Crashland (45 page)

Underground
, she thought again. Was prison really the only possibility? Maybe RADICAL's Antarctica contingency would be safe, along with Hassannah and Akili—but how would she get there? She didn't think Devin's friends were going to let her or the
entity
barge on in.

The ward was empty apart from Agnessa's curled body, silent apart from the hissing and beeping of machines.

“Why isn't she talking to us?” Clair asked. “Is she all right?”

“She's angry at me for giving away her secret,” said Nelly. “But it would be wrong to deny you the chance. You won't tell anyone, will you?”

That the new leader of WHOLE was a secret user of d-mat?

“No,” said Clair. She doubted she would have the opportunity anyway. Or that anyone would care, in the face of Wallace's revenge.

Wallace
, she thought as Nelly shifted the stack of chairs and unlocked the panel behind it, and Q did whatever she needed to do to get the booth ready. Wallace had done nothing at all since she had killed him. The dupes, with the recent exception of Nobody, had been controlled by LM Kingdon and her allies. But once again his actions had profoundly changed the world, thanks to Nobody and his deadly trap. Was anyone immune to the effects of the cascade? Was anywhere safe on Earth now?

Baikal
, she thought.

Tash had found two odd locations in the data. One was the satellite uplink that had led to V468. The other was the lake on the other side of Russia.

The Baikal borehole
, Q had said.

The Baikal
Superdeep
Borehole.

Where better to hide than the deepest artificial pit in the world? One that had its own geothermal power supply, to boot?

“The Yard,” she said, gripping Q by the arm. “That's where we're going to go.”

Q came out of her focused state. “What?”

“You know where it is, don't you? You've known ever since you took over Wallace's space station. You know where the dupes come from, and you know where everyone's patterns have been stored.”

“Yes.”

Q's matter-of-fact tone was excruciating. How long had Clair been hunting for that information? If only Q had
told
someone . . .

Another thought hit her with near-physical force: Jesse was in there. She had seen him duped earlier that very day. He wasn't dead yet.

But would he let her bring him back?

Clair forced her own tone to remain level, even in the face of near-crippling confusion.

“So what's in there, exactly? Is it just a big data cache or is there more to it?”

“Just data, right at the bottom of the pit,” Q said. “The cascade won't touch it.”

“If you could get down there,” said Nelly, “you'd be safe, but it's on the other side of Russia.”

“The only way we'd get in there is as data,” Clair said, seeing the flaws in her idea now. It was too crazy. “Anyone could erase us and we'd never know. We might as well go to prison and take our chances.”

“Hang on,” said Q. “There are processors there as well. Big ones. I could try kick-starting a virtual shell. You know, like the Maze and its shortcuts? This would be the same—constantly in the act of transmission except we'd never arrive anywhere. We'd be nothing but what Devin called a shortcut. Entirely virtual, until we decided to come out.”

That was a giddying thought.

“Would it be safe?”

“I don't know,” said Q. “I guess it would be no different from being in the Air.”

“Is that supposed to reassure me?”

“It's not that bad. I was
born
in the Air, Clair.”

“Still, I don't know. . . .”

What was the phrase Devin had used long ago—“data ghosts”?

Q smiled without humor. “‘He ne'er is crowned with immortality,'” she said, “‘who fears to follow where airy voices lead.'”

Clair couldn't place the source, but she knew who Q was quoting. Keats again, just like when they'd started. And the message was plain.

She would almost certainly die if she didn't do what Q said. The cascade would get her, or angry survivors, or starvation, or disease. By escaping into the Yard she would probably have to forget about ever being an Abstainer, but at least she would
be
. There would be hope.

Her mother was in there, Q had said. And Jesse. Maybe Devin, Trevin, and Forest too—and who knew how many people wiped off the face of the Earth in the last few minutes? If they had used d-mat, anything was possible.

The terrible irony was not lost on her that this place, the last place on Earth that could possibly give her shelter, was the very same place she had been trying to destroy a short time ago.

“All right,” she told Q, unashamed of the faint tremor she couldn't disguise. “Do your best and let's see what happens.”

“Okay. We will.” Q grinned, and Clair wondered if Sargent was grinning with her. It certainly seemed so.

The booth opened. It was big and wide enough to hold Agnessa's bed. Clair saw her image reflected in the back wall mirror and barely recognized herself. She was so thin and fierce-eyed. What had happened to the girl she remembered?

She had
survived
, she guessed. She had gone from Clair 1.0 to Clair 2.0 and so on through the numbers to end up here, about to be scanned into data and fed into a server at the bottom of the deepest pit on Earth, where her worst enemy maintained a secret stash of stolen patterns, including all manner of dangerous dupes. What could possibly go wrong with that plan?

Q's grin fell away. She stepped inside and turned to face back into the room. Clair did the same next to her.

“Thank you for helping us,” Clair told Nelly, who remained stoically outside.

Nelly nodded. “Common courtesy.”

The door closed.

sssssss—

A familiar sound and a familiar ache in her ears. As the booth worked around her, Clair wished she was about to step out into a familiar world, restored exactly as it had been. But everything familiar was gone now, literally. When the blue dawn had finished its work, everything that had been d-matted or fabbed would be left as dust. What lay ahead no one could guess—except maybe Q. She was the smartest mind on the planet, and growing, but had a long way to go before she stopped making stupid mistakes. She stood silently beside Clair, as immobile as a statue, as expressionless as Forest. Clair wondered if that meant she was worried.

“I'm glad you're back,” Clair told her.

Q said, “Me too.”

—
pop

The booth doors opened. All Clair saw outside was Nelly and Agnessa. They were in the private ward exactly as they had been before, except that Nelly looked startled.

“Did something go wrong?”

“We didn't go anywhere,” Q explained. “It was a null jump, simply to take our current patterns.”

Clair leaned against the back of the booth. “What does that mean?”

“Our patterns are going to the Yard exactly as you wanted, Clair.” Q looked pleased with herself, but not in a way that offered Clair any reassurance. “They'll be safe there.”

“But what about us?”

“You and I are going to stay here and face the consequences of our actions.”

Clair's knees felt watery. “I don't know what you mean.”

“I think you do.” Q held out her hand. “Come with me.”

A primitive part of Clair instinctively recoiled. There was nowhere else to go except outside, and Clair didn't want to go there—to do
that
again—not after everything she had done to avoid it. Couldn't she stay right where she was, in case the other Clair didn't survive the Yard? Didn't it make sense to keep a backup of her, just in case?

But that was cowardice speaking, and she had never been ruled by cowardice before. Not in Wallace's station, and she wouldn't be ruled by it now, particularly when she was supposed to be an Abstainer. For Jesse, if nothing else.

Besides, who wanted to be a
backup
?

Clair straightened, took Q's hand, and nodded. Nelly didn't intervene. She probably approved, Clair thought.

This time it wasn't sacrifice. It was justice, and a way of publicly making amends.

They stopped at the double doors. A faint sizzling came from the other side.

“Ready?” asked Q in her most grown-up voice of all.

Clair nodded. Her throat was too full to allow her to speak.

Good-bye, Jesse. Good-bye, Mom. Good-bye . . . me
.

Together they stepped out to greet the blue dawn.

—pop

Sargent stumbled and steadied herself against the mirrored doors with both hands.

“Where'd she go?” she said.

“Who? Nelly?”

“No, the girl . . . in my head.”

Clair looked at Sargent closely. The green eyes were the same, but someone else was staring back at her. One person only, triggering a sharp spike of panic.

“Q? Where are you? Can you hear me?”

Had Q tricked her and escaped again?

“I'm right here,” Q bumped them both, coming through on the crest of a wave of new information that filled their lenses with colors and movement, like a fairground in fast motion. “We made it . . . even if we did get a little split up along the way. The shell I created seems to be interfering with something else in here. Everyone's pattern has defaulted to the original—including mine.”

The details didn't matter. They were inside the Yard, alive, and Karin Sargent was free. Something had gone right for a change.

But what was the Yard
like
? Why were the doors to the booth still closed? Was there anything out there at all, or just a terrible, empty void?

The information flooding through her lenses suggested otherwise. There were maps of a world that looked just like the one she knew. There were pictures of places and people plucked from myriad profiles. Bumps poured in—but not like the torrent of panicked communications she had left behind. These were cheerful, excited,
normal
.

It was as though everything that had happened in the previous week had rewound and everyone had gone back the way they were. The way they should but couldn't possibly be.

“Xandra Nantakarn is
so
jazzy,” said Tash over an open chat.

“Did you hear she has a private booth big enough for thirty people?” Ronnie replied.

“I'll believe it when I see it,” said Zep.

“This is going to be the best crashlander ball ever!”

Clair felt a hitch in her throat. That last had come from Libby. Was this live or another recording? Were the dupes enacting another cruel play for her, with some new twist?

“What's going on?” asked Sargent.

“There have been some unintended complications,” said Q. “The patterns stored in the Yard have been activated. I'm still trying to work out what that means.”

“Clair's missing,” said Libby. “Tash, Ronnie—has anyone seen her?”

Clair opened her mouth to say
I'm here
when another voice came over the chat.

“Keep your hair on. I'm coming as fast as I can.”

Sargent turned to look at her, her expression one of utter puzzlement.

“That was you,” Sargent said.

“Impossible,” said Clair. “She must be a dupe.”

“There are no dupes here,” said Q. “It appears that even they have defaulted to their originals.”

Clair stared in shock at her reflection in the booth's interior doors.

“But that means . . .”

“Yes, Clair,” said Q as, with a hiss, the door of the booth slid open. “Both of you are real.”

This book is dedicated to my wife, Amanda, who doesn't like me to be too gushy.

Huge thanks to Kristin Rens and everyone at Balzer + Bray for a thousand and one reasons. To Jill Grinberg, Cheryl Pientka, Katelyn Detweiler, Kirsten Wolf, and Ant Harwood. To Jo Hardacre, Eva Mills, Stella Paskins, Hilary Reynolds, Sophie Splatt, Lara Wallace, and everyone at Egmont UK and Allen & Unwin. To Sarah Shumway. To Garth Nix. To James Bradley, Alison Goodman, Alaya Dawn Johnson, and Scott Westerfeld. To Anne Hoppe. To John Joseph Adams, Jason Fischer, David Levithan, and Steven Gould. To Sputnik and Morgan Martin-Skerm. To Linda Shaw and Jon Reding. To Nick Linke and Robin Potanin. To Kate Eltham and Judy Downs. To Val and Lee for all the names. To Rachel Yeaman for the sandwich. To Patrick Allington, Brian Castro, Jan Harrow, Sue Hosking, Nicholas Jose, and Ros Prosser. To the real Catherine Lupoi and the Cora Barclay Center (“Teaching Deaf Kids to Speak”). To the real Devin and Trevin for being so patient. To everyone on the SF Novelists list for their support and advice. To Sean E. Williams and Deb Biancotti also for being so patient. To the quoted, misquoted, and paraphrased: T. S. Eliot, Nathan Hale, John Keats, Graham Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, Frank Loesser, Michael Wilson, and the anonymous author of “I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail.” Finally, to Caroline Grose for taking me on one of those extraordinary journeys that would be entirely ruined by leaping straight to the destination. Getting there is at least half the fun.