Twinmaker (12 page)

“You look like hell, Clarabelle,” said Zep from behind her. “And no wonder.”

She turned, wondering if he was reading her mind. “What?”

“The video. I saw all of it except for when I was in transit. Fifty people have sent me the link since then. That’s the most popular Gordon the Gorgon has ever been. You too. It’s popping in the wake of the crashlander thing.”

“Oh, great,” said Clair.

“Soon you’ll be famouser than famous—until some cat meme takes your place, anyway.” He actually looked jealous.

“Don’t. It’s not helping.” She pressed her palms hard into her temples, wishing she could squeeze out a solution. Her infield was full of bumps, distracting her.

“Do you think it’s real?” Zep asked in quieter tones. “Nine girls in six months?”

“It can’t be, can it?” said Jesse. “There’d be no missing that
kind of correlation.”

“Not if no one’s looking. . . . Hey, you’re the Stainer kid. Son of the lunatic himself.”

Zep held out his hand, and Jesse warily shook it.

“Nice entrance back there, by the way,” Zep said. “Bet you’re looking forward to going home and facing the music.”

“I’m going there now,” said Jesse. He was speaking more to Clair than Zep. “I’m really sorry it went like this.”

“It’s not over yet,” she said. “I’m going with you.”

“What?” Zep looked from Clair to Jesse and back again. “Are you crazy?”

“Maybe, and maybe he is too. But I can’t leave it here.” Fury and frustration were making her hands shake. “He’s going to talk to me properly, and I’m not leaving until he does.”

“All right,” said Jesse, looking resigned to an awkward replay of the previous night’s confrontation. “I’ll leave the bike here. We’ll walk together.”

“You don’t have to do that,” said Clair.

“Don’t worry about the bike,” he said, misunderstanding her concern. “I’ve got a spare if this is stolen. That’s the trouble with Dad’s plan to reeducate the world. He can only make so many things, which makes them valuable, which makes people copy and fab them so anyone can have their own. It’s stupid.
He’s
stupid.”

Jesse stopped himself. He had wrapped a chain through the front wheel and fastened it to a water fountain.

“Screw school,” said Zep. “I’m going too. This is for Libby, right?”

Relieved, Clair could only nod.

SHE SCANNED HER infield as they headed for the school gate. The small crowd had completely dispersed, and the drone had gone with it. There was no physical sign that anything untoward had happened at school that day. The aftershocks were all semantic, with Clair’s lenses still full of strangers bumping her, her news grabs filling up with related topics and caption updates, and nags from both of her parents. They had seen the video, like everyone else. She expected another nag the moment they noticed her leaving school.

She sent them a quick note telling them she was all right and would explain later. She said the same thing to Ronnie and Tash and deleted everything else, including the blinking call path from her string-of-
q
’s stalker. She concentrated on matching Jesse long pace for long pace as they left school and headed up Woodward. His head was down, so she couldn’t see his eyes through his hair, just his mouth and the unhappy shape it made.

“You think Dad is some kind of mad bigot,” Jesse said, “but he wasn’t always that way. Mom used d-mat, and they were married for ages before they had me. She came from Australia. Her family
still lives there, but we don’t have anything to do with them now.”

“So he used to be cool,” said Zep. “That doesn’t help us now, does it?”

“I just mean there’s a reason why he’s the way he is. One night when I was very young, there was an outage all down the west coast, as far inland as Utah. It was the tail end of a run of errors that stretched from the superconductor grid right back to a particular powersat, where some astronaut had messed up the routine maintenance a week earlier. There are safeguards against this kind of thing, of course, buffers, backups, blah-blah, but in this case they all failed. Tens of thousands of transits were interrupted. I have the exact number somewhere. The outage lasted less than a second, but that was long enough.”

“Long enough for what?” asked Zep.

“Nineteen people died that night,” Jesse said. “My mother was one of them.”

“Dude, that sucks.”

“It does,” Clair agreed, feeling a modicum of understanding, then, perhaps even sympathy for Jesse’s father. But the bulk of her feelings were for Jesse. She couldn’t begin to imagine what it would be like to lose her mother that way, literally in the blink of an eye.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“You don’t have to be sorry.” Jesse was emerging from his shell of hair as he talked, first his nose, then his eyes, which
gleamed in the afternoon light. “You just have to understand. VIA was keen to pin the blame on someone else. It was a terrorist action, they said. WHOLE, specifically. They never revealed how WHOLE had done it—for fear of copycats, they said. It didn’t change what happened, and that’s why Dad would say that d-mat can never be trusted. Because you can’t trust the people who are supposed to make it safe.

“You might think he’s nothing but an asshole,” Jesse concluded, “but Mom’s death is at the heart of everything he does. All he really wants is for everyone to be safe. He wants to protect me like he couldn’t protect her.”

“You make him sound like a saint,” said Zep.

“Oh, he’s definitely not one of those. You saw the video, right?”

Clair’s attention was tugged away by two new notifications that had appeared in her infield. One was the
q
’s again. The other was a bump from Libby.

“You just can’t help yourself, can you?” the latter said. “You just won’t leave well enough alone.”

So, thought Clair, she had seen the video too.

“I’m sorry,” Clair sent back. “I was worried.”

The return bump was almost instantaneous. “You don’t trust me.”

“I do, I swear. I tried Improvement like you told me to, but it didn’t do anything.”

“I don’t believe you. You’re jealous. You want to ruin it for
everyone, just like Dylan Linwood.”

“What if he’s right?” Clair bumped back, acknowledging the risk she was taking by even raising the possibility with Libby. “What if Improvement has hurt you somehow?”

“You’re the one who’s brain damaged. Improvement is a good thing. Why would anyone want to hurt me? Apart from you and Zep, I mean.”

“We don’t want to hurt you, I swear. We’re trying to help.”

“Who says I need your help?”

“We just want to do what’s right.”

“Too late for that.”

Clair wrote half a reply, then deleted it. She would get nowhere by responding to Libby’s barbs. Instead, she thought through everything she had learned in the previous twenty-four hours in the hope of finding another tack.

“What if someone’s hacking the system, and that’s interfering with d-mat somehow? Changing people’s patterns by accident. What harm is there in having yourself checked out, just in case? I’ll do it too. We’ll do it together when the drugs have cleared your system. You and me.”

“What happened to keeping Improvement a secret, like the note says?”

Before Clair could reply, she was blinded by a bright emergency flash, the kind she only ever saw in stories, never in real life. Only peacekeepers had the authority to override someone’s vision. She stopped momentarily, stood blinking until her lenses
cleared. When they did, a single red patch was glowing like an afterimage of the sun in the center of her vision.

qqqqq . . . qqqqq

Furious, she hurried to catch up with Zep and Jesse and took the call.

“That flash was you, wasn’t it?” she said, mouthing the words so she wouldn’t interrupt Jesse’s story. “How the hell did you hack my lenses?”

“That is what I’m good at,” said the eerily childlike voice. “There is nothing I can’t get into. Nothing I have come across yet, anyway.”

“Why won’t you leave me alone?”

“I just want to clarify the connection between you and Dylan Linwood. This is something else I don’t understand.”

“He’s nothing to me. A pain in the neck. I thought he might help
me
understand something, but he’s only made everything worse.”

“He broadcast you against your will,” the voice said. “Is that correct?”

“Of course it is. Why are you so interested?”

“I could help you, if you wanted.”

“Like you helped Libby? No thanks. I want you to leave me alone.”

“But—”

“I mean it. If you’re not going to tell me what’s going on, stay
away from me and stay away from my friends.”

There was another empty silence, until finally the voice said, in a tone that was almost reproachful, “‘Beauty is a terrible and awful thing where boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side.’”

Another quote, one Clair recognized. It was Dostoevsky this time, but there was a missing piece: “God sets us nothing but riddles,” something like that.

She agreed wholeheartedly.

The call closed from the other end, and Clair’s infield returned to normal. The last message from Libby was still in view. Clair felt no loyalty to the secrecy Improvement demanded of its users, only to Libby’s privacy and well-being.

Zep was saying, “I’ve heard that Stainer meetings are where WHOLE recruits hard-liners. Is that true?”

“I don’t know, Zep. No one’s ever tried to recruit me.”

“What about your father?”

“He never came out and said he was in WHOLE.”

“But he never said he wasn’t, either.”

Jesse nodded. “He and I argued all the time. When I was a kid, I used to talk about turning fifteen and getting into a booth and visiting my grandmother in Melbourne. Dad had cut me off from her, pretty much. He didn’t want me
influenced
by her. So it was exciting to imagine—because it was a little bit terrifying, too. My mother died in one of those things. Who’s to say it wasn’t going
to kill me, too? When it came down to it, though, I couldn’t make myself go through.”

“That’s what you were doing yesterday,” Clair said. “When the PKs hassled you.”

He looked surprised that she was listening. “Yes. Thinking about it but never
doing
anything about it. The story of my life.”

A new bump from Libby appeared in Clair’s infield. She opened it, hoping.

“You can’t stand that I’m perfect,” Libby said. “Get over it or stay away from me forever.”

CLAIR DIDN’T HEAR much of the conversation between Zep and Jesse after that. They passed the station, and Jesse led them onto the side streets of the suburb he lived in. All Clair could think about was the people stepping into and out of the rows of shining booths, remembering games she and Libby had played when they were younger. “Guess” involved one taking the other blindfolded to a destination that they then had to determine without using the Air. “Cram or Crap” scoured the strangest corners of a fabber’s memory to find the most revolting food officially designated as edible. They had attended performances advertised in the Air just moments before the acts went onstage, braving traffic jams and instant crowds just to be there in that moment.

Libby had always been the one to push Clair into something new, and Clair the one to pick up the pieces afterward. Now, it looked like there would be no putting the pieces back together, no matter what Clair did. It wasn’t even about Zep and Improvement anymore. Clair was caught between the uncompromising extremes of competing with Libby or trying to unravel her new sense of self-worth. It was a lose-lose situation.

Clair felt a terrible hollowness in her chest, as though Libby had already vacated from her life, leaving nothing behind but the echoing sense that it was all her fault.

“If Libby
would
only come forward,” Jesse was saying, “if we could prove that her birthmark has really gone, then we’d have all the evidence we need to make someone act.”

“If it really has,” Zep said.

“Don’t talk about her like that,” Clair said. “Libby’s not a courtroom exhibit. She’s a person.”

Jesse’s face disappeared behind his bangs again.

“I’m sorry—I know that.”

They turned onto Jesse’s friendly neighborhood street and walked along the opposite side, sticking to the shade. No sign of the kids, but the dog droppings were still there, turning white in the heat.

“That’s my place,” said Jesse to Zep, pointing two houses along. “Don’t expect much—oh, hey, there’s Dad.”

Dylan Linwood walked through the front door of his house and stood there with his hands on his hips. He had changed since Clair
had seen him. He was wearing a shirt that was even more crumpled than the one before, and there was a bruise on his forehead. One of his eyes, the left, was red where it should have been white. He looked as though he had been beaten up. But he didn’t look beaten. His expression was anything other than cowed.

Jesse raised his hand in greeting.

Dylan Linwood vanished into a giant ball of flame.

The flash, the bang, and the physical impact of the explosion weren’t simultaneous. They came in that order, spaced out over tiny slices of time that the human mind couldn’t individually distinguish. All of them outraced alarm. The electrical impulses in Clair’s nerves might have traveled much faster than the ball of flame radiating outward from the structure that had once been Jesse’s home, but the shocked tissues of her brain needed time to catch up. A second wasn’t long enough. Two seconds wasn’t long enough.

After three seconds, she found herself on her hands and knees in some bushes, coughing her lungs out. The air was full of soot and smoke. There was ash in her eyes, making her lenses sting. Her ears were ringing so loudly she could barely think, and her skin felt hot and raw, as though she had been rubbed all over with sandpaper. Her headband had come off, and she had no idea where it was. Next to her right knee, a tiny flame burned a black hole into the grass.

Rough hands grabbed her around the waist and pulled her upright. She lurched to her feet and threw up. The bile was acid and foul and seared her already aching throat. Distantly, through the whining in her ears, she heard a voice urging her to hurry. She didn’t recognize it, but she did her best to obey, fleeing the fire.