Twinmaker (22 page)

“Hey, watch it!”

She could see only Zep, face ruined and bloody. Her throat closed tight, and the night swam around her.

She needed answers, and sleep, and a shower, and a spare second to think when she wasn’t being hunted through the dark with no one but Jesse to lean on. She needed her mom, she needed a hug, she needed a thousand things that he couldn’t give her.

She punched Jesse on the shoulder a second time, harder than before. She was angry at him for making her cry, first, then angry at him for what he said next, because that meant he knew she was crying.

Everything depended on them getting to the airship, because there, she had to believe, things would start to go right again.

“All right, all right,” he grumbled. “We’ll do it your way.”

THE DAM LOOMED ahead of them, a vast wall of concrete rising like some ancient concave monolith from the riverbed. Its sluice gates were open; there was no need for either irrigation or power generation anymore, so the river just rushed straight through. But the structure remained as a testimony to a time of terrestrial mega-engineering, one of many such structures scattered all over the globe. Dams, bridges, tunnels—all functionally useless now, for most people.

“Look for somewhere we can get off without being seen,” she said, her voice throaty from suppressed emotion. “I presume this thing can keep itself upright for a while?”

“It’ll travel along a straight line until it hits something,” he said almost proudly, steering the doomed bike up the old riverbank to the eastern side of the river, where the road curled up onto the top of the dam itself. There was a narrow access road along the top whose safety barriers looked so rusted and fragile, a determined child could push through them.

Jesse took them around the end of the road to where the bank on the far side dipped down behind the dam. There he brought the bike to a brief halt.

Clair hopped off and flexed her stiff legs, feeling a thousand tiny pains.

“Wait,” she said, taking the extra ammo from the baggage compartment and shrugging the backpack over her shoulder. She took off her helmet and slung it on one arm. “Okay. Go.”

He hesitated, and she would have sworn she saw him pat the chassis farewell. Then he climbed out of his seat and used the handlebars to push the bike back up the slope. Crouching down behind it, he lined it up, fiddled with the controls, and dropped facedown onto the ground beside it to present a lower profile for anyone looking for them in infrared.

The bike accelerated away from him as he slithered back to join her. Would the engines be hot enough to cover the absence of the passengers? Clair hoped so. She also hoped that Jesse had had the forethought to angle the bike’s trajectory so it would fall to the left, not the right. They needed the person following them to see it die.

Halfway across the dam, the bike hit an irregularity in the road surface. Its back wheel lifted momentarily off the ground and then slewed right out from under it. The bike tipped onto its side and in a shower of sparks crashed through the rusted safety barrier—to the left. Engine shrilly singing and wheels futilely spinning, the bike sailed over the edge and followed a perfect arc out into space.

Clair craned her head and watched it as long as she dared.

“Now we find out if that’s enough to get them off our tail,” she whispered to Jesse, pulling him farther downslope, away from the road.

“You’d better hope so,” he hissed back at her. “Dad made that bike with his bare hands. . . .”

He stopped. The whining of another bike was rising up from the valley below.

“That’s not a Linwood,” Jesse said. “Too noisy, too inefficient. But powerful. Could be a PK bike.”

“Quiet,” Clair hissed, flattening herself against the backside of the dam and holding her breath as tightly as she held the pistol.

Their pursuer’s bike rumbled up the path and stopped at the top. Clair held her breath and waited. Would the person hunting them assume that Jesse and Clair had died in the crash and move on, or stick around to investigate more closely?

The person on the bike did nothing for over a minute, then put the bike back into motion, heading away from the dam and on the wild-goose chase Clair had set for them, chasing a phantom airship across the California countryside.

“Well, hell,” Jesse said. “It actually worked.”

“Told you it would.”

Clair felt no triumph. She didn’t relax until the sound of the bike had completely faded, and she told Jesse not to move for another five minutes after that, just to be sure. She wasn’t about to be caught halfway across the dam, exchanging a wild goose for sitting ducks because they were impatient.

“You ever play strategy games?” Jesse whispered as they waited.

“No. Why?”

“You should. You’d be killer at them.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re
good
at this. I’d have been caught five times over by now on my own. You’ve missed your true calling.”

“Hardly,” she said, fervently not wanting that to be true. Clair would rather be like Tilly Kozlova. She had famously only started playing piano in her teens and within two years had gone on to perform in the world’s most prestigious theaters. “You have your own skills,” she offered in the hope of taking some of the attention off her. “You can drive, for one.”

“And I’m killer with a screwdriver,” he said. “Never underestimate that.”

They sat still together, the wind whistling downriver forming an atonal counterpoint to the river’s basso continuo directly behind her. She could literally feel it through her back, the distant roaring of turbulence in concrete and steel piping. She wondered how long it would take to reduce the whole structure to rubble. A thousand years? A century? A decade?

“Look on my works, ye Mighty,”
she thought,
“and despair. . . .”

“Clair?” Someone was shaking her. “Clair, wake up.”

She jerked her head so hard, she banged it against the concrete, instantly dispelling a vivid dream about sandstorms and sphinxes.

“Sorry,” she said. “I just closed my eyes for a second.”

“Yeah, right. You were snoring. We’d better get moving. We haven’t got all night.”

Clair didn’t want to check the time. She didn’t want to move even her eyeballs. The tiny fragment of sleep had completely perforated her resolve.

He tugged her again.

“Come on, Clair. We’ve got to get to the airship and talk to Turner. He won’t wait for us forever.”

She forced herself upright. Everything from her brain all the way down to her feet felt like rubbery mush, and she had no doubt she looked as bad as she felt.

“Who is this guy, anyway?”

“Which guy?”

“The one on the airship Gemma said we’re going to meet.”

“Turner Goldsmith? You’ve never heard of him?”

She shook her head.

“No one knows where he is or what he looks like. I’ve never met him. I’m not sure if even Dad did. But if the World Holistic Leadership has a leader, it’s him. He’s supposed to be amazing.”

“And he’ll tell us what to do?”

“I guess so. Gemma said he knows what’s going on.”

“She’d better be right. I’m not going all that way for nothing.”

It would be a relief, she told herself, to let go like she had in the safe house, and allow someone else to give the orders. Jesse was right: being late wasn’t an option. If the airship left without them, then everything she had done would be for nothing. She’d end up like Arabelle and Theo and Cashile. And Zep.

With heavy footsteps, she followed Jesse up the slope. The backpack was heavier than it had been before—she was sure of it.

The wind was rising. She hugged herself and tugged her head in close to her shoulders to stay warm.

TERRAIN THAT HAD looked flat on the satellite map of California’s Central Valley turned out to be wrinkled and cracked in unexpected ways. After an hour of stumbling in and out of ditches, getting tangled in old fences, and constantly stepping on jagged rocks, Clair swore she would never complain about the seat of an electrobike again.

The only consolation was the starscape above, which was brighter and more brilliant than any she had ever seen before. There was no moon to diminish the spectacle. Whenever she felt hungry or thirsty or footsore or weary, all she had to do was look up and her problems would disappear for an instant. Then she would be back to remembering that she was
walking
in an age of near-instantaneous, pollution-free global transport and being chased by murderers who could apparently do the impossible. . . .

The way became hillier. She and Jesse argued about whether it was better to travel on the ridges, skirt the sides, or follow the dry creek beds they came across. The creeks were safer, but they curved in unpredictable ways and were often clogged with debris.

“I seriously need to rest,” Clair said, swigging down the last of the water in her bottle. “Can’t we stop for a minute?”

“No,” he said, taking her free hand and tugging her on. “Not far now.”

“You said that half an hour ago.”

“I did. But what does ‘far’ mean? Aren’t all locations the same to you, d-mat girl? All you need is a booth at either end, and you’re practically there.”

She let go of his hand and went to snark back at him, then recognized his intent for what it was. He was trying to distract her, not insult her.

A memory came to her from her childhood. She and her parents had been on a day trip somewhere in Central America, wandering around ancient stone pyramids that she could barely remember now. Clair had been young enough to have a favorite toy she didn’t want to be parted from, a bright-red stuffed clown with limp, raglike limbs, called Charlie. She had, however, been old enough to be embarrassed by it, so she had tucked up under her shirt where no one would see it.

Charlie had slipped free just as she and her mother had headed home, and Clair didn’t notice the loss until the door of the d-mat booth had been sliding shut. She remembered panicking and wriggling free of her mother’s grip to duck through the closing door. She had reached down to pick up Charlie from the sidewalk and clutch him tightly to her chest.

Then she turned to find the d-mat booth closed and both her parents gone.

Clair didn’t recall any kind of hysterical fit, not like Allison told it, but she had banged on the doors, begging for her parents’ return. “It takes time,” said an old lady who had noticed her predicament. “You have to let the machines do their work.” But Clair didn’t want to wait. She didn’t want the old lady, either. She wanted her parents back
now
.

And of course, they
had
come back, bursting out of a neighboring booth just soon as they had been able to make the return trip. They had scooped her up and told her that she had been very silly because didn’t she know that they could have just fabbed her a new clown anytime she wanted? And she remembered the complex puzzlement she had felt in that moment—at her parents for not realizing that a new clown couldn’t
possibly
be the same as her old clown and at herself for not suspecting that this clown was indeed probably one of many and might have been replaced many times without her knowing it.

That had been the beginning of the end of her love affair with Charlie.

It was also the first occasion she could recall thinking about the time it took to d-mat from one point to another. In the booth, time didn’t seem to pass at all.

Never had she stopped to wonder about the spaces involved either. They were irrelevant.

Not irrelevant anymore, unfortunately.

“Screw geography,” she said. “Carry me.”

“Not for all the tea in China.”

“Whatever that means.”

“China is where tea came from before people could fab it anytime they wanted.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” she said. “Why only grow it in one spot? You’d have to freight it everywhere, which must’ve taken ages without d-mat.”

“It did.”

“So why not drink something else that grows near where you live?”

“Beats me,” he said. “I guess that’s what led to the Water Wars.”

They tramped on for another minute, skirting the edge of a tiny, dried-up pond. The rib cage of some large animal, a horse or a cow, stuck out of the caked soil like bony fingers cupping long-lost treasure.

“So much for never doing anything,” Jesse said.

“What?”

“You know: the story of my life. Sitting around thinking. Well, check me out. It’s like being in a book! This is the part where the heroes are slogging on through the dark, refusing to give up because there’s something horrible coming up behind them.”

Clair didn’t feel anywhere near as excited about this as Jesse sounded.

“You like books?” she said.

“Love them.” He glanced at her, the whites of his eyes bright in the starlight. “
Heart of Darkness
,
The Lord of the Rings
,
Master and Commander
,
On the Road
. . . I’ve got a collection of old print editions at home. Dad gives me one every birthday.”

He caught himself.

“I mean, I
had
them at home. He
used to
give me one.”

She thought of the old books she hung out with in the library at school.

“Screw adventures, too,” she said, “and screw slogging through the dark. I’d give anything to be home in bed, plugged back into the Air and reading something good.”

“Agreed, with all my heart.”

This time the silence felt even deeper.

“Actually,” he said, “what I really want is Dad back.”

“Yeah.”

“And you probably feel the same way about Zep.”

Her heart hitched a little. “
He
would’ve carried me . . . if Libby hadn’t been around.”

“Can I ask you about him?”

“I . . . guess.”

“You told Aunt Arabelle that Zep was just a friend, but he looked like more than that to me.”

She didn’t answer immediately.

“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. I’m just trying to pass the time.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “If you want to know, I’ll tell you.”