Hollowgirl (23 page)

Clair Two

CLAIR WOKE WITH
her heart hammering, feeling as though a whole army had just run across her grave, firing pop guns and being chased by monsters she couldn't see. . . .

A thought was ringing in her mind.

Outside . . . There's another Clair Hill, outside the Yard.

For a moment, she couldn't tell what was a dream and what was reality.

She was
definitely
in the prison. According to her lenses eighteen hours had passed since the hollowmen had attacked. Since she had been shot. The thought struck like a soft punch to the gut.

That much she knew.

But nothing else was clear. Nothing else made sense.

Something had woken her up. Some ripple in the Yard, some tear in the fabric of the world.

“Q, what's going on?”

There was no answer to her panicked bump, and she wondered if that might be connected to her strange awakening.

“Kari?” she called aloud.

“Easy, I'm right here.” A large shape detached itself from the shadows and came to loom over her. “You shouldn't be awake. We took off the cast only an hour ago—”

“Something's wrong.” Clair could see another version of herself standing at the end of the bed, flickering and silent, her expression one of dismay and resignation. A glitch. Data ghost. She remembered seeing something like that just after she'd been shot. Could it really be an echo of the Clair on the outside? A Clair who thought she should have died in the blue dawn?

She blinked and the vision disappeared. “Something's very wrong.”

Distantly, an alarm began to sound.

Clair lurched into an upright sitting position, amazed at first by how easy the movement seemed, but then undid that personal triumph by making herself sick. Putting her weight on her right hand—her left was bound tightly to her side, with her forearm flat across her stomach—she leaned over the edge of the mattress and vomited onto the
floor, chest burning with every heave.

Kari stopped her from falling out of bed, but then tried to press her back down onto the mattress.

“Lie still, Clair—”

“I can't.” The sense of panic she had woken with wasn't going away. “I need to get up.”

“Why? There's nothing going on we can't handle. That alarm . . . it's almost routine now. The hollowmen have been attacking on and off ever since you were shot, trying to wear us down. But the Yetis are a match for them. They've laid traps everywhere. You have to rest, Clair. You were seriously injured. You almost died.”

“But I didn't die,” she said, thinking,
The other me, trying to get in touch . . . maybe
that
was what caused the most recent glitches. Rescue coming in the form of a giant floating head . . .

What
exactly
had woken her up?

A lanky, long-haired figure skated to a halt in the doorway.

“Sarge, this time it's different,” he said. “It's . . . Oh, you're awake. How are you?”

Jesse smoothed out his urgent expression with a visible effort and hurried to Clair's side. He reached for her free hand, but stopped at the last instant, as though afraid of hurting her. She caught his hand before it could escape and gripped it tightly, perhaps too tightly, but she was beyond holding herself back. The other Clair's sense of
all-pervading grief was still in her mind. Being around him calmed her a little on that front.

“I feel terrible.” Her injured shoulder was covered in a stiff fabric wrap that smelled of menthol. The pain was a distant ache, her stomach settling now that it was empty. But there was something new about her head. Letting go of Jesse briefly, she discovered that her hair had been shaved to the skin. Patches of glue remained where sensors had been stuck to her scalp to monitor her brain waves.
You almost died.

She shivered, feeling suddenly cold. Even that small movement caused her pain.

My hair is gone.

“I really am damaged now, aren't I?”

Jesse sat down on the edge of the bed and squeezed her hand tightly. “Bullshit. I've never seen anything like the patches Sargent used. Peacekeepers always keep the best stuff for themselves.”

“You'll be as good as new in a couple of days,” Kari said. “If you do as you're told.”

Clair felt tears gathering at the corners of her eyes. Nothing would ever be the same again. She had been
shot
. The world outside was almost completely gone. Humanity was hanging on by the thinnest thread, a thread that could snap at any moment.

She couldn't meet Jesse's eyes. He looked so worried. But when she looked away, she saw shapes turning and
twisting ominously in the dark corners of the room.

“You said something's different about this alarm,” she said.

Kari shook her head before Jesse could reply. “There're two of you now, remember? You don't have to do everything.”

Clair remembered Clair One's face suddenly looming at her out of the darkness right when the bullet ripped into her shoulder.

“You trust her?” she asked Jesse. “After what she said to you?”

“Uh, actually, we can't find her,” he said, glancing apologetically at Kari. “She's been missing ever since she said she was going to get Billie—”

“She said
what
?” said Kari, rounding on Jesse in alarm.

“I know, I know, she made me promise not to tell you. But now Zep's missing as well, and when the Yetis went looking for him, they found someone else.”

“Who?” asked Clair.

“Nobody,” Jesse said. “That is, Cameron Lee. He was lurking about in one of the empty offices. We've taken him to the hub, where . . . Wait, you can't do this.”

She could and she was, but swinging her legs around in order to stand was taking more strength than it turned out she had.

“Help me up,” she said.

“What? No. I'm in enough trouble already.”

“Kari's all talk. There's too much important stuff going on for me to stay here.”

She gripped his T-shirt with her right hand and pulled at him, forcing him to take her weight or be yanked forward. Kari sighed and assisted from the other side. Clair's head spun when she was on her feet, and for a moment she wished she wasn't so stubborn, that she could just give in and let someone else sort it out, but then her balance returned and she felt able to stand without falling over.

The room was full of beds. It looked like a field hospital in a war zone. She took a step forward and something tugged sharply in her chest. She tried not to show how much it hurt. Sitting back down was unacceptable. As she took a second step, the ghostly vision of another Clair returned, this time covered from head to foot in blood. That was even more ominous.
“Cunctando,”
said Devin in her ear, which didn't help. At least she could guess what that meant, now.

Assuming the dream of another Clair outside the Yard was real.

It had to be, didn't it?

She was gambling a lot on not being stone-cold crazy.

One slow step at a time they passed an office that was now a morgue. The door was open. She counted thirty body bags lined up on the floor and on desks. She tried
not to wonder who was in there. Ronnie? Tash? Libby? Any of the Unimprovables? She couldn't think about that now.

The morgue was lit with red light. The next room was entirely in blue, and the hospital had been yellow. That could have been to help people sleep, but then the next room along was green and she knew there was more to it.

Before she could ask about the party atmosphere, the alarm cut off, then started again.

“Glitches are up,” said Jesse. “Maybe because you're awake. That could be why Q has gone quiet again.”

She thought there was more to it than that, but she didn't want to tell it twice. The dream had contained another Clair, another Kari Sargent—and another Q, too. What kind of knots was the Yard tying itself into in order to accommodate the reality of the message she had received? That
must
be why the glitches had gotten worse, earlier: information was real in here.

Letting Jesse's theory stand for the moment, Clair searched her memories of the dream for a way to reply, some means of telling the other Clair that she had been heard. That would test the truth of it, once and for all.

The dream, however, felt less like something that had happened to her than something she had put together from a series of fragments—dialogue, images, descriptions, names. Q and her other self had compiled this jumble and with Devin's help fired it into the Yard, hoping
she would understand it when it arrived. The fact that she had been unconscious at the time might have made the message easier to absorb, but the dreamlike quality it retained made it slippery, hard to pin down. If they had ever said,
Do so-and-so to reply,
unfortunately she didn't remember it.

The hub was lit in purple and a wash of other colors. She kept hold of Jesse's shoulder as they entered, feeling like everyone was staring at her. The room was full of people, and they all looked tired and stressed, and annoyed at her, although she didn't know why.
She
hadn't done anything.

“The prodigal Clair returns.”

The comment came from a huddle of Yetis on the far side of the room. Or rather, Clair realized, the man they were holding prisoner. He was small, blond, and young, and immediately recognizable even though she hadn't met him in that body before.

Nobody.

Clair did her best to stand straight without wincing. “You don't get rid of me that easily.”

“Do you think that's my intention?”

“
Someone
tried to kill me.”

He shrugged. “You will keep putting yourself in the line of fire. . . .”

She couldn't banter with him and stand at the same time.

“Chair,” she said, shuffling toward the agglomeration of desks in the middle of the room.

“You shouldn't be up,” said Dylan, standing to give her his seat.

“You're probably right.” She eased herself down and fought the urge to keep on going to the floor. Sitting was uncomfortable, but there was no way she was lying down in front of anyone in this room. “That's never stopped me from disagreeing with you before.”

“You wake up the same time he appears,” Dylan said, managing to look worried about her and suspicious at the same time. “Is there a connection?”

Between those two things, Clair wasn't sure, but something was definitely going on. She could see it in the shadows and taste it in the back of her mouth.

“I think . . . no, I'm sure of it. I've received a message from outside,” she said, choosing her words with care. She didn't want to reveal too much while one of Wallace's agents was in the room. The possibility of a third Clair was something she definitely wanted to keep secret. “There are survivors, and they're trying to communicate with us.”

Nobody was suddenly paying very close attention. “There are?” he said. “That trumps what I came here to tell you.”

“You didn't come here to tell us anything,” said Dylan. “We found you—”

“I wanted to be found, because something went wrong,” Nobody said. “I received a message too. It was a bump that was only to be sent in certain extreme circumstances. You'll want to know about that—but now I want to know about this instead.”

He grinned at Clair, taunting her. She wasn't going to rise to the bait.

“What was your message?” she asked him.

“Let's trade.”

“No.” The last time they had done that, the world had been destroyed. “Tell me.”

“It said, ‘The barn burned.'”

“Which means?”

“That Mallory Wei didn't die the way she wanted to.”

Mallory . . . dead. Clair didn't know what that had to do with anyone here, but she felt satisfaction nonetheless. That was one problem solved, if Nobody was telling the truth, since dead was dead in the Yard.

“She
wanted
to die with you,” Nobody added.

Clair laughed to show she wasn't riled by his posturing. “Well, she missed her chance, didn't she?”

“Maybe not. You were with her when she died, after all.”

Clair felt her face lock up, although she tried to act naturally. Clair One was missing on a secret mission involving Billie, presumably with Zep, and now Nobody was telling her that Mallory had been with her. And Mallory was dead.

“We need to find Clair One,” she said.

“Libby, Ronnie, and Tash are searching the prison as we speak,” said Arabelle.

“They won't find her,” said Jesse. “I've already looked. She's not here.”

“I've bumped Billie,” said Kari. “She's keeping quiet about something, but I'll get it out of her.”

“Tell me about the outside,” said Nobody, leaning eagerly forward. “Tell me what I got wrong.”

“Everything,” said Clair, feeling a rise of hatred for the man who had made her life a living hell. “Everything you do is wrong.”

“Cunctando!”
said glitch-Devin again. Space rippled like a funhouse mirror. And into that moment, bursting through a hole in the air trailing smoke and a smell of ripped space, fell Zeppelin Barker and a blood-spattered man Clair had never seen before.

ALARMS SQUALLED. YETIS
reached for their weapons. Zep raised his hands and dropped to his knees, tears streaming down his black-smudged face. The man steadied himself and said, “My name is Evan Bartelme, and I want to know what the hell is going on.”

Bartelme,
thought Clair. Was he connected to Devin,
Trevin, and Eve? Finding RADICAL was high on her list of things to do, but it seemed RADICAL had beaten her to it.

“Cunctando regitur mundus,”
she said, trying to stand but falling back into the seat when it turned out she didn't have the strength. “We're friends. You can trust us.”

He stared at her a moment; then his eyes widened in recognition. “The last person who used those words betrayed us . . . but you . . . Clair said there'd be another version of you, a different version, and she was right.”

Clair's bald scalp crawled. “You saw Clair One?”

“Is that what you call her? Yes, I saw her. I stopped her from running into the exit and killing us all.”

“You found the exit?” asked Jesse.

“Yes,” said Zep, still on his knees. He wiped his face and looked at Clair as though he couldn't believe she was really there. “I know where it is. I can take you there anytime.”

“But you can't go, Clair,” said Evan. “It's too dangerous. You must've seen the topological breaks and fractures in continuity when you and the other Clair were together. You call them glitches. Putting you anywhere near the exit would be cataclysmic for the entire simulation.”

“The Yard,” said Kari. “That's what it's called. So where is Clair One now?”

“She had to stay behind.”

“We have to go back for her,” said Zep.

“We can't,” Evan snapped. He had obviously told Zep that many times already. “It's too dangerous. She'll find her own way. She's disguised, remember?”

“Disguised how?” asked Clair.

“She looks like
him
.” Zep pointed accusingly at Nobody. “It was their idea. Nobody and Mallory. They wanted Clair to go into the exit. They
wanted
the world to end.”

Everyone looked at Nobody, who shrugged. “I've never been one to leave something unfinished.”

There was a moment's silence, during which the horror of the situation sank in. Nobody had tricked Clair One in the Yard just as he had in the real world. And what was she doing now, alone?

“We can't just leave her there,” said Jesse. “Where is she?”

“She's in the heart of Wallace's stronghold,” said Evan. “You'll be dead in seconds if you blow her cover. We're the only ones who made it out.”

“But she's on her own, helpless—”

“Not helpless,” said Clair. “Not if she's armed.”

“I gave her a grenade,” said Dylan Linwood. “I told her to deliver it to the hollowmen.”

Everyone stared at him now.

“She wouldn't,” Jesse said.

Clair remembered Turner Goldsmith and her first plan to kill Ant Wallace.

History repeats itself,
she thought.

“Maybe she already did,” Clair said.

Jesse stared at her in horror.

Something shifted in the Yard, so subtly that it took her a moment to notice how. She simply felt it, from the small hairs on her arms to the marrow of her bones. Then she noticed that the shadows had stopped moving, and she could no longer sense voices just below the threshold of hearing.

The glitches had stopped.

Which meant that there was now one fewer Clair Hill alive in the Yard.

But that thought brought no relief, as it might once have. Now there was just futility, anger, and grief.

Clair One was dead.

“If there's any justice,” said Kari in a cracked voice, “she took Ant Wallace with her.”

A voice broke the silence that followed, coming over the prison's internal speakers as well as all their augs.

“She did not,” said Q, speaking through the sudden calm, her voice very adult and serious. “But her sacrifice has not been pointless. We now know the location of the exit, and I have already used that information to trace a packet sent from the people on the outside to the Clair before you. With that trace I can contact them in turn. This will create a new source of glitches, but I believe
I can control them now that I know what the source is. Among the people on the outside is another Clair.”

Another Clair?
The whisper spread through the room.

“Lose one, find another,” said Nobody.

Clair wanted to snarl at him, but Q wasn't done.

“Clair One has also gained you valuable breathing room. I believe that the attacks on the prison will cease temporarily, following the strike on Wallace's stronghold. Mallory Wei is dead. Many hollowmen have died, also. This is a major victory.”

So why didn't Clair feel like celebrating? Because Mallory Wei was a serial suicide—and maybe she was too? Or because everything had changed while at the same time staying horribly the same?

“Wallace or Kingdon or whoever's left,” said Dylan, “they won't sit idle for long. We need to respond, and fast.”

The room erupted into chaos as everyone began talking at once. Clair shrank back into her seat, knowing she should be paying attention, knowing she should be feeling satisfaction, but instead just feeling tired and filled with the certainty that there was another conversation she needed to have, right now.

Accessing the prison's interface, she found Libby and the others on the fringes, still looking for Clair One and Zep.

“Meet me in the mess,” she bumped them. “There's something you need to know.”

Tash held Libby while she cried. Ronnie glared at Clair with hot, red eyes. Clair was sitting in front of them, feeling too many kinds of pain to classify. She hadn't cried yet, and she wasn't sure she was going to. Part of her felt numb inside, like it had been hurt too often.

“This is all your fault,” Ronnie said.

“It's not.” Ronnie's words didn't hurt her, but she felt a strong need to defend herself. It was important they understand, even though she was struggling to understand it herself. “It's not all her fault either. We're the same person. Under similar circumstances, we made the same decisions. She was tricked just like I was. She made a mistake just like I did. She died . . . she sacrificed herself . . . hoping that it would make things better. We have to make sure she didn't die for nothing.”

“She didn't trust you. Why should we?” Ronnie wasn't going to make it easy, and Clair didn't have the heart to blame her.

“You either trust all of us or none of us,” she said. “You can't have it both ways.”

“Clair's right,” said Zep. He was standing in the doorway. Clair hadn't brought him with her, but he had obviously figured out what was going on and wanted to be part of it. He deserved that, she supposed, although it risked muddying things with an entirely different emotional crisis.

He went to Libby and tried to put his arm around her
too, but Libby pushed him away.

“She told me to look after you,” he said. “Just before—”

“Why?” Libby's voice was snappy. She didn't look at him. “Because she felt guilty? She already sent me a note to apologize. Wasn't that enough?”

Zep blushed, and Clair knew that she and Clair One had shared more than he wanted to let on.

“Clair was never very good with the small stuff,” said Tash into Libby's hair. “She'd walk through a picnic following a cloud, my mom would say.”

“She walked practically to the other side of the continent to save her best friend,” Kari said. “Who cares what she stepped on along the way?”

Clair's throat felt hard and tight with emotion. Was the past tense really necessary? She felt as though she were hearing the eulogy at her own funeral, one where everyone said exactly what they really thought and, ghostlike, she had no right of reply.

“She
used
me,” said Jesse, staring fixedly at the floor. He had avoided meeting her eyes since Evan's arrival and had helped Kari carry Clair to the mess only sullenly.

Clair reached for his hand but he pulled away.

“I'm sorry,” said Zep, his expression as wretched as Clair had ever seen it. “I should've talked her out of it. But she took me by surprise. I was just running some laps around the hub and heard her talking. Then they jumped me, and . . .” He looked like he was about to cry. “She
always seemed to know what she was doing.”

“She thought so,” said Ronnie, then added what Clair supposed was a kind of concession: “She was usually right.”

“I'm sorry too,” Clair said. “That's all I can say.”

“She gave her life so we could find a way out,” said Tash. “You don't need to be sorry for anything.”

They sat together in silence, each nursing their private thoughts, Clair realizing that it wasn't just she who had changed. Her friends were different now too. They had been thrust into a situation not remotely of their making and forced to make do as best they could. And they
were
making do. They could hold their own in a world of terrorists and would-be dictators as easily as she could. Clair was sure there wasn't one among them who wouldn't do the same as she had for their friends and loved ones.

“If we know the way out now,” said Ronnie, “why don't we just go?”

“It's not as simple as that,” said Clair. “We don't know if there's a working booth on the outside. Without a booth, there's nowhere to go to.”

“And
you
can't go anywhere,” said Zep. “Not through the exit.”

“She can go last,” said Tash. “Once the Yard is empty, what does it matter if it's destroyed?”

“What if the exit is destroyed while she's going through?” said Ronnie.

“We need more information,” said Clair. “That's why it's good that there's someone on the outside now.”

This time the silence was shorter but more uncomfortable.

“Another you,” said Libby. “How many
are
there? And is she as bald as a coot too?”

“That's it, I think,” Clair said, touching her scalp self-consciously. She hadn't been brave enough to look in a mirror yet. “I don't know what she looks like.”

“That makes her Clair Three,” said Tash, rubbing her chin with the knuckle of her thumb. “I still don't get how this is possible. How can one of you die but the rest still be alive?”

“We've been through this,” said Ronnie. “Copy the atoms and you copy the person. Remember when we cloned those tomato plants in biology? Just because yours died didn't mean the others died with it.”

“People aren't tomatoes,” said Tash hotly.

“And neither's Clair, but the principle's the same.” Ronnie changed the subject. “When can we talk to her?” she asked Clair.

“I don't know.”

“I am close to establishing contact,” said Q, making Clair jump. She hadn't known Q was paying attention. It dismayed her to think that she had grown used to this new distance between them.

“How long will it take?” she asked.

“Perhaps ten minutes. I must make absolutely certain that Wallace will not detect the exchange.”

“Let's make the chat open at this end, so everyone can hear,” Clair said. That was the right thing to do. “We'll go back to the hub. I think we need to be together for this.”

Libby nodded. She understood. This was bigger than friendship, bigger than who belonged to what group. There was nothing bigger than the future of the human race itself.

“Okay,” Libby said, “but first we've got to find you a hat.”