Twinmaker

30

THE ATAC SPED them through the night as though all the peacekeepers of Manteca were on their tail.

Route 120 had a single lane remaining for wheeled transports, leading into areas that had once been entirely rectangular fields and farm lots but now contained little other than wild things, as far as Clair knew. She had stubbornly resisted all attempts by her parents to camp in order to get her closer to them.

Everything she cared about was behind her, in the light.

The boy next to her wasn’t talking anymore. No one was talking. It was as though Gemma’s impossible declaration had pushed them into a zone beyond words. It was too insane. Too far gone ever to come back to reality.

With a sudden lurch the ATAC turned to the left onto a different road. The rough asphalt surface stabbed perfectly east, rising and falling with the contours of the land beneath.

Clair dried her eyes with the backs of her hands and wiped her hair from her face. The kid was watching her. Zep’s blood had left a sticky red mark on his arm.

“You’re Clair,” he said. “I’m Cashile.”

Her voice was hoarse. “That’s . . . that’s an unusual name.”

“It’s Zulu. My mom is from Africa.”

That reminded Clair that she had been in Cape Town a couple of hours ago, just before “q” had told her not to use d-mat. She didn’t mention that, in case it made Cashile think she didn’t have a soul, that she was a zombie who only thought she was real. She didn’t think she could handle that accusation on top of everything else.

“I’ve never seen you before,” he said, braving her silence. “You’re not one of us.”

“I guess not.”

“But you killed him.”

“Who?”

“The dupe.”

There was that word again. It might have been short for duplicate, but it also meant someone who had been tricked or fooled.

“You mean Dylan Linwood?”

“You shouldn’t call him that. It wasn’t him anymore.”

So the kid believed it, too. Maybe it was a form of mental self-defense, Clair thought. Jesse’s father wasn’t responsible for everything he’d done because it wasn’t him at all. Clair couldn’t blame them. If he was dead to them already, it would be much easier to live with his blood on their hands.

Or her hands, as the case may be. Unconsciously, she put them under her thighs and pressed down on them with all her weight.

She had shot Dylan Linwood because he had tried to shoot her. It was self-defense, not murder.

Would she see it that way in Jesse’s shoes?

“Our place in Escalon has lots of stuff,” the boy said, as though to cheer her up.

“What kind of stuff?” she asked, trying to imagine what terrorists might hide in their secret caches.

“Electrobikes, for one,” said Arabelle from behind her. “We’ll be riding the rest of the way.”

“The rest of the way where? I thought we were stopping there?”

It was Gemma’s turn to speak, slowly and painfully thanks to the gunshot wound in her shoulder. Ray had roughly dressed it during their flight from Manteca, but the bandage she pressed against the wound was already sodden with blood.

“It’s too soon to stay still. We’ll talk later. The new plan is to split up and regroup at the old Maury Rasmussen airfield. It’s not the closest, but it’s designated for hobbyists and won’t draw the kind of attention we’d get at Oakdale.”

“What kind of hobbyists?” asked Clair, feeling the darkness thickening around her like tar.

“People who fly aircraft. In this case, airships.”

She didn’t know such things still existed. “Why an airship?”

“Well, they’re more mobile than vehicles and safer than d-mat,” said Arabelle, “and they’re both highly visible and impossible to sneak up on. We’ll be safe there.”

“If we get there,” said Gemma.

“Hope for the best,” Arabelle said, “plan for the worst.”

“Uh . . . I’ve never ridden an electrobike,” Clair admitted, unsure for the moment whether she would be going anywhere with anyone. All she wanted was answers, not de facto membership in their clique.

Jesse broke his long silence to say, “Then I guess you have two choices: stay behind or learn.”

Arabelle glanced at him. Her lips pursed.

“We’re not leaving anyone behind,” she said. “Clair, you can ride pillion with Jesse.”

Clair didn’t know what that meant, but she knew a reprimand when she heard it.

Jesse looked down into his lap again and didn’t say anything.

Escalon wasn’t quite a ghost town, but it showed few signs of life. Most of the buildings were abandoned, their windows broken and roofs slowly collapsing inward. Even at night everything looked desert brown. Clair watched the d-mat sign go by with longing. Who knew when everything would go back to normal and she could travel that way again, without fear of being tracked down and murdered?

There would be no normal, she thought with a dull heart, without Zep, without Libby, without being able even to go home. . . .

The cache was in a squarish Art Deco building that might once have been an old movie theater. The ATAC trundled between the theater and the church next door and swung around the back, where there was a large clear space overhung by shabby eucalyptus. The vehicle came to a halt with a barely perceptible jerk, and its motor’s steady hum ceased.

“Okay, people.” Gemma hauled herself out of her seat, moving wearily, gingerly, protective of her injured shoulder. She was drenched in blood like Clair, but Gemma’s was all her own. The rear door unsealed with a squeak. Clair’s menus returned the moment the cage was broken. There was a patch from “q,” and she answered it by text only, hoping her mask was still in place.

“You’re in Escalon, I see,” said “q.” “It’s lucky no one else can find you. You’re a wanted person now.”

“Murder?” she sent back, misspelling the word twice before sending it.

“Not yet. Get the pistol into a booth so I can dispose of it and no one will ever match it to the bullet that killed Dylan Linwood.”

“Can’t get to a booth right now,” she said, still sick to her stomach at the thought of killing anyone, whether he was Dylan Linwood or not. “These guys are WHOLE, remember? It’s not really on their agenda.”

“Understood. Are you friends with them now too?”

Clair didn’t know how to answer that. The voice sounded more childlike than ever, convincing her that it really did belong to a kid somewhere. A kid who was for some reason obsessed with her and her friendships—but Clair could accept that for now, just so long as “q” continued to help her.

Everyone piled out into the still, cold air. Clair scanned the urban nightscape around her, expecting gunshots at any moment but hearing nothing out of the ordinary. This was her chance to run, she thought. She could head for the scattered lights of Escalon, those faint glimmers of civilization, and leave the mad world of WHOLE behind her forever.

The memory of Dylan Linwood’s body falling from the roof made her stay. She wasn’t part of civilization anymore, and until she understood why, she was stuck with Gemma and her disheveled band. It was either that or be pulled in by the PKs . . . or worse, she thought. How many other assassins were roaming the night, looking for her right now?

They would be safe at the airship, she told herself. She had to believe that, or she might as well give up now.

A stocky, silent woman with long black dreadlocks took Cashile to a small door at the back of the hall, and the rest followed. Although the walls looked on the verge of collapse, the lock on the door worked just fine. The hinges gleamed in the starlight.

The old theater was a garage, a word Clair had never had cause to use before. Inside the main hall were a dozen sleek electrobikes not dissimilar to the one Dylan Linwood had driven to school that morning, except these were more solid and had larger, spokeless wheels. They resembled ink-stained quicksilver cheetahs, frozen in midstretch. Cashile climbed over them like a hyperactive cub.

“Fully charged and ready to go,” he said with a grin.

“We’ll leave one minute apart,” said Gemma, doing a credible impersonation of someone able to stand on her own.

“I get my own bike, right?” broke in the kid.

“But you still ride out with your mom. No radio contact unless it’s an emergency. They’ll be hunting us. You can count on that.”