Twinmaker

72

“NO!”

Clair was at Zep’s side in an instant. Before the life entirely left his eyes, he seemed to see her through a veil of hurt and puzzlement. His lips moved, but no sound emerged from them. Then he was gone. Again.

Clair knelt in the expanding pool of his blood, buried her head into his ruined chest, and would have wept but for Mallory’s hand in her hair, pulling her up and away from the body.

“It’s not your silence we want.”

Mallory pushed her back to the ground, away from Zep’s body.

“Leave me alone.” Clair scrabbled backward until her spine was pressed hard against a wall. Revulsion threatened to subsume her. Zep had died twice, and both times it had been because of her.

“Shall I bring him back again? One time if you do as we ask. Many times if you don’t.”

“You have Turner. What do you need me for?”

“Ant wants something else from you—and what Ant Wallace wants, Ant Wallace gets.”

“Now, now, there’s no need to be unpleasant about it. . . .” Wallace had entered the room without Clair noticing. He stood over Zep’s body and adjusted the cuffs of his shirt.

“Here’s the story,” he said. “I’m on my way to see you, as per your request, when an attack on the building triggers an emergency lockdown. You are isolated for your own protection, as am I, until security and peacekeepers foil the attack, at which point you and I are released. In response to the inevitable media uproar provoked by your followers, we hold a video conference. Gemma Mallapur confesses that you were used by WHOLE as a cover for an attack on the very heart of VIA. Once WHOLE’s terroristic aspirations are revealed, you renounce all your accusations of me and my organization. You are taken away for questioning but are not expected to be charged. The end. Any questions?”

Clair shook her head.

“I’m not saying that.”

“You misunderstand me. You already have.”

He stared down at her as the horrible truth sank in.

“We duped you, Clair,” he said. “My version of you is already out there, recanting all the things you said.”

“You couldn’t have,” she said, feeling a wave of existential panic. How could there be a copy of her out there when she was still alive here, wherever here was? “What about breaking parity?”

“Irrelevant in a private network.” He waved to indicate the booth-disguised-as-an-office. “No one will ever find you in here.”

“So why am I here? What can I do that my dupe can’t?”

“You can tell me all about your friend.”

“Libby?”

Mallory barked a short, hard laugh. “Hardly.”

Clair went to get up, but Mallory put a foot on her chest and pushed her back down.

“I’m talking about Q,” said Wallace. “That’s what you call her, right?”

Clair stared at him in complete confusion.

“You must know more about her than I do,” Clair said. “She’s one of Improvement’s victims, after all.”

“Don’t try to pin this on us,” said Mallory. “We had nothing to do with her.”

“I don’t believe you. How can she be in the hangover if you didn’t put her there?”

“The what?”

“The safety net, the memory dump, whatever you call it.” Clair tried to remember how Arcady had explained it to her. “The place you pulled Zep from.”

Mallory tilted Libby’s head and studied her with distant blue eyes, like she was a bug in a jar, slowly running out of air.

“Someone’s lying,” said Wallace, “and it can’t be both of you.”

His eyes moved, selecting menus from his lenses.

sssssss-pop

Gemma was standing next to Zep’s body, looking first at the room around her, then at her injured arm, which was still in a bandage.

“What?” she said, startled and confused. “This isn’t what you told me would—”

“I know what I told you,” said Wallace, “but you haven’t delivered. We’ve kept you on ice in case we needed you.”

“Ice . . . ?” Gemma’s expression became one of horror. “Sam—you promised me Sam—”

“And you’ll get him if you tell us the truth, this time.”

Clair lunged for Gemma, but Mallory’s boot held her down with crushing strength.

“You!” Clair spat. “You betrayed us!”

Gemma glanced at her, but only for a moment. Her gaze dropped to the floor, danced away from the blood, and ended up looking nowhere.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I had no choice.”

“Yes, you did,” said Wallace, “and you chose correctly. You chose your son over a band of misfits and meddlers. Who in their right mind wouldn’t do that?”

“This isn’t right,” Gemma said, still avoiding looking at the body. “You said you wouldn’t hurt them.”

“And you believed him?” said Clair, aghast.

“It’s not how it looks! They wanted me to be a sleeper agent, but I never actually spied on anyone, never gave anything away—until I saw proof in the Farmhouse that they could do everything they claimed they could do—changing people, bringing them back from the dead . . .”

“Yes, yes,” said Wallace in an impatient tone. “You activated the bug at the Farmhouse. We exchanged messages. We promised you the one thing in the world you really want.”

He had walked half a circle around Gemma and come to a halt next to Mallory, drawing attention to the body, Clair realized, and to the gun in Mallory’s hand.

“I don’t reward lies,” he said. “Tell me everything you know about Q.”

Gemma blinked at him. “What about her?”

“You told us she was a kid,” Mallory said. “Some kind of prodigy.”

“That’s what she sounds like. A kid living in the Air.”

“But you’re not sure?”

“I’ve never met her. Why would she fake something like that?”

“I don’t know. That’s why we brought you back.”

Gemma stared at Wallace and Mallory with despair and hatred in her eyes, then suddenly ripped the cross from her neck and threw it across the room.

“Keep your stupid bug,” she said, voice crackling with emotion. “You’re never going to give him back to me, are you? You played me for a fool.”

“The thing is,” said Wallace, “in all honesty, we don’t care much either way. You can have as many Sameers as you like, as long as you convince us that we can trust you.”

“But I’ve told you everything I know. I swear!”

“I don’t believe in the ghosts of dead girls haunting the Air,” said Wallace. “I do believe that Clair can tell us more. The boy from Manteca here”—he indicated Zep’s body—“didn’t have the effect we were hoping for. I’ll be grateful if you can provide us with the leverage we need.”

“How?”

The smile he offered her was as dangerous as Mallory’s pistol.

“You work it out.”

Clair stared at Gemma, seeing her desperation and her thwarted hope. She had been strung out and stressed ever since the attack on the Farmhouse, and now Clair knew why. She had started expressing her doubts at the train station in Mandan, but Clair hadn’t listened. Clair was listening now, wishing she could find some way to hate her.

This wasn’t the grand treachery of Wallace and Mallory, the depths of which she hadn’t yet begun to fathom. This was an everyday betrayal, human, galling, and desperately frustrating.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Gemma snarled at her. “Who are you to judge? You’ve had it easy all your life. You have a family, and you have friends, and you have a life full of riches. You can go anywhere, do anything, be anyone you want to be. And who am I? Some mad old fool whose child died—and now I have the chance to get him back, exactly as I remember him. You’d take it, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t even hesitate.”

Clair shook her head. She could see what Gemma was doing. She was talking herself into something, something she knew she shouldn’t do. And to make matters worse, Clair knew what it was.

“Don’t,” Clair said. “They’ll never give you what you want.”

“You can talk. I asked you to look after him, but you wouldn’t do it. And even if you had agreed, I wouldn’t have believed you. You could never have protected him. And neither can I. It’s done. It’s over. We’re through.”

The brief war waging behind Gemma’s eyes was over. Clair had lost.

Gemma told Wallace, “Try Jesse.”

Mallory smiled.