Crashland

by Sean Williams

  “So you can be reasonably sure Wallace never touched it.” Devin nodded knowingly.

  “Exactly,” said Sargent. “It’s not as extensive or as fast as anything VIA had, or as reliable, and it’s already running well above its usual carrying capacity, so don’t expect any miracles.”

  “‘Needs must when the devil drives,’” Forest said. “This is the first stop of two, intended to throw off anyone who might be watching. We will be here for a minute or so until the next transit window opens. You will be reconnected to the Air at the other end, but all geographical data will be scrambled. The safe operation of Net One is something we are keeping secret for now. The barracks is in Crystal City, not far from the center of Washington, and sudden jumps in location would be a giveaway.”

  In Washington, Clair promised herself, she would renew her efforts to find Q. If she could help bring d-mat back to everyone, maybe that would restore the world’s faith in her.

  Jesse suddenly pounded the arms of his chair.

  “Don’t you people ever ask? Fuck!”

  Everyone stared at him, and he retreated back into the seat a little.

  “I’m sorry, but not everyone thinks this a good thing. Maybe taking d-mat offline for a while is a positive step, giving people time to think about what it really means, how it’s being used, without taking it for granted like they usually do. . . .”

  He sounded like his father—a heretic in the church of d-mat—and for a second Jesse even looked like him. There was a defiant jut to his jaw, and a fire in his eyes that Clair had never seen before. She stared awkwardly elsewhere, not wanting to look at him like the others did. They clearly thought he was crazy for having objections to something they all thought was normal.

  There was one other person who wasn’t watching him, though, and that was PK Sargent. She was staring at Clair with an intense expression, as though she had just realized something important. Clair was about to ask what it was when her dupe broke the awkward silence.

  “Charlie says hello,” she said, kicking backward with both feet against the floor and sending her chair rolling headlong toward Clair. She ducked under PK Drader’s widespread arms and kicked again, accelerating.

  Clair barely had time to raise her hands when she and the dupe collided, spilling them both onto the floor. She landed on her bad elbow and hissed in pain. Clutching her arm to her chest, she tried to roll away from the dupe, but how could she possibly outrun herself? The chain of the cuffs caught Clair around the neck and for an instant she was being strangled.

  Booted feet surrounded them. Drader and Forest pulled the dupe up and away from Clair, one on each arm. Clair wrenched free and scrabbled backward across the floor, clutching her throat. The dupe’s face was like nothing she had ever seen—her own features twisted in a snarl that looked barely human. Clair couldn’t tell if the dupe was angry or in pain. The sound she made was incoherent, a forceful groan through grinding teeth.

  Then, with a loud bang, the front of the dupe’s orange jumpsuit exploded.

  Someone screamed. People scattered to all corners of the booth. Clair was hit on the side of her face by something hot and wet, and the air was suddenly full of stinking yellow smoke, through which it was hard to make out anything or anyone. She reached out for something to hang on to, then found Jesse. He was on his feet already and helped her to hers, blinking and gaping with shock.

  The dupe lay flat on her back in the center of the booth with one arm bent awkwardly underneath her. The midriff of her jumpsuit was a gaping hole, and judging by what Clair could barely glance at, so was the midriff of the dupe.

  “Did someone shoot her?” Jesse said over the sound of coughing. “It looks like she blew up.”

  Clair cautiously approached the body, covering her mouth with one hand. A tiny voice whispered in her ears, a voice saying words she couldn’t quite make out. She tilted her head and blocked her ear with one finger. It seemed to be coming from her augs. Something about didn’t see that coming.

  Was it issuing from the body?

  The corpse twitched, and Clair jumped backward, bumping into Devin. Blood dripped from his hair.

  “She did blow up,” he said. “Can’t have been a real bomb or the shadow road would’ve picked it up. Chemical and fat stores, probably, triggered by the body’s natural electricity. Didn’t know dupes could do that.”

  Clair stared at him in disbelief. He sounded fascinated. That was almost as horrible as what lay on the floor in front of her.

  Around them, the other occupants of the booth were regaining their feet. Incredibly no one was hurt. Covered in gore, and Tilly/Xia had thrown up, but not actually hurt.

  “Didn’t someone once say the dupes were booby-trapped?” Jesse wiped his hands on his jumpsuit, succeeding only in smearing blood everywhere. “Guess that’s one way of getting rid of the evidence.”

  “There are no secrets anymore,” said Devin. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  Clair felt sick to the core at the sight of her own dead body, but she couldn’t look away. It was almost too horrible. The dupe’s face was locked in a terrible grimace that looked pained the longer Clair stared at it.

  “She went for me,” Clair said. “She tried to hurt me, maybe kill me.”

  “Again, why not earlier?” asked Devin, scratching his head and looking even paler than usual when his fingers came away red. “Unless something triggered the booby trap, and she decided to use it to her advantage. But what was the trigger . . . ?”

  Shock and awe. Never gets old, just keeps changing faces. . . .

  “Can anybody else hear that?” asked Clair. The whispering was still there, one voice talking in a constant stream at the edge of her hearing, the words just beyond understanding.

  The dupe’s body twitched again, making everyone jump backward. Devin returned to his corner, well away from the corpse.

  A droplet of sweat trickled down Clair’s back between the orange fabric of her prison jumpsuit and her skin.

  “This is vile,” said Jesse. “Can’t we just get out of here?”

  “There is nowhere to go except by Net One,” said PK Forest, his blank expression seeming even more out of place in the context of such chaos. “We are in a relay station one mile underground. We will be on our way any second now, though, straight to Crystal City this time. We have priority, under the circumstances.”

  “No,” said Sargent, speaking for the first time since they had left New York. “Wait, we shouldn’t—”

  chug

  The room quaked again.

  chug

  Sargent put herself in front of Clair as the dupe made a sound that could have been a cough and then exploded a second time.

  Clair screamed in a mixture of anger and horror. There was more blood, more smoke, and if possible she felt even more of a shock that such a thing could possibly keep happening to her own body. Several sharp pinpricks pierced her exposed skin, and she heard cries of pain as well as fright from her fellow travelers.

  “What the hell?” PK Drader cried out.

  “Secondary detonation,” Sargent said, pressing Clair as far from the body as she could. “Common terror tactic. Triggered by d-mat, I think.”

  Clair peered past her, even though she didn’t really want to see. The body was now on its side, and this time it had burst open down its chest and face, putting splintered ribs and skull on display. Clair glanced hastily down at her jumpsuit and saw a tiny thornlike protrusion sticking out of the orange fabric. Bone, she realized with disgust. She hastily brushed it off, grateful to Sargent for protecting her from the worst of it. All around her, people were making sounds of discomfort as they removed the ghastly splinters. Tilly/Xia retched again.

  “Your eye, PK Sargent,” Devin called out from his corner. “You might want to do something about that.”

  Sargent touched her face in puzzlement, and Clair saw a bone fragment sticking out of Sargent’s tear duct like a malignant eyelash.

  “Doesn’t t
hat hurt?” asked Jesse.

  Sargent just stared at him. Shock, Clair thought. She had been all business before; maybe it was catching up with her now. Clair sympathized.

  “Here, let me,” Clair said, tugging Sargent’s shoulder gently downward. “You’re no good to anyone half-blind.”

  Sargent resisted for an instant, then gave in. She looked up and away as Clair opened the lids of the injured eye with one hand and with the other reached for the splinter.

  “I’ll try to be gentle.” That was what her mother would have told her.

  Sargent didn’t even wince when the splinter came out.

  “There.”

  “Thank you,” said Sargent stiffly. She blinked and a single red tear trickled down her cheek.

  “How did you know that the shadow road was going to make it explode again?” Clair asked her, carefully not thinking of the dupe as her anymore.

  “It made sense. Any unexpected transit would mean the living dupe had been discovered, triggering the explosive response. I should have thought of it sooner.”

  “That explains why Libby’s body didn’t blow up in the train or submarine,” said Jesse, flicking away the last of his bony splinters. His jumpsuit looked like he had been wrestling with a cactus. “I wondered about that.”

  “The second blast did more than frighten,” said Devin. Everyone else was hugging the walls, staying as far from the body as possible in case it blew up a third time. He alone approached it, extending the toe of one delicate shoe and shifting the body slightly. The floor beneath the dead dupe was a bloody mess. Through the hole where carpet had been Clair saw a cracked mirror surface. The booth was damaged.

  “If this had happened before the last jump,” Devin said, echoing Clair’s own worried thought, “and you had stopped us jumping, PK Sargent, we could’ve been stuck a mile underground.”

  Sargent’s ears turned a shocked red. “I didn’t know. I was afraid of what a second jump would trigger.”

  “Not an unreasonable fear,” said PK Forest. Flick. The doors were opening. “Of no consequence now. We have arrived.”

  Through the door came a peacekeeper dressed in body armor, followed by the sound of alarms.

  [7]

  * * *

  “I THOUGHT YOU said these barracks were secure,” said Jesse to PK Drader.

  Drader was a solidly built man of average height, with crooked shoulders, one higher than the other, a round face, and slightly protruding ears. His chin was dark with stubble and his uniform had seen better days. Under the fresh blood spatter there were smears of building dust and soot from the action in New York.

  “They were supposed to be secure,” he said with a questioning look at the PK who’d just come in.

  “We came under guerrilla attack on our northern fence line the moment your patterns were processed,” explained the PK. “We’ve identified six known dupes and spotted another three unknowns. Crystal City is on full lockdown.” She saw the mess in the center of the room. “Shit. This is one of only three operational cages. Get these kids out of here and I’ll call the techs in to see if they can fix it.”

  Clair bristled at “kids,” but PK Forest was already hustling her and Jesse out of the room ahead of him. PK Sargent followed, looking around her at the blank, gray walls as though expecting to be somewhere else, with Devin tagging along behind her. Clair looked over her shoulder. The prisoners in orange suits looked pale and lost, stuck in the booth with the body and PK Drader. The peacekeeper nodded at Jesse and raised a hand in farewell. Jesse didn’t respond.

  Clair refused to feel sorry for Tilly or Xia or however she thought of herself now. So what if she had turned herself in? She shouldn’t have done what she did in the first place. Who knew what the real Tilly might have grown up to become but now wouldn’t? Unless somehow Clair could find her pattern and reactivate her, too . . .

  Was that her mission now, Clair wondered—to hunt down all the lost girls and boys and bring them back? At what point did she draw the line?

  “This way.” PK Forest hurried them along a series of corridors that looked identical to the ones in New York. Only the alarm was different, a piercing, repetitive siren that made her want to cover her ears. At least the air was fresh, a welcome change from the foulness they’d left behind.

  “Where are we going?” Clair asked, filled with the same anger that had fueled her on the station. The dupes had attacked her in a secret d-mat booth in peacekeeper HQ, and now they had come after her in Crystal City. They weren’t going to let her escape easily. Doing nothing in response was only going to get her killed. “What are we going to do?”

  She had originally planned to look for Q. Now the dupes were the bigger problem. But how was she going to stop them? She was just a sixteen-year-old girl with a sore elbow, a bruised throat, and a boy she liked but was still getting to know, a long way from anywhere familiar.

  “Someone? Anyone?” She wasn’t going to be ignored.

  “Through here,” said Forest.

  They turned left into an atrium that afforded them a glimpse of gray skies outside and passed from there into a series of changing rooms, complete with uniform fabbers down one wall. The Air returned, filling Clair’s infield with a new flood of notifications, and five fabbers started whirring industriously.

  “Shower and change,” said Sargent, indicating three cubicles in a row. “Undersuits and light body armor will be outside the curtains when you’re done.”

  Armor sounded like a step in the right direction.

  “Uh, I’m not volunteering to defend your little fort,” said Devin, trying and failing to brush the dried blood off his Nehru jacket. “I’m an observer only.”

  “You can observe all you like,” said Forest. “That was the agreement.”

  “Well, we’re not going to just sit here while someone attacks us,” said Jesse.

  Clair agreed. “Otherwise, you might as well send us home.”

  “That would never be authorized,” said Forest. “Net One is strictly limited to priority transits. You are no longer a priority now that we are out of danger.”

  “You can hear that siren, can’t you?” said Jesse, pointing at the ceiling. “I’m not imagining it?”

  “No one’s going anywhere,” said Sargent, raising her hands for calm. “Including the dupes, unfortunately. In order to stop them we need to understand them, and in order to understand them we need data. We have drones, but they can’t watch everywhere at once. That’s where you guys come in. Crystal City is short of monitors, thanks to the d-mat shutdown and lags in the Air, and we need all the eyes we can get. If we can track the dupes, we can pin them down, maybe even capture another one of them, see if we can get it to talk. Are you in?”

  “Observation I can do,” said Devin.

  “When do we start?” Clair said. The sooner she got the immediate problem of the dupes off her back, the sooner she could get back to working on the rest.

  “Showers first,” said Sargent, pointing firmly at the cubicles. “Don’t think we’re doing this just to make you smell nice. Another common terror tactic is combining chemical or biological agents with light shrapnel, to ensure the agent gets in. I’m talking about poisoned blood and bone darts. Scrub yourself completely clean and report any odd reactions around puncture wounds. We’ll be doing the same, so don’t think you’re being singled out.”

  Clair looked with new concern at the red line stretching down Sargent’s face from where the sliver of bone had stuck into her. Standing there arguing was giving those “agents” a chance to spread through the peacekeeper’s body.

  “All right.” Clair stepped into the cubicle and tugged the curtain closed behind her. She would do as she was told as long as in return she wasn’t going to be brushed off like some inconvenient kid. She had seen and done too much to be pushed to the sidelines, by the dupes or by anyone else.

  [8]

  * * *

  SHE TUGGED OFF the jumpsuit and threw it into one corner of
the stall. Then she turned on the shower, producing a powerful stream of hot water. There was soap, shampoo, and conditioner, even a pick for her hair. She used the soap thoroughly, checking every part of her for cuts or puncture wounds that might have come from the exploding dupe. Her elbow was loosening up under the patch the medic had given her, and her throat hadn’t even bruised. She felt surprisingly okay, physically, considering she had killed herself and watched her own dupe die in the last few hours.

  As she applied conditioner and worked steadfastly through the numerous tangles in her hair, she checked her infield for a message from Q. Still nothing. Using the same address, she bumped Q again, while she had the chance.

  “I feel awful about what I did, and I’m really sorry. Can you see why I had to do it? Wallace would’ve won if I hadn’t. Maybe more people died this way—I don’t know. But it’s better, isn’t it, to fix something than to leave it broken?”

  She sent the bump, too late realizing that she had inadvertently reiterated the argument behind Improvement. You can be Improved. Except having a big nose wasn’t the same thing as being broken, not by a long shot. Or living in a broken world.

  Clair’s mother, Allison, was in a PK station in Windham, their hometown. She answered practically the nanosecond Clair requested a chat.

  “You’re safe! Thank everyone and everything. Where are you? When are you coming home?”

  Clair explained as best she could, hoping the shower would cover the sound of the siren. It was difficult to admit how little she knew about current events without sounding completely irresponsible. Allison wanted to know if her plan to enlist VIA had worked and if everything was going to be all right now, but what could Clair say?

  For the moment she tried to focus on the small and personal, rather than the whole world.

  “Where’s Oz? Is he with you?”

  Allison shook her head. “He went back to the apartment to get some rest. The PKs have been deputizing volunteers in the old town hall. Everyone’s doing their best to band together, but no one really knows anyone else. He’s worried about riots if this goes on much longer.”