It’ll be there. She told herself to focus on what was waiting for them inside it. Turner Goldsmith, the leader of WHOLE, would have answers. He would whisk them away from the assassins in the dark and tell them what to do next. She wasn’t expecting a knight on a charger like something from a fairy tale—but he was a grown-up who presumably knew what he was doing. He would help them like he had helped others in the past.
They ran down the other side of the ridge and approached a steeper, stonier rise with more caution, wary of turning an ankle. In the hush before sunrise, every footstep sounded deafening.
At the top of the rise were two runways connected by taxiways at both ends. All but one of buildings was abandoned and weatherworn. To the right of those two were spaces that might have been for light planes or automobiles. Parked haphazardly across those wide, empty spaces were three electrobikes.
There was no sign at all of their riders or the airship.
Clair stopped dead on the asphalt and looked around. The light was brighter now. Everything was still and silent and empty. No engine noise. No voices. No giant airships hanging in the sky.
“They left without us,” said Jesse.
[40]
* * *
THE HOPELESSNESS IN his voice broke her heart. Clair took his hand and squeezed his cold fingers. It wasn’t his fault they had been slow. If they had been any less careful, they might have ended up like Arabelle, Cashile, and Theo. She and Jesse had done their best to keep the others in the loop, and what had WHOLE done in return? They had left without so much as a good-bye. Forget Turner Goldsmith and explanations. Forget help. At the very least, Gemma could have told them not to bother, sparing Jesse and Clair a futile end to their long and exhausting trek.
She blamed herself. If she hadn’t switched off her lenses in abhorrence at Q’s actions, she would have known. She would have seen the airship moving on the map and directed the buggy accordingly.
“It’s not over yet,” she said, trying to find some hope to cling to. Any would do. “They left the bikes. We can use them. They’ll be faster than the buggy thing.”
“You can’t drive,” said Jesse.
“I’ll learn. You can teach me.”
“Where would we go?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere a long way from here, for starters.”
Maine, she thought, tugging him toward the bikes and turning her lenses back on as she went.
The first thing she saw was a red dot right in front of her.
Then a dark figure rose up from behind the bikes and trained a pistol on the center of her chest.
“Stop right there.”
She obeyed, but not because of the order. She stopped because she had heard that voice giving her orders before. Not exactly the same voice. This time, there was a hint of another accent—British, perhaps. But even under starlight there was no mistaking the face.
It belonged to Dylan Linwood. Only he wasn’t wearing it anymore.
Jesse was two paces behind her. He stopped too, then came forward one hesitant step.
The pistol shifted left and down. A single shot cracked into the asphalt at Jesse’s feet. He jumped.
“No closer. Clair, I know you’re armed. Put the gun down where I can see it. Don’t try anything, or I’ll shoot you in the leg.”
“You’re going to kill us anyway,” she said.
“Not until you tell us where the others have gone. The gun, Clair, or I’ll call your parents. Would you like that? Would you like me to pay them another visit?”
“No.” She slipped off the backpack and dropped it to the ground. The gun she pulled from her pocket and skidded across the ground toward him. With it went her last hope.
She refused to think of the dupe as Dylan Linwood. She knew what he really was now. He was a duplicate, but not an exact duplicate. He was like Libby in Copperopolis—an exact copy of Dylan Linwood with another person inside his head. He was the puppet master hidden within the puppet.
“Who are you?” Jesse asked, and she could tell from his voice that he was experiencing every emotion she had on seeing Q in Copperopolis.
“Move over with your girlfriend.”
He didn’t move. “She’d never be my girlfriend. If you were my father, you’d know that.”
Clair joined Jesse before he could be shot for disobeying, and the dupe came out from behind the bike, picking up her gun on the way. Behind him, the sky was slowly lightening. In the pale predawn wash, Clair made out the bruise on his forehead and the reddened eye, exactly as they had been the previous day.
“We know what you are,” she said.
“Don’t talk,” said the dupe, “unless it’s to tell me about your friends in WHOLE.”
“What friends?” said Jesse bitterly. “We don’t know where they’ve gone.”
“That’s a lie. Tell me the truth.”
“Or what? You’ve already taken everything from me.”
“What about her?”
The pistol shifted to point at Clair. Complex shapes danced in his lenses. Orders? Map data? Clair couldn’t tell.
“Who are you?” asked Jesse again, rage and fear quivering in his voice.
Make something up, Clair told herself. Got to try something.
“They went north,” she said, “to Seattle.”
“That’s a lie,” the dupe said. “There’s been no air traffic in that direction.”
That was interesting. No traffic meant the airship hadn’t moved. But if the airship hadn’t moved, that meant . . .
Clair took her eyes briefly off the fake Dylan Linwood and studied the vista behind him. Something was moving against the backdrop of hills, all outline and no detail, visible because of the way the colors didn’t quite match. The patch was almost perfectly circular, and there was no way to tell how far away it was, but it was between the airfield and the hills, swinging northward and getting larger. It was already the size of a full moon. How many seconds until the sound of its engines were audible over the rising dawn chorus?
“Let’s make a deal,” she said, thinking faster than she ever had before. “You tell me who you work for, and I’ll tell you where the airship is.”
“No deals,” he said. “Tell me now, or I’ll shoot one of you at random.”
“But we don’t know,” protested Jesse.
“The longer you stall, the longer I’ll keep you alive after.”
“I’m not stalling,” said Clair. “I just want you to give me something in return. Why don’t you tell me your name, at least?”
“No.” His one red eye glared balefully.
In her lenses, an emergency patch appeared. She clicked it, hardly daring to hope.
“Gemma Mallapur says to get ready,” whispered Q in her ear. “We need you to stall for ten seconds.”
To the dupe, Clair said, “What are you afraid of?”
“I’m not afraid of anything,” he said, pointing the gun at her chest.
“Sure you are. It can’t be easy, living in someone else’s body.”
“Easier than you think.”
Inspiration struck her. Seven days. “But it isn’t permanent, is it? How many times have you died? How many times has someone like me killed you? How many bodies have you lived in now?”
His borrowed eyes widened slightly.
“Three seconds,” said Q.
“No, wait,” she bumped back. “I think I’m getting through to him.”
“Two.”
Clair took Jesse’s arm as though for solidarity.
“Come on,” she said. “Tell me who you were.”
The dupe straightened.
“I am nobody.”
His finger tightened on the trigger, and Clair braced herself.
“Get down now, Clair,” said Q.
She dropped and pulled Jesse to the asphalt with her. The agent jerked as though shoved in the back. Red mist burst out of a sudden hole in his chest. A split second later, the sound of the shot reached them, followed by another
shot from much closer at hand. The dupe’s finger had squeezed the trigger as he dropped. The slug that might have killed Clair whined harmlessly off the asphalt. Two more shots in rapid succession whizzed over their heads before the sharpshooter in the airship realized that the job was done.
The dupe went down and stayed down.
Jesse was moving before she could grab him. He threw himself at the fallen body and pounded its bloody chest.
“Who are you?” he screamed. “Who are you?”
[41]
* * *
CLAIR RAN AFTER him and kicked the dupe’s pistol away. “Dylan Linwood’s” battered face was turned as though to stare at her, but all his eyes contained were empty, unseen data. Anyone could be watching.
She put a hand over the body’s face and closed the eyelids. Bright blue and blood red: she was glad to be rid of that terrible gaze.
Now she could definitely hear the airship’s engines whining and whirring as the craft came in to land.
Clair pulled Jesse away from the body.
“Why did they do this to him?” he asked, his voice thick with tears. “Who are they?”
The airship rose hugely over them, and Clair gaped up at it, amazed by how big it was. Easily a hundred yards across, it had a wide, two-story upper deck and a docking station on the lowest tip, connected by a narrow shaft so it looked like a fat, inverted teardrop hanging in the dawn sky. Three smaller, egg-shaped dirigibles clung to the docking station, rocking in the breeze. At close range, the airship’s camouflage lost much of its efficacy, and she could make out propellers whirring on the half-seen underside, guiding it to a safe landing. The downwash flattened her hair across her scalp and whipped Jesse’s mop from side to side.
He looked up from his father’s body and gripped Clair’s arm.
“It’s a Skylifter!” he said, wiping his eyes with his free hand.
She checked the Air in case that detail was significant. Skylifters were antiques left over from the days when people still hauled freight from one place to another but said they were worried about carbon emissions. The Air didn’t mention anything about WHOLE.
A patch winked in her eye. She answered it.
“I hope I did the right thing this time, Clair,” said Q.
Clair didn’t know what to say. She had been stupid, and that had almost got her and Jesse killed.
“You did,” she said, “but we’ve got a lot to talk about, Q. About Libby and the dupes.”
“Yes, Clair. I will tell you all I can, when I can. I promise.”
The airship touched down. A hatch opened. Ray and a man she hadn’t seen before stepped out of the interior and loped toward her.
“You two get aboard,” Ray told them. “We’ll bring the body.”
Clair hesitated, wondering if they realized it really wasn’t Dylan Linwood. Then she understood. Evidence.
How long until another version of him stepped out of a booth in San Andreas, or Copperopolis, or anywhere else she tried to hide?
“Come on,” she said, taking Jesse’s hand as he had taken hers outside Copperopolis. The airship had impressed her and restored her hope. “It’s time to get some answers.”
[42]
* * *
THE ELEVATOR WAS easily large enough for all of them, with a second shaft surrounding it, containing a spiral staircase. Clair fidgeted as the cage lifted them to the top of the Skylifter. She didn’t know what to expect of either Turner Goldsmith or the airship’s interior. The latter was swaying ponderously beneath her in a not entirely unpleasant way. Taking off again, she assumed. The deep thrumming of propellers was distant but ever present, like giant bees were buoying them up into the sky.
When the elevator door opened, Clair found herself in a D-shaped chamber that spanned fifteen yards down the straight side. The curved side to her left was all window, letting in the sky. Apart from that spectacular feature, the interior of the Skylifter was unassuming. The semicircular space at the top of the elevator was part meeting hall, part mess hall. Clair could smell stale coffee, and her mouth watered. There were two doors leading through the interior wall, which was decorated with paintings of landscapes and, incongruously, childish sketches in primary colors. Large, hand-embroidered cushions sprawled on a brown-carpeted floor.
Five people looked up as they walked in. The only one Clair recognized was Gemma.
“If it hadn’t been for your friend Q, we’d have given up on you,” Gemma said. Her cheeks were flushed, but the rest of her was as white as bone, and she moved her shoulder as though bearing a great burden. She nodded at Ray, who had come up the elevator with them. “Where is it?”
Ray hooked a thumb at where the body rested under a tarp.
“Bring it through. If we’re quick, we might hack into the lens feed. Be careful, though. The body could be booby-trapped.”
Clair hadn’t considered that possibility. From the sharp downturn of Jesse’s mouth, she guessed he hadn’t either.
“Which one of you is Turner Goldsmith?” Clair asked as the body disappeared through the right-hand door, followed by Gemma and the others.
“Turner’s upstairs,” said a woman in her twenties with disconcertingly mismatched eyes—one blue, the other green. “He’ll call when he’s ready. I’ll show you where you can freshen up.”
“Right now, I don’t care about freshening up,” Clair said.
“It’s through here.” The young woman ignored her protests, opening the other door and showing Clair and Jesse a toilet area. There were four cubicles crammed around two tiny basins. “Go easy on the water, but help yourself to soap.”
Clair started to argue. They hadn’t raced all night to get to the airship, dodging dupes every step of the way, only to be left on the bench like they didn’t even matter.
“I’ll be back when Turner sends for you,” the young woman said, talking right over her and following the others through the right-hand door and shutting it firmly in her wake. The sharp click of a lock left Clair in no doubt that she wouldn’t be able to follow.
Clair went to call Q, but her lenses were empty of anything other than a simple menu broadcast by the Skylifter itself. The Air was jammed.
She put her hands on her hips and looked around in annoyance and disappointment. So much for Turner Goldsmith telling them what to do.
“Buffalo,” said Jesse, his fingertips dancing across virtual menus.
“What?” She didn’t mean to snap, but she couldn’t help it.
“That’s where we’re headed, according to the flight plan. North until we hit the westerlies. From there, northeast over Washington, Montana, maybe into Manitoba and Ontario, then south for a landing in Buffalo.”
“What’s in Buffalo?” asked Clair.
“Maybe nothing. It could just be a ruse, in case anyone’s watching.”
“Fantastic.”
“We’re in a Skylifter,” said Jesse, as though he still couldn’t believe it. “No wonder no one ever knows where Turner is!”
Clair leaned her forehead against the sweeping plastic window, fighting tears of frustration and exhaustion. The ground below was already impossibly distant, a hazy brown plain, crinkled and dotted with faint geometric shapes still visible despite nature’s reclamation of the land. The plains were bounded to the east by jagged mountains—the Sierra Nevada, muscular stone in all its brutality.
Somewhere down there, Libby was in just as much trouble as she had ever been. And being high above it all, Clair thought, wasn’t solving anything.
You’d better have answers for me, she said to herself, or I swear, Turner Goldsmith, I’ll pop your balloon and bring you down to earth myself.
[43]
* * *
SINCE SHE HAD nothing better to do while she waited, Clair used the bathroom to freshen up and emerged feeling gritty and greasy under damp clothes she would ordinarily have recycled without a second thought. The source of the coffee smell turned out to be a well-used filtration unit behind a hatch in
the wall, with a selection of mismatched mugs stained from frequent use. There was a whole miniature kitchen in there, with a small freezer and what looked like a fabber but was in fact a microwave oven. She just poured herself a coffee, adding lots of milk and sugar. Her stomach ached, but she wasn’t remotely hungry.
The Air was still jammed, Q with it.
“Any word from the others?” she asked Jesse.
“Nope,” he said. He was lying flat on his back in the center of the room, with his arms folded across his eyes.
She sat down next to him, needing a means of keeping her hope alive. “How well do you know these people? Can we trust them?”
“I’ve known some of them most of my life. Abstainer meetings are like AA meetings—everyone has a testimonial. I heard those stories over and over, but they obviously didn’t tell me anything important, like who was really in WHOLE and who wasn’t.”
His voice was full of self-blame and irritation. Clair had moved past that. For now, she was determined to learn everything she could about their captors, in case that was indeed what they turned out to be.
“Are those testimonials secret?”
“I guess not. Are you asking?”
“Yes,” she said bluntly.
He sighed. “All right. You remember Aunt Arabelle . . . ?”
“Two left feet. And Gemma: she lost her son to Improvement.”
“Yes, well, I’d never heard that before. Ray’s wife died in transit—just arrived dead for no reason, and they couldn’t revive her. Theo, Cashile’s mom, had aphasia thanks to d-mat: she could understand but couldn’t speak.”
“What about Turner Goldsmith?”
“I don’t know what his story is. There are lots of others: someone had a son whose mind was wiped; someone else’s mom died of the same cancer as George Staines. And, oh, hey, this is a good one: there’s a girl who used to come to meetings with this guy she said was her brother. But he was older, way older, like thirty years or more.”
Twinmaker Page 20
