Twinmaker

43

SINCE SHE HAD nothing better to do while she waited, Clair used the bathroom to freshen up and emerged feeling gritty and greasy under damp clothes she would ordinarily have recycled without a second thought. The source of the coffee smell turned out to be a well-used filtration unit behind a hatch in the wall, with a selection of mismatched mugs stained from frequent use. There was a whole miniature kitchen in there, with a small freezer and what looked like a fabber but was in fact a microwave oven. She just poured herself a coffee, adding lots of milk and sugar. Her stomach ached, but she wasn’t remotely hungry.

The Air was still jammed, Q with it.

“Any word from the others?” she asked Jesse.

“Nope,” he said. He was lying flat on his back in the center of the room, with his arms folded across his eyes.

She sat down next to him, needing a means of keeping her hope alive. “How well do you know these people? Can we trust them?”

“I’ve known some of them most of my life. Abstainer meetings are like AA meetings—everyone has a testimonial. I heard those stories over and over, but they obviously didn’t tell me anything important, like who was really in WHOLE and who wasn’t.”

His voice was full of self-blame and irritation. Clair had moved past that. For now, she was determined to learn everything she could about their captors, in case that was indeed what they turned out to be.

“Are those testimonials secret?”

“I guess not. Are you asking?”

“Yes,” she said bluntly.

He sighed. “All right. You remember Aunt Arabelle . . . ?”

“Two left feet. And Gemma: she lost her son to Improvement.”

“Yes, well, I’d never heard that before. Ray’s wife died in transit—just arrived dead for no reason, and they couldn’t revive her. Theo, Cashile’s mom, had aphasia thanks to d-mat: she could understand but couldn’t speak.”

“What about Turner Goldsmith?”

“I don’t know what his story is. There are lots of others: someone had a son whose mind was wiped; someone else’s mom died of the same cancer as George Staines. And, oh, hey, this is a good one: there’s a girl who used to come to meetings with this guy she said was her brother. But he was older, way older, like thirty years or more.”

“Don’t tell me d-mat prematurely aged him,” Clair said.

“No, it’s better than that. They’re actually twins. Have you heard that story about a girl who was hung up in transit . . . ?”

She gaped at him. “You want me to believe that’s real?”

He rolled over and lifted his arms off his eyes to look at her. “Some urban legends must be based on truth, Clair. They can’t all be lies, even if most people want them to be.”

“Do you believe it?”

Jesse looked down at his feet. They were bare, revealing calluses she normally associated with natural-sport players like Zep. She supposed he just walked a lot. In the last two days, her blisters had developed blisters.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I don’t automatically disbelieve it, not after what we’ve seen.”

“True. I’m not sure I’d believe our story if someone else told it to me: Libby and Q, the dupes of your dad . . .”

He rolled away, and she let him go, understanding. It was too early to talk about that, although she desperately wanted to know the truth of it. She couldn’t imagine how it must feel to see a parent die not just once, but over and over again. It was a hellish thought, too much to take in quickly.

The whole situation was too much. She had thought getting to the airship would solve all her problems, but here she was, sitting on a cushion in bright sunlight, avoiding the raw ache where Zep had been and wondering if Libby knew what had happened to him. She couldn’t begin to guess how Libby might be feeling if she did. Would she blame Clair? Clair would give everything to talk to her best friend as they had talked before . . . when the only issues they’d had had to worry about were school, captions, and chores. Nothing had seemed insurmountable then.

Three days had now passed since Libby had used Improvement.

However much time she had left, it was too little to make amends, too little for everything they’d planned to do together. Too little for the lifetime they were owed. Improvement had to be stopped, no matter what.

Clair took her shoes off and put them next to Jesse’s so they would dry. Then she propped herself against the window, facing inward. There was a picture of a blue cow on the wall directly opposite her with the name DAISY written underneath. Impossible to tell if Daisy was the cow or the kid who had drawn it. Clair stared at the picture, feeling the warmth of the coffee spreading through her body, radiating outward from her chest like the heat of the sun. The actual sun provided no heat at all, and the window behind her head was cold. The caffeine should have woken her up, but instead she grew sleepy. Apart from a brief nap at the dam, she hadn’t slept since she had last spoken to Libby, before Improvement, the dupes, WHOLE, everything. Her head throbbed in time with the propellers.

At least she wasn’t trudging over anything or holding on to anything for dear life. Moving without effort felt like the most amazing miracle in the world.

Clair’s eyes drifted shut as she teased at the many problems facing her, looking for solutions that weren’t there. Staying awake was hard, too hard, but she would do it if she had to, like she had done everything else.