Clair shook her head.
“I’m not saying that.”
“You misunderstand me. You already have.”
He stared down at her as the horrible truth sank in.
“We duped you, Clair,” he said. “My version of you is already out there, recanting all the things you said.”
“You couldn’t have,” she said, feeling a wave of existential panic. How could there be a copy of her out there when she was still alive here, wherever here was? “What about breaking parity?”
“Irrelevant in a private network.” He waved to indicate the booth-disguised-as-an-office. “No one will ever find you in here.”
“So why am I here? What can I do that my dupe can’t?”
“You can tell me all about your friend.”
“Libby?”
Mallory barked a short, hard laugh. “Hardly.”
Clair went to get up, but Mallory put a foot on her chest and pushed her back down.
“I’m talking about Q,” said Wallace. “That’s what you call her, right?”
Clair stared at him in complete confusion.
“You must know more about her than I do,” Clair said. “She’s one of Improvement’s victims, after all.”
“Don’t try to pin this on us,” said Mallory. “We had nothing to do with her.”
“I don’t believe you. How can she be in the hangover if you didn’t put her there?”
“The what?”
“The safety net, the memory dump, whatever you call it.” Clair tried to remember how Arcady had explained it to her. “The place you pulled Zep from.”
Mallory tilted Libby’s head and studied her with distant blue eyes, like she was a bug in a jar, slowly running out of air.
“Someone’s lying,” said Wallace, “and it can’t be both of you.”
His eyes moved, selecting menus from his lenses.
sssssss-pop
Gemma was standing next to Zep’s body, looking first at the room around her, then at her injured arm, which was still in a bandage.
“What?” she said, startled and confused. “This isn’t what you told me would—”
“I know what I told you,” said Wallace, “but you haven’t delivered. We’ve kept you on ice in case we needed you.”
“Ice . . . ?” Gemma’s expression became one of horror. “Sam—you promised me Sam—”
“And you’ll get him if you tell us the truth, this time.”
Clair lunged for Gemma, but Mallory’s boot held her down with crushing strength.
“You!” Clair spat. “You betrayed us!”
Gemma glanced at her, but only for a moment. Her gaze dropped to the floor, danced away from the blood, and ended up looking nowhere.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I had no choice.”
“Yes, you did,” said Wallace, “and you chose correctly. You chose your son over a band of misfits and meddlers. Who in their right mind wouldn’t do that?”
“This isn’t right,” Gemma said, still avoiding looking at the body. “You said you wouldn’t hurt them.”
“And you believed him?” said Clair, aghast.
“It’s not how it looks! They wanted me to be a sleeper agent, but I never actually spied on anyone, never gave anything away—until I saw proof in the Farmhouse that they could do everything they claimed they could do—changing people, bringing them back from the dead . . .”
“Yes, yes,” said Wallace in an impatient tone. “You activated the bug at the Farmhouse. We exchanged messages. We promised you the one thing in the world you really want.”
He had walked half a circle around Gemma and come to a halt next to Mallory, drawing attention to the body, Clair realized, and to the gun in Mallory’s hand.
“I don’t reward lies,” he said. “Tell me everything you know about Q.”
Gemma blinked at him. “What about her?”
“You told us she was a kid,” Mallory said. “Some kind of prodigy.”
“That’s what she sounds like. A kid living in the Air.”
“But you’re not sure?”
“I’ve never met her. Why would she fake something like that?”
“I don’t know. That’s why we brought you back.”
Gemma stared at Wallace and Mallory with despair and hatred in her eyes, then suddenly ripped the cross from her neck and threw it across the room.
“Keep your stupid bug,” she said, voice crackling with emotion. “You’re never going to give him back to me, are you? You played me for a fool.”
“The thing is,” said Wallace, “in all honesty, we don’t care much either way. You can have as many Sameers as you like, as long as you convince us that we can trust you.”
“But I’ve told you everything I know. I swear!”
“I don’t believe in the ghosts of dead girls haunting the Air,” said Wallace. “I do believe that Clair can tell us more. The boy from Manteca here”—he indicated Zep’s body—“didn’t have the effect we were hoping for. I’ll be grateful if you can provide us with the leverage we need.”
“How?”
The smile he offered her was as dangerous as Mallory’s pistol.
“You work it out.”
Clair stared at Gemma, seeing her desperation and her thwarted hope. She had been strung out and stressed ever since the attack on the Farmhouse, and now Clair knew why. She had started expressing her doubts at the train station in Mandan, but Clair hadn’t listened. Clair was listening now, wishing she could find some way to hate her.
This wasn’t the grand treachery of Wallace and Mallory, the depths of which she hadn’t yet begun to fathom. This was an everyday betrayal, human, galling, and desperately frustrating.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Gemma snarled at her. “Who are you to judge? You’ve had it easy all your life. You have a family, and you have friends, and you have a life full of riches. You can go anywhere, do anything, be anyone you want to be. And who am I? Some mad old fool whose child died—and now I have the chance to get him back, exactly as I remember him. You’d take it, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t even hesitate.”
Clair shook her head. She could see what Gemma was doing. She was talking herself into something, something she knew she shouldn’t do. And to make matters worse, Clair knew what it was.
“Don’t,” Clair said. “They’ll never give you what you want.”
“You can talk. I asked you to look after him, but you wouldn’t do it. And even if you had agreed, I wouldn’t have believed you. You could never have protected him. And neither can I. It’s done. It’s over. We’re through.”
The brief war waging behind Gemma’s eyes was over. Clair had lost.
Gemma told Wallace, “Try Jesse.”
Mallory smiled.
73
SSSSSSS-POP
Gemma and Wallace disappeared in another null jump, and there Jesse was, spattered with Ray’s blood and caught midsentence.
“—together . . . Wait, what?”
He saw Libby’s face and started in fright even before Mallory stepped away from Clair and pointed the pistol at him.
“Don’t!” Clair cried, placing herself directly in front of the muzzle. “Please don’t hurt him. I’ve told you everything I know. Q is one of the lost girls, like Libby. She woke in the hangover and latched onto me when I used Improvement. She’s been helping me, and I’ve tried to help her, too. She deserves to know who she is, who she was, before Improvement.”
“Clair, what’s happening?” asked Jesse, standing up behind her. “Are you all right? Where’s Ray, Gemma, Turner . . . everyone?”
“They’re gone forever,” Mallory said, “unless your girlfriend tells us the truth.”
“Why would I lie?” Clair said, determined to keep herself between Mallory and him. She couldn’t bear to think of Jesse dead, not now that she had him back.
“Q is some Little Orphan Annie who latched onto you at random?” Mallory shook Libby’s head. “I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m careful,” she said. “I don’t leave leftovers.”
In the face of Mallory’s ruthlessness, Clair believed her, but at the same time she couldn’t believe her. There had to be hope for Libby, just as there was hope for Q. There had to be hope for Clair as well.
“Well, this time you made a mistake,” Jesse insisted, coming forward to stand next to Clair.
“I don’t make mistakes either,” Mallory said, her lenses flickering, “but Ant does. I think he’s too generous. This is your last offer.”
The air thinned around them again. Clair took Jesse’s hand and held it so tightly, she hoped, that not even d-mat could tear them apart.
sssssss-pop
When the machines stopped, Mallory was gone, and Dylan Linwood had taken her place.
Jesse’s father staggered backward and clutched his temple. Bruised. Fresh from his kidnapping. He looked up at them, blinking, left eye filling with blood.
“Jesse?”
“Stay away!” Jesse let go and stepped back from her, forming a triangle among the three of them. “Who are you?”
“It’s him, Jesse,” said Clair, hearing it in Dylan’s ordinary California accent and seeing his true self in the way he held himself, in his bewilderment and shock. “Really him this time.”
“Who else would I be?” Dylan said, his lined face twisting in hurt.
Jesse was speechless.
“You were captured in the street by people who work for Ant Wallace,” Clair said. Someone had to tell him. “They put you in a booth, a null jump, like they’re doing now.”
He looked down at his body, then back up at Clair and Jesse. “What have they done?”
“They duped you. Your dupes tried to kill us. We . . .” She remembered with pure visceral force shooting at him and seeing his corpse. “We managed to stay ahead of you . . . of them . . . for a while.”
“So we’re all zombies now?” He stared at her in horror.
“Don’t say that,” she said. “That’s not the way it is.”
He turned to his son. “Jesse, what are you doing here? What do they want?”
Jesse still didn’t speak. He was wrestling with all the doubts and decisions Clair had agonized over when Zep had appeared.
“They’re going to take you away again, Dad,” Jesse finally said. “They want something we can’t give them.”
Dylan was staring at Jesse, his face a mask of agony. Not because of the blow to his head. His psychic pain was palpable.
“How can I feel like this?” he said, openly weeping. “How can I feel anything at all? Was your mother right the whole time? Was I wrong not to let them bring her back?”
sssssss—
“Wait,” Jesse cried, reaching out to take his father’s arm, “wait!”
—pop
Jesse and his father vanished. Clair crouched into a ball and shook with frustration and despair. Nothing she said or did seemed to help anyone or change anything. Zep was dead . . . again. Clair had been duped. Jesse was being used against her. What cruelty had Mallory and Wallace prepared for her this time?
When she raised her head, she found that she was alone with Wallace. He looked saddened and puzzled, as a kindly uncle might by his niece’s errant behavior. She seriously thought that he was about to pick her up, pat her on the back, and set her down on her own two feet again.
She stood up on her own and backed as far away from him as she could.
“Tell us about Q,” he said. “That’s all you have to do.”
“And then what? You’ll put me on ice, too? Or erase me permanently?”
“You’re making my choices for me, Clair. If you’d only do as I ask, I’m sure we’d all get along.”
He came closer. She retreated.
“There’s no need to be frightened of me, Clair, or to mistrust me. I’m just trying to make the world a better place.”
“What?”
“You’ve seen what we can do. You’ve talked about it on your feed. I know you don’t think it’s all bad.”
“You’ll never convince me that what Mallory is doing is a good thing.”
“Mallory is a special case, true. I don’t love her for her unsubtlety.”
“Murder is unsubtle?”
He was herding her around the office, like a very patient old sheepdog with one skittish ewe.
“Improvement isn’t murder, Clair. It started as a way of saving lives—the lives of our greatest minds when they grow sick and old. We didn’t have Turner’s genes then, so how else were we to prolong their work? We couldn’t create new bodies out of nothing and set them loose in the world, since that would violate parity, the one rule we cannot break; the same with copying them. So why not use the bodies of young people living vacant, empty lives? Teenage minds are flexible; that’s why they’re so changeable, so perfect for our plan. You see, Improvement is like duping, only stronger, more subtle, permanent. In the right body—not just any will do—a transplanted personality has time to settle into place, rather than being dumped wholesale and left to break down, like the dupes do. Society is infinitely better off for it, I’m sure you’ll agree, as are the beneficiaries of the program. Ask Tilly Kozlova or Madison Chu if they would rather be dead. Ask Elisha Neimke if he thinks you’re being fair for judging me without taking this into account. Ask all of them. I know what they’ll tell you.”
Clair felt herself flinch at Tilly Kozlova’s name. She didn’t want to believe it. Her idol an old woman stealing the life of a girl like her? It couldn’t be true . . . but it did explain her preternatural talent blossoming apparently from nowhere. And it explained the other names too. Madison Chu was the young mathematician who had solved the Riemann hypothesis. And Clair thought Elisha Neimke might be the first Go champion to beat an AI in forty years—at the age of sixteen.
Getting smarter, younger, her grandfather had grumbled, and for once he had had something important to say. But who listened to old people on the subject of kids these days? Clair certainly hadn’t. How many other brilliant minds had taken over innocent young people who had wished to be more than they were?
At least Turner’s genes would put a stop to Improvement. Why go to so much trouble when people could stay in their own bodies and be young forever? But that would mean people like Ant Wallace living forever too—and Clair didn’t trust him to give just anyone the secret. Improvement was given only to the geniuses he chose. A world ruled forever by people like him wouldn’t be worth living in at all. . . .
“No one uses d-mat against their will,” he was saying, as though that made a difference. “The same with Improvement. We do it to ourselves, Clair, and no one complains.”
“You’re lying,” she said. “Someone forced Dylan Linwood
into a booth so he could be duped. Your dupes killed innocent people, and so does Improvement.”
“Minor exceptions, all in the service of the greater good. Would you really have us give up d-mat like those fools in WHOLE say we should?”
She shook her head. “D-mat isn’t the problem. It’s people like you, people who abuse the system. The sooner you’re all in prison, the safer it’ll be for everyone else.”
“Is that really what you think?”
“Of course it is. I’m not so far gone that I don’t know who I am anymore.”
“Far gone . . . ?” He tilted his head. “Ah! I didn’t realize. You used Improvement too. Perhaps I should just wait, then. The answers will come to me in due course.”
“If I don’t kill myself first.”
“Yes, you might, just to spite me, if you are one of Mallory’s. She’s nothing if not persistent, once she fully comes into herself. Her death wish is a stain I could never remove, no matter how I tried. . . .”
His confident facade fell away, and Clair glimpsed something much more real and intimate. She remembered his activism on behalf of potential suicides. For the first time, Clair thought she was seeing the real ma
n.
“Why is Mallory a special case?” she asked.
“Because she’s my wife,” he said. “I can’t let her go.”
She stared at him. “So you bring her back, over and over—”
“And she keeps taking herself away from me. She loves me, but in the end she always hates life more. Her last pattern was taken a week before . . . the first time . . . and it’s always the same. Do you understand me now, girl?”
Clair did, and it was like a coal in her heart. One week was exactly how long Gemma had given Libby to live before she committed suicide—which Libby would do, Clair now understood, not because there was something wrong with Improvement, but because Libby had become Mallory, exactly as she had been when Wallace had taken her last pattern. Improvement killed because Mallory wanted to die.
“Are you satisfied, Clair? Have I at last earned your cooperation?” Wallace’s expression twisted again, becoming very hard and cruel. “Tell me who Q is and what she can do. Who named her? Where did she come from? Most importantly, I need to know how she can be controlled.”
He lunged with great suddenness and speed and caught her arm in one strong hand. She tried to pull away, but he only wrenched her closer, as though punishing her for the glimpse of weakness she had elicited from him.
“If you do,” he said, “I’ll make everything go away. I’ll bring back Zep and Jesse’s father—Libby, too, if you like, before it’s too late. We can do that. It’s easy. Just say the word, and I’ll take Mallory out just as simply as I put her in. But if you don’t, I’ll destroy you. There’s too much at stake now to let you ruin it. And we won’t just kill you and your parents and Jesse, Clair. We’ll destroy the life you might have had.”
He wrenched her closer still.
“Remember that gun you got rid of in Copperopolis? It turned up in what you call the hangover, with your fingerprints still on it. Terrorists are such bad influences, aren’t they? And to think they helped you hide the bodies we have in the hangover too. Fancy that. How do you feel about spending the rest of your life in a penal colony? Do you want to grow old alone? You, not your dupe. You.
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