Twinmaker

70

SHE BANGED AT the door again and again.

“Hey, answer me!”

The mug shattered, and she recoiled, blinking ceramic flecks from her eyes.

The pounding was definitely louder.

“Clair, look.”

Jesse was pointing at the door. Her coffee mug had left deep scratches in the paint. Beneath was a shiny surface that looked like metal at first glance, except it was too reflective. It did more than gleam. It was so shiny, it looked like a shard of perfect mirror.

Clair leaned closer, puzzled.

Why go to the trouble of making the doors out of mirror and then painting over them? Why use it as a door at all?

What if it wasn’t just a door?

Clair stood up and turned a quick full circle, taking in the space around her. The windows were sealed tight: the shutters were painted too. The ceilings were unbroken, and they were also painted. Using a sharp sliver of broken mug, she worried at a carpet seam until it came up: more mirror.

The room wasn’t a room. It was a giant d-mat booth.

“Clair?”

She barely heard Ray trying to get her attention. Why build an office inside a booth? She could think of one reason: so Wallace could move from meeting to meeting without leaving his desk. VIA was a global company and its executive director no doubt a man in demand. People could come to him or he could go to them. Maybe he liked doing the latter without even getting out of his chair. Maybe this was his management style, to be the guy who dropped in rather than the guy who summoned from afar.

Clair could accept that.

But why lock them inside it? Was it a coincidence or something more sinister?

“Clair? Can you feel it?”

She blinked. The hammering was audible now and getting noticeably louder by the second. Occasionally, the floor shook. It sounded like a full-on war out there. A completely unnecessary war caused by VIA locking Clair in. Wallace couldn’t have provoked Q more effectively if he’d tried. Or Turner. Capturing Ray, one of WHOLE’s own, would give Turner the perfect excuse for “direct action.”

With that thought, the missing piece fell into place.

“Oh no,” she said.

“What?” Jesse was watching her.

“I’ve figured it out.”

“Figured what out?”

“It’s Turner. That’s what this is about.”

“Why Turner? How?”

“The dupes steal someone’s body. What if they steal someone’s memories as well? That means they’d know where Turner was the moment they duped Arabelle—but they couldn’t take him from the Skylifter because it was too public. So they shot it down and sent in the dupes.” It all made horrible, blinding sense to her now. “That didn’t work, but they didn’t try again because they didn’t need to—all thanks to me!”

“Why,” asked Jesse. “What have you done?”

She hated the wariness in his eyes.

“Nothing,” she said, “except ignore Gemma, because she was right. She was absolutely right!”

It was getting hard to talk over the hammering of guns.

“They’re just outside,” Ray said, backing away from the door.

“Don’t let them in,” Clair said in rising desperation. “They have to stay outside!”

But the double door was already sliding open, as it had to for the plan to work. Q had to be fooled into thinking she’d unlocked the door herself. It couldn’t be damaged by explosives. The space within the room had to be resealable.

“Clair!” The cry came from the drone, which was the first through the gap. Q’s triumph was palpable. “You’re alive!”

“Not for much longer if you don’t do as I say,” she said, running to the first actual person into the room—Gemma, singed and smelling like century-old slime. She wrenched the pistol from Gemma’s hand and emptied the clip into the walls.

“Get out!” she yelled. “Get out now!”

Jesse and Ray dived as bullet after bullet ricocheted around them. Then Clair’s finger was wrenching the trigger to no avail, the pistol making nothing but a click-clicking sound. Empty.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Gemma asked her, eyes wide with fury.

Clair ignored her. She turned to get another weapon and found Turner right behind her, raising his hands in placation as though she were the crazy one, and he hadn’t put them all in danger just by stepping into the booth.

“You can’t be here,” she said, pushing him to the door. “This is what they want. Your secret—your life—”

Dawning understanding transformed Turner’s expression into one of panic. The d-mat booth was a trap, and Clair was the bait. Q had led Turner right into it—Turner, with his immortality genes, just waiting to be scanned and dissected. Everything else was incidental.

She seemed to think much faster than reality was moving. Turner—door—now. Her body weighed tons. She willed it to move more quickly, screaming at herself for being so slow. Turner was even slower and heavier than she was. She grabbed his shoulder and her muscles burned. He was a mountain that took an age to move an inch.

Even as she strained, she wondered: How had VIA known?

The door was already closing. Ray slipped one arm into the gap and tried to pull it back, but the door wasn’t staying open for anyone now that Turner was inside. Ray screamed as the metal mouth closed on him. Blood sprayed. There was a terrible crunching sound.

The d-mat process started the very instant the room was sealed. Clair’s wild shots had damaged nothing, changed nothing.

ssss—

The room was much bigger than a normal booth and contained much more air. That gave her more time—but to do what? Jesse stared at her in hopes of an explanation. Turner was bent over Ray, pale-faced. Only Gemma seemed calm, fatalistically resigned.

—ssss—

“Q, can you stop this?”

“This booth isn’t connected to the public domain. It’s a private network, and I don’t know how to access it.”

“Well, find out fast!”

“I’m sorry, Clair. I did the wrong thing again. I didn’t realize—”

—ssss—

Clair’s ears were stinging. Jesse was backed up against the wall, red from neck to thigh with Ray’s blood. She felt the air grow Himalaya thin as she pushed past her would-be rescuers in order to be near him.

“You always wanted to try d-mat,” she said. “I’m sorry it had to be like this.”

He swallowed.

“At least we’re—”

—pop