Twinmaker (38 page)

“‘Direct action,’” she said, quoting the phrase that Jesse had asked Turner to clarify, back at the Farmhouse. “He never said what that meant. What if he’s using me as cover in order to get close to VIA and do something stupid?”

“Like what?”

She didn’t know, but those bags could hold a lot of guns, grenades, or god only knew what.

“If he does do anything,” Jesse said, “VIA will never help us.”

“I know, but perhaps that’s a small price to pay from Turner’s point of view.”

Clair could see it all too easily. Turner, fighting a decades-long war against d-mat, had come out of hiding . . . for what? To help save a few lost girls? Was it more likely he was intending a suicide run that would strike right at the heart of his enemy—and destroy his mutated genes in the bargain?

“Do you think Gemma knows?” asked Jesse.

“If she does, she’s not talking.” Gemma seemed tense, but she
always
seemed tense. “She wouldn’t want to sabotage the plan, though. Improvement killed her son, remember?”

Jesse nodded.

Clair leaned out into the narrow corridor and saw Ray nearby.

“Tell Turner to come back here,” she said. “I need to talk to him. It’s urgent.”

Ray nodded, and a minute later the leader of WHOLE joined them.

“What is it?”

“Change of plan,” she said. “I want you to drop me and Jesse off early.”

Both Turner and Jesse looked at her in surprise.

“Why?” Turner asked.

She kept her voice steady, even though inside her doubts were stirring. This
was
the right thing, wasn’t it? This wasn’t some other mind in hers, trying to sabotage the mission?

She could only let the facts speak for themselves.

“One,” she said, “we’re being too predictable. That makes it easier for the dupes if they decide to spring anything on us that might look like an accident. Also, it’s bad for ratings, me being down here instead of up there. Shaking things up will only keep people more interested.

“Two, if we stay together like this, and we
are
intercepted, there goes our only shot. By splitting up, we double the odds in our favor. I’ll have the ratings, and you’ll have the body. Someone wants to stop us, they’ll have to take us both out.”

Turner was nodding slowly.

“Where?” he asked.

“Brooklyn Heights is closest,” she said, “and the most photogenic. It’s also less obvious than the Thirty-fourth Street docks. I know it’s farther, but it’s not as if we have to walk or anything. We can fab something that will probably get us there quicker than you will through all those old tunnels.”

“The two of you?” Turner asked. When both of them nodded, he said, “I’d feel happier if Ray went with you. Just in case.”

“And you can keep the drone,” Clair conceded.

He nodded again. They understood each other. Ray would keep an eye on Clair and Jesse, while Q kept an eye on Turner when the submarine surfaced under VIA. They might be temporarily on the same side, but that didn’t mean they trusted each other.

“It’s a good plan,” he said. “I’ll go tell the pilot we’re changing course.”

Jesse waited until he had gone before whispering, “Are you sure about this?”

“Positive,” she said. “Ask yourself who’s going to look like more of a threat: a bunch of walk-ins from the sticks or a sub full of well-armed terrorists?”

“You really think someone’s going to try something, even with everyone watching?”

“I think there’s a chance, and I don’t want to be sitting in here waiting for the torpedoes to arrive.”

Jesse looked around them and nodded grimly as though only now feeling the water pressing in on them.

“Our job is to get there before Turner does,” she said. “We’ll never get a second chance.”

The sub shifted underfoot.

“We’re changing course,” Jesse said, fingers tapping rhythmically against his leg. “Surface in half an hour.”

Clair closed her eyes and resumed counting.

THEY SURFACED AT the Atlantic Avenue docks, emerging from the submarine double time and not lingering to say farewells. By the time Clair, Jesse, and Ray stepped onto dry land, the sub was gone. They took a moment to get their bearings under a gray morning sky, then headed off uphill for the War Memorial.

Brooklyn Heights was connected by a restored bridge to the Manhattan archipelago. Clair checked her updates and news on the popularity front as she took her physical bearings. They had picked up people of a nautical bent, thanks to the submariners, and regained some of the crashlanders, thanks to Xandra Nantakarn throwing a party in Clair’s honor in an old underwater base. Counter-Improvement continued to spread, particularly in areas where the original Improvement message had been rife. Social commentators were beginning to notice, not the symptoms of Improvement itself but an upwelling of concern about them. One venerable columnist described Clair as an example of something he called the New Youth Movement: “Crashlander, Abstainer, fugitive, campaigner, all in an ordinary week. What next?”

What next indeed
, thought Clair. It all depended on whether she got to Wallace safely. And whether she was herself when she got there.

“Let’s move,” she said. “We’ve got a hike ahead of us.”

“This is nothing,” said Ray. “I walked the John Muir Trail once. Two hundred ten miles in sixteen days—
that’s
a hike.”

“Even I think that’s crazy,” said Jesse. “Q, where do we go from the memorial?”

“Manhattan Bridge,” she said.

“Okay, then. ‘Lead on, Macduff.’”

“‘I would the friends we miss were safe arrived,’” Q said.

“What?”

Clair said nothing as Q explained that she was also quoting—not misquoting, unlike Clair—from
Macbeth
. The words were too appropriate. She just walked up the hill as fast as she could, ignoring the way her shoes rubbed her heels and concentrating on what she had to do.

Their unscheduled appearance in Brooklyn Heights caused a new spike of interest. Drones appeared as though from nowhere to chronicle their arrival. By the time they reached the memorial, they had accrued a small coterie of people who had d-matted in from all over the world to say hello, ask questions, challenge her assumptions, or ask her out. She responded to all of them as politely as she could, knowing it was the right thing to do in order to keep people watching. But she didn’t stop walking, and she kept one hand always under her overalls, tightly clutching her pistol.

At the bridge she discovered that a well-wisher had fabbed them autostabilizing monocycles—an early Dylan Linwood design, as it happened—to save them making something of their own. Clair had Q hack into their operating system to make sure they weren’t booby-trapped, then accepted the gift. That prompted a run on similar devices, and Clair hurried off before she could gain an entourage that would only slow them down and potentially put innocent people in danger. The world was watching; there was in theory no reason to feel nervous. But the city ahead was a minefield. There could be snipers in any window, and not just dupes. The hate mail and death threats in the comments of her posts were rising in tandem with her popularity.

They formed a line and headed out, Clair first, then Jesse, then Ray, drones tagging along with them like balloons on a string. Vines hung from the suspension cables around them, and trees grew tall out of soil piled deep in the bridge’s lower levels. Ahead was the famous Manhattan skyline, as familiar to Clair as the gondolas that plied its crystalline waters. The buildings weren’t the tallest in the world, and they certainly weren’t the only ones to have suffered inundation, but their restoration had been a potent symbol for the generation following the Water Wars. Clair’s parents still talked about seeing the opening of the first walkways as kids.

The sun was behind Clair now, and the electric motors of the monocycles were whisper quiet on the graceful arch over the river. There had once been another bridge, Clair knew, but its foundations had subsided as the water rose to swallow it, and it had been turned into a reef with great ceremony, a sacrifice to the drowned boroughs and the new world of d-mat.

As they cruised over the central section of the bridge, Clair could see the elaborate marble arch on the other side. The entourage Clair had worried might impede her progress was awaiting them there.

She cursed silently to herself, even as she flashed her best smile and waved. The Air might have made her famous, but d-mat enabled anyone with a passing interest to jump right into her path. At this rate, every road between Little Venice and VIA HQ would be full of gawkers.

“Looks to me,” drawled Jesse, loud enough for the drones to hear, “like we’ve got ourselves a posse.”

In as much time as it took for his words to flash through the Air and back again, the crowd cheered.

“Last one to VIA’s a rotten egg!” he called, and the crowd cheered again. Some of them shouted his name, and it quickly became a chant.

By the time Clair reached the arch, the crowd was moving as one, accelerating to meet and race alongside her, catcalling and jostling but keeping up, for the most part. They were a mixture of kids and teenagers, plus some older people who had the Abstainer look. Most rode monocycles, but some had Segways, sunboards, or even bicycles. There was a carnival atmosphere that belied the deadly seriousness of her purpose. It was a game to them, she supposed. A game for the curious and bored, jumping on a bandwagon that was popping at the time.

Clair understood. She’d never been much for flash crowds and celebrity bombing, but Libby had occasionally dragged her to them, and they could be fun. And there was no denying that she was grateful to Jesse for his quick thinking. By redefining their journey as a race, he had turned an obstacle into something that, if she squinted hard enough, might even be called an asset.
A human shield
, she didn’t want to think.

She looked back at him, and he winked.

“Are you enjoying this?” she asked.

“Who me? You’re the one in the lead.”

Jesse-Jesse-Jesse
went the crowd as they rode on into the Manhattan archipelago. A girl leaned in to kiss his cheek, and he blushed and pushed her away. Clair felt a surprising twinge of jealousy and told herself sternly to concentrate on the road ahead.

THE PATCHES OF dry land that had once been Chinatown and Little Italy were extensively canalled. Clair led her entourage up ramps to a level high above the tourist boats, where Q helped them navigate through the maze of bridges and monorails. They hopped from building to building to SoHo, the southernmost tip of the main Manhattan island, and touched ground on Broadway. There they left the bridges and went right down to ground level, where the original road surface remained largely unchanged.

Their entourage spread out around them, waving at passersby and taking up a new chant:
Counter-Counter-Counter
. Jesse raised his fist in acknowledgment and chanted along with them. Clair didn’t join in. She was too conscious of the time.

“Q, can you tell where Turner is?”

“I’m afraid I can’t, Clair. I am unable to connect with the drone, and there’s been no sign of the submarine.”

That didn’t mean anything either way, Clair knew. The sub was likely camouflaged, and most people had probably assumed it was elsewhere now that Clair had popped up on the ground. Turner might be minutes or hours from VIA HQ. He might have changed his route entirely. There was no way for her to know until he surfaced.

She searched her busy infield for the message from Ant Wallace’s assistant.

“For the sake of the crowd,” she sent, “would Mr. Wallace be willing to meet somewhere public?”

“That’s not necessary,” Catherine Lupoi replied. “Your meeting will be broadcast in its entirety to the Air.”

“Good,” Clair sent back. “But I’m worried about what the crowd will do when I’m not around.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Wallace’s assistant said in a reassuring tone. “We have PKs on hand. You’ll note quite a gathering here, too.”

Clair checked and found that to be absolutely true. At least a hundred people had congregated in Penn Plaza to witness her arrival. Some of them were singing. Clair grimaced when she recognized “We Shall Not Be Moved.” Jesse wouldn’t be pleased by that.

She passed the word back to Jesse and Ray.

“They can’t possibly ignore us now,” said the older man. “Not when we turn up with an army on their doorstep!”

Some army
, she wanted to say. But he was speaking for the benefit of the drones and the crowd, and they cheered along with him. Perhaps he was speaking for himself, too. Turner might have sent him to keep an eye on her, but that didn’t mean Ray was her enemy. He might even want her to succeed so Turner wouldn’t have to.

Between Twenty-third Street and One Hundredth, where water claimed the island, Park Avenue was preserved as a national monument, complete with yellow cabs and food stalls. Clair took advantage of the clear road surface to go faster, pushing the monocycles to the limits of their tiny motors. Around them, the buildings grew taller. She could see the Empire State Building a few blocks ahead.

At a sign advertising a “genuine replica steakhouse,” they turned left and rolled on up Thirty-third Street. Ray’s “army” had doubled, and the cry of
Counter!
became a regular chant that echoed off the stone walls around them. Peacekeepers had become more visible too. Domed blue helmets stood out on every corner and in front of the historic storefronts. Clair wondered if they were afraid of a riot. She wondered if she should be too.

At Greeley Square, at last, their destination became clearly visible. One Penn Plaza was a tall black glass oblong that was imposing even from several blocks away. No greenery marred its precise lines. No signs or logos, either, despite the perfect flatness of its north- and south-facing sides. Some organizations might have had visual and virtual ads rolling 24-7, but not VIA. The evidence of its labor was all around them.

The skyscraper slabbed vertically out of a wider base. Clair and her entourage circled the base once, counterclockwise, passing Madison Square Garden, its southwestern edge literally hanging over the water, in order to approach the crowd from the other side. A cheer rose up. Placards waved. Some people booed. A surge of information rolled through the Air, spiking Clair’s popularity levels to new heights.