Crashland (31 page)

THE DREAM STARTED
exactly the same way as it had before. She was lost in a giant multicolored maze that spread out all around her, a vast and impossibly complex tapestry. Something tugged at her, some thread of familiarity on an unconscious level, but she didn't know how to follow it. Promising routes took her nowhere; dead ends suddenly flowered into new possibilities; routes that had led her in a circle the first time unexpectedly sent her in new directions the next.

“This is a test,” said Q in a reproachful voice. “You're failing.”

She sounded like she had at the end, right before Clair had sacrificed herself.

“Give me a hint,” she begged. “Just one. I won't let you down.”

“You already have.”

“But I didn't know it would lead to this. I didn't understand the rules.”

“There are no rules,” said Q. “When are you ever going to learn?”

What kind of world didn't have any rules? Clair was about to say that when the nagging sense of familiarity suddenly became stronger than ever. She had been inside this maze before, and if she could only remember when, she was sure her destination would become clear. But who would be waiting for her there: Q? Her mother? Someone else entirely . . . ?

She jerked awake, her heart pounding at the sound of a person creeping into her room.

“Who's there?” she called out blindly in the darkness.

“Shhhhh. It's me . . . Jesse.”

The familiarity of his voice cut through her sudden panic, but it still took her a second to work out where she was. Her lenses were as dark as the room. The icon containing all the bumps and grabs from the outside world was the only detail glowing in her infield.

“You're back,” she said, trying to shake the heaviness of sleep from her mind. Half a dream lingered . . . something about a pattern that had seemed important . . . but it was fading as she reached for it. “How long have I been out?”

“I don't know,” he said, sitting on the bed next to her. She could barely see him, but she could smell him. He hadn't showered or changed his clothes. It wasn't all bad, though. She liked the muskiness of him. He smelled different from any guy she had ever known. More real, in a way that was hard to define. Maybe it was because the soaps and colognes he used were real, not fabbed.

“I talked to Agnessa for an hour,” he said, “and then I went for a walk around the muster. There are thousands of people here, with more coming every day. They've spread out for miles. There are farms, factories, recycling plants . . .”

Since she couldn't see him, she reached out to touch him instead. His back was tense under her fingertips, a long, lean wall of muscle and bone.

“Why didn't you come straight back?”

He exhaled sharply.

“She knew everything about me,” he said. “My family, what happened to my mother—she said she'd talked to my father a couple of times. She knew I was an Abstainer but wasn't a member of WHOLE. . . . Do you know what she believes?”

Clair sensed that he had been about to say something else, but had changed his mind at the last second.

“It's not the usual thing?” she said.

“Similar,” he said. “Everyone who's gone through d-mat . . . none of them have any souls. They died the first time they went through. But that doesn't mean they're robots or zombies or anything like that. They're still people. They just can't do anything about the afterlife. Their souls have already gone to heaven or hell or wherever they were supposed to go, when they ‘died' that first time. Their fates are decided.”

“So why's she helping us?”

“Because people without souls can still do good. And helping them do good can be good for
her
. She's lost her health, she said, but she still has her soul—and it sounds like she has heavy stuff to atone for before she dies. WHOLE's done some things over the years . . . There were accidents. . . .”

He stopped talking, and Clair reached up and put an arm around his shoulders, pulled him close.

“Is this about your mother?”

She felt him shake his head. He leaned into her, so their temples touched.

“It's about me.”

“What about you?”

“Me and all the jumping I've been doing.”

A germ of disquiet began to grow inside her. This was what he had been avoiding, she was sure. For a moment she thought about letting it go unsaid, but she had the feeling that he had come to her wanting to talk. Either that or his seduction skills needed a lot of work.

“I know that hasn't been easy for you,” she said, taking a middle ground between encouraging him and discouraging him, and more than a little wishing he would just get to the point. She was tired, and that dream was still nagging at her. . . .

What he said next woke her up as effectively as a bucket of cold water.

“I can stay an Abstainer if I turn my back on d-mat forever, Agnessa said—but only if I do it publicly, so everyone can see.”

She straightened and pulled away from him.

“Is that what you want?”

He took a deep breath.

“I've been an Abstainer as long as I can remember,” he said. “I don't know any other way to live. If I turn my back on that, what am I? But if I don't . . . I don't see how you and I could ever work out. I heard you tell Nobody that you want everything to go back the way it was. I don't want that. We'll never agree on that. And people . . . the people who look up to us . . . won't want us to be together because of our differences. So maybe we just . . . shouldn't.”

Clair didn't say anything. Here they were again, arguing about their beliefs. Her heart and head were torn between sympathy and annoyance—which was nothing, she guessed, compared to how he felt. He was the one who had been interested in her for years, whereas she had barely noticed him until a week ago. With the normal rules of the world suspended, it had been easy to imagine that they could just continue on like this forever, but what he said was right. She could see it as clearly as he could. When things went back to normal—as they surely had to, soon; she had to believe that—their very different lives would tear them apart.

But there was still
right now
. Didn't that count for something?

Her chest filled with a new feeling: anger.
This
was what WHOLE was getting in return for helping her. Jesse Linwood was a much more straightforward hero for the Abstainer movement than Clair Hill. A victim of the dupes of his own father . . . tricked by Ant Wallace into using the reviled d-mat . . . steadfastly sticking to his principles,
if
he publicly renounced d-mat . . . he was a tragic but hopeful figure that might inspire a movement already strengthened by the crash.

But what about her? What did Clair want? Did that factor in anywhere?

Did she even know what she wanted? She had been struggling so long to save other people that she had hardly thought about what
she
needed.

A stab of sadness went through her at the thought of losing Jesse. They had barely gotten together, and this was the third time he had tried to talk himself out of it. She wasn't going to let him. It felt so
right
right now, and she needed him too much to let him go.

“Don't decide immediately,” she said, coming back close to him. “There's no hurry. You're here. There's no d-mat to worry about. No one's going to ask you to use it again.”

“Agnessa wants my decision by tomorrow. The day after at the latest.”

Clair bit her lip on what she wanted to say.

“Tomorrow's tomorrow,” she said instead. “That's what my mom always tells me. Today is today. Everything ends up yesterday, anyway.”

“That's a song,” he said. “An old one.”

“Is it?” She hadn't known that.

“Yeah, my dad used to sing it to me when I was a kid.”

“Your dad . . .
sing
?”

“Hard to imagine, isn't it?”

He laughed, just once, but it was enough to break the tension. She laughed too, and then they both had their hands over their mouths, trying hard not to make too much noise. She put her arms around him and buried her face in his neck, reveling in the smell of him, and then they were kissing, and falling back onto the bed, and for a while all anxious thoughts were forgotten.

Later, still dressed in the undersuit but with her nerves singing too loudly to sleep, Clair lay awake feeling the steady rise and fall of Jesse's rib cage at her side. Her right arm was completely numb, trapped under his shoulder, but she didn't want to disturb him. He wasn't used to constantly changing time zones like ordinary people, so he was always dropping off at odd times and needing to catch up on his sleep. She didn't want to think about the choice he had to make and what it might mean for her, so her mind drifted back to the dream. It was still nagging, which annoyed her: why couldn't it leave her alone so she could ponder something important, like whether Q and the dupes were hiding in the same place and what she could do about it if they were?

She should be grateful, she told herself. At least she wasn't dreaming about the Linwoods doing something horrible to her mother. Or the Cashiles. Or the thousands of other dupes out there, all trying to get to her for reasons she no longer understood. When the situation had been about Q, she could live with it, in the sense that it didn't drive her insane trying to work it out. Now it just seemed so random. If they didn't want to kill her or interrogate her or blackmail her, what did they want? Why would they lie about her mother? Who did have her if they really didn't?

When she closed her eyes she saw lines, lines, lines.

When she opened them, her subconscious started nagging her again.

If it was trying to tell her something, why didn't it just tell her?

That was why it was called the
sub
conscious, she supposed. It was up to the rest of her mind to figure out what it was trying to say.

All right. Since she obviously wasn't going to get any sleep, she might as well try to solve the puzzle. It was better than worrying about her mother and feeling impotent.

The dream wasn't only about lines. It was also about Q. Q was in a maze, talking to her, goading her on. Could it be a clue as to where Q was hiding—like a map, or a message in writing she couldn't understand?

Unlikely. She didn't think her mind was playing that kind of trick on her—besides, how could one part of her mind drop a clue the rest of her mind knew nothing about? It had to be something she as a whole actually knew.

Or had seen . . .

The lines seemed familiar to her in the dream. Could she really have seen something like that before and forgotten it? In the Air or somewhere like that? Was it something Q had shown her?

Could this be the information the dupes were alluding to?

What did you see, Clair, in the stars . . . what did you see?

Stars made her think of the night sky, but there was nothing special about that. Anyone could look up.

Clair sighed in frustration, and Jesse stirred. She held her breath until he went back to sleep, not ready to derail this train of thought just yet. There was something at the end of it, she was sure. She trusted herself. It was just a matter of getting there.

Q . . . lines . . . stars . . .

The other place that had lots of stars was outer space. Maybe that was what “in the stars” meant.
In
them, not looking
at
them.

With that thought, details began clicking together like sections of a three-dimensional jigsaw.

Click
.

The only time she had been in space was in Wallace's station.

Click
.

That was where she had betrayed Q.

Click
.

Before then, Q had hacked into the station map to find the patterns of Jesse, Turner, and the others.

Click
.

The sheer complexity of Wallace's secret dataverse had been as blinding as the sun.

Lines in a maze, spreading out in all directions
.

SHE WANTED TO
leap out of bed and wake everyone up. This was it, she was sure of it. This was what the dream was telling her.

The thing she had seen, the thing the dupes were worried about, was the architecture of Wallace's secret world. The world that he had built to enable Improvement and the dupes, and that she had blown up along with the space station.

Or had she?

Clair had searched it at the time, seeking the patterns of Libby, Dylan Linwood, and Zep, but had been unable to find anything. Maybe she had been looking for the wrong thing, or looking in the wrong place, or looking the wrong
way
. . . .

It was hard to understand what she could do about that now. The station didn't exist anymore. But there had to be something in there of importance, or else why would everyone be chasing her? If she could only remember what it looked like in detail. . . .

Clair almost cried out in triumph then, but still she stayed in bed, every muscle locked, heart hammering with a different kind of excitement now.

She didn't need to remember. Q had streamed the vision of Wallace's lair through her lenses. The data might still be in there. She had occasionally lost homework assignments sent to her by her friends, so she knew there was a folder where such data was held for a while before permanent deletion—a bit like the hangover in the Farmhouse that had given her hope of finding Libby, an age ago. If she could remember where that folder was, and if the vision Q had given her hadn't been cleared from it . . .

She fumbled her way through several menus, wishing she had paid more attention to Ronnie the last time this had happened. She couldn't call her friend now because it might tip her hand, if someone was listening. Besides, Ronnie might not be willing to help her again, after what had happened the last time.