Crashland (11 page)

“We should get out of here,” said Clair, feeling a flicker of panic. The dupes just wouldn't let up.

“Wait,” said Forest. “Reinforcements.”

He indicated the window. A squad of peacekeepers was deploying at the base of the building. As a pair of canisters rolled across the plaza, gunfire broke out between the two parties, faintly audible from the ground below.

Clair hoped the PKs showed no mercy. How long until that video of her and Zep turned up on Clairwatch for the entire world to see?

“That's all well and good,” said Devin, “but the dupes are theoretically unlimited in number, while you guys are not.”

“More are on their way from New York HQ,” said Forest.

“The fact remains. Unless you start duping your officers—”

“That is illegal,” said Forest with an irritated frown.

“You could change the law—”

“If we were allowed to do it, they would be too,” said PK Drader. “I can't see the lawmakers agreeing to that. LM Kingdon made it very clear in a ruling this morning—”

“Look,” said Jesse, pointing at something above street level. “There's another show in town.”

On the building opposite the old post office, a trio of masked figures had appeared. They weren't wearing uniforms or armor. They had backpacks, which, when they reached the edge of the roof garden, they took off and opened. Carrying what looked like glass bottles in each hand, the masked figures leaned over the edge, directly above the thick brown cloud created by the dupes.

One by one, they threw the bottles at the points from where gunfire appeared to be issuing. Each bottle exploded on impact, sending tendrils of fiery liquid in all directions.

“Your friends, I assume,” said Devin to Jesse.

“No one I know personally,” said Jesse. He bumped Clair a statement from WHOLE listing all the people killed by dupes in recent days, followed by a call to arms. These three had responded. “They're local Abstainers.”

“How did they get up there so quickly?” she asked.

“They know their way around because they don't use d-mat.”

Clair remembered the people who had flocked to see her on her train journey to New York. At the time she had felt sorry for them, but now she saw that their lifestyle actually gave them an advantage during the crash. As Turner Goldsmith had said, they were in every town, everywhere, and they didn't treat their homes like temporary rest stops, with their real lives happening somewhere else entirely.

A bottle bomb exploded in the middle of a clump of dupes, sending bodies flying.

“If a terrorist helps you, PK Forest,” said Devin, “are they still terrorists?”

“They're not helping us,” said Sargent. “They're helping Jesse.”

“And Clair,” Jesse said. “She's the girl who killed d-mat.”

“I wish people would stop saying that,” Clair said.

“I'll go down and tell them now, if you like,” said Devin. “Then they can go back to whatever hole they crawled out of and leave us to die in peace.”

Clair shot him a sharp look that had no effect whatsoever.

“We can't stay here,” she said, just as horrified by what was going on outside the room as what lay within. How long until someone innocent was killed by one of those bombs? “
I
can't stay here.”

“We don't have to leave just yet,” said Sargent. “We're in no immediate danger.”

“Can you watch this? I can't,” she said, balling her fists and rubbing them into her eyes. It didn't help: she saw the images just as clearly in her mind. “I don't want anyone else to die because of me.”

“It's about more than you,” said Devin. “There's an ideological war taking place down there, one that's been brewing for a while . . . but I take your point. You're the flashpoint, the trigger. If you go away, most likely the dupes will too. But go where? That's the question.”

“Let's join the guys fighting out there,” said Jesse eagerly. “Go underground, travel quiet. They'll know where to hide. They can keep us safe.”

“It could work,” said PK Drader, scratching his ear.

“We'll be spotted the moment we set foot outside the building,” said Sargent, her expression betraying her alarm at the scheme, alarm Clair shared. “If we're cornered, there'll be no way to escape.”

“You don't have to come with us,” said Jesse. “In fact, the fewer there are, the easier it will be to stay out of sight.”

“We cannot allow that,” said PK Forest.

“Why not?” Jesse asked. “Are we your prisoners?”

“No, but you are critical to our investigation.”
Flick
. “Not to mention vulnerable. It would be irresponsible of me to allow you to leave our care at this time.”

“You can't make us stay.” Jesse glanced at PK Sargent, the biggest person in the room. “Can you?”

“They're the ones with the guns,” said Devin. “That gives them a certain bargaining power.”

“Yes, but—”

“He's right, Jesse.” Clair put a hand on his arm. Sargent was right too: it was a crazy idea. Besides, she was exhausted. She couldn't remember the last time she'd slept. On the train, perhaps, near Chicago. It felt like a lifetime ago—and was, in a sense, exactly that.

“We can't go back out into the real world,” she said. “It's not safe for us
or
for anyone near us. We have to go somewhere else, somewhere the dupes won't find us, somewhere preferably without any people at all. That's the only way we can be sure we've shaken them. . . .”

“How about Antarctica?” asked Devin. “RADICAL conducts some pretty extreme research, and we don't like prying eyes. Valkyrie Station is on Dome Fuji, thousands of miles from anyone. You can't get any farther from people without actually leaving the planet . . . which I assume you don't want to do?”

Clair shook her head. She wasn't going back into space for anything. The one and only time she had done so, Wallace had threatened to blow her out an airlock.

“I don't like it,” said Jesse. “We'll be completely isolated down there.”

“That's the point, isn't it?” said Devin.

Clair waved him silent. “Give us a moment.”

She pulled Jesse by the arm into the privacy cubicle, trying with every step to ignore the memories that short walk prompted. Her heart danced a shuffle, uncertain of the tempo.

Jesse pulled away the moment they were alone.

“What are you doing, Clair?” he asked in a tense whisper. “Are you signing up with those guys?”

“No,” she said, “but I'm not signing up with WHOLE, either. I'm somewhere in the middle. You understand that, right? We need to get the dupes off our back, and if RADICAL can do that, great. If not, we try our own thing.”

Jesse hesitated, then nodded.

“What if I said I was going to stay behind this time?” he asked.

Her heart shuffled again. Would he really leave her over some small difference of opinion? Did she mean that little to him?

“I'd talk you out of it,” she bluffed. “Can we just take that for granted?”

He bit his lip and didn't say anything.

“I understand,” she said, and she did understand, or at least was trying to. “The first few times you had no say in when you had to use d-mat, and that last one wasn't really your decision either. It was either do it or drown. No contest, from where I was standing.”

Clair took his right hand in both of hers.

“This time it's your choice,” she said, “and I'm
asking
you to trust me. Nicely. I promise you it'll be okay.”

“How can you promise that?”

She reached up on tiptoes and kissed him long enough to make her point. Out of the corner of her eye she caught a reflection of the two of them in the glass: short and tall, both with so much hair. It worked.
That
was the only thing she could promise.

“I guess it's only fair,” he said in a resigned tone. “You crossed the country the Abstainer way, so now it's my turn. Besides, the damage has been done. If d-mat does turn you into a zombie, that's what I am now.”

Clair hated that word. It reminded her again of his father, who had been unpleasant enough even before being turned into a dupe.

“Does that mean you'll do it?”

He hugged her. “Yes,” he said, and she breathed a sigh of relief into his neck. It was all well and good to stick to one's principles—admirable, even, and one of the things she liked about him—but being reasonable would keep them together. And staying together was more important than anything else, short of saving the world.

BEFORE THE SHUTTERS
came down and she was cut off from the Air again, Clair posted a caption. It was a picture of her own face accompanied by the words “Watch this space.” She couldn't think of anything cleverer than that, and it was the basic message she wanted to convey. The dupes were telling lies about her, and she didn't know how to stop that at the moment. She could only hope that people wouldn't make up their minds too firmly, too quickly, and that when she, the real Clair Hill, was able to reappear later they would recognize the person she had always been.

But was she really that same person anymore? She didn't know. It wasn't just the things she had seen and done, and the small matter of being a copy—it was the weirdness of seeing herself do things that she definitely hadn't done. Her dupes took liberties with her body that no one should ever be able to; their very existence cast her own sense of self into question. When the rest of the world was so easily confused about who she was, even her closest friends, it was hard not to feel that way herself.

“Ready?” Devin asked when the view of the fighting outside was cut off.

“Actually,” said PK Drader, raising a hand, “I'm wondering if some of us should peel off. Me and Xia here, for instance: I really should take her into permanent custody. You can come with us to HQ, if you want,” he added for the benefit of the tech. “Cold weather doesn't agree with me.”

He winked at Jesse, who didn't respond. Clair assumed the odd, one-sided camaraderie harked back to when Jesse had been in his custody, while Clair had been interrogated. If it was another good cop/bad cop scenario, then it was doomed to fail with Jesse because he had been raised to think that there weren't any good cops at all.

“Very well,” said Forest with a nod. “That is what we will do. If you can arrange it, Devin . . . ?”

“Easy,” said Devin, pointing at PK Drader, Xia, and the tech. “You three stand to one side. It'll be simpler to split the pattern that way.”

Once those words would have sent a shudder of dread through Clair. Altering a pattern was supposed to be dangerous, and it was definitely illegal, but it had happened to her so many times now that she barely thought about it anymore.

PK Drader and the two women stepped to one side. There was no blood on the floor, but Xia was standing exactly where Zep had fallen dead for the second time.

“Au revoir,” said PK Drader. “And bon voyage to us all.”

Clair took Jesse's hand again and squeezed it tightly. He brought the back of hers up to his lips and kissed it.

mmmmm-click

Then her hand was empty, awkwardly upraised, and she was alone with Devin in a cylindrical space approximately ten yards across, with no visible doors or windows. Contorted reflections of her danced in curved mirrors as she twisted to look behind her.

“What is this?” she asked, alarmed by Jesse's sudden disappearance. “What went wrong?”

“Nothing. You're exactly where I said I'd take you. Look.”

The mirrored walls turned transparent, revealing a flat, snowy expanse dotted with a dozen black silos mounted on thick struts that speared down into the ice. The sky above was bright blue, dusted with long streaks of white. Streamers of wind swept back and forth across the fields and drifts of snow. It looked like nowhere on Earth.

She reached instinctively to the Air to orient herself. She had basic access only—no bumps, no chats. Taking neither Devin nor RADICAL at their word, Clair confirmed for herself that she was deep in Queen Maud Land, on the East Antarctica ice sheet, the largest remaining ice sheet on the planet. The temperature outside was forty degrees below zero. She shivered at the thought of it.

“Is this some kind of trick?” she asked, sweeping the Air aside and rounding on Devin. There was no sign of anyone else but the two of them. They were alone at the bottom of the world. If he thought that made her his prisoner . . .

He backed away from her with his hands upraised, as though she were about to attack him. “No trick, honest. I just want to talk to you alone.”

“About what? About why I should trust you?”

She proffered the hand that had until seconds ago been holding Jesse's. She could still feel the faint pressure of his lips against her skin.

“This is so not helping,” she said.

“Just hear me out, will you?”

“You've got one minute.” What she would do at the end of that minute she didn't know, but it was important for him to know that she wasn't a pushover.

“There's another ideological war going on,” he said, “and you need to be clear about who's on the winning side.”

“I'm not going to join WHOLE,” she said. “I thought that was obvious.”

“It is, but I'll be honest and say that it'd be easier if you did. WHOLE and its goons are predictable, within certain parameters. You know, I was surprised today, when they came out lobbing bombs at the dupes. They're usually so self-limiting, too busy looking backward to see what lies ahead. Most people are, so don't take offense when I say that you're no different. You're not looking back quite as far, that's all.”

“Again,” she said, “if you're trying to win me over, great job.”