That was a giddying thought.
“Would it be safe?”
“I don’t know,” said Q. “I guess it would be no different from being in the Air.”
“Is that supposed to reassure me?”
“It’s not that bad. I was born in the Air, Clair.”
“Still, I don’t know. . . .”
What was the phrase Devin had used long ago—“data ghosts”?
Q smiled without humor. “‘He ne’er is crowned with immortality,’” she said, “‘who fears to follow where airy voices lead.’”
Clair couldn’t place the source, but she knew who Q was quoting. Keats again, just like when they’d started. And the message was plain.
She would almost certainly die if she didn’t do what Q said. The cascade would get her, or angry survivors, or starvation, or disease. By escaping into the Yard she would probably have to forget about ever being an Abstainer, but at least she would be. There would be hope.
Her mother was in there, Q had said. And Jesse. Maybe Devin, Trevin, and Forest too—and who knew how many people wiped off the face of the Earth in the last few minutes? If they had used d-mat, anything was possible.
The terrible irony was not lost on her that this place, the last place on Earth that could possibly give her shelter, was the very same place she had been trying to destroy a short time ago.
“All right,” she told Q, unashamed of the faint tremor she couldn’t disguise. “Do your best and let’s see what happens.”
“Okay. We will.” Q grinned, and Clair wondered if Sargent was grinning with her. It certainly seemed so.
The booth opened. It was big and wide enough to hold Agnessa’s bed. Clair saw her image reflected in the back wall mirror and barely recognized herself. She was so thin and fierce-eyed. What had happened to the girl she remembered?
She had survived, she guessed. She had gone from Clair 1.0 to Clair 2.0 and so on through the numbers to end up here, about to be scanned into data and fed into a server at the bottom of the deepest pit on Earth, where her worst enemy maintained a secret stash of stolen patterns, including all manner of dangerous dupes. What could possibly go wrong with that plan?
Q’s grin fell away. She stepped inside and turned to face back into the room. Clair did the same next to her.
“Thank you for helping us,” Clair told Nelly, who remained stoically outside.
Nelly nodded. “Common courtesy.”
The door closed.
sssssss—
A familiar sound and a familiar ache in her ears. As the booth worked around her, Clair wished she was about to step out into a familiar world, restored exactly as it had been. But everything familiar was gone now, literally. When the blue dawn had finished its work, everything that had been d-matted or fabbed would be left as dust. What lay ahead no one could guess—except maybe Q. She was the smartest mind on the planet, and growing, but had a long way to go before she stopped making stupid mistakes. She stood silently beside Clair, as immobile as a statue, as expressionless as Forest. Clair wondered if that meant she was worried.
“I’m glad you’re back,” Clair told her.
Q said, “Me too.”
[71]
* * *
—pop
The booth doors opened. All Clair saw outside was Nelly and Agnessa. They were in the private ward exactly as they had been before, except that Nelly looked startled.
“Did something go wrong?”
“We didn’t go anywhere,” Q explained. “It was a null jump, simply to take our current patterns.”
Clair leaned against the back of the booth. “What does that mean?”
“Our patterns are going to the Yard exactly as you wanted, Clair.” Q looked pleased with herself, but not in a way that offered Clair any reassurance. “They’ll be safe there.”
“But what about us?”
“You and I are going to stay here and face the consequences of our actions.”
Clair’s knees felt watery. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I think you do.” Q held out her hand. “Come with me.”
A primitive part of Clair instinctively recoiled. There was nowhere else to go except outside, and Clair didn’t want to go there—to do that again—not after everything she had done to avoid it. Couldn’t she stay right where she was, in case the other Clair didn’t survive the Yard? Didn’t it make sense to keep a backup of her, just in case?
But that was cowardice speaking, and she had never been ruled by cowardice before. Not in Wallace’s station, and she wouldn’t be ruled by it now, particularly when she was supposed to be an Abstainer. For Jesse, if nothing else.
Besides, who wanted to be a backup?
Clair straightened, took Q’s hand, and nodded. Nelly didn’t intervene. She probably approved, Clair thought.
This time it wasn’t sacrifice. It was justice, and a way of publicly making amends.
They stopped at the double doors. A faint sizzling came from the other side.
“Ready?” asked Q in her most grown-up voice of all.
Clair nodded. Her throat was too full to allow her to speak.
Good-bye, Jesse. Good-bye, Mom. Good-bye . . . me.
Together they stepped out to greet the blue dawn.
[71 redux]
* * *
—pop
Sargent stumbled and steadied herself against the mirrored doors with both hands.
“Where’d she go?” she said.
“Who? Nelly?”
“No, the girl . . . in my head.”
Clair looked at Sargent closely. The green eyes were the same, but someone else was staring back at her. One person only, triggering a sharp spike of panic.
“Q? Where are you? Can you hear me?”
Had Q tricked her and escaped again?
“I’m right here,” Q bumped them both, coming through on the crest of a wave of new information that filled their lenses with colors and movement, like a fairground in fast motion. “We made it . . . even if we did get a little split up along the way. The shell I created seems to be interfering with something else in here. Everyone’s pattern has defaulted to the original—including mine.”
The details didn’t matter. They were inside the Yard, alive, and Karin Sargent was free. Something had gone right for a change.
But what was the Yard like? Why were the doors to the booth still closed? Was there anything out there at all, or just a terrible, empty void?
The information flooding through her lenses suggested otherwise. There were maps of a world that looked just like the one she knew. There were pictures of places and people plucked from myriad profiles. Bumps poured in—but not like the torrent of panicked communications she had left behind. These were cheerful, excited, normal.
It was as though everything that had happened in the previous week had rewound and everyone had gone back the way they were. The way they should but couldn’t possibly be.
“Xandra Nantakarn is so jazzy,” said Tash over an open chat.
“Did you hear she has a private booth big enough for thirty people?” Ronnie replied.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” said Zep.
“This is going to be the best crashlander ball ever!”
Clair felt a hitch in her throat. That last had come from Libby. Was this live or another recording? Were the dupes enacting another cruel play for her, with some new twist?
“What’s going on?” asked Sargent.
“There have been some unintended complications,” said Q. “The patterns stored in the Yard have been activated. I’m still trying to work out what that means.”
“Clair’s missing,” said Libby. “Tash, Ronnie—has anyone seen her?”
Clair opened her mouth to say I’m here when another voice came over the chat.
“Keep your hair on. I’m coming as fast as I can.”
Sargent turned to look at her, her expression one of utter puzzlement.
“That was you,”
Sargent said.
“Impossible,” said Clair. “She must be a dupe.”
“There are no dupes here,” said Q. “It appears that even they have defaulted to their originals.”
Clair stared in shock at her reflection in the booth’s interior doors.
“But that means . . .”
“Yes, Clair,” said Q as, with a hiss, the door of the booth slid open. “Both of you are real.”
[Author’s Note]
* * *
This book is dedicated to my wife, Amanda, who doesn’t like me to be too gushy.
Huge thanks to Kristin Rens and everyone at Balzer + Bray for a thousand and one reasons. To Jill Grinberg, Cheryl Pientka, Katelyn Detweiler, Kirsten Wolf, and Ant Harwood. To Jo Hardacre, Eva Mills, Stella Paskins, Hilary Reynolds, Sophie Splatt, Lara Wallace, and everyone at Egmont UK and Allen & Unwin. To Sarah Shumway. To Garth Nix. To James Bradley, Alison Goodman, Alaya Dawn Johnson, and Scott Westerfeld. To Anne Hoppe. To John Joseph Adams, Jason Fischer, David Levithan, and Steven Gould. To Sputnik and Morgan Martin-Skerm. To Linda Shaw and Jon Reding. To Nick Linke and Robin Potanin. To Kate Eltham and Judy Downs. To Val and Lee for all the names. To Rachel Yeaman for the sandwich. To Patrick Allington, Brian Castro, Jan Harrow, Sue Hosking, Nicholas Jose, and Ros Prosser. To the real Catherine Lupoi and the Cora Barclay Center (“Teaching Deaf Kids to Speak”). To the real Devin and Trevin for being so patient. To everyone on the SF Novelists list for their support and advice. To Sean E. Williams and Deb Biancotti also for being so patient. To the quoted, misquoted, and paraphrased: T. S. Eliot, Nathan Hale, John Keats, Graham Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, Frank Loesser, Michael Wilson, and the anonymous author of “I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail.” Finally, to Caroline Grose for taking me on one of those extraordinary journeys that would be entirely ruined by leaping straight to the destination. Getting there is at least half the fun.
About the Author
Photo by Scott Westerfeld
SEAN WILLIAMS is a #1 New York Times bestselling author of several novels for adults as well as the coauthor of the middle grade series Troubletwisters with Garth Nix. As a resident of South Australia—which he reports is a lovely place a long way away from the rest of the world—Sean has often dreamed of stepping into a booth and being somewhere else, instantly. This has led to a fascination with the social, psychological, and moral implications of such technology. When not pondering such weighty matters, Sean can generally be found eating chocolate (actually, he eats chocolate when pondering these matters, too). Visit Sean on the web at www.seanwilliams.com.
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Praise for Twinmaker:
“A sprawling and complex tale, built on an impressively well-constructed premise and held together with intrigue and tension.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“A mind-blowing adventure about what it means to be human, and what it means to find ourselves.”
—SCOTT WESTERFELD, author of Uglies and Leviathan
“A thrilling, existential head trip worthy of my favorite anime. I couldn’t stop reading this book. More importantly, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”
—ALAYA DAWN JOHNSON, author of The Summer Prince
Books by Sean Williams
Twinmaker
Credits
Cover art © 2014 by Howard Huang
Cover design by Erin Fitzsimmons
Copyright
Balzer + Bray is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
CRASHLAND
Copyright © 2014 by Sean Williams
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Williams, Sean, date.
Crashland : a Twinmaker novel / Sean Williams. — First edition.
pages cm
Summary: “In this sequel to Twinmaker, the world’s teleportation network has crashed, armies of dupes are attacking—and Clair must determine her allegiances, figure out how to find her mysterious online friend called Q, and stay alive”— Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-0-06-220324-3 (trade bdg.)
EPub Edition © September 2014 ISBN 9780062203267
[1. Science fiction. 2. Space and time—Fiction. 3. Cloning—Fiction. 4. Friendship—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.W6681739Cr 2014
[Fic]—dc23
2014002147
CIP
AC
14 15 16 17 18 CG/RRDH 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FIRST EDITION
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