Thankfully, everyone else continued to leave them alone. Apart from an obligatory sneer from Sandler Jones as he left, there were no incidents. When she was done, Clair got up to take the plates to the sink, where Sargent helped her wash and dry.
Midway through, Sargent slipped and dropped a plate, which shattered into several large fragments on the floor. Clair wondered how hard it would be to replace, given the lack of fabbers.
“Sorry,” said Sargent as they paused to sweep up the mess. “I don’t know why I’m so clumsy.”
“We’re all tired,” Clair said.
“Out of sorts, my mother would say. And then Dad would say, ‘Out of sorts and out of the blue,’ and then he’d insist on telling the story of how they met for the thousandth time. It drives . . . it drove Billie mad.”
The pieces went in the garbage. Sargent’s missing girlfriend was one data point against Sargent being a dupe or a traitor, Clair thought. If Billie had been killed by d-mat, wasn’t it more likely that Sargent would be working to stop d-mat, not help those abusing it? Forest, too, since his face had been damaged in transit . . . ?
Clair shook her head. She was getting tangled up in her own paranoid theories now. It made sense to play her cards close to her chest, but that didn’t mean she had to drive herself insane, looking for jokers.
“Does your mother have stories like that?” Sargent asked Clair as they returned to their chores.
“I’m trying not to think about her,” Clair said, although she knew she wasn’t doing a very good job of it. “Not until I can do something to help her. I want to know that she’s okay, but . . . not if she’s not okay. Not yet. Does that make sense? I’ve had enough bad news for one week.”
Prompted by the question, Zep and Libby came to mind, and Clair realized only then that she had stopped thinking about her missing friends as people. She didn’t clearly remember their faces, or their voices, or anything they had done together. They had become holes in her life where real people had once been. Absences rather than presences. She didn’t know when she had started concentrating on Tash and Ronnie and her mother—real people who she could still save—but it depressed her that she had. She couldn’t give up on saving her loved ones, not yet. There always had to be hope.
“What about Q?” Sargent asked. “Are you trying not to think about her, too?”
“No. Things would be so much easier if she was here, but what can I do? If RADICAL and the PKs can’t find her, I don’t even know where to start.”
Except for with the source of the dupes, she thought. That was something she had mentioned to no one but Agnessa, because it promised an unhappy outcome either way. Q either wasn’t with the dupes and therefore remained lost, or she was, which meant she was never going to come around.
“Is that all she was to you,” Sargent asked, “someone to help you?”
“No. She was a good person, like Billie. She didn’t deserve what happened to her. I wish I could say how sorry I am about that.”
“Q was six days old when her only friend in the whole world betrayed her. When you think about it that way, ‘sorry’ might not cover it.”
Clair wondered if Sargent was trying to make her feel bad.
“What do you want me to do about it?”
“Perhaps you need to convince her, Clair. Prove to her that you’re worthy.”
“How am I supposed to do that when she won’t talk to me? How do we even know she’s still out there?”
“She has to be. Otherwise how are we ever going to fix d-mat?”
Clair didn’t know how to answer that question. Sargent’s anxiety was very real and understandable, but that didn’t change anything for anyone, particularly Clair. Why was it always up to her to fix things? Couldn’t someone else do it for a change?
But she was the finisher. That was what Zep had called her. Or was she just Libby’s finisher? It was all a blur now. And Libby was gone, and so was Q, and Billie, and thousands of others, and doing the dishes was taking forever.
The last was her own fault, though. Clair insisted on doing any dishes that came her way, including some they hadn’t created in the course of their meal, and certain Abstainers were fully willing to take advantage of her offer. When she was finally done, her hands were pink and wrinkled. She wished she could fab some hand cream and a manicure kit, and then she chided herself again for being superficial.
“Back to waiting for the mob to come and put the monsters to the flame,” said Sargent, wiping her hands on a towel and stepping into the night.
[53]
* * *
THE OTHERS WERE outside. Jesse fell in beside Clair and she took his hand, pleasantly warm against the chilly air, as they walked back to the dormitory.
“Want to join me?” he asked. “I’m tired of sitting on my own.”
“Sure,” she said, glad that he had asked.
“Just don’t let me sleep through again. I don’t feel like I’m pulling my weight.”
“You’re working as hard as me.”
“Maybe. Do you think that’ll be enough? The two of us against the world?”
She didn’t want to think about the possibility that it wouldn’t be. What else did they have to work with? She couldn’t afford to trust the PKs. WHOLE and RADICAL had their own agendas. It was up to her to put everything together as best she could, because she was in the right place at the right time—or the wrong place at the wrong time, depending on how she looked at it.
Slow and steady wins the race, she told herself, imagining her mother’s voice. Trust your instincts. Never give up. Use the Force, Luke.
In Jesse’s room, she closed her eyes and lay down next to him as he wrestled with his augs, together but in their separate mental worlds. She told herself to enjoy their physical closeness while it lasted, but there was so much data to sort through that she found it hard to concentrate on anything else. Information pressed in on her, even as she tried to focus on his body beside her and the sound of his breathing in her ear.
Facts and names stubbornly refused to gel, and her thoughts kept drifting back to Sargent’s questions about Q. It surprised her that anyone other than her was still holding out hope of finding Q. The worst-case scenario remained that Q had switched herself completely off to erase the slightest trace of her existence. Was that the same thing as committing suicide? Clair wondered. Or was it a kind of dreamless sleep? If Q had arranged a timer to switch herself back on, was that reactivation or just waking up?
Clair’s thoughts drifted further. She wondered what it was like to be a dupe, jumping from body to body, losing chunks of her life as versions of her died unupdated. Did dupes ever get holidays as their original selves? Did they ever find that their minds didn’t fit when they tried to go back? Maybe that was what had happened to Nobody. It would drive her crazy, being locked out of her own body.
Nobody. No-body . . .
An image came to her in a flash, horrific in its intensity: of being trapped under a mound of dead and dying dupes, just as she had been on the seastead, only this time they were her own dupes, smothering her in her own flesh, drowning her in her own blood.
Her heart hammered, and any chance of sleep vanished. The idea of duping and Improvement, of taking out someone’s mind and putting another in, felt just as horrific as it had the first time she had seen it in effect, in Copperopolis, when Q had temporarily taken over Libby’s body. It shocked her to the core, as she was sure it shocked most people. Anyone who signed up to be a dupe for a living didn’t deserve her sympathy.
There was something about that fear, though, something important. . . .
A sharp crack in the still night brought her out of her thoughts.
Her first thought was that the dorm was under attack.
“What’s going on?” she bumped Sargent.
“Sounded like a sniper rifle, from inside the muster.”
“Perhaps you should get under cover.”
“Stay where you are and I’ll see wh
at’s going on.”
Before Clair could call Agnessa, a video patch from the WHOLE leader appeared in her infield with a note: “You’ll want to see this.” Clair opened it.
The short video showed one of the roadblocks protecting the muster from the world beyond. A woman stood on the outside, dressed in a heavy overcoat and thermal leggings. Her head was covered but her face exposed. A thin wind whining through the empty suburbs very nearly whipped her words away.
“I come in peace to parley with Agnessa Adaksin,” she said.
Jesse surged upright next to Clair, nearly throwing her into the wall.
“Mom?”
Clair gaped at him, then back at the footage of the woman at the barricade. There was just enough of her face visible to guess that there might be a resemblance—but how was that possible? Jesse’s mom had died years ago—hadn’t she? She couldn’t be here. It had to be a trick.
“Who are you?” asked a guard offscreen.
“I represent the hollow men.”
“What do you want?”
“To talk.”
“About what?”
“About a trade. We offer amnesty in exchange for the girl, Clair Hill.”
“They can’t be serious,” Clair said. Jesse said nothing, but he was breathing hard.
“We don’t negotiate with murderers,” said the guard. “Or zombies.”
There was a gunshot, the same gunshot they had heard earlier.
“No!”
The woman fell to the ground, limbs splayed out and lifeless. The recording ended there.
Clair gripped Jesse’s arm before he could rage out into the night.
“Don’t,” she said, pressing both hands against his chest. She could feel his muscles straining. “You can’t.”
“They shot her. They killed her.”
“But it wasn’t her. You know that.”
“How can we be sure?”
“Because she said was one of the hollow people. And she hadn’t aged, had she? She was copied from an old pattern, from the last time she used d-mat. The first time she died. This couldn’t have been her, Jesse. The dupes are trying to trick us, just like Wallace tricked your father. Don’t you see?”
His face was contorted with grief. Tears poured down his cheeks. He looked ten years younger.
“How did Wallace trick Dad?”
That had distracted him, as she had hoped. “He didn’t, really, but he tried. Do you remember when we saw your dad in the station? He said something about letting ‘them’ bring your mother back. Who else could ‘they’ have been but the dupes? They must’ve had her pattern all this time. They tried to use her against your dad, perhaps as a kind of bribe, but he wouldn’t bite.” Clair held Jesse tightly by both shoulders, trying to keep him looking at her. “What happened just then . . . It doesn’t change anything. She was dead and she’s still dead now. Do you understand?”
She forced herself to add, “Like Zep.”
He nodded and folded into her, pressing his face into her neck. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.”
She felt wretched for Jesse and emotionally exhausted on her own account. Somehow the dupes always found new ways to ratchet up their attack.
“I’m going to kill him,” Jesse said. “I’m going to kill him.”
She could feel him shaking. “Easier said than done. I tried, remember? But we’re going to do it. Once and for all.”
He sagged. She held him tightly, even as her mind worked. The PK patch in her lenses didn’t show any dupes walking boldly up to the barricades, but that could have been because there weren’t any drones in the area to see them. How long until they were swarming through? How long until Nobody returned in force? She dreaded the thought of going on the run again, but she had to be ready, just in case they had no choice.
Jesse pulled away so he was sitting on the bed, not quite facing away from her, looking down at his hands. They hung limply on his knees like empty gloves.
“I can’t do it.”
[54]
* * *
THINKING HE WAS talking about Wallace, she said, “Then I will, or someone else will. Either way—”
“That’s not what I mean. Everything is wrong. Mom, Dad, your dupe—all the dupes, Improvement, resurrection . . . even you.”
“I’m not wrong,” she said defensively. “How am I wrong?”
“The station,” he said, and her heart lurched. They had never talked about this, not once, and she had thought he either didn’t know or didn’t care. “What happened to you up there . . . It’s hard not to think about it. You died, Clair. You shouldn’t be here. But I want you to be here. And I know you’re really you. Everything about you tells me you’re you, but still . . .” His head hung down even further, until it was practically touching his knees. “It’s just all so broken.”
Clair felt like she might throw up. Every moment they had been together, every time they had kissed, had he been wondering if she was real? When he looked at her, did he see the girl he had known from school or the girl who had died with Turner Goldsmith? Was he thinking of the dead Clair even now, wishing he could be with her instead?
She desperately tried to think of something to say that would undo the damage she was doing simply by existing.
“We’re going to fix it. We just have to keep trying.”
“When you say ‘fix it,’ you mean d-mat.”
She couldn’t lie. “Yes.”
“But d-mat did all this. Don’t you see that?”
She reached out a hand to touch his shoulder, but he shrugged away. Now all she could see was his back.
“Are lenses wrong?” she asked. “Is the Air?”
“I know what you’re trying to do,” he said. “You’re trying to tell me that d-mat isn’t the problem—it’s the people who abuse it. Maybe that’s true, but without it, there couldn’t be any abuse at all. I want to live in a world like that.”
“Never going to happen.”
“It might. We’re most of the way there now. If people really think about what’s happened, they can be convinced that it’d be a mistake to bring it back. I’m sure of it.”
“And the fabbers? Are you going to switch them off too?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“How does making people starve solve anything?”
“How does d-mat? It takes people apart, Clair. It’ll always be abused. There’s no way around it. It’s evil. It has to be stopped.”
Clair gathered herself together, sitting with her back in the corner and pulling her legs up so her thighs pressed against her chest.
“I don’t think it’s evil.”
“I know,” he said. “That’s the problem.”
“Do you think I’m evil?”
“What I think and what I feel aren’t the same. They’re the exact opposite, in fact, and I don’t know how to bring them into line. Part of me says that everything is wrong. The rest knows it’s right. So right. How do I reconcile them, Clair? How can I love you and hate everything you stand for at the same time? Can you tell me that?”
Love.
Hate.
Clair put her chin on her knees and blinked away the full feeling in her eyes. She didn’t know what to say in response. I love you too? I hate what you stand for too? She didn’t know if he was breaking up with her or telling her . . . what?
“Your parents were the same as us,” she said. Her voice sounded like it was coming from a thousand miles away. She was amazed it worked at all. “They disagreed about d-mat.”
“And look what happened to them.” He turned to face her then, and she was shocked to see that he was crying. “Dad’s a monster. Mom died in a d-mat accident and turned up here ten years later with someone else inside her, and then I had to watch her die. Do you know how many times I’ve dreamed that she’d come back? That someone would find her pattern in a server somewhere, just as she used to be, and return her to us? Turns out that wasn’t such a stupi
d dream after all . . . but I was stupid for thinking it would be a happy ending. She’s dead and gone, and she’s never coming back.”
Clair remembered getting angry at him in Valkyrie Station for insisting that the people they had lost were dead. Maybe he had been weakening himself, she thought, on more than just the d-mat front. Who wouldn’t want their father or mother back? Clair certainly did.
“I don’t want to argue about this,” she said, feeling utterly miserable. She couldn’t help the way she was. But maybe he couldn’t help the way he felt either.
“Neither do I. But we always will.”
She thought he was about to leave, but instead, confusingly, he came closer and took her face in his hands. He had stopped crying, but his cheeks were still wet.
She pulled herself to him, and they kissed, and then she was crying, and she really didn’t know what to feel.
“Don’t decide yet,” she said.
“I have decided. I’m an Abstainer and I always will be.”
“Don’t go, then. Stay here with me.”
“What’s the point? We both know how it’s going to end.”
“I need you. I can’t do this on my own.”
“Yes, you can. This is what you’re good at. I’m just trailing along behind you, pretending to be someone I’m not.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why not? It’s true.”
“It doesn’t have to be like this.”
“How, Clair? How?”
She didn’t know, so she kissed him again. He kissed her back, so she knew she wasn’t the only one finding it impossible to let go. Just because he wanted to be an Abstainer didn’t mean they couldn’t be together, did it? But what if he decided to join WHOLE and actually attacked d-mat? Could she sit by and let him do that? Did she have the right to stop him?
Improvement had brought them together, but it might just as easily tear them apart. She could see how it would play out, just like he could. Jesse would become an anti-d-mat celebrity while she remained Clair Hill, the girl who broke the world. And when d-mat started working again, Abstainers would turn on her for disagreeing with Jesse, while her friends would doubt her even more for wanting to be with him. They would never agree and it would never work out, and maybe it would be better for everyone to give up now and be done with it.
Crashland Page 27
