A ring of worried, puzzled faces stared down at Q as she quivered and shook on the table. She was very pale, and her eyes were barely open. Jesse brushed sweat-dampened hair back from her forehead.
“How come the dupes can do this,” Ray asked, “and she can’t?”
“They’ve had more practice,” Clair guessed.
“I’ll give you . . . ,” Q started to say, but the twitching of her jaw muscles made it hard for her to continue, “. . . give you the woman . . . who was supposed to be here.”
Clair gripped her hand tighter. “Yes, of course. Someone must have been on their way already, in Libby’s body, otherwise Q couldn’t be here now. There’d be a parity violation.”
“So what?” asked Arcady.
“The dupes were expecting this other woman. They called her . . .” It was on the tip of her tongue. “Mallory. They deferred to her. She might be the one giving the orders.”
“All right,” he said, cautiously. “We’ll trade your friend for one of theirs. Then we use the ax.”
“On her?” asked Jesse.
“On the machines, of course. We’ll worry about the rest when we have her.”
[54]
* * *
TWO FARMERS LIFTED Libby’s body and carried her through the Farmhouse. Clair stayed close, still holding Q’s hand. Q’s grip was getting limper by the moment. Her eyes were now completely closed. When they reached the booth—a big industrial machine shaped like a water tank with a curved, sliding door—they laid her on the floor inside and stepped back.
“Are you okay from here?” Clair asked, the last to leave.
Q’s head nodded fitfully. “It h-hurts, Clair. I j-just want it to s-stop.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
Q shook her head.
Clair lingered a second longer, still troubled by this broken vision of Libby’s body. Then she let Q go. The door slid shut behind her. The machine hummed and hissed, cycling matter and data in furious streams. It seemed an age since Clair had last been near a booth, let alone standing inside one.
“The dupes Improved Arabelle,” she said to the others, “and Theo, too. The dupes fixed the errors in their patterns before bringing them back. Gemma said that Improvement is like duping . . . and now we know it’s the other way around, too.”
“Is that how you knew they were dupes?” asked Jesse.
“That and the guns they pulled on me.”
Gemma was pale and staring at Clair in horror. Her fists were clenched.
“They won’t get a second chance,” said Arcady. “Not here. That I promise you.”
The booth chimed and the door began to slide open. Farmers and members of WHOLE alike raised their weapons. Clair stepped closer. Finally, she had a real shot at finding out who was behind all this. She tried to stand tall in her one-sleeved shirt and willed herself not to flinch, no matter what she saw.
Inside the booth stood a lone girl dressed all in black. It was as though d-mat had rolled back time. Libby’s body was uninjured and showed no signs of trauma. There was no sign of the birthmark, either.
“Hello . . . Mallory,” said Clair. The name felt strange on her tongue, directed at someone who looked exactly like Libby.
The woman tensed, but the pistol at her side stayed where it was. Her head tilted slightly to the right.
“So you know my name,” she said. “Don’t think that makes you special. It won’t change anything.”
The woman spoke with a voice that was neither Libby’s nor Q’s. The inflection was harder, more controlled. Confident, even when she was staring down a dozen angry men and women.
“Tell us about Improvement,” Clair said. “Tell us about the dupes.”
“Or else?”
Mallory raised the pistol and placed the barrel under her own throat. Before Clair could move, Mallory pulled the trigger and folded to the floor like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
Arcady rushed into the booth, calling for a medical kit. Clair stared in shock. It was too late to do anything. She had more blood on her face and hands—Libby’s blood, this time, and the face of her best friend was ruined in her memory forever. No amount of effort was going to get Mallory to tell them her secrets now.
Jesse turned away, looking as though someone had punched him in the stomach.
Clair wondered why she didn’t feel more shocked. Mallory had been a living being, a person as vital as any other. Even if she was a dupe in a stolen body, even if other versions of her could be created a thousand times over, identical to the version that had been standing in front of Clair just moments ago, she had been alive. Now she was dead. She had thrown her counterfeit life away without a moment’s hesitation, as she would throw it away no matter how many times they tried to bring her back. That made the dupes seem only more formidable.
Yet Clair felt calm and focused. Clarified, like she had crossed some kind of emotional threshold—or saturation, perhaps, after too many shocks in a row—and emerged stronger on the other side.
Or else it would hit her later, when she could afford to let her guard down.
“Are you going to be okay?” she asked Jesse, putting a hand on his shoulder.
He nodded once, a bit too quickly, like he might be about to throw up.
“Secure the body,” said Arcady, giving up any thought of resuscitation. “It’s time to make plans.”
[55]
* * *
THE COUNCIL OF war took place in the Farmhouse’s main hall.
“We’ll leave immediately,” said Turner. “We’re putting you all at risk.”
“I think that’s for the best,” said Arcady without hesitation. “We’ll help you as much as we can, but this isn’t our fight.”
“They murdered your people too,” said Jesse.
“They died defending our turf. That’s what we do. If the dupes come back, we’ll be ready.”
Clair imagined an army composed of infinitely replaceable, Improved dupes and said nothing. What could she say? Hunkering down wouldn’t solve anything. Libby, the real Libby, was still out there somewhere, frozen in a data server even after Mallory had destroyed the copy of her body. The dupes made making bodies look easy, as long as parity wasn’t broken. The mind was the hard part.
Clair wasn’t going to give up on Libby, no matter what Libby had told her to do. Clair was going to finish Improvement, one way or another.
“What is your intention?” Arcady asked them. “Where are you planning to go?”
No one spoke for a long moment. Clair was waiting to see what Turner would say. Presumably WHOLE had other hideouts like the Skylifter, where they could slowly rebuild their numbers. It couldn’t be easy assembling any kind of operational core when Abstainers were scattered all over the world, steadfastly refusing to make use of the main means of getting around.
“I still like Clair’s plan,” said Jesse. “Take it up with VIA. It’s their problem, ultimately. They’ll have to fix it.”
“You’d be exposed all the way,” said Arcady. “Who knows what would be waiting for you in New York?”
“And VIA is toothless,” said Ray. “The watchdog hasn’t even barked in years.”
“You obviously haven’t smuggled any illicit molecules recently,” said one of the farmers. “Or tried to sell a bootleg Mona Lisa.”
“And we have evidence,” said Jesse, glancing at the rows of bodies.
“If the dupes try to attack us,” Clair said, “we could end up with several of the same body, which would really clinch it.”
“But we couldn’t take them all with us,” said Ray.
“I know,” she said. “We’d just take Libby.”
Libby was where it had all started. It would end with her, Clair swore.
“You don’t really think VIA’s going to let us walk up to the front door with a corpse over our shoulders and stroll right in?” Ray held his hands above his head as though someone had stuck a gun in his back. “There’ll be security sweeps,
background checks, the works. Look at us. If you were VIA, would you let any of us in?”
Clair did look. They were still in pajamas and shirts, except for Gemma, who must have slept in her clothes. They were splattered with blood and stained with pasts no ordinary citizen would boast of. Ray was right. They wouldn’t get near the place.
But why was Ray asking her this? She might have proposed the plan to Turner, but Jesse had been the one to suggest VIA in the first place. Why weren’t they looking to him as well?
Because she had stopped the dupes, she supposed, and because she was doing most of the talking now. That made a kind of sense, but it didn’t mean she had the answers.
Gemma and Turner were suspiciously quiet. Maybe they had already made up their minds, and it didn’t matter what anyone else said.
Then an idea came to her that blew all her doubts away.
“They’ll let us in,” she said, “because we’ll make it impossible for them not to.”
Everyone was looking at her now, not just Jesse and the surviving members of the Skylifter.
“Do tell,” said Ray.
She told them about the crashlanders. Then she reminded them of the video feed Dylan Linwood had put out into the Air. Zep had joked about her being famous for a day, and there was some truth to that: Arcady had seen the video, and he couldn’t have been the only one.
“I thought that was a bad thing at first,” she said, “because of the way it made me look, but now I think we can use it to our advantage. Both the crashlanders and Abstainers are communities primed to latch onto something new or controversial. They’re completely different, and neither is huge, but they draw attention because people outside them disagree on whether they’re good or bad. People talk about them, and talk about what they’re talking about. If we can make the crashlanders and the Abstainers talk about us, I think we can really make something pop.”
“Something like what?” asked Jesse.
“We don’t hide the fact that we’re going to VIA HQ in New York. The exact opposite: we tell everyone—anyone who’s interested. We promise them something worth seeing. Like Ray says, we’ll be exposed when we leave the farm; there’ll be drones all over us as soon as we’re back in civilization. They’re the eyes of the world, and if they’re on us because we’re giving the world a show, the dupes won’t dare act, not up close when they can be seen as well. Home is where the harm is—that’s what my mom says: we think we’re safe when we’re hiding, but we’re not. Let’s come out of hiding and let the world protect us.”
“The drones in Manteca were compromised,” Gemma reminded her. “They couldn’t see anything.”
“Q can help with that,” she said, hoping that was true.
“What if they hit you from a distance or make it look like an accident,” said Arcady, “like they did with the Skylifter?”
“Enough people will know what really happened,” she said, hoping that would be true as well. “Who could ignore something like that? Especially if we spread the word widely enough. There’s no reason we can’t fight this on more than one front at once. Improvement started with a note that told people to keep it a secret. So maybe we should issue a note of our own that does the exact opposite.”
“Anti-Improvement?” said Jesse. “No, Counter-Improvement. That’s better.”
“But we only mention Improvement and the damage it does,” Clair said. “That’s important. Anything else will make us look crazy. Really crazy, I mean.”
“Even though it’s true?” said Arcady.
“Let’s not overcomplicate things. No one will believe us until they see it with their own eyes. If the dupes come out of the shadows to take us down—that’ll do it. If they don’t and we get to VIA with the body—that’ll do it too. Either way, it’ll all come out. When VIA says it’s happening, everyone will believe.”
“What if VIA’s involved?” asked Turner. “The dupes have to be directed by someone.”
“Do they? I really don’t think VIA would be so stupid as to attack their own system—”
“But if they are, what then?”
She thought for a second. “They’ll still let us come. Their best shot will be to discredit us, not destroy us. As long as we stay in the public eye and don’t use d-mat, they can’t engineer an accident or dupe us. They can’t do either without exposing the truth or breaking parity, so we’ll be safe.”
“What about peacekeepers?” asked Arcady.
“Technically, we haven’t done anything wrong,” she said. “They’ve got no grounds to bring us in, and we’ve seen no sign that they’re likely to. Maybe they’ll turn a blind eye if we’re in trouble, maybe we can’t entirely trust them, but they won’t act openly against us.”
“And what about you?” asked Jesse. “Your reputation is also at stake. What’s everyone going to think when you out yourself as . . . well . . . one of us?”
“It’s only temporarily, and I reckon my reputation is pretty shot already.” She offered him a smile but didn’t look any lower than his neck. He still hadn’t put a shirt on and she didn’t want to blush again, not when she was busy arguing her case. “Thanks, though. Maybe we can show the world that being controversial is not such a bad thing when you’re right.”
“I think . . . ,” Gemma started to say, then stopped when people looked at her. She raised her chin. “I think we should do it.”
Clair stared at her. She was the last person Clair had expected to come out in favor of the idea.
“Really?” asked Ray. He looked as startled as Clair felt.
“Yes. It’s better than sitting here waiting for the hammer to fall.”
“I agree,” said Turner, and Clair was doubly amazed.
“We need to go for one simple reason,” he explained. “If VIA won’t listen, WHOLE will be there to take direct action.”
“Uh . . . what does that mean?” asked Jesse.
“It means whatever it needs to mean.”
“I’m not a terrorist,” said Clair.
“No one’s asking you to be one,” Turner said.
There was a tense silence around the table, but Clair felt that was as close to a consensus as she was ever going to get.
“All right, then. Great. So how do we get there?” she asked. “We certainly can’t walk.”
“I know a way,” said Arcady. “You can hitch a ride with train hobbyists.”
“You’re kidding, right?” said Jesse.
“No. We use them all the time. There’s a line running right across our property, and engines go by once a day—east at dawn, back west at dusk. You catch the next one, you’ll be on the east coast in two days, maybe sooner.”
“What happens then?” asked Gemma. “We swim?”
“We won’t have to,” said Turner. “We’re going to take a submarine.”
“Now you’ve got to be kidding,” said Clair.
“I am not.” He folded his arms, his expression betraying no trace of humor. “You want a spectacle, that’s exactly what you’re going to get.”
[56]
* * *
THEY WERE READY to move within the hour. Clair showered and changed out of her soiled farmer’s shirt into a new one and put on her overalls and sneakers. The bodies were taken away, all except for Libby’s, which was hermetically sealed and zipped up in a makeshift plastic shroud. Evidence. Packs were distributed. Clair began to get a camping vibe from the exercise, reinforced when she saw how much gear she was expected to carry. Among the packets of freeze-dried food, canteens, a sleeping bag, and a bedroll were a pistol and two boxes of ammunition. She remembered exactly how heavy they were from lugging similar ones halfway across California.
Instead of complaining, she asked Arcady to show her how to load the pistol. It was smaller than the one Q had made for her, fitting neatly into the palm of her hand as though designed for it. He promised less of a kick and not greatly reduced accuracy at close range.
“You won’t need to clean it today,” he s
aid. “But you might want to test fire it if there’s time before you leave.”
She did so, deriving a nervous satisfaction from the solid kick of the weapon into her palm. She hoped against hope her plan would hold, and she wouldn’t need to use it.
The sky was lightening when they piled their gear into a sturdy farm vehicle on four fat wheels, and the expedition prepared to set out. There was a tense farewell on the Farmhouse’s broad steps. Arcady hugged Clair, his beard tickling her check, and gravely shook Turner’s hand.
“You’ll remember everything I told you?” he said.
“Of course.” Turner nodded. “I’m grateful to you.”
“Give us a good show. We’ll be watching.”
Their four-wheeler had a flatbed on the back, which Clair shared with Jesse and Ray and two heavy bags that made metallic sounds with every bump. Watching the Farmhouse recede as they sped up the dirt track through the orchard, she tried to think of their departure less as abandoning somewhere safe, more as progressing boldly toward a solution to everyone’s problems.
“I grew up on a farm like this,” said Ray out of nowhere, and Clair could tell that he was wrestling with similar demons. “There’s nothing like getting your hands dirty.”
“I used to love working in our kitchen garden back home,” Jesse said. “Dad and I never managed to keep the bugs out of our asparagus, no matter what I tried.”
“You should have coplanted with coriander,” Ray suggested. “It attracts ladybugs, which eat the asparagus beetles.”
“We never thought of that.”
Clair zoned out while Ray and Jesse swapped gardening tips. She was even less interested in growing produce than she was in cooking it. Besides, her hands were shaking, and she was afraid her voice might start shaking too. This was the first chance she’d had to sit still since the dupes attacked. She could feel a rush of anxiety building behind the walls she’d built, pushing outward, threatening to overwhelm her. She couldn’t afford to break down now, she told herself. She had to be strong.
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