Twinmaker

24

CLAIR’S MIND WENT blank for a moment, then filled with alarm and self-recrimination. Of course she still had the note on her. She’d slipped it under the elastic of her underpants the previous night, and she was wearing the same underpants now.

“Yes, I do,” she said, slipping her index finger around her waist until she found the note. It was creased and softened by sweat, a piece of paper made far from ordinary by the words written on it—a “signal to the system,” as Jesse had called it. Could his father be using that very signal to track her now?

“What do I do? Tear it up?”

“No. Turn left here.”

Clair ducked into another lane lined with market stalls. At the far end was an exit. Next to the exit was the sign for a d-mat station, and on seeing it she understood.

“A wild-goose chase,” she said. “That would work, I guess.”

“Not this jump,” said the voice, “but the next one. Clair, do you trust me?”

“Uh.” That was a difficult question. “How far, exactly?”

“I can program the booth for you, if you will permit me. That will save time.”

“Can’t I do it myself?”

“You can. But in that case I must ask you to give me the list of destinations in advance so I can prepare the way. And you will need to speak without hesitation.”

“How many?”

“Four should be sufficient.”

The impossibility of her situation made it hard to think of anything other than putting one foot in front of the other. The resort in Switzerland she’d stayed in with her parents as a kid. The dig in South America she and her friends had visited last year as part of their Lost Civilizations elective.

Somewhere random? That would be good, she thought. And somewhere she’d never been before.

Not Omsk. Cape Town. And the Tuvalu memorial in the Pacific.

“Perhaps we should we send it to the moon,” she said. “That’d really throw him off.”

“All lunar installations are restricted while the OneMoon embargo is in place.”

Clair had been joking, never dreaming that accessing somewhere off-Earth was remotely an option.

She forced her way through a tangle of people at the market’s exit, into the relatively free space of the street outside. She ran the last dozen yards to the station.

“Take the note with you to your first destination,” said the voice. “You will dispose of it before the transmission after that.”

Clair shouldered her way into the nearest booth and cried out the Swiss address. Dylan Linwood burst out of the market and moved sharklike in her wake. Not firing, not shouting, just moving quickly, confident she wouldn’t get away from him. The gun wasn’t visible.

That it would reappear when she was caught, she had no doubt.

The door shut. Her ears popped. The door opened.

It was cold and dark in Switzerland. Heavy snow was falling outside the station. She wrapped the shawl tightly around her neck and shoulders and hugged herself.

“Put the note in the next booth over and use your second destination,” the voice told her.

She did so, giving the booth the South American address and requesting an unaccompanied freight transfer. She ducked out before the door shut on her and went to the third booth.

The doors closed and opened again a moment later in Cape Town, her third destination. She stepped out of the booth and warily looked around. It was nighttime there too, but the air was warm and humid. The station was deserted. A sign in her lenses welcomed her to the Devil’s Peak lookout. Below her was the university, on the edge of a moon-shaped bay. Across the bay was Ndabeni, lit up by a ghostly spear of light fired at a slant from a powersat above the equator.

Clair unwound the shawl and threw it away.

“Why are you doing this for me?”

“I have been following Improvement, Clair. That is what I do. Now I am involved, and it is very exciting.”

“Is this some kind of game to you?”

“No, Clair. I am not playing a game. I am very serious. I want to be your friend. Like Libby. Like the two of you are friends.”

“You can’t just become my friend. Friendship has to be earned. And besides, who knows what Libby thinks of me now . . . ?”

“Her profile declares your relationship to be unchanged.”

Clair checked her lenses. Libby’s most recent caption simply said “I’m beautiful!” with a rapid-fire sequence of women’s faces, all of them blondes like her. She was in the Manhattan Isles, not at school, but she didn’t say why.

“I can’t find Zep,” Clair said when she looked for him.

“He cannot be located.”

“What does that mean?” Her heart skipped a beat. “He’s dead?”

“No. He is disconnected from the Air.”

Recaptured, she thought. Back inside WHOLE’s Faraday cage. Every instinct in her railed at the thought.

“I have to go back for him,” she said. “I can’t just leave him behind.”

Before “q” could offer a reply, the booth behind her came to life. Its door closed, and the machines within busily whirred, processing new data and spinning pure energy into matter. Someone was coming.

“Is that . . . him?”

“Yes.”

“But it can’t be,” she said in disbelief. “We got rid of the note.”

“This proves that your location is being tracked by means other than the note.”

“What do I do now?”

“You must disconnect from the Air and go to your fourth destination.”

She balked at that. Disconnecting from the Air would be like locking herself in a coffin and nailing it shut.

“Think of something else,” she said.

“I cannot. This is now the most likely method your pursuers have used.”

“But if I leave the Air, no one will know where I am.”

“Including the man following you.”

“Yes, but . . . oh, damn it.”

She opened another booth, didn’t enter.

“What if I disconnect now and then reconnect when I arrive?”

“Any direct connection is undesirable.”

“Is there any way just to hide my connection?”

“Not in the time remaining, Clair.”

“All right, but first I need to bump Mom and Dad—”

“You have five seconds precisely, Clair.”

The whirring of the active booth reached a crescendo. It was going to open any moment.

She shot into her booth and asked for the Tuvalu monument. As the door shut, she called up menus and options in her lenses. Disconnect. Sever. Disallow. Isolate. Interface by interface, she plucked at the ties connecting her to the rest of the world. Her augmented senses, her sunburn epidermals, even the pedometers built into the soles of her shoes—everything.

sssssss—

One by one, the patches in her lenses went dark.

“Wait,” she said as the air thinned around her. “If I do this, how will I talk to you?”

—pop