Hollowgirl

by Sean Williams

  “At the end,” she said, “when the chain reaction was spreading, some of us talked about hiding in a prison to get away from it. There wasn’t time, though; that’s why we came here.”

  “The Yard’s not so different from a prison, in that we can’t get out,” Jesse said. “So we’re heading for a prison within a prison.”

  “We can’t get out . . . yet,” she corrected him. She wasn’t abandoning her hope of rebuilding the world from everything saved in the Yard. All it would take was one booth on the outside and one exit from the inside. Everything came down to that.

  “As ever,” Dylan said, “you are blind to the real problem.”

  Clair couldn’t decide if Dylan was expressing disdain or dismissal. Either way, she decided not to rise to the bait.

  There was one more bridge left to rebuild before Clair could concentrate on the next phase of the plan. It frustrated her that things were moving so slowly, but if she’d learned one thing, it was that the delays increased in line with the number of people involved. She would just have to be patient and keep pushing where she could.

  Taking Jesse’s hand again, she turned it over in hers, marveling as she had long ago that these fingers had made things. There were lots of ways to touch someone, but none as powerful in Clair’s experience as stroking the skin of someone lost and newly regained.

  “Come and get me when it’s time,” she said. “Can I kiss you again?”

  They did, and it was as sweet as the first time, with a bit more enthusiasm on his part. No, not enthusiasm: acceptance, perhaps. He had always wanted to kiss her. It was just taking him time to understand that this was something they did now. Clair’s heart, cautious at first, began to trip over itself in something much more like its usual rhythms. She placed her hand against his chest in order to feel his heart, and it was thumping just like hers.

  “Whatever I missed out on must’ve been good,” he murmured. “You’ll bring me up to speed one day?”

  She nodded and smiled up at him.

  “Good,” he said with a grin. “Can’t wait.”

  They parted, he to make sure his dad didn’t do anything drastic without anyone knowing, Clair to do what she dreaded but knew she had to do next. There would be no saving the world without this.

  Clair One was curled under her blanket at the end of a narrow, low-ceilinged corridor, where the shadows were darkest. It would have been difficult to find her, except that it was exactly the kind of place Clair herself might have gone to be alone, were their situations reversed. She didn’t emerge as Clair approached, but Clair could tell that she was awake.

  “We’re moving out soon,” Clair said. “I hope you’ll come with us.”

  “Do I have a choice?” came a muffled voice from under the blanket.

  “Always.” Clair sat on the cold stone next to her, fighting a moment of existential disorientation. This was the first time she had been one-on-one with herself. It was like talking through a mirror with a reflection that talked back. A mirror who at the moment wouldn’t even look at her.

  “I can stay here and wait for the drones to find me,” Clair One said, “or I can go back home, where Wallace will pick me up in case I’m really you. Or I can let you drag me deeper down the rabbit hole.”

  “I didn’t ask for it to be like this,” Clair said, not without sympathy. “It just happened, one thing after another.”

  Clair One shifted under the blanket. Her head finally slid free, hair wild with restless sleep, eyes red and heavily bagged.

  “You survived,” she said, sitting up and pulling the blanket around her shoulders. “That means I can survive too.”

  “I’ve survived so far,” Clair corrected her. “Who knows what’s coming?”

  “Yeah, but there are two of us now. Wallace won’t know what’s hit him.”

  A ghost of a smile flickered across Clair One’s familiar features.

  “Exactly.”

  They shared the moment for barely a second; then the harsh reality of cold caves and their history crashed back in.

  “So you kissed Zep,” Clair One said. “Don’t tell me it was an accident or you didn’t mean to do it. It didn’t just happen. I know you wanted to. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  Clair nodded, feeling her face go warm. “Yes. But you have to understand that it wasn’t something I planned to do. It was wrong.”

  “It sure was,” Clair One agreed. “Your best friend’s boyfriend—is there a dumber cliché?”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Was it worth it?”

  Clair hadn’t anticipated that question, but when she studied Clair One’s anxious, almost eager face, she could understand where it came from. Easy for Clair Two to dismiss the Zep thing as a mistake: she had tried it and it hadn’t worked. For Clair One, however, it was still a fantasy, fresh in her heart: forbidden and wrong, yes, but untested and therefore still a possibility.

  “Not under any circumstances would Zep be right for us,” Clair said, with all sincerity. “For a fling, sure—but we’re not really the flinging type, are we? We take things too seriously. We think about things too much. Zep’s not a thinker. Which isn’t to say he’s stupid or anything. He’s just . . . the wrong guy, that’s all.”

  “And Jesse is the right guy?”

  Clair was relieved that Clair One wasn’t asking for details about the kiss, but there was still a note of challenge to her voice.

  “I know it seems crazy to you,” Clair said. “It probably seems crazy to him right now too, or at least not terribly real, even though he’s had a crush on me—I mean, us—for years.”

  Clair One’s eyebrows rose. “He has?”

  “Yeah.” Clair could have shown her the recording of him blurting out that fact at exactly the wrong time; better to spare him any further embarrassment. “You haven’t seen the real him.”

  “And I guess I won’t now,” she said with a listless shrug.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, things have worked out differently for me, haven’t they? It’s not going the way it went for you. You’re here, and I don’t get Zep. I don’t get Jesse, either. It doesn’t seem fair.”

  Clair nodded. Looked at like that, she decided she would probably feel the same way.

  “But you haven’t lost Zep and Jesse,” she said. “Zep was shot right in front of me, twice, and Jesse died too. I don’t want to say that that’s worse than never having met them, but I’m glad for you that you haven’t lived through that.”

  “Thanks for nothing, literally.” But Clair One nodded. “All right. Maybe that makes us even. And maybe I’ll meet some handsome young Abstainer who I can convert around to my way of thinking . . . someone you’ll never get your hands on. . . .” She peered out at the cave from her tucked-away nook. “Doesn’t seem likely, though, judging by this group. They’re all so old. And anyway, relationships just seem to mess me up.”

  Under Clair One’s critical eye, Clair didn’t have the heart to disagree, even though she knew it wasn’t necessarily the relationships but the circumstances under which they happened.

  And there were plenty of other reasons why Clair was messed up that Clair One would hopefully never experience. . . .

  “I’d better tell Libby and the others we’re moving out,” said Clair One.

  “I can do it,” Clair said.

  “No. They’re my responsibility. You’ve got Jesse, PK Sargent, Dylan Linwood—all that. Let me have this. That’s fair, isn’t it? I mean, you can’t do everything.”

  “All right.” Clair forced herself to make that concession. It wasn’t, after all, like she was handing the responsibility of her friends over to a complete stranger. “I don’t know when exactly WHOLE will be ready, but it could be soon.”

  “I’ll do my best. You know what Libby is like in the morning.”

  Clair smiled weakly, unsure whether Clair One was rebuilding bridges of her own or challenging her again. Frustrated by the thought that, in some
ways, the hardest person to read was herself, she went to see if there was something she could do elsewhere.

  [19]

  * * *

  CLAIR ONE GOT the others in an organized huddle while Clair found ways to get ready for their departure. WHOLE had a surprising amount of supplies in the caves, and it all needed to be packed in readiness for carrying back up to the surface. As she worked, she considered how best to search for Wallace from the prison, and decided that maybe Clair One had a point: small search parties might well go unnoticed, once the fuss of Kingdon’s census died down and they had a secure base to return to if things went wrong.

  “Clair!” Jesse’s voice cut through her thoughts. He was shouting from the entrance, her name echoing through the caverns. “Ray took off without me knowing. I don’t know where he went, but he’s ripping back now, and he’s bringing someone with him.”

  The anchor. Clair dropped what she was doing and hurried up the stairs. Ray was just returning when they left the caves. Kari stood to one side of the entrance, arms folded, watching.

  Clair had never seen someone come through a rip before. It was like looking up at the surface as a pebble plopped into a calm lake. There were ripples of sound as well as light. A strange taste swept across her tongue. She felt as though her hair was curling and uncurling from the roots out to the tips and back again.

  Then Ray jerked to a halt on the back of an electrobike with a passenger in the sidecar. There was a hood over the passenger’s head.

  Clair’s stomach fell, fearing kidnapping, coercion, maybe worse. She hurried over to interrupt any further assault on a possibly innocent person, but stopped upon seeing Ray’s passenger step out unaided.

  “Whoa, intense.” She was a solidly built woman with a long, gray ponytail down her back, dressed in a shapeless navy jumpsuit. Her voice was slurred. She put a hand out to steady herself and caught Ray’s sleeve, pulling him down to her level. “Have we arrived?” she said too loudly in his ear.

  “We’re here,” Ray told her.

  “Can I take the hood off now?”

  “Not yet.” Dylan Linwood had come up behind Clair. The bagged woman’s head turned to face the new voice. “We’ll tell you when.”

  “O-kay, then. And you are?”

  “Someone who’s very grateful for your help. Thank you, Lalie.”

  “Anytime.”

  “You’re doing this willingly?” asked Clair.

  The woman turned blindly again. “Sure. Why not? No harm in talking about a place no one’s ever going to escape from. Ask me what you want and I’ll get back to my very important business.”

  She mimed raising a glass to her mouth, and Clair understood then that the woman was drunk. Clair told herself not to judge. There was no right way to cope with life in the Yard, particularly if she was one of the many unfortunates who had lost a child.

  “Come with me,” said Dylan, taking her by one arm, Ray ready at the other. “We’ll talk inside.”

  “Her name is Lalie Hagopian,” said Kari, falling in beside Clair as the woman was led away. “Dismissed from Corrections and Containment a year ago. No love lost between her and C and C, which makes her exactly the kind of person WHOLE needs to get into the prison. This way no one gets hurt.”

  Clair looked up at her. “Thank you.”

  “Thus I keep the peace. Now . . .” She looked around. “We don’t have long. Drones have been seen within two miles of here. They could find us any minute if Mariah calls it in.”

  “Calls what in?”

  “Your faces were circulated while you were belowground. Come on. Let’s find some terrorists and get this show on the road.”

  Under Aunt Arabelle’s authoritative direction the supplies Clair had bundled together were hauled up and out of the cave and packed into waiting vehicles. Several more vehicles rolled out from under the trees, waiting to be loaded. Clair kept her parka but was grateful for a new set of clothes—a simple outfit that was more practical than their tattered party gear, but lacked body armor. She felt even better when her gun was returned, but that worried her. There was no way to reconcile that feeling with who she used to be, when she had been Clair 1.0.

  Zep asked where the clothes had come from.

  Jesse said, “Fabbed. Where else?”

  “But I thought fabrication was verboten,” said Zep.

  “In here,” said Aunt Arabelle, “everything is fabbed. But we can still abhor waste, so keep hauling.”

  “You mean I could have had any clothes I wanted?” asked Libby, tugging at the front of her nondescript blue top. “First, you tell me I can’t post to the Air, and now—”

  “This isn’t a popularity contest,” Arabelle said. “We’re leaving as soon as Dylan is ready.”

  Libby went back to work, picking up a box of cans with a scowl and dropping it carelessly into place.

  Along with the other vehicles, a steady influx of people trickled in from the forest around the caves. When everyone was assembled, Dylan and Ray emerged with the woman, Lalie, walking between them. She seemed steadier on her feet, and the bag over her head had been replaced with a black blindfold. She lit a cigarette and smoked it while Dylan gave everyone their instructions for the move. Sharpshooters kept a close eye out for drones on the edges of the clearing.

  “Ray takes the lead,” Dylan said. “Everyone else follows. You’ve done this before; you know how it works. Keep concentrating on him and you’ll be fine.”

  Jesse and Clair were in a van driven by Theo and Cashile. Clair One, Libby, and the others were squeezed in the back. Theo mimed how to fasten the seat belts as they climbed aboard and she insisted they use them.

  “You drew the short straw, did you?” said Zep. “Being stuck with us, I mean.”

  Theo signed something to her son, who translated, “We volunteered. It gets boring hanging out with gun nuts and . . . can you spell that, Mom? Oh yeah, isolationists. The guys who live in huts on top of mountains and think drones are sent by the devil.”

  Clair understood, then, the hostile looks some of the forest contingent had given her as they had loaded up. If they didn’t like drones, what would they think of her?

  “PKs call them ‘Yetis,’” said Kari. “Rumored to exist, potentially dangerous, and destined for extinction.”

  “Yeah,” said Tash. “How on earth do they breed?”

  “Spores,” said Ronnie. “Or maybe asexually.”

  Theo laughed, a surprising sound from someone who had never spoken. She signed to Cashile, who translated: “We call them Neanderthals. But never when they can hear us.”

  This time only Jesse didn’t laugh. As engines started purring around them, Theo turned her attention to the controls and Jesse explained what would happen.

  “Lalie’s going to remember what the prison looks like,” he said. “Then Ray’s going to open a rip so her memories will guide him there. It might take us a few legs. If we think about Ray, we’ll all tag along like pearls on a string.”

  “Ray’s the tall, skinny guy with one arm?” asked Tash.

  “Yes. It sounds crazy, but it does work.”

  “Has anyone gotten lost in a rip?” Clair One asked.

  “Lost forever?” Jesse said. “I don’t know. Maybe. No one’s said anything.”

  “I will be monitoring your progress as best I can,” said Q out of nowhere, in brisk tones. “This process exposes a key flaw in the structure of the Yard, if flaw it is. One could regard it as an enhancement to conventional topology. It is much like the way I move my point of view from place to place, most of the time.”

  “Yes, you only had a body to drag around with you for a little while,” said Kari, with an amused smile. “Count yourself lucky.”

  “I do.” That didn’t sound like a joke.

  “So we think about Ray,” said Jesse, bringing them tersely back to the topic at hand. “Really think about him. Try not to be distracted by anything else. We don’t want to end up somewhere obvious, where the hollowm
en will be waiting for us, like back at Harmony—or at school. That happened to me once.”

  “Why would we think about school?” asked Zep.

  “Now that you’ve mentioned it,” said Tash, “I’ll have trouble keeping it out of my head.”

  “Don’t think of an elephant,” said Libby, still looking surly from Aunt Arabelle’s telling-off.

  “Give me school over a bunch of Yetis,” said Clair One.

  “Doesn’t sound so different to me,” said Jesse. “Try having your bag stolen when you can’t fab a new one whenever you want. Or your lunch because you can’t eat fabbed food. Or someone deliberately spills paint on your shirt—staining it, because that’s a hilarious pun.”

  “No one did that,” said Clair One. “Did they?”

  Jesse glared at her reflection in the mirror. “On my first day of high school, Saxon Vargas told me he was going to follow me and throw me into a booth so I’d have to d-mat. But not that day, no. When I wouldn’t see him coming. I walked home terrified, hearing him laughing at me all the way, and it was the same every day after that. He was probably just messing with me, but I never forgot. I was always afraid that today he would remember his promise, and then I’d be fucked.”

  He stopped talking, and the final word seemed to ring in the air, capturing everyone’s embarrassment—his own, clearly, for revealing more than he had probably planned to; that of Libby and the others for being on the side of the bullies, at least to the point of giving him an ugly nickname; and Clair’s simply for not knowing. It was a reminder that there was still a lot to learn about him in the here and now—and that this Jesse could still surprise her.

  “Well, we’re all fucked now, Stainer boy,” said Zep, reaching forward to clap him on the shoulder, “and we’re your bitches. Karma paid off for you big-time, I’d say.”

  Jesse looked embarrassed, then grinned, and Clair felt a wave of gratitude for both of them. She might have the most complicated love life of anyone, anywhere, but her taste in boys wasn’t so bad.