Twinmaker

71

CLAIR BLINKED. THE room was the same, right down to the scratches on the walls. The light was the same. The air smelled the same. Except for the pop of her ears, she wouldn’t have believed she had gone anywhere.

But there was no Jesse. No WHOLE. No blood. No empty gun in her hand. She stared around her in shock.

The pattern had been altered in transit. Everything but her and the room’s furniture and decorations had been edited from the space contained within the mirrored walls. What had happened to the data she couldn’t guess. Saved elsewhere? Erased? She hoped with all her heart it wasn’t the latter.

She took a hesitant step and noticed something that was new—a weird giddying sensation, as though the floor were moving under her in ways she couldn’t consciously determine.

The doors to the office opened, and two people walked in. One looked exactly like Libby, except for two very important things: her birthmark was missing, and so was the light in her eyes. She was like the room around them, with everything that made her special edited out. She held a steel-gray pistol in her right hand.

The other person was Ant Wallace. Of course it was, she thought. It had to be him. He looked exactly like his picture in the Air: round faced, in his fifties or so, with an open expression and care lines around his eyes. Perhaps a little shorter than Clair had expected, he was jacketless, in shirtsleeves and silk tie, with charcoal suit pants and patent leather shoes. His right hand was outstretched in welcome.

She backed away, confused and scared at the same time.

“No?” he said, raising the hand in imploration, then lowering it. “Understandable, perhaps. Your plan to shame VIA into action would have been a good one, had I not been behind Improvement all along.”

The doors closed, giving Clair the barest glimpse of what lay outside. Another corridor, but not the one she had come through before. She was definitely in a different place. Wherever she was, there was no access to the Air: her lenses were completely blank.

“And the dupes as well?”

“They’re aspects of the same thing, as I think you’re beginning to appreciate.”

The woman in Libby’s body came closer and pointed the gun so the barrel was only a hand’s span away from Clair’s head. She was wearing a simple black dress in a heavy fabric, some kind of wool weave, perhaps, with a black suit jacket over the top and black leather shoes with a low heel. Her blond hair was pulled back to expose her neck. She wore no jewelry and looked classy and cool, a decade older than the girl Clair knew.

“You don’t frighten me, Mallory,” Clair said, forcing herself not to flinch. She met the woman’s cold stare and searched it for any sign of recognition. Surely there was some hint of Libby left, some shred of Clair’s best friend who still remembered who she had been, remembered her. “I know you won’t kill me.”

The woman holding the gun frowned. The barrel dipped slightly.

“How do you know my name?”

“From the Farmhouse, of course,” said Wallace with affable authority. “She’s resourceful.” He moved around behind the desk and sat casually in the chair. “That’s why we want to reward her, not punish her. Isn’t that right?”

“Reward me for what?”

“For bringing Turner Goldsmith to me. Without you and your plan, he would’ve gone to ground, and we would’ve lost him again. For all our assertions to the contrary, mistakes do happen, and we don’t always learn from them. The error that allowed Turner Goldsmith to live so long is one such, but now that he’s safely uploaded and awaiting analysis, we can make up for lost time. His genes are going to be very useful indeed. I will live young, well, and long enough to do everything I want. Isn’t that all anyone desires?”

Wallace glanced at Mallory in Libby’s body. A microexpression that might have been a frown flashed across his features. “Well, maybe not everyone. But the point is valid. You’ve helped give me what I want, and I think it’s time we returned the favor.”

The d-mat booth came to life around them again. Clair put her arms around herself and held on tight, afraid of what might be changed this time.

sssssss-pop

Zeppelin Barker was in the room, not three yards from her.

Her heart jolted.

Solid, blond, and tanned, dressed in track pants, sneakers, and a vest sporting the school colors. No bullet wound. Living, breathing, real. She could smell him.

He was already reacting in puzzlement to an environment he hadn’t expected, adopting a wary crouch and looking around until he saw her.

“Clair? What’s going on?”

Clair didn’t know what to tell him. There were just the two of them in the room now. Wallace and Mallory—it seemed simplest to call her that—were gone. The faint sense of giddiness remained, so Clair guessed that she and the room had been d-matted nowhere this time—a null jump, Arabelle had called it. The pattern had been edited again en route.

But . . . Zep?

“What are you doing here?” she asked him. “Where did you come from?”

“The dorm. Remember? That Abstainer freak sending the feed from Gordon the Gorgon’s office? Don’t tell me I missed the end of it. . . .”

He looked around again as though trying to match his last memory with this new moment. Clair was struggling to do the same thing. If the last thing he remembered was leaving the dorm to come join her at school, that meant he was a copy taken from the last time he had used d-mat. The original Zep had gone on to get shot, while an echo of him—this version of him—had survived in storage somewhere. And now he was alive again, missing the last hours of his life and the last few days of Clair’s, but otherwise exactly as he had been.

“Clair? What’s going on?”

He went to approach her, but she instinctively pulled away. There was always a chance it wasn’t really him. . . .

“What did we talk about the last time we saw each other?”

“Libby, of course. Why?”

She shook her head. That was a stupid question. Mallory was in Libby’s head now; she could have known and could have briefed him.

“What’s my least favorite city?”

“Omsk.”

He came closer, as though to touch her, and she shied away again, even though she knew now that he was really him.

“Clair, what’s wrong with you? You’re starting to freak me out.”

He wasn’t the only one feeling that way. Wallace and Mallory obviously knew about her and Zep and what had happened to him in Manteca. They were offering to undo the harm that had been done—and they could deliver, too, with access to his archived pattern, wherever it had been saved. Since Zep wasn’t legally dead, he could walk back into his life as though nothing had happened. Maybe Wallace thought the two of them could even pick up where they had left off, if they wanted to. Without Libby.

That was the deal. All she had to do to accept it, presumably, was to back down from her Counter-Improvement campaign.

If she took the deal, however, Wallace would win. Libby would disappear, possibly forever, Q would never get her body back . . . and what would happen to WHOLE and the others? What would happen to Jesse? She couldn’t just rewind the last few days and forget they had ever happened.

She clenched her fists. Clair Larhonda Hill wasn’t so easily bought.

“It’s not going to work,” she shouted at the walls and ceiling. “Do you hear me? You can’t buy my silence so easily!”

The doors opened.

“Libby!” Zep cried. “Thank God. We’ve been so—”

“Worried? Why? I’m beautiful, remember?”

The pistol was still in her hand. She raised it, this time pointing at Zep.

“Libby, wait . . . if this is about Clair—”

“Clair, Clair, Clair,” she said. “It’s always about Clair.”

The gun cracked, and Zep fell to the floor, shot through the heart.