Twinmaker

by Williams, Sean

  “Last one to VIA’s a rotten egg!” he called, and the crowd cheered again. Some of them shouted his name, and it quickly became a chant.

  By the time Clair reached the arch, the crowd was moving as one, accelerating to meet and race alongside her, catcalling and jostling but keeping up, for the most part. They were a mixture of kids and teenagers, plus some older people who had the Abstainer look. Most rode monocycles, but some had Segways, sunboards, or even bicycles. There was a carnival atmosphere that belied the deadly seriousness of her purpose. It was a game to them, she supposed. A game for the curious and bored, jumping on a bandwagon that was popping at the time.

  Clair understood. She’d never been much for flash crowds and celebrity bombing, but Libby had occasionally dragged her to them, and they could be fun. And there was no denying that she was grateful to Jesse for his quick thinking. By redefining their journey as a race, he had turned an obstacle into something that, if she squinted hard enough, might even be called an asset. A human shield, she didn’t want to think.

  She looked back at him, and he winked.

  “Are you enjoying this?” she asked.

  “Who me? You’re the one in the lead.”

  Jesse-Jesse-Jesse went the crowd as they rode on into the Manhattan archipelago. A girl leaned in to kiss his cheek, and he blushed and pushed her away. Clair felt a surprising twinge of jealousy and told herself sternly to concentrate on the road ahead.

  [67]

  * * *

  THE PATCHES OF dry land that had once been Chinatown and Little Italy were extensively canalled. Clair led her entourage up ramps to a level high above the tourist boats, where Q helped them navigate through the maze of bridges and monorails. They hopped from building to building to SoHo, the southernmost tip of the main Manhattan island, and touched ground on Broadway. There they left the bridges and went right down to ground level, where the original road surface remained largely unchanged.

  Their entourage spread out around them, waving at passersby and taking up a new chant: Counter-Counter-Counter. Jesse raised his fist in acknowledgment and chanted along with them. Clair didn’t join in. She was too conscious of the time.

  “Q, can you tell where Turner is?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t, Clair. I am unable to connect with the drone, and there’s been no sign of the submarine.”

  That didn’t mean anything either way, Clair knew. The sub was likely camouflaged, and most people had probably assumed it was elsewhere now that Clair had popped up on the ground. Turner might be minutes or hours from VIA HQ. He might have changed his route entirely. There was no way for her to know until he surfaced.

  She searched her busy infield for the message from Ant Wallace’s assistant.

  “For the sake of the crowd,” she sent, “would Mr. Wallace be willing to meet somewhere public?”

  “That’s not necessary,” Catherine Lupoi replied. “Your meeting will be broadcast in its entirety to the Air.”

  “Good,” Clair sent back. “But I’m worried about what the crowd will do when I’m not around.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Wallace’s assistant said in a reassuring tone. “We have PKs on hand. You’ll note quite a gathering here, too.”

  Clair checked and found that to be absolutely true. At least a hundred people had congregated in Penn Plaza to witness her arrival. Some of them were singing. Clair grimaced when she recognized “We Shall Not Be Moved.” Jesse wouldn’t be pleased by that.

  She passed the word back to Jesse and Ray.

  “They can’t possibly ignore us now,” said the older man. “Not when we turn up with an army on their doorstep!”

  Some army, she wanted to say. But he was speaking for the benefit of the drones and the crowd, and they cheered along with him. Perhaps he was speaking for himself, too. Turner might have sent him to keep an eye on her, but that didn’t mean Ray was her enemy. He might even want her to succeed so Turner wouldn’t have to.

  Between Twenty-third Street and One Hundredth, where water claimed the island, Park Avenue was preserved as a national monument, complete with yellow cabs and food stalls. Clair took advantage of the clear road surface to go faster, pushing the monocycles to the limits of their tiny motors. Around them, the buildings grew taller. She could see the Empire State Building a few blocks ahead.

  At a sign advertising a “genuine replica steakhouse,” they turned left and rolled on up Thirty-third Street. Ray’s “army” had doubled, and the cry of Counter! became a regular chant that echoed off the stone walls around them. Peacekeepers had become more visible too. Domed blue helmets stood out on every corner and in front of the historic storefronts. Clair wondered if they were afraid of a riot. She wondered if she should be too.

  At Greeley Square, at last, their destination became clearly visible. One Penn Plaza was a tall black glass oblong that was imposing even from several blocks away. No greenery marred its precise lines. No signs or logos, either, despite the perfect flatness of its north- and south-facing sides. Some organizations might have had visual and virtual ads rolling 24-7, but not VIA. The evidence of its labor was all around them.

  The skyscraper slabbed vertically out of a wider base. Clair and her entourage circled the base once, counterclockwise, passing Madison Square Garden, its southwestern edge literally hanging over the water, in order to approach the crowd from the other side. A cheer rose up. Placards waved. Some people booed. A surge of information rolled through the Air, spiking Clair’s popularity levels to new heights.

  As they wheeled past the plaza’s stand of d-mat booths to approach the main lobby entrance, gunshots cracked over the crowd

  “Traitors!” a voice shouted. “Terrorists!”

  People went in all directions. More gunshots, and Clair found herself on the ground with Jesse, not entirely sure how she had gotten there, her pistol in her hand but no one to point it at.

  Over the shouts and screams came the sounds of barked commands. Peacekeepers, Clair hoped. She didn’t want fighting to break out in the crowd. A man cried in protest as barking voices ordered him to the ground.

  Clair raised her head. Three PKs were standing over a spread-eagled man dressed in combat gear and flak helmet. He had been liberally sprayed with thick white confinement foam that held him immobile on the ground. There was a rifle trapped safely beneath one of the PKs’ boots. The crowd had scattered to points of cover, from where they watched the scene unfold. There was no cheering now, just weeping and exclamations of shock. Two people were injured. There was blood on the ground.

  In a panic, remembering Zep, Clair turned to check on Jesse. He was fine.

  “Thanks, Clair,” he said, sitting up and brushing himself off. “That was close.”

  She just nodded, although she still had no memory of what had happened immediately after the first shot. Her pulse was still racing, and it was hard to think. The Air was full of clamoring voices. Footage was already streaming in, including a perfect shot of her throwing herself at Jesse and tackling him to the ground.

  “I’m sorry, Clair!” Q’s voice was frantic. “I should have seen him. I should’ve done something—”

  “It’s not your fault,” she said. “Do you know who he is?”

  Data poured into her infield. The shooter looked like an ordinary guy, if a little extreme in his anti-Abstainer outbursts. He had a feed not so different from hers, except with a much longer history, detailing deaths by terrorist attacks all around the world. He had lost his mother in a shutdown in Cairo, which WHOLE said was a power failure, VIA sabotage.

  Clair hadn’t known that such arguments existed. It hadn’t been part of her world until now.

  A peacekeeper towered over her, offering her his hand.

  “Best you move inside, Clair,” he said. “Things could get ugly out here.”

  His name was PK Drader, Clair’s lenses informed her, leader of the Rapid Response team. His face was hidden behind his visor. He had narrow shoulders set on a slight angle
, as though he were leaning into a strong wind.

  Clair nodded but didn’t take his hand. She could stand on her own. Jesse did the same. Ray joined them, and PK Drader and three other peacekeepers formed a protective cordon around them as the three of them approached the Penn Plaza building. Their monocycles lay abandoned on the ground behind them. The crowd was emerging slowly from cover. This wasn’t a game anymore. It was something else entirely, now that someone had been tangibly hurt.

  Clair wondered what would happen to the shooter. Then she saw two bullet holes in the glass doors ahead of them and decided she didn’t care. That was the third time she had been fired at in four days. It had to stop.

  [68]

  * * *

  “WE’RE HERE,” JESSE said as the glass doors slid closed behind them. He looked shaken but relieved. “We actually made it.”

  “Don’t get cocky,” said Ray. “This is the hard part.”

  Clair agreed. They might have beaten Turner to VIA, but he was still out there somewhere, perhaps right under their feet, right at that very moment. And then there was Ant Wallace: he wouldn’t be a pushover. Her plan was, basically, to convince him that he wasn’t doing his job.

  The lobby was cool and dimly lit, a marble expanse with a reception desk directly between the doors and a bank of elevators at the opposite end. A single person sat behind the desk, an ageless woman with porcelain skin and a sleeveless halter top in silver and gray. Her red hair was piled up in a series of complex curves with no visible means of support. Clair felt intimidated, although the woman didn’t actually do anything as they approached. Doing nothing was more than enough.

  Only when Clair was right in front of her did the receptionist stir. Her voice was honey and steel. She came right to the point.

  “Mr. Wallace will see you in his office. Please proceed to elevator three.”

  One perfectly manicured hand indicated a bank of sliding doors to her left.

  “Thank you,” Clair said. The woman didn’t acknowledge her.

  “Can you still hear and see me?” she asked Q.

  “Perfectly well, Clair,” came the instant reply. “This is exciting! What do you think he’ll say?”

  “I guess we’re about to find out.”

  The elevator doors opened as they approached, revealing a heavyset security guard in a shiny blue suit that was a near-perfect match for his stubble. He motioned them inside without a word. Clair obeyed. Through the foyer’s glass windows, she saw the crowd waving at her, mouthing words she couldn’t hear. Through the Air she saw herself, expressionless, as the doors closed over them. It didn’t look like her as she thought of herself. Was she really her, Clair couldn’t help but wonder, or someone who only thought she was?

  The elevator moved underfoot. Clair’s weight seemed to double. There was no progress indicator above the door, no counting upward like Clair had seen in old movies.

  “You’ll be required to leave your weapons behind at the next checkpoint,” said the guard in the blue suit. His voice was surprisingly light. “They’ll be returned to you afterward.”

  “How do you know we have any?” asked Jesse.

  “You’ve been scanned.”

  Ray shrugged philosophically.

  The doors opened, and the security guard escorted them into an unremarkable corridor. There was another security guard waiting for them, next to a table, on which they placed everything lethal. Clair gave them her pistol. Jesse had nothing but a pocketknife. A small arsenal appeared from Ray’s pockets and the depths of his pack, including three pistols, a collapsible rifle, ammunition for all, and several grenades.

  “We’re lucky you didn’t start a war when that guy started firing outside,” Clair said.

  “He’s lucky the PKs were there,” Ray said.

  “This way,” said the first blue suit, indicating a double door at the end of the corridor.

  This is it, Clair thought. This is really it.

  On the other side of the door was an office that took up half an entire floor. It contained a desk and several chairs but seemed empty. The view more than made up for that. They were looking out across the archipelago, over a jungle of rooftops and parabolic bridges and sails and swooping monorail tracks. The light seemed brighter from their elevated position, even through storm clouds moving in from the west. The whole world shone with optimism and opulence.

  In front of the view, behind the desk, sat a woman in her fifties, not Ant Wallace, as Clair had expected. Tall and solid, with swept-back gray hair and a thin, bladelike nose, she was wearing a conservative, tight-fitting suit that was a light shade of blue identical to that of the suits of the men outside the room. She stood up but didn’t shake their hands.

  “Catherine Lupoi?” asked Clair, remembering the name of Ant Wallace’s assistant.

  The woman shook her head. “Angela Kadri, head of security. Ant will be down in a moment. I’ve been asked to make you comfortable. Is there anything you’d like to drink, eat?”

  Clair felt a moment of dizziness that she put down to lack of sleep and a terrible awareness of how important the coming moments were. After every hardship they had endured, every mile covered, every discomfort and privation, they were about to come face-to-face with VIA’s head of operations, a man who could make the world really pay attention. If Improvement was ever to be stopped, if Libby and Q were ever to be restored, if Clair’s doubts about her mind were ever to be put to rest, he had to be convinced of its reality. If she failed, nothing would change—but everything would change for her, because all she held dear would be gone.

  “Clair, are you all right?”

  Jesse was asking her the question, but everyone was staring at her, like she was an actor who had forgotten her lines.

  “I think I need to sit down,” she said.

  “Please, feel free.” Kadri indicated the chairs scattered about the room. “There are facilities if you need them. I’ll go see what’s holding Ant up.”

  Kadri strode crisply across the room and through the double door. Clair looked around her and noticed an arched entranceway she hadn’t seen earlier. She went through it and found herself in a privacy alcove containing a fabber, a sink, and a small mirror. She looked dirty and desperate, like every other Abstainer she had ever met. Worse than that, she looked as crazy as Dylan Linwood.

  Suddenly convinced that Wallace was going to brush them off, no matter what they said to him, she leaned over the sink and splashed cold water on her face. She saw a double image of herself as she did so, one from the mirror and another via a video feed someone was posting. They had hacked her lenses somehow, so she was seeing what she was seeing twice over.

  She turned to see Jesse watching her.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Yes, honest. And that’s me talking, in case you’re wondering.” This kind of anxiety could only come from herself.

  He half smiled. “I can tell.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m shitting myself,” he said. “I wish Dad were here. He’d do a much better job of explaining things than I would. Not that you won’t, I mean,” he added. “You’ll be great.”

  “What about after?” she said, meaning What will you be going home to? What’s left out there for you?

  He looked away. “I’m not thinking that far ahead.”

  “You could go to Melbourne to live with your mom’s family.”

  “I don’t want to do that. I don’t know them, and it would mean changing schools.”

  “You could do that.”

  “But I don’t want to,” he said, with a flash of his old prickliness. “Are you trying to get rid of me?”

  “No,” she said. “That’s not what I want,” she said, only realizing the truth of it as she said it.

  “Good, because . . . well, to hell with it.” He paced around the tiny space, looking at her and then looking away, over and over, as though making sure she wasn’t about to vanish into thin air. “I know this
isn’t the right time, and I know you had that thing with Zep, but we’ve been holding hands, and we kissed once, and then you kinda threw yourself at me downstairs—not like that,” he amended, “but it happened, and it must mean something when a girl tries to save your life. Right?”

  “Jesse—”

  “Don’t get me wrong. I know I’m not your type. Girls like you don’t date Abstainers. So we’re doomed from the start, but I have to—”

  “Jesse, listen to me.”

  “Wait, Clair. I’ve been rehearsing this in my head ever since Brooklyn, and this might be the last chance I have to say it, so I need to get it out. I’ve had a thing for you for years, and then Improvement brought us together, but now it’s going to be fixed, and I’m worried that everything will go back to normal, and you—”

  “Jesse.”

  She put a hand over his mouth.

  “Someone hacked my lenses. The whole world is seeing this. Hearing it too, probably.”

  He swiveled slowly to face her.

  “Oh . . . that’s . . . great.”

  Before he could say or do anything else, a piercing wail split the air.

  [69]

  * * *

  CLAIR PUT HER hands over her ears and stared up at the ceiling. The blast of sound was so loud, it seemed to be coming from inside her head.

  “What is that?”

  “Sounds like a fire alarm,” Jesse shouted close to her ear. She could barely hear him.

  They ran into the office and found Ray tugging bodily at the doors.

  “We’re locked in!”

  Jesse lent his weight to the effort while Clair checked her infield.

  There was a message patch from Angela Kadri. Clair winked on it immediately.

  “What’s going on? Why are the doors locked?”

  “It’s for your own safety,” the head of security told her. “The building’s under attack.”

  Clair went cold. The submarine. Turner.

  Ending the exchange with Kadri, she called Q.