Twinmaker

49

CLAIR REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS upside down, locked into her harness, and choking for breath. There was fluid in her nose, filling her sinuses, and bubbling up the back of her throat, making her feel as though she were drowning.

She jerked explosively forward and sprayed blood across the cockpit of the airship. That cleared her nose, but it didn’t make the view any prettier.

The airship was ruined, its cabin filled with broken glass, destroyed electronics, and broken branches. Clair reached out for Jesse, but the seat next to her wasn’t just empty. It was gone. One whole side of the compartment had been torn away. When she twisted wildly to look down, she saw him lying on his side on what had been the crew compartment’s roof. She couldn’t tell if he was breathing.

Clair twisted farther. All she could see were branches. No other bodies. She forced herself to breathe deeply and not to give in to panic. Imagining the worst wasn’t going to help anyone, starting with herself.

“Jesse? Q?”

Her voice sounded nasal and thin. No reply from either the Air or the boy below her.

With one forearm, she braced herself against the armrest of the seat. She hit the harness release with her free hand and dropped like a sack of stones, too heavy to hold herself up. But she slowed her fall with the arm that had been bearing her weight and landed next to Jesse rather than on him. She bent down to check his pulse and make sure his airways were clear, as she had been taught in first aid. That lesson had been a long time ago. She had never needed it more.

After a moment, she sagged back onto her heels, dizzy with relief.

Jesse was alive.

When she brushed the hair back from his face, though, he didn’t react. She pressed her hand against his forehead, wondering if he felt hot or cold, or if that even mattered after an accident like this. She ran her hand over his skull, looking for bumps or wet patches. There were none, but that didn’t reassure her.

“Jesse? Wake up, please. . . .”

She wished she could talk to Q, but she had no access to the Air at all even though she was out in the open. She had no one to turn to for advice. She was on her own.

Clair straightened, blew more blood out her nose until she was able to breathe freely, and warily approached the open side of the airship. Her chunk of the crew compartment had been snagged by trees. They weren’t huge trees, maybe four or five yards high, and they were spaced in rows like an orchard. Bright-red autumn apples dotted the lush green leafscape like dollops of paint. The sun was either rising or setting, but she couldn’t see the sun itself, only the long shadows stretching away from her under the warm tones of a melting sky. Pink light mottled the underside of the solid cloud bank above. To her right, black smoke rose in a column, whipped into feathers by the wind. There was no sign of the power beam or the rest of the airship.

Through the trees, she saw lights flashing, long white beams darting like the antennae of insects. Questing, searching the thickening dusk. Coming closer, she thought.

The dupes had hunted her all the way from Manteca to the edge of the Sierra Nevada, and their power beam had blasted the Skylifter out of the sky like a laser might zap a mosquito. The implacable momentum of their pursuit made her feel like lying down and closing her eyes. They would never give up.

“Jesse,” she said, hurrying to his side. “Jesse, can you hear me? You have to wake up.”

Jesse didn’t stir. Clair wanted to shake him, but she didn’t, afraid of spinal injuries. Instead, she clapped her hands in front of Jesse’s face and shouted, “Jesse! We have to go—now!”

Still no response.

Still no word from Q.

Still no sign of the others.

And the lights were closer, leaving no doubt in her mind that the crash had been seen.

Clair was more alone than she had been at the Tuvalu monument. But she wasn’t helpless. The remains of the crew compartment still contained one of the small arms cases she had seen earlier, and inside it was a pistol. There was no ammunition, but she wouldn’t have known how to load it anyway. All she needed was a prop to back up the only strategy she had left, which was to bluff. A bluff could be enough, if she put everything into it.

You can handle yourself, Zep had said in the safe house. Remembering his confidence in her only made her feel sad again.

You’re good at this. You’ve missed your true calling.

Those were Jesse’s words. She bent over him to check his breathing again, touched his cheek gently for luck, then stood in the open end of the compartment with an empty gun in one hand, waiting for what came next.

The lights came closer, resolving not into people holding flashlights, but vehicles. Two-, three-, and four-wheeled, they bounced on oversized tires over ruts between the trees, spreading out to surround the airship and filling the air with the snarl of their engines. These motors were chemical rather than electric, leaving smoke trails behind them. Clair squeezed her nose between the thumb and forefinger of her left hand to stop herself from sneezing blood again.

Two vehicles came to a halt near her tree. One was a jeep with a flatbed at the rear and two men in the cab at the front. The third was a three-wheeler. The driver of the three-wheeler dismounted and jogged to stand directly below her. He was heavyset and bearded, wearing a checked shirt and overalls. He looked like a cartoon lumberjack. So did his friends. She stared down at him with her pulse beating high and fast in her throat.

“You with Turner?” he called, red-faced and belligerent.

“Why do you want to know?”

“This is a piece of his airship. We’re looking for survivors. Is he up there with you?”

“No.”

“He could be anywhere, then. Pieces of this thing fell all over.” He indicated the gun. “Are you going to shoot me with that or put it away?”

“Tell me who you are,” she countered, not moving an inch. He looked nothing like Dylan Linwood, but that didn’t mean she should automatically trust him.

“I’m a farmer, of course. Don’t you know where you are?”

She shook her head.

“So you weren’t headed here specifically?”

Clair remembered the frantic moments after their escape from the Skylifter. Turner had given Gemma a destination, but then the powersat beam had hit them, and they had gone down. Not knowing whether they had made it to their destination or not, she decided to continue stalling until she knew who she was talking to.

“We were heading for Buffalo,” she said, recalling the Skylifter’s official flight plan.

“Buffalo, huh? Well, that’s not here.”

“Are you going to tell me where ‘here’ is?”

The big man put his hands in his pocket and glanced down at the ground for a moment. When he looked back up again, he seemed to have reached some kind of decision.

“My name is Arcady. Turner trusts me, so you can trust me too. Or you can stay up there on your own. Your decision.”

My friend’s friend, thought Clair, or my enemy’s enemy. She wasn’t sure if this Arcady fit into either category, and she wasn’t really in a position to be fussy.

She knelt down and placed the useless pistol on the floor.

“All right,” she said. “I need a hand, though. There’s someone hurt up here.”

Arcady whistled and waved both arms above his head. Two more vehicles converged on the scene. The rest spread out through the orchard, looking for the other half of the airship.

Clair went back into the blood-spattered cockpit and kept an anxious vigil next to Jesse as the farmers climbed up from below.