Hollowgirl

by Sean Williams

  “Yes, and you’re being treated.”

  “No. You. Farm.”

  It was surprisingly hard to select the letters—normally she didn’t even have to think about it—but this suddenly immense effort was giving her something to focus on apart from the color of her own blood and Kari’s grim expression.

  “Oh yes, that’s right! I was shot in the Farmhouse, and it was awful, for a while. Then I was back in the Air and the pain went away.”

  “How. Did.”

  “The hollowmen know how to get in here?” Somehow Q understood what she was trying to tap out. “They followed the glitches caused by you and Clair One. I tried to cover your tracks, but then the glitches suddenly got a lot worse for some reason. It’s ebbed a bit now, but there are still aftershocks. Hollowmen are still coming through. They’re quick, Clair, and mean.”

  Clair had another theory. The best way into the prison was via someone who knew it personally. That was how WHOLE had gotten in, with Lalie. Wallace didn’t have Lalie, so he must have found someone else. And who better than someone who was inside right now? Someone who could tell them exactly when to come, while everyone was distracted?

  Q was still talking. Clair tried to interrupt but her lenses made only random shapes.

  “. . . WHOLE is fighting them off, don’t worry. Wallace knows where you are now, but he also knows that getting to you isn’t easy. He won’t shut you up that easily. The hollowmen aren’t infinite in number here, remember? We’ve seen no sign of PK Drader, so I think it’s definitely safe to assume that dead is dead is dead forever. But you’re not going to die, Clair,” Q added hastily. “You’re going to be just fine. Both of you.”

  “One,” Clair managed to type out, because suddenly it was clear. WHOLE did have a spy in their midst, someone who had waited until everyone was in one spot, then brought the hollowmen right where they needed to be—and had even tried to pin the blame on her!

  Clair One was a traitor.

  “That’s right. Clair One is safe with the others, somewhere isolated from the first ingress point.”

  “One,” Clair typed again, wishing she could find the exclamation mark for emphasis. The fragment of conversation she had heard before—it must have been between Wallace and Clair One, not her. Clair One knew what the prison looked like now, and she had been quick to put the onus of proving who was who on Clair herself when they had met. Who was to say it wasn’t Clair One who had shot Clair during the confusion of the attack?

  “I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me, Clair.”

  Q’s voice was apologetic and utterly unhelpful. How come Q could understand her before but not now, when it really mattered? Was Q glitching or was she? Or was she even more wounded than she thought?

  Clair cracked her eyelids open, feeling as though she was rolling back the stones from a tomb. Kari was still bending over her, fingers working just out of sight. Someone said something about still losing a lot of blood, but what it felt like to Clair was that she was losing herself. Or confusing herself, somehow. Behind Kari was Jesse, and next to him was Devin, and next to him were Mallory and Nobody. On her left side was Clair One, and on the other side was Clair Two, and both were leaning over her, trying to say something. She could see their lips move, although she couldn’t hear the words.

  Wait. That couldn’t be Clair Two on her right side. She was Clair Two.

  Was this third Clair a glitch, vision, or reality? She couldn’t afford to take the chance that it wasn’t the latter.

  “Dup—”

  Three letters out of four was as far as she got because Kari was suddenly pushing down on her chest, hard. She felt as though her entire body was being gripped, twisted, and torn. Then the pain passed, and she fell back into empty space. The room tilted around her. She was being carried. The peacekeeper she trusted was on one side, the boy she loved on the other. Her best friend was leaning over the top of her, saying something about staying right where she was, damn it, but Clair couldn’t hear it, and then she was gone again, riding a soft pillow into nowhere, leaving everything she so urgently needed to tell her friends unsaid, and everything she needed to do undone.

  How was she going to save the world if she couldn’t save herself?

  Then without warning she was dreaming of someone somewhere else. And this time, she didn’t wake up.

  [27 redux]

  * * *

  “OKAY, WE’VE MADE it,” said Devin. “Your data is going into the Yard and it’s connecting somewhere. Let’s kill the feed and see what happens next.”

  Tomorrow is tomorrow

  Today is today

  Everything ends up yesterday

  Anyway

  Spring becomes summer

  Summer becomes fall

  Fall becomes winter

  Evermore

  Lyrics by Nana Healey © 2053

  [1 redux]

  * * *

  CLAIR AND Q stood at the double doors of the low, L-shaped building where Agnessa Adaksin hid her secret d-mat booth from the WHOLE muster in New Petersburg. A harsh, high-pitched sizzling sound came from outside. The chain reaction destroying the world was running rampant—unstable matter turning ordinary matter into more unstable matter, spreading destruction everywhere.

  “Ready?” asked Q, her voice more grown-up than it had ever sounded before. Or was that Kari Sargent—the last peacekeeper left on the planet? Now that Clair knew Q was in Kari’s body, she was unsure precisely who was talking.

  Was she ready? Clair could only nod. Her throat was full of words she couldn’t bring herself to say. Sob them, maybe; scream them, a very real possibility. But say them, as though they were nothing but ordinary words belonging to an ordinary moment? She didn’t think so.

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

  She was intensely glad for Q’s strong hand resting in hers. Q wasn’t forcing her to do this. They were doing it together, as they had to. They were responsible. The price needed to be paid, and it needed to be paid by them.

  Clair reached out and opened the door, hearing the crackling grow louder as she did so.

  A gust of ash swept over her.

  She closed her eyes and, with Q, stepped out to greet the blue dawn.

  Clair expected death to be quick, that the ghastly radiation of Wallace’s chain reaction would flash over her, violently unraveling her atoms, all the fundamental particles of her existence, and turn them into raw nothingness. But even as she walked through the door, she heard the hiss and spit of dying matter ebb. The blue light dimmed as though a switch had been pulled. She staggered on uneven ground and fell, pulling free from Q and falling up to her wrists in a drift of fine dust.

  She made the mistake of breathing in, and coughed until she saw stars.

  Q reached around her and tied something across her face.

  “Breathe through this,” said Q, her voice muffled. “I don’t know what this stuff will do to your lungs.”

  Clair opened her eyes a crack and saw Q bending over her, face obscured by a strip of black cloth tied across her mouth. The sleeve of her undersuit, Clair guessed, because Q’s armor was open across her chest, and her forearms were exposed right down to the skin.

  “What happened?” Clair asked, but what she meant was Why didn’t it happen?

  They were still alive. It wasn’t supposed to be that way.

  “The second wave must have passed just before we came out,” Q said, looking around her with a worried expression, blinking furiously to clear the dust from her eyes. The sky was gray above them. The whole world was gray. “It took out the cables we used to send ourselves into the Yard and everything else the first wave skipped over. But it missed us.”

  “Will there be a third wave?” She didn’t know what to hope for. A moment ago she had been ready to die, as ready as she had been on Wallace’s space station. Now she wasn’t so sure. A guilty hope had replaced the dreadful certainty that had filled her just moments ago.

 
Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive. That was Wordsworth. Only it wasn’t dawn, and it wasn’t likely to be blissful, either.

  Q shook her head. “There’s obviously not enough unstable matter left to sustain the reaction. And if the front is moving too quickly for us to catch it, it’s done.”

  “We’re not, though.”

  “You tried,” said Nelly, appearing in the doorway, a hulking shape even bigger than Sargent. She wore a surgical mask across her face. “Get up. Let’s see what’s left.”

  The muster was a postapocalyptic ruin, craters and collapsed buildings everywhere. A wind had come out of nowhere, making it hard to see, through tears or otherwise, and the air was surprisingly hot—something to do with the chain reaction, Clair assumed. What that meant for the long-term weather, Q didn’t know. Would the world freeze under thick ashen clouds that kept summer at bay for years? Or would it heat up in a spiral like Venus? It would be terrible if the ash finished what the blue dawn had started.

  If there were going to be survivors anywhere, the muster was it. She told herself to get used to being one of them. Clair 6.0: the one who got away, standing in the wrong place at the wrong time in order to live while billions didn’t.

  Another was Sandler Jones, the piebald redhead who had once tormented her, who they found whooping and dancing in the ruins, throwing ash over his head as though it were confetti. The knockout blow PK Forest had given him seemed forgotten as he frolicked around them, once even moving in to embrace her.

  She fended him off.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Celebrating, of course,” he said. “We’ve won! All the peekers and zombies are gone. Well, nearly,” he said, acknowledging Clair and Q. “It’s just us now. WHOLE has inherited the earth!”

  It was Nelly’s turn to cuff him around the head. “I don’t feel like celebrating,” she said. “Come with us now. People might be trapped and needing help. We have to find food, power, transport. What use is inheriting the world if we all starve to death?”

  That sobered him, restoring his usual sour disposition.

  “Should’ve thought of that when you burned everything up, zombie girl,” he said, poking Clair’s shoulder.

  Maybe she would have, if destroying the world had been her plan. She had been trying to save it, but everything had gone wrong. Everything she had attempted had turned to dust, along with Jesse.

  She might have given up all hope of putting the world back the way it was, but for one remaining chance: the copy of her in the Yard. Was she alive and thinking, living inside a new version of the Air? Was she safe? Was Jesse in there with her?

  If the answer to even one of those questions was yes, then she wouldn’t give up.

  Lightning flashed in the leaden sky.

  “I have a suspicion that things are going to get a lot worse,” said Nelly, “before they get any better.”

  “Shelter,” said Clair, agreeing with her suggestion. They had to survive in order to be ready when word came from the Yard. “We need to find it and get people to it before the cold returns. Hunting them down individually could take hours.”

  “Little Teddy has a trumpet,” said Sandler. “He could blow it. People would come.”

  “What dorm are you in?” Nelly asked.

  “I’ll take you.”

  The dorm was still standing and the trumpet was there, safely in its case under Little Teddy’s bunk. Of Little Teddy himself, however, whoever he was, there was no sign. Clair assumed that he had secretly used d-mat, like Agnessa. Doing so even once meant that he was most likely dead. Not everyone would be as lucky as she had been. If she could really call it lucky.

  “We’ll never fit everyone in here,” said Sandler. The dorm was big enough for ten people. Outside, the wind was rising.

  “There’s the gymnasium,” said Nelly. “It’s not far. Grab as many blankets as you can carry. Sandler, you blow the horn, and keep blowing. Doesn’t matter what it sounds like, as long as it’s loud.”

  “What about Agnessa?” Clair asked as they set off, weighed down by supplies, Q almost invisible under a woolen mound like a walking mushroom. Her borrowed body was strong. Clair hoped Kari Sargent didn’t mind being held captive inside her own head a little longer.

  “Agnessa is dead,” Nelly said. “I shut off her life support once it was clear we were going to lose power. Her battery backup was good for thirty minutes. Kinder this way.”

  And a kind of justice, Clair thought.

  “That makes you boss,” said Sandler, taking his lips momentarily off the trumpet.

  “Keep blowing,” Nelly told him. “I don’t want to be the boss of a bunch of dead people.”

  The path was hard and uneven, and made treacherous by all the ash. Gray pooled in pitfalls and crevices, creating a constant risk of turned ankles or worse. They passed a crashed airship with gaping holes in its sides. Glimpsed in the distance through the ruins was a fire, burning steadily. It seemed for a while as though there was nothing and no one else left at all.

  But slowly people joined them, drawn by the brassy call of the trumpet. They appeared out of ruined structures in twos or threes, bringing supplies and torches and, one of them, a primitive radio transceiver.

  “I’m picking up a signal,” the woman said. Her face was ashen except around her eyes, where she had rubbed at tears. It made her look startled.

  “From the moon?” Nelly said. “If the chain reaction didn’t spread that far, there will still be people in the colony.”

  “From the south pole, relayed by an old GPS satellite. Someone called Eve Bartelme.”

  “Who?”

  Clair started. Devin and Trevin’s surname was Bartelme. A relation? Perhaps another sibling?

  “RADICAL,” she said.

  The woman with the radio nodded. “They want to know what we did.”

  “Let them believe what they want to believe,” said Nelly. “We’ll talk to them later.”

  “What if they attack us?” Clair said.

  “No one’s attacking anyone,” Nelly said. “Not today.”

  The gym loomed out of the stormy night just as the first thick drops of rain began to fall. They were muddy and gray, full of dissolved ash, and stung the eyes. Clair was glad to get under shelter. They found another thirty people inside the boxy building, stained and spattered, harrowed expressions on their faces, making a total of seventy-one.

  They were in shock. Even Abstainers had friends and loved ones who used d-mat. They had all lost people. And they wanted answers. Clair knew how they felt.

  “We didn’t do this,” Nelly said shortly, pressing for calm. “It was a trap set by Ant Wallace. This is on him, not us.”

  That was the simple version of the story, Clair knew, the version that absolved her of any blame. Whether it stuck or not, she would know the larger truth, and she would always feel guilty, unless she found a way to fix it or to make amends. Preferably both.

  Lightning flashed, bright through the gymnasium’s windows. Thunder boomed. There was another flash, hard on the heels of the first, and then another. The wind shrieked.

  “I suggest we try to sleep,” bellowed Nelly over the noise. “There’s nothing else we can do for now.”

  Q had dropped her load of blankets in the middle of the room. Keeping one large enough to cover herself, she said to Clair, “First, I want to try the radio.”

  Clair nodded and joined Q at the woman’s side. She was in her fifties, with long gray hair and handsomely weathered skin, visible where she had wiped the ash away. She was wearing a knitted shawl that had once been brightly colored.

  “This was my grandfather’s,” she said, reluctantly handing the radio to the PK. “The batteries, too. You’ll be careful with it, won’t you?”

  Q nodded, even as her strong hands twisted the casing, popping it open along a seam to expose the insides, wires and circuit boards and other incomprehensible things. Clair promised the woman that Q would put it back exactly as it was, ho
ping that was true.

  “This is potentially the most precious machine on the planet,” Q said as she rearranged the radio’s innards in ways Clair didn’t understand, using tools she produced from inside her armor. “It’s certainly the most precious to us. Your grandfather would be proud. He lived through the Water Wars, did he?”

  The woman nodded. “Fought in Texas. Was part of the Consensus Riots and died wishing he’d been on the other side. D-mat saved the world but killed everyone: Who can argue with that now?”

  “It didn’t kill everyone,” Q said. “There’s still us, and there’s still hope. All we have to do is get through the next few days. Three meals from savagery, eh, Clair?”

  This didn’t sound like Q. Clair wondered if Kari Sargent was leaking out while Q was distracted by the radio. They were the very same words she had used the first time they met. Either way, she was making sense.

  “We have food,” Clair said, not wanting to talk about the Yard yet to anyone else, not until they heard something from inside to indicate that her desperate plan had been successful. “When the storm passes, we’ll find more. Grow more, even. Will the crops be okay?”

  The woman shrugged. “The rain will wash the ash away.”

  “Clean water might be the bigger concern,” said Q or Kari. She clicked her tongue against her teeth with satisfaction and put the case back together. “There. This should work.”

  Something appeared in Clair’s blank lenses, a raw pixelated image that looked like a child’s first attempt to create a patch. She winked on it.

  A window opened, revealing a grainy image of woman so pale she looked translucent, with red-and-pepper hair cut short across her scalp. Her eyes were a brilliant green. Too old to be Devin’s sister—she had to be his mother or perhaps an aunt.

  “Respond, if you’re hearing this,” she said, her voice crackling with static. “Explain to me how the hell you’re still alive.”

  “What do we tell her?” asked the woman who owned the radio.