Crashland (7 page)

Devin waited until Jesse had sat next to Clair and then chose the seat farthest from them, on the opposite side of the circle. Maybe he just didn't like people, she thought.

“PK Beck will guide you to your drones,” said Forest.

Clair made herself physically comfortable and concentrated on navigating the new windows opening in her lenses. There was a quick tutorial, a practice simulator, some FAQs . . .

“They're going to a lot of trouble to look after a couple of kids, don't you think?” bumped Devin.

“
Three
kids,” she shot back. “You forgot to count yourself.”

“I'm here voluntarily. Besides, my relationship with them isn't in question.”

“Not with them, maybe. I still don't understand why they're letting you tag along.”

“I'm the closest thing to a specialist anyone has when it comes to Improvement and the dupes. Apart from you, I guess. You blew everyone else up.”

Clair supposed his explanation made sense, and maybe they thought that she was more likely to trust him because they were roughly the same age. Boy, had they gotten
that
wrong.

Sargent folded out a tray from the arm of Clair's seat and placed her snack next to her. Clair glanced up and said thanks, wondering if Devin had a point. Was Sargent being weirdly servile or just practical? Clair couldn't decide.

“You should eat,” said Forest to Jesse. “How long since your last meal?”

“Uh . . . it's fine.” Jesse looked up from fiddling with the hood of his armor, which he had flipped forward to provide a HUD to make up for his lack of modern lenses. “I'm not hungry.”

“You ate nothing in New York.” Forest came around the chairs to stand over him. “I know, you are an Abstainer. I understand. But we have only fabbed food here. If you do not eat that, you will starve.”

“Then I'll starve, okay—or are you going to force-feed me?” he snapped. His anger quickly evaporated. “Sorry. I just don't want anything now, really. Some water. That would be good.”

Forest nodded.

Clair reached between their couches to touch the back of Jesse's hand. He looked down and flipped his hand over. Their fingers tangled in soothing knots.

“You must think I'm stupid,” he said.

She shook her head. Not stupid, just different, and stubborn. That was something they had in common. He might have inherited his beliefs from his father, but it was his right to defend them, and no one could take that right away from him. She actually felt proud of him, although worried at the same time.

“Please don't starve to death,” she said.

“That chocolate smells amazing.”

“Yeah, sorry. I'm totally going to eat it.”

He smiled. “I would in your shoes.”

PK Beck issued the virtual equivalent of an “ahem” and began assigning drones. The principle was the same as any eye-in-the-sky drone: they were autonomous but could be overridden by human control at any moment. Anyone in the network could examine the world around the drone through its many senses—in the regular world “anyone” meant literally anyone over eighteen, but around Crystal City it meant only those authorized by PK Beck—in order to guide the drone toward any sites of interest. Oz put in a few hours a week in random places around the world, and Clair had watched over his shoulder a few times. Once they had seen an actual crime, and the way the community of observers had converged on the scene had amazed her. Until backup drones and PKs arrived, there had just been the one drone, “controlled” by Oz and more than a hundred other people in a rapidly evolving consensus that was made possible by the same participatory algorithms that lay behind OneEarth itself. There were no leaders and no followers: everyone found the way together.

Chewing on a stick of jerky, Clair picked one unsupervised drone at random and accessed its feed. Drone 484117B was cruising at a steady speed over one of Crystal City's many aboveground buildings, a boxy structure containing offices and data storage, according to the map her visual overlay provided. Visible were several other PK buildings, the old airport site, now a nature reserve, greater Washington and the Potomac River, and to the south a long, gray wall that was the Great Alexandria Barrage, one of the more awesome attempts to keep the ocean in place after the Water Wars. Fifty yards high and more than two miles long, it looked like storm clouds stuck on the horizon, never coming closer and never going away.

The drone was intuitively easy to direct. Clair experimented with various commands, pitching, yawing, and diving until she was sure she had it all worked out. Then she put the drone back under its own control and concentrated on the feed. There were dupes out there somewhere, trying to get to her. Her job was to stop them, and if she learned more about them into the bargain, all the better.

“Where are they?” she asked, studying her windows in vain.

“Stick to the assigned flight path,” said Sargent. “If you notice anything out of order, let us know.”

“Don't get your hopes up,” bumped Devin. “They won't be giving us any real work.”

“Stop it,” she said. “I'm trying to concentrate.”

But there was a chance he was right. The task was simple and soon became routine. Her mood soured. Every five minutes she was automatically assigned a new drone, to stop her from getting complacent about the view, she assumed. The drones flew over empty rooftops, empty lawns, and empty physical training grounds.

When not absorbed with this menial task, Clair explored the network of Crystal City and the small insight she had to the wider world of the peacekeepers. It reminded her of the vast complexity of Wallace's secret network, into which Q had briefly plugged her in the station. That had been epic in scale, spanning the entire world, and this was much the same. There were literally millions of PKs and their new deputies active at that moment, all over the world. She couldn't tell what they were doing, but she could see their names and where they were. Some came online while she watched and others dropped off. She hoped the latter weren't dying. Maybe they were using the shadow road to move around.

Reports about dupes were coming in from all over. That was good, if slightly unnerving, to know.

A flicker on her drone's feed brought her out of her observations. The view was alternating between bright white and blackness as though the camera lens was blinking at the sun. She was puzzled for a second until the drone identified it as a laser attack. The drone wasn't damaged, but its vision was being deliberately obscured.

Finally
, Clair thought, although not without a twinge of nervousness.

“I think I've got something,” she said to PK Beck.

He slipped smoothly into the drone's control systems.

“Great. Let's give her a touch of rotation . . . like this.”

The drone—Clair refused to refer to it as a “she”—turned on its gyroscopes and fans, blinking all the way. At a certain point the vision in one camera cleared.

“The source of the laser is now blocked by the body of the drone, see?” PK Beck explained. “That gives us a set of possible angles. All we need is another and we can triangulate, get some countermeasures in place. Let's take her over here and see what happens.”

The drone jetted off along a new trajectory, tilting and swaying to define the laser's path. Clair watched the view through the cameras closely, trying to tease out useful information from the interference. Image-processing algorithms did the same. She saw notifications appear in the corner of the field telling her that Jesse and Devin had joined her feed as well.

Glimpses of Crystal City's urban landscape came and went. Clare locked on to one particular frame and zoomed in as far as she could, sweeping her point of view across a stand of bushes next to a park named after the last president of the United States, Caroline J. Oswald.

“Could that be someone's arm?” she said, highlighting a particular patch of shadow.

“Maybe,” said PK Beck. “We'll check it out. Good work.”

“That's not an arm,” Devin bumped her. “Hypervigilance and false positives. The PKs are nervous. I wonder what they're not showing us.”

“I thought you said they were doing this just to keep us occupied.”

“I can't have it both ways?”

“That siren is too annoying to be a fake.”

“True.”

A flash cut across the PK lens interface, distracting Clair from her task. She blinked and focused on the new notification. It had to be important to rise up out of the morass of other messages.

When she saw what it was, everything else ceased to matter. A chat request had come through her most private channel. It was from Libby.

SEVERAL THOUGHTS COLLIDED
in Clair's mind at once. But Libby was dead! No, she might not be—not if her pattern had been saved in the same place Zep had come from. Should she mention it to someone? There wasn't time—if she didn't take the request now it might go away and never come back!

She opened the chat and peered into a new window that opened in her infield.

There was Libby, seen through someone's lenses, looking exactly as Clair remembered, skinny and vibrant in sweatpants and halter, birthmark and all, standing on a bed and singing something—a jitter-punk song that had been big a few months back, “Pinch Me” by the Ponies. Seeing Libby again was like a physical shock to her entire system: not jealous Libby or Libby the dupe, but Libby, her best friend, who was generous with rice broth when needed, constantly late, and compulsively fashionable, and whose favorite aromatic oil was vanilla. Clair could smell that perfume now, as though Libby were in the room with her. It made the muscles around her eyes tighten as though she might cry. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out of it.

Libby was dancing with great enthusiasm to her own singing, mocking the lead Pony's distinctive hip roll, while in the background someone laughed hugely and without restraint. Clair knew that laugh. It was Zep. When he came into view to sing the chorus, Clair's pulse knocked hard in her throat. His voice was terrible, which only made it funnier, and sadder, and more heartbreaking.

A second laugh joined in. It was Clair's own.

And suddenly she remembered this moment, from before everything had gone wrong. It had been after school a month ago, while they were supposed to be studying. The room was Libby's bedroom, and the recording had been taken from Clair's augs. She didn't remember saving it, but she must have. She didn't remember that shirt Zep was wearing either.

The recording must have been lifted from her profile by the dupe.

But why send it to Clair now? Why use Libby's profile to do it?

Clair considered closing the chat, but she couldn't tear her eyes away. Those had been happier times in every way, hanging out at each other's places or jumping all over the world, watching as Zep competed in various contests, crashing Libby's cliques, strolling through Clair's favorite art galleries and making fun of the old-fashioned hairstyles. Clair had gotten along well with both Libby and Zep, and the trio had become duos at various times without jealousy or competitiveness, at least until the whole having-a-crush-on-Zep problem had surfaced. The reason it had taken her by surprise was precisely because of how content they had been. It was like a bomb had fallen out of a clear sky and blown her happy world to smithereens.

She wondered if she was kidding herself. Perhaps even then the cracks had been forming, too slowly and too subtly for her to notice but there nonetheless. People didn't contemplate cheating with their best friend's boyfriend if the friendship was healthy.

Or was that too harsh a way of looking at it? Being attracted to people was normal. Handling it badly, that was the problem.

Whichever way she looked at it, she felt awful.

In the recording, Zep and Libby finished their duet with a theatrical
ta-da!
and collapsed laughing onto the bed. The Clair taking the recording looked away, and caught sight of herself in Libby's bedroom mirror. She wasn't smiling. Staring at her reflection, she took one step closer to the mirror, then another.

Clair couldn't take her eyes away from this image of herself. There was something off about it. Her hair had been shorter than that back then, she was sure. Her stare was too intense, her isolation from the others too keenly felt. Surely, they would have noticed and said something?

The giggling stopped when she was so close to the mirror that her image filled the entire window.

The Clair in the recording turned around. Her friends were standing right behind her.

“You know what we want,” said Zep.

“Don't wait too long,” said Libby.

The recording flipped to black, and she gaped in shock at the void where her friends had been.

“Clair? Clair?”

Someone was calling her. She shook her head and the drone interface came back into focus. The voice belonged to PK Beck.

“Yes, what?” There was a tremor in her voice, and no wonder. One of her private memories had just been turned against her, leaving her shaken and upset.

“I asked you to take control of 462441A and check out that arm. Can you do that?”

“Yes, yes,” she said, even as she wondered why the dupes had come after her this way. Would they really have gone to the trouble of staging a reenactment? It could have been the original recording, edited.

But there was Zep's shirt. Why would they edit that too?

“Clair, are you all right?

She forced herself to concentrate. There were dupes in Crystal City, alive and dangerous and looking for her. That trumped dupes somewhere else, messing with her head. Both might be different prongs of the same attack, but she couldn't deal with everything at once. And she couldn't curl into a ball, no matter how much she wanted to. She owed it to the real Zep and Libby to keep going.