do it in time with her heartbeat.

  “I’ve had another thought,” said Q eventually. “This might work even better than your suggestion. I can outfit a quadricycle with a telepresence system and pilot it to you by remote control. That way I can stay where I am to keep an eye on things and help you at the same time. Would that work for you?”

  Clair wasn’t in a position to argue, even though Q’s unwillingness to come in person made her nervous. What was she hiding? Or was she just afraid of getting too involved and putting her own life at risk?

  Maybe she just didn’t know how to drive, like Clair.

  “Fine,” Clair said. “Better get moving, though. The faster our new ride reaches us, the better.”

  “Yes, Clair. I’ll get on it right away.”

  “Thanks, Q.” She hesitated, then added, “I really owe you for this.”

  “That’s what friends are for, Clair.”

  Not in the world I come from, Clair wanted to say.

  She clicked back to Jesse, who had been fuming in silence while she talked to Q, driving mechanically through the arid night.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s hear it.”

  He took her explanation about as well as she expected.

  “You must be out of your mind,” he said. “How do I know we can trust this Q person to do as she says? How do I know I can trust you?”

  Was he kidding? “I don’t see how you have any other choice. We have to lose the bike, and we’re going to use the dam to do it.”

  “And who put you in charge?”

  “No one. I just know it’ll work.”

  “How can you possibly know that?”

  “Because it has to. Otherwise, we’re dead like Zep and Arabelle and Cashile, and it’ll be all your fault!”

  She punched him the shoulder, making the bike wobble.

  “Hey, watch it!”

  She could see only Zep, face ruined and bloody. Her throat closed tight, and the night swam around her.

  She needed answers, and sleep, and a shower, and a spare second to think when she wasn’t being hunted through the dark with no one but Jesse to lean on. She needed her mom, she needed a hug, she needed a thousand things that he couldn’t give her.

  She punched Jesse on the shoulder a second time, harder than before. She was angry at him for making her cry, first, then angry at him for what he said next, because that meant he knew she was crying.

  Everything depended on them getting to the airship, because there, she had to believe, things would start to go right again.

  “All right, all right,” he grumbled. “We’ll do it your way.”

  35

  THE DAM LOOMED ahead of them, a vast wall of concrete rising like some ancient concave monolith from the riverbed. Its sluice gates were open; there was no need for either irrigation or power generation anymore, so the river just rushed straight through. But the structure remained as a testimony to a time of terrestrial mega-engineering, one of many such structures scattered all over the globe. Dams, bridges, tunnels—all functionally useless now, for most people.

  “Look for somewhere we can get off without being seen,” she said, her voice throaty from suppressed emotion. “I presume this thing can keep itself upright for a while?”

  “It’ll travel along a straight line until it hits something,” he said almost proudly, steering the doomed bike up the old riverbank to the eastern side of the river, where the road curled up onto the top of the dam itself. There was a narrow access road along the top whose safety barriers looked so rusted and fragile, a determined child could push through them.

  Jesse took them around the end of the road to where the bank on the far side dipped down behind the dam. There he brought the bike to a brief halt.

  Clair hopped off and flexed her stiff legs, feeling a thousand tiny pains.

  “Wait,” she said, taking the extra ammo from the baggage compartment and shrugging the backpack over her shoulder. She took off her helmet and slung it on one arm. “Okay. Go.”

  He hesitated, and she would have sworn she saw him pat the chassis farewell. Then he climbed out of his seat and used the handlebars to push the bike back up the slope. Crouching down behind it, he lined it up, fiddled with the controls, and dropped facedown onto the ground beside it to present a lower profile for anyone looking for them in infrared.

  The bike accelerated away from him as he slithered back to join her. Would the engines be hot enough to cover the absence of the passengers? Clair hoped so. She also hoped that Jesse had had the forethought to angle the bike’s trajectory so it would fall to the left, not the right. They needed the person following them to see it die.

  Halfway across the dam, the bike hit an irregularity in the road surface. Its back wheel lifted momentarily off the ground and then slewed right out from under it. The bike tipped onto its side and in a shower of sparks crashed through the rusted safety barrier—to the left. Engine shrilly singing and wheels futilely spinning, the bike sailed over the edge and followed a perfect arc out into space.

  Clair craned her head and watched it as long as she dared.

  “Now we find out if that’s enough to get them off our tail,” she whispered to Jesse, pulling him farther downslope, away from the road.

  “You’d better hope so,” he hissed back at her. “Dad made that bike with his bare hands. . . .”

  He stopped. The whining of another bike was rising up from the valley below.

  “That’s not a Linwood,” Jesse said. “Too noisy, too inefficient. But powerful. Could be a PK bike.”

  “Quiet,” Clair hissed, flattening herself against the backside of the dam and holding her breath as tightly as she held the pistol.

  Their pursuer’s bike rumbled up the path and stopped at the top. Clair held her breath and waited. Would the person hunting them assume that Jesse and Clair had died in the crash and move on, or stick around to investigate more closely?

  The person on the bike did nothing for over a minute, then put the bike back into motion, heading away from the dam and on the wild-goose chase Clair had set for them, chasing a phantom airship across the California countryside.

  “Well, hell,” Jesse said. “It actually worked.”

  “Told you it would.”

  Clair felt no triumph. She didn’t relax until the sound of the bike had completely faded, and she told Jesse not to move for another five minutes after that, just to be sure. She wasn’t about to be caught halfway across the dam, exchanging a wild goose for sitting ducks because they were impatient.

  “You ever play strategy games?” Jesse whispered as they waited.

  “No. Why?”

  “You should. You’d be killer at them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re good at this. I’d have been caught five times over by now on my own. You’ve missed your true calling.”

  “Hardly,” she said, fervently not wanting that to be true. Clair would rather be like Tilly Kozlova. She had famously only started playing piano in her teens and within two years had gone on to perform in the world’s most prestigious theaters. “You have your own skills,” she offered in the hope of taking some of the attention off her. “You can drive, for one.”

  “And I’m killer with a screwdriver,” he said. “Never underestimate that.”

  They sat still together, the wind whistling downriver forming an atonal counterpoint to the river’s basso continuo directly behind her. She could literally feel it through her back, the distant roaring of turbulence in concrete and steel piping. She wondered how long it would take to reduce the whole structure to rubble. A thousand years? A century? A decade?

  “Look on my works, ye Mighty,” she thought, “and despair. . . .”

  “Clair?” Someone was shaking her. “Clair, wake up.”

  She jerked her head so hard, she banged it against the concrete, instantly dispellin
g a vivid dream about sandstorms and sphinxes.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I just closed my eyes for a second.”

  “Yeah, right. You were snoring. We’d better get moving. We haven’t got all night.”

  Clair didn’t want to check the time. She didn’t want to move even her eyeballs. The tiny fragment of sleep had completely perforated her resolve.

  He tugged her again.

  “Come on, Clair. We’ve got to get to the airship and talk to Turner. He won’t wait for us forever.”

  She forced herself upright. Everything from her brain all the way down to her feet felt like rubbery mush, and she had no doubt she looked as bad as she felt.

  “Who is this guy, anyway?”

  “Which guy?”

  “The one on the airship Gemma said we’re going to meet.”

  “Turner Goldsmith? You’ve never heard of him?”

  She shook her head.

  “No one knows where he is or what he looks like. I’ve never met him. I’m not sure if even Dad did. But if the World Holistic Leadership has a leader, it’s him. He’s supposed to be amazing.”

  “And he’ll tell us what to do?”

  “I guess so. Gemma said he knows what’s going on.”

  “She’d better be right. I’m not going all that way for nothing.”

  It would be a relief, she told herself, to let go like she had in the safe house, and allow someone else to give the orders. Jesse was right: being late wasn’t an option. If the airship left without them, then everything she had done would be for nothing. She’d end up like Arabelle and Theo and Cashile. And Zep.

  With heavy footsteps, she followed Jesse up the slope. The backpack was heavier than it had been before—she was sure of it.

  The wind was rising. She hugged herself and tugged her head in close to her shoulders to stay warm.

  36

  TERRAIN THAT HAD looked flat on the satellite map of California’s Central Valley turned out to be wrinkled and cracked in unexpected ways. After an hour of stumbling in and out of ditches, getting tangled in old fences, and constantly stepping on jagged rocks, Clair swore she would never complain about the seat of an electrobike again.