Crashland (33 page)

Her stomach rumbled.

“You mentioned breakfast,” she said.

“I did. Are you game?”

“Game? I'm so hungry I'd eat anything.”

“Wait until you try my legendary beetroot and porridge omelet.”

“Uh . . . maybe not
that
hungry. I'll ask Jesse instead.”

“Just a joke, Joyce. Meet you in the kitchen in sixty. Prepare to be amazed.”

Half an hour later she was amazingly full of scrambled eggs, fried mushrooms, and two thick slabs of whole-grain toast, dripping with butter and generously dusted with salt. She had wolfed it down, having been made even hungrier by the smells produced during the cooking process—and by the delay. Cooking was almost unbearably slow. She suspected her digestive tract of eating a large part of itself by the time the plate arrived in front of her.

“You clean up,” said Devin from the seat opposite her. “That's the deal.”

His plate had contained less than half of hers, and he did little more than pick at that, obviously not suffering from the same gastronomic crisis she had been. They were the only people in the kitchen, maybe because they were being avoided, or maybe because the members of WHOLE were busy doing whatever it was they did to keep the muster fed, clothed, and safe.

Clair leaned back in her chair and sipped at a mug of steaming black tea, skimming over a list of untraceable links she had found in the station map. The only coffee available smelled like burnt toast. She felt pleasantly overfull, but wasn't going to begrudge herself the indulgence. She wasn't sure how long it would be before she ate again. Only the thought that her mother might not be eating, wherever she was, cast a pall over her momentary contentment.

“You know what you've done?” Devin asked out of nowhere.

“What?”

“You've assembled Clair's Bears for real, the complete set: WHOLE, RADICAL, the peacekeepers . . . They're all jumping at your beck and call. If I was one of the bad guys, I'd be feeling more than a little nervous right now.”

She couldn't tell if he was serious or subtly mocking her.

“I told you not to call us that.”

“But that's what we are. We're all sitting around waiting for you to tell us what to do.”

She understood then that he was fishing for information. And perhaps sending a message to the dupes at the same time, since the two of them were in a public space. If she was a leader, then Devin had proactively taken on the role of media advisor, and perhaps grand vizier as well.

“You'll have to be patient,” she said. “I've got a lot to think about.”

He nodded. “And dishes to do.”

“Can't I plead ignorance on that score as well as the actual cooking?”

“It's never too late to learn. Come on, I'll dry.”

Her mind wandered while she washed the mismatched plates and cups, settling on the question of whether her mother's kidnappers were watching her right now. She wished she could search the list of people following her, but there were simply too many names now for one person to trawl through. That was something she considered asking for help with, but she decided she was already asking a lot. And if she did isolate someone suspicious among her observers, there was nothing she could do about it, short of locking herself in a Faraday shield, which would make communicating with her partners difficult, not to mention rule out any possibility of finding or—dare she continue to hope?—talking to Q.

Besides, if Devin was right and the dupes were worried, that was fine with her.

As they left the kitchen, a trio of young men stepped out of a laneway and put themselves right in her path. One held a broad, powerful-looking dog on a short leash. Its deep-set eyes glared at her as though sizing her up for breakfast. Clair stopped and backed up, alarmed.

“Where do you think you're going, zombie?” asked the young man in the middle, a redhead with streaks of black in his hair and odd, dark patches scattered across his skin. “Taking your pet freak for a walk?”

“Let us through,” said Devin. “We don't want any trouble.”

“Funny way to show it,” said the thug to the redhead's right. He had long, skinny fingers like the legs of an enormous spider. “You didn't think to ask what
we
wanted before you barged in here.”

“I'm only trying to help,” Clair said. Her heart was hammering, but her voice was steady.

“You're only nothing,” said the thug holding the dog. His ears were two lumpy extrusions on the side of his head that his thin hair didn't quite cover. “Those sounds you're making, that twitching you're doing with your mouth . . . You're dead, and you just don't know it.”

“You want to be careful,” said the redhead, “walking around here like you own the place. People might take offense. Anything could happen. Eh, Shiv?”

The dog growled, low and dangerous. Clair backed up another step.

“I think you should back off,” said Devin, putting himself between Clair and the trio in a move that only made the situation worse.

“And I think you should get out of my face, ladyboy,” said the redhead, pushing Devin to the ground. “I'm talking to the zombie.”

Clair felt her muscles tense in readiness as the trio surrounded her. Her fists came up in front of her. She had no idea what she would do if they did attack her, but she wasn't going to go down without a fight. If only she hadn't lost her pistol on the seastead. . . .

“Don't do this,” she said as one of the thugs shoved her shoulder, pushing her closer to the dog. It barked once, a horrible, violent sound. She pushed back and raised her hands to retaliate the next time one of them touched her.

“We haven't done anything . . . yet,” said the redhead with a leer.

“That's enough, Sandler Jones,” said a voice from behind them. “Leave the girl alone.”

Heads turned to where Nelly stood on the common area, her broad face radiating authority. Behind her, Forest and Sargent were running from the dormitory, probably called by Devin, who stood nearby, face flushed and furious, shoulder muddy from where he had been thrown down. Jesse brought up the rear, his expression horrified.

“She's no girl,” said the thug with the dog. “She's a thing. Walking meat.”

“Well, you, meathead, have just earned a week in the sewage treatment plant. Want to make it two weeks?”

He glared at Nelly, the muscles around his mouth working viciously. The dog growled again.

“These people are guests of Agnessa,” Nelly said. “Screw with them and you screw with her. I hope that's understood, Sandler.”

The redhead opened his mouth as if to argue. Then he glanced at Sargent and Forest, two armed and armored peacekeepers at Devin's side. Forest's expression was furious—a masterwork of intimidation that made even Clair worried, even though she knew it was a fake. Or maybe he really was furious. A fake that stood in for something real was no different from the real thing, was it?

“Agnessa doesn't speak for all of us,” Sandler said, but he backed away, taking the other two with him. The dog strained at the leash, unwilling to be dragged away too. “Watch your step, zombies. You're not welcome here.”

Nelly said nothing as the trio retreated, and when they turned a corner and disappeared from sight Clair allowed herself to breathe again. Her hands dropped back down to her sides. Her palms were sweating. The big breakfast sat like a stone in her stomach.

“Thank you,” Clair told Nelly sincerely.

“Thank me by doing what you have to do and going somewhere else,” Nelly said. “And don't go wandering on your own. Next time I might not be around.”

She turned and walked away, big hips swaying and hands clenching and unclenching at her sides. Clair understood, now, that Nelly was much more than Agnessa's nurse. She was probably her second-in-command, and perhaps an enforcer as well, when circumstances demanded.

“Are you all right?” said Jesse, coming up behind Clair and touching her shoulder.

“Yes,” she said, pulling away. “No. Let's just get back to the dorm. Nelly is right. The sooner we get out of here, the better.”

She folded her arms across her chest and hugged herself as she walked across the common area, trying to tamp down the fear and anger still coursing through her. The confrontation rattled her.
This is what happens when I start to feel safe
. She should have learned that lesson in Crystal City, or in Antarctica, or definitely on the seastead. What might have happened if no one had been there to help her? Sandler Jones and his thugs weren't just letting off steam. They wanted to fight, or worse, and neither she nor Devin would have stood a chance against them. Running away might have been an option if Devin could run more than ten yards without gasping like a beached fish. She would never have left him behind.

Then there was her automatic reaction to wish for her pistol. Sandler and friends weren't dupes. They weren't even her enemies. They were people. Horrible people who hated her, but people nonetheless. Since when did she consider threatening someone
real
with lethal force a reasonable response? That wasn't what she thought. It wasn't what Allison Hill's daughter should think.

She rubbed her hands where traces of Nobody's dried blood remained, stuck deep in the lines of her palms and under her fingernails. She imagined it staining her, poisoning her in some horrible alchemical way. He had become her, briefly. Was she now in danger of becoming a dead-eyed killer like him?

Not now, she told herself firmly, and not ever.

BACK IN THE
dorm, she went straight to work, effectively locking herself in her room and ignoring all distractions. Jesse kept asking if she was all right, but what could she say? She was as right as anyone would be under the circumstances. The sooner she found the source of the dupes, saved her friends, and stopped Wallace, the better. From there, it was just a matter of the PKs bringing d-mat online—and with Q's loyalties as uncertain as her location, that was going to be entirely their problem.

Into the station map she dove again, tracing promising threads to their endpoints, the details of which she sent to Devin for cross-checking if they were virtual and to Agnessa if they were physical. Many of the virtual endpoints turned out to be dead ends, parts of the station's infrastructure that no longer existed. Slowly, tentatively, she began to think of it as an outline of a forest, with a dense tangle of overlapping roots leading up through a dozen or so much thicker trunks to the canopy above. The canopy was the real world. If she could trace the trunks to where they connected at either end, in the roots or the branches, she hoped to find out where the dupes came from and where they emerged. Somewhere along that route could be Nobody's name.

It felt like homework, but as it was homework that might save the world, she did her best.

Jesse wouldn't leave her alone, so she set him to work browsing through the information Sargent had given her on the investigation into Wallace's illegal activities. There was a lot of it, including the testimonies they had given in New York and those of dozens of other people who worked at VIA. There were interviews with Xia Somerset and the other Improved. There were autopsies of Mallory's victims. There was a lineup of known dupes, including the ones involved in the kidnapping of Clair's mother, who hadn't been seen since. Last, there was a highly technical analysis of the circumstances that had led to the creation of Q and the breakdown of Quiddity.

Jesse went straight to that section.

“Does this make me a deputy too?” he bumped from the room next door.

“
He
is an Abstainer who can't see through his hair,” she bumped back in her best voice-over voice. “
She
is a crashlander with the ugliest nose in the world. Together, they fight crime.”

“Heh. I see your nose perfectly well and won't hear a bad word about it.”

She smiled and went back to work. Coming out of the station map, she turned her attention to the answers coming in from Devin. Some of the endpoints were easily identifiable, such as pattern archives relating to technical components likely used in the building of Wallace's station. Others were more mysterious—virtual addresses that didn't match up with the traces Sargent had made of Nobody's and the other dupes' appearances during the attack on the seastead. Clair searched meticulously through them, looking for the slightest hint of a connection, but saw nothing.

Some of the endpoints were physical locations that clustered in several densely populated areas, such as Ahmedabad, Lima, and Paris. Clair could see nothing about those places to explain what was so special about them. A scan of the PKs' dupe data showed no unexpected increase in appearances there.

Maybe Agnessa could help. Clair sent that data on, with a note expressing her gratitude to Nelly for helping her with the thugs earlier.

The reply was brisk and to the point: “Common courtesy.”

“I'm looking through the VIA employee records,” Jesse bumped not long after, “to see if anyone's gone missing in the last few years. My thought was that they could be dupes. One of them might even have been Nobody.”

“Good idea,” she said, only partially paying attention. Her head was full of links and trunks and the patterns they made.

“That's what I thought, until it occurred to me that it wouldn't work that way. If someone volunteers to be a dupe, they don't have to disappear. They can leave their original behind and just work from their pattern.”

She pressed her hands to her face. “Derp.”

“Exactly. This is entirely crazy-making. Took me ages to think of it.”

“So we'll never find Nobody that way. Damn.”

“There's still hope. Nobody was one of the first dupes—is that what the Cashiles told you?”

“Yes.”