“Don’t hurt her . . . please don’t hurt her.”
Clair stiffened at the sound of her mother’s voice. Her heart swelled up inside her, threatening to burst inside her chest like the bomb that had killed Dylan Linwood.
“We’ve been nagging her all day.” That was Oz, her stepfather. “What makes you think she’ll answer us now?”
There was the sound of flesh hitting flesh.
“You figure it out.”
Clair’s fingernails dug into her palms as she fought a powerful urge to burst in and hurl herself at the man in her apartment, armed with nothing but teeth and nails. The voice behind the emergency patch was right. That would be the action of someone with a death wish.
She backed up a step, feeling shaky in the knees, and spoke silently to the peacekeeper.
“I need a . . .” What had PK Anastas called it? “. . . a Rapid Response team at my home in Maine. Quickly!”
“What is the situation, Clair?”
“My parents are in trouble. They’re being threatened. Send someone, now!”
“All right, Clair,” said the peacekeeper. “We’ll have a team there shortly. Keep this window open and don’t go anywhere.”
Behind her, the door to the d-mat booth slid shut.
A new bump flashed in her lenses: it was a nag from her stepfather, flagged as urgent.
Clair highlighted the bump and without reading it sent him a quick message.
“Stall. Help’s coming.”
“!!” he shot back immediately. “Stay away! Not safe!”
The apartment went quiet. Even her mother was silent. Clair held her breath, wondering what had changed.
When the voice of the man in the apartment came again, she was struck by a feeling of impossible recognition. She couldn’t know who he was. No one in her world was capable of something like this.
The man WHOLE is trying to kill, as the mysterious “q” voice had called him, spoke in response to something only he could hear.
“What?” he said. “She’s here? Now?”
Clair backed away from the door. He couldn’t be talking about her, could he?
Footfalls hurried to the other side of the door.
The booth behind her was still closed, processing the data that comprised the Rapid Response team.
The locks clicked and clunked on the door to her apartment. He was coming out to get her. But who had told him? How had he known?
“Run, Clair, run!” said the childlike voice in her ear.
[23]
* * *
THERE WAS A door marked FIRE at the end of the corridor. Clair burst through it, onto a steep flight of concrete stairs that wound down to the ground floor below.
“Clair! Hold it!”
She definitely knew that voice from somewhere but didn’t stop to see who it belonged to. She ran down the stairs three at a time.
“What’s happening, Clair?” asked the peacekeeper.
“You told him,” she said. “You told him where I was!”
“Told who, Clair? I’m afraid I don’t know—”
She closed the window. The door leading into the stairwell burst open above her, sending echoes flying like startled birds all around her. The man was close. She ran flattened against the wall as best she could, minimizing the likelihood that he would see her.
She ducked through the next exit and closed it quietly behind her. Feet thundered down the stairs. She ran for that floor’s booth, threw herself inside, said the first address that came to her.
“Woodward and Main, Manteca.”
The stairwell entrance burst open just as the booth door started sliding shut. Framed at the other end of the hallway was the man chasing her. He didn’t look like an assassin. He was scruffily dressed, with gray hair, a bruise on his forehead, and a glaring, blood-filled eye. He was Dylan Linwood, and he was holding a sleek black pistol in his right hand.
Clair couldn’t move. The end of the barrel was like a black hole, growing larger with every degree it rose. Behind it, Jesse’s father aimed the pistol with both hands and squeezed the trigger twice.
Two bullets slammed in quick succession into the closed booth door, bang-bang.
Clair dropped to the floor with her hands over her ears.
sssssss—
She glanced up fearfully. The mirrored inside of the door showed no damage. It wasn’t even warped.
—pop
Her legs had no strength beneath her. She wasn’t sure she could stand. But she was instantly on her feet, thinking: Manteca? What the hell am I doing? Crazy to go back to where she’d come from, where Big-Ears might still be looking for her.
A stunned part of her was thinking: Dylan Linwood?
The door hissed open. She ignored the people waiting and leaned out, searching for any familiar faces.
Isn’t he dead?
Outside the booth there was no sign of anyone she recognized. No Big-Ears. Zep hadn’t responded to her bump. Maybe he was in transit.
Drones were whining overhead. She breathed out through pursed lips and moved to step from the booth. Then Dylan Linwood burst into view three doors along, and she threw herself back inside.
Very much alive, apparently. And using d-mat!
People complained in the queue outside her booth.
“Clair? I know you’re here,” Dylan Linwood called.
“Take me to the Isle of Shanghai,” Clair said in a quiet, fast voice. If Zep had gotten away, he might have gone to his dorm. “Ju Long Hostel.”
“You can’t run, Clair, and you can forget about calling for help.”
He walked into view. They stared at each other for a split second. His pistol was hidden from the drones as Gemma’s had been. He moved toward her just as the door closed.
“Shi—!” she heard him say.
sssssss-pop
She came out of the booth at a run, not sticking around to see if he had followed her a second time. Hurrying toward Zep’s dorm, she opened the qqqqq patch in her infield.
“You were right,” she said. “How did you know?”
“I told you, Clair,” said the voice. “There is very little I cannot access.”
“Was it you who rang the safe house?”
“Yes. The landline was the only way I could contact you while you were inside the Faraday shield. Unfortunately, you had left by the time I got through.”
“Why are you doing this? What’s in it for you?”
“I just want to help you, Clair. I am on your side. You can trust me.”
Clair wasn’t certain about that. “Who are you?”
“Does that matter? Can’t I just help you?”
Clair screwed up her face. It was like she was talking to a kid of some kind—a hacker prodigy sticking her nose in for kicks. There were isolationist communities that lived in a state of passive-aggressive antagonism with the world around them, governed by peculiar notions of society and morality. She could accept that one of their offspring might have developed an unhealthy curiosity regarding Improvement and its victims. Was that what was going on?
If it was, would Clair be crazy not to take advantage of it?
Zep wasn’t in his room, but there was another huddle of young men in the common area. They all looked the same to her. One of them called something, a slightly more verbal version of a wolf whistle. This time she didn’t ignore it.
“There’s a guy following me, trying to hurt me,” she said. A dead man. “Please don’t let him come through here, will you?”
The huddle broke apart, puzzled and territorial in equal measures, as Dylan Linwood burst into the common area behind her.
“That’s him!” she cried. “Stop him!”
The huddle swarmed forward.
She grabbed the nearest guy before he could run into the fray.
“Is there a back way out of here?”
He nodded and hurried her to the far side of the room. A single shot sounded behind them, and her guide turned back to see what w
as going on. She kept running, hoping it was just a warning round, that none of Zep’s friends had been hurt.
She took the stairs all the way to the bottom and burst out into the busy Shanghai street. It was full of pedestrians and bicyclists, conveniently rowdy with music and calling voices. She pushed her way through the crowd, putting as much distance and confusion between her and the hostel as she could. There was a d-mat station at the next junction. She headed for it.
As she fled, she sent a call request to “q,” who answered immediately.
“Okay,” Clair said. “I’m really out of options here. If you can tell me why Dylan Linwood is back from the dead and what I have to do to shake him, then maybe I’ll start trusting you.”
“I cannot help you with the first part at the moment, but I might be able to do something about the second. The first thing to do is find out exactly how he is tracking you. He is clearly not accessing friend privileges, since he is not your friend. I doubt he hacked into VIA or the peacekeepers. He could be monitoring surveillance cameras and EITS data like the peacekeepers do—”
“I don’t need a list. I just need to get rid of him!”
“Take the next left,” said the voice.
“But the station—”
“It is too obvious. And you do not have enough time. He is behind you.”
Clair glanced over her shoulder. There he was, shouldering his way through the crowd with a determined expression on his face. Again she felt a moment of fundamental wrongness about his existence. You’re dead, she wanted to yell at him. Lie down and leave me alone!
“Next left it is,” she said, renewing her efforts to press through the throng and into a crowded market stall.
“Go straight ahead. Take the second lane on your right.”
Clair did as she was told, the skin between her shoulder blades burning with an ancient sense of danger. Dylan Linwood could see her, but at least he couldn’t fire at her, not without risking hitting someone else. That helped a bit.
She ducked into the lane when she reached it and snatched a brightly colored shawl from a stand. She slipped it over her head and ducked lower, easing through the crowd as quickly as she could.
“Is he far behind me?” She didn’t dare look.
“Keep going straight. I will tell you when to deviate from this course.”
“But you’ll warn me if he’s about to catch me, won’t you?”
“Yes, Clair. I will not let that happen.”
She squeezed past a woman pushing a small child in a stroller. “Have you worked out how to stop him from tracking me yet?”
“I believe I have. Do you still have your Improvement note on your person?”
[24]
* * *
CLAIR’S MIND WENT blank for a moment, then filled with alarm and self-recrimination. Of course she still had the note on her. She’d slipped it under the elastic of her underpants the previous night, and she was wearing the same underpants now.
“Yes, I do,” she said, slipping her index finger around her waist until she found the note. It was creased and softened by sweat, a piece of paper made far from ordinary by the words written on it—a “signal to the system,” as Jesse had called it. Could his father be using that very signal to track her now?
“What do I do? Tear it up?”
“No. Turn left here.”
Clair ducked into another lane lined with market stalls. At the far end was an exit. Next to the exit was the sign for a d-mat station, and on seeing it she understood.
“A wild-goose chase,” she said. “That would work, I guess.”
“Not this jump,” said the voice, “but the next one. Clair, do you trust me?”
“Uh.” That was a difficult question. “How far, exactly?”
“I can program the booth for you, if you will permit me. That will save time.”
“Can’t I do it myself?”
“You can. But in that case I must ask you to give me the list of destinations in advance so I can prepare the way. And you will need to speak without hesitation.”
“How many?”
“Four should be sufficient.”
The impossibility of her situation made it hard to think of anything other than putting one foot in front of the other. The resort in Switzerland she’d stayed in with her parents as a kid. The dig in South America she and her friends had visited last year as part of their Lost Civilizations elective.
Somewhere random? That would be good, she thought. And somewhere she’d never been before.
Not Omsk. Cape Town. And the Tuvalu memorial in the Pacific.
“Perhaps we should we send it to the moon,” she said. “That’d really throw him off.”
“All lunar installations are restricted while the OneMoon embargo is in place.”
Clair had been joking, never dreaming that accessing somewhere off-Earth was remotely an option.
She forced her way through a tangle of people at the market’s exit, into the relatively free space of the street outside. She ran the last dozen yards to the station.
“Take the note with you to your first destination,” said the voice. “You will dispose of it before the transmission after that.”
Clair shouldered her way into the nearest booth and cried out the Swiss address. Dylan Linwood burst out of the market and moved sharklike in her wake. Not firing, not shouting, just moving quickly, confident she wouldn’t get away from him. The gun wasn’t visible.
That it would reappear when she was caught, she had no doubt.
The door shut. Her ears popped. The door opened.
It was cold and dark in Switzerland. Heavy snow was falling outside the station. She wrapped the shawl tightly around her neck and shoulders and hugged herself.
“Put the note in the next booth over and use your second destination,” the voice told her.
She did so, giving the booth the South American address and requesting an unaccompanied freight transfer. She ducked out before the door shut on her and went to the third booth.
The doors closed and opened again a moment later in Cape Town, her third destination. She stepped out of the booth and warily looked around. It was nighttime there too, but the air was warm and humid. The station was deserted. A sign in her lenses welcomed her to the Devil’s Peak lookout. Below her was the university, on the edge of a moon-shaped bay. Across the bay was Ndabeni, lit up by a ghostly spear of light fired at a slant from a powersat above the equator.
Clair unwound the shawl and threw it away.
“Why are you doing this for me?”
“I have been following Improvement, Clair. That is what I do. Now I am involved, and it is very exciting.”
“Is this some kind of game to you?”
“No, Clair. I am not playing a game. I am very serious. I want to be your friend. Like Libby. Like the two of you are friends.”
“You can’t just become my friend. Friendship has to be earned. And besides, who knows what Libby thinks of me now . . . ?”
“Her profile declares your relationship to be unchanged.”
Clair checked her lenses. Libby’s most recent caption simply said “I’m beautiful!” with a rapid-fire sequence of women’s faces, all of them blondes like her. She was in the Manhattan Isles, not at school, but she didn’t say why.
“I can’t find Zep,” Clair said when she looked for him.
“He cannot be located.”
“What does that mean?” Her heart skipped a beat. “He’s dead?”
“No. He is disconnected from the Air.”
Recaptured, she thought. Back inside WHOLE’s Faraday cage. Every instinct in her railed at the thought.
“I have to go back for him,” she said. “I can’t just leave him behind.”
Before “q” could offer a reply, the booth behind her came to life. Its door closed, and the machines within busily whirred, processing new data and spinning pure energy into matter. Someone was coming.
“Is that . . . him?”
>
“Yes.”
“But it can’t be,” she said in disbelief. “We got rid of the note.”
“This proves that your location is being tracked by means other than the note.”
“What do I do now?”
“You must disconnect from the Air and go to your fourth destination.”
She balked at that. Disconnecting from the Air would be like locking herself in a coffin and nailing it shut.
“Think of something else,” she said.
“I cannot. This is now the most likely method your pursuers have used.”
“But if I leave the Air, no one will know where I am.”
“Including the man following you.”
“Yes, but . . . oh, damn it.”
She opened another booth, didn’t enter.
“What if I disconnect now and then reconnect when I arrive?”
“Any direct connection is undesirable.”
“Is there any way just to hide my connection?”
“Not in the time remaining, Clair.”
“All right, but first I need to bump Mom and Dad—”
“You have five seconds precisely, Clair.”
The whirring of the active booth reached a crescendo. It was going to open any moment.
She shot into her booth and asked for the Tuvalu monument. As the door shut, she called up menus and options in her lenses. Disconnect. Sever. Disallow. Isolate. Interface by interface, she plucked at the ties connecting her to the rest of the world. Her augmented senses, her sunburn epidermals, even the pedometers built into the soles of her shoes—everything.
sssssss—
One by one, the patches in her lenses went dark.
“Wait,” she said as the air thinned around her. “If I do this, how will I talk to you?”
—pop
[25]
* * *
IT WAS SUNNY in the Pacific. There was nothing but ocean in all directions. A full circle of booths opened up on a broad viewing platform with unobtrusive holographic displays showing where the islands had once been. The tiny former nation had a special place in the history of the twenty-first century as the first country destroyed in the Water Wars. Where some had fallen in armed conflicts and others had crumbled from within, Tuvalu had simply vanished beneath rising seas. Clair had learned about it in high school but couldn’t care less now.
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