Twinmaker

4

THE ACCIDENT DIDN’T kill the party, but it did have a decidedly sobering effect. Dawn did the rest. Within half an hour it all was over, and Clair was standing in line for the booth with Zep and Xandra Nantakarn and fifty other people, all shivering and awaiting their turns to go home. There was some disgruntled muttering about the delay. Clair hadn’t considered that downside of the d-mat bottleneck.

“Don’t feel bad,” Xandra told Clair when her chance to leave came. “No one died, and the crashlander legend lives on. See you tomorrow night?”

“Uh . . . maybe.” Clair wasn’t thinking that far ahead. The electric bubble she had occupied earlier had popped. Now she just felt tired.

“Don’t wait too long. One day we really will run out of venues.”

Xandra winked as the door shut on her, leaving Clair and Zep alone in the restless crowd.

“Now what?” he asked her.

“Now what what?”

“The night doesn’t have to end here. I have some scotch back at my dorm, and we could both use some warming up— Hey!”

She had kicked him. “Don’t do that, Zep.”

“Yeah, sorry.” He retreated into himself a little. “I guess I should talk to her.”

Clair hated pushing him away, but she knew it was the right thing to do.

“We were buzzing on adrenaline and too much beer. That’s all.”

The booth opened in front of them. Neither of them made a move.

“If I say ‘after you,’ will you kick me again?”

“No, because I’m tired and want to get home.”

She stretched up to kiss him on the cheek and quickly slipped away.

The door slid shut. Clair was surrounded by reflections of herself. She looked completely washed out, something the bright, white light coming at her from all corners didn’t help at all. She closed her eyes and wondered what she was feeling underneath that shade’s pallid facade.

Zep liked her. What did that say about him? What did it say about her that she had really kissed him now, even if it was in a moment of weakness, just once? Where did that leave Libby? He clearly wasn’t over her if he only “guessed” he should talk to her. Clair was an idiot for getting involved.

She felt as though her insides were being torn apart by invisible hands, which was a thousand times worse than how she had felt before.

It can’t happen again, she told herself. Clair Larhonda Hill doesn’t do things like this.

It would best for everyone, she decided, if Zep just got over whatever it was he felt for her and made things good with Libby. Clair could live with rejection if it meant keeping her best friend. There would be other boys. There would never be another Libby.

When she woke the next morning, there were over five hundred bumps in her infield. It was like on her birthday, only that was months ago, and there were no important holidays listed that she might have forgotten. She rolled onto her back with a groan, thinking, Who died?

The bumps appeared to float in the darkness above her, names in a soft Helvetica font against a minimalist, blocky background in burned oranges and yellows. The colors of sunrise, automatically selected by her lenses, probably by some algorithm that thought this would ease her into wakefulness rather than dump it on her like a bucket of cold water. If so, it wasn’t working.

The alarm that had woken her came again. It was time to get ready for school. Why was she so tired? The party, right. The crashlanders. The kiss . . .

Her eyes flickered open. She felt faintly sick, and not just from the beers she had drunk. The list of bumps remained in her field of vision, as though demons had scribbled across the ceiling while she slept. The text slid from ceiling to drapes as she sat up with a jerk.

Zep’s name was on the list of bumps—not as a recipient, but as a subject.

People were talking about him in the Air. And she was part of the conversation. Anxiously, she winked on one of the bumps and skimmed through a short vlog covering what had happened the previous night.

At first she was relieved. It was just a brief account of the ball, with emphasis on the incident of the boy who had almost died. There were interviews with people either praising Zep for his bravery or damning the entire clique. Xandra Nantakarn was unflustered in a brief clip doing the rounds. The Lucky Jump wasn’t to blame, said a representative of VIA, the Virtual-transport Infrastructure Authority, whose job it was to make the rules about how d-mat was used. A peacekeeper spokesperson wasn’t so sure.

It was news of a fairly minor sort. Clair supposed that she must have been mentioned somewhere in one of the posts, leading to the general topic’s prominence in her infield. And it was pleasing in a way. Popularity in social media wasn’t something she went out of her way to seek, like Libby did. She had never popped this way before.

Then she saw the phrase, “Zeppelin Barker and his girlfriend, crashlander Clair Hill . . .”

“Oh no,” she said, skipping to the next bump and following its link.

This one came with a snapshot of her pulling on the rope, taken through the lenses of someone at the top of the dome. This time, they got the name of Zep’s girlfriend right, but they had attached it to the wrong face. The caption on the picture of Clair read, “Liberty Zeist, discoverer of the latest crashlander ball that almost cost her boyfriend’s life . . .”

“No, no, no!”

The mixed-up name wasn’t going to save her. Clair’s face was still there, recognized by the Air and sent to her as it would be to anyone interested in Clair Hill, crashlanders, or Zeppelin Barker. Among a multitude of correctly labeled pictures of Libby were enough of Clair to be certain that Libby would see them and ask the question: What had Clair done last night to make people think she was Zep’s girlfriend?

Maybe Libby had already seen them.

Clair scrolled through the long list of bumps, looking for Libby’s name. It wasn’t there, but Tash and Ronnie’s were.

“Thought you went home with Libby,” Tash had sent earlier that morning. “Didn’t know you were still there, being a hero!”

Ronnie’s was more guarded. “Anything to this, or is it just another Airhead false positive?”

Clair didn’t know how to respond. She hugged her knees and wished she could erase the bumps not just from her infield but from the Air itself. But the vast web of wireless connectivity covering the Earth tangled everyone in information. There was no escaping it or the myriad algorithms that guided data to its destination. It didn’t matter if two or two hundred thousand people were following the story, Libby was absolutely, positively certain to notice.

How much worse would it look if Clair didn’t say something to her right away?

When Clair checked Libby’s public profile, she found a caption of an old woman on a swing with a shotgun on her lap and the words Disturb at own risk. Not encouraging.

Clair got out of bed, threw her clothes in the fabber for recycling, and dialed a set for school. While she was in the shower, she sent a message to Libby.

It’s not what it seems. Really truly honestly. Can we talk?

She deleted everything from her infield so there’d be no mistaking a reply when it came.

Libby hadn’t said anything by the time Clair got out of the shower and dressed in her freshly made clothes. The apartment was empty and tomb quiet around her. Clair’s mother regularly started work in the middle of the night. Her stepfather lived in Munich most weekdays. Clair was an only child and heartily glad of it.

For breakfast she had perfectly scrambled eggs with freshly toasted bread, low-salt butter at room temperature, and the best black coffee a fabber could find. The coffee was the only thing she truly tasted.

“Libby,” she sent, and was unable to stop once she had started this time, “did you get my message? Are you up yet? Are you feeling all right? Please call me back as soon as you can.”

She desperately wished she could stay home with her head under the covers, but skipping school wouldn’t solve anything. Being smart had gotten her parents’ parents through the Water Wars, Allison Hill, Clair’s mother, liked to say. That and never giving up. Allison claimed that Clair had inherited her maternal grandmother’s stubbornness, and that even when they argued, it was something to be grateful for.