Crashland

by Sean Williams

  “Let’s just get moving,” Devin said. “Please.”

  She nodded, but he didn’t go anywhere.

  Impulsively, she bent down to hug Sargent, not caring about blood, worried only that she didn’t hurt the injured peacekeeper in the process.

  “Sarge,” she said. “Can you hear me? Sarge, I’ll stay if you want me to.”

  The peacekeeper shook her head. She was very pale, and her eyes seemed to be sinking back into their sockets. Her hand twitched in a gesture that might have been Get the hell out of here. Or equally Take my pistol before you go.

  Clair had to assume it was probably both, even if the thought of shooting someone still made her squeamish. But the thought of dying made her feel worse.

  Sargent didn’t move after that. She looked peaceful, but that didn’t make Clair feel any better. Leaving her was a betrayal of their brief camaraderie, whether Devin’s suspicions were warranted or not. I’m sorry, Clair thought, promising to come back when she could. If she could.

  [20]

  * * *

  CLAIR GOT TO her feet, wiping her hands on her armor so her grip on the gun wouldn’t slip. Her breath shuddered in and out of her, sounding almost like weeping, but there were no tears. Not yet. There wasn’t time.

  They eased through the hole in the tank, shards of mirror turning to white dust with every step. The machine was situated in the center of an ancient deconsecrated chapel. All the religious trappings had been removed, along with the pews and the carpets. Someone had taken a stab at turning it into a home but given up midway, leaving dark-stained wooden beams to gather cobwebs and dust. The tank—a blocky, angular thing on the outside, now featuring a substantial hole in its side, with thick cables snaking to a nearby drain—looked no more out of place there than it would have anywhere else. A closed wooden door with a modern lock led to the exterior world on the other side of what would once have been the nave.

  They crossed to the door, where Devin fiddled with the lock. It clunked and swung open, revealing a hilly, green landscape with gray sea visible nearby. The air smelled of salt and fish. A path led north, inland. Clair couldn’t see the lighthouse, but the Air showed her where it was. She had full access now that she was outside the chapel. A flurry of patches and bumps clamored for her attention, including several from Jesse, sent hours before, while they were still in the Maze. She swept them all aside to concentrate on the landscape and what threats it might contain.

  “See anyone?” Devin asked her.

  “No. No drones, either.” She wished Q was around to tell her if anyone was nearby. “Not much in the way of cover.”

  “Don’t sound so disgruntled. It’s better than the alternative: six five eight—the number that kept repeating in the Maze?—that was Beijing. We’d be up to our ears in dupes if we’d gone there, like they wanted us to.”

  She wasn’t listening to him. Their best bet, she figured, was to follow the path. “How long do we have?”

  “A minute or so before those two dupes arrive. If we hurry, we might get to the lighthouse before them.”

  “I can tell you’ve never run six hundred yards before.”

  “Not wounded,” he said in a hurt tone, then corrected himself. “No, you’re right. Never.”

  She pulled up her hood and broke cover, pulling Devin after her. Clair set a steady pace, trying to watch every direction at once. The hills were gentle; in theory it would be easy to spot anyone coming toward them. The memory of dupes in active camouflage in Crystal City was still strong, however. She wasn’t going to take anything for granted.

  Halfway there, Devin panted, “Okay, they’re here. The two dupes. We’ve got to be careful now.”

  She agreed, and she didn’t like the way his breathing was coming. He was pale and he clutched his right arm tightly to his chest. Blood dripped from the elbow, leaving a thin trail along the path. He seemed to be getting heavier to pull along with every step.

  “We need to split up,” she said. The map showed a low valley nearby. She could follow it almost all the way to the lighthouse, and maybe she wouldn’t be seen along the way. “I’m going in that direction,” she said, pointing. “You . . .”

  “Keep going along the path to draw their fire? You must think I’m— Wait, yeah, they’ll be looking for you. So there’s a chance they’ll let me walk on by. Or they’ll kill me just to get me out of the picture. How do you figure my odds?”

  “Zero if you stick with me,” she said.

  All you have to do is survive, she told herself. Get to the booth and get away, live to fight another day. Jesse would be waiting for her at the other end.

  And there, she promised herself, she would stop running and start retaliating for real. Somehow.

  Devin shrugged. “Okay. You take the high road, I’ll take the low. Wish me luck, will you?”

  “Good luck,” she said, sincerely hoping he wouldn’t need it. “See you at the other end.”

  “If I don’t see you first.”

  “Put up your hood!” she hissed, darting to her right off the path and heading for the valley, pausing only to make sure that he had obeyed her instruction, which he did with a shrug.

  She checked the map one more time then clicked off the Air entirely, to reduce the chances of her being tracked. Her green-tinged lenses went dark. She was on her own.

  Clair stayed low, hoping a tangle of thorny bushes that hugged a narrow creek at the bottom of the valley might provide some cover. The space between her shoulder blades burned, even though she knew the dupes were ahead of her, not behind. Sargent’s pistol felt unnatural, clutched tightly in her hand. She hoped it would act as a deterrent and she wouldn’t need to use it. That would depend, she supposed, on whether these particular dupes were coming to capture her or kill her.

  Two small birds shot out of a nearby bush, and Clair’s heart almost stopped. Her eyes tracked the birds as they skated away from the interloper, seeking shelter over the nearest hill. When she looked forward again, Cashile was standing five yards in front of her.

  Her heart was already pounding from the last fright. The only move she made was to raise the pistol, held tightly in both hands.

  “Get out of my way,” she said.

  He shook his head, a small boy of maybe ten with cornrows and skin the same color as hers, staring at her with adult eyes. She had last seen him dead in Crystal City, but that hadn’t really been him either. Clair’s final memory of the real Cashile was of him waving as he roared off with his mother on an electrobike. She wished she had an electrobike now, even though she didn’t know how to drive it. Anything to put some distance between her and the doppelgänger standing patiently in front of her.

  “You’re done,” dupe-Cashile said in an adult voice. “Give it up.”

  “Not a chance,” she said. “Get out of my way.”

  “If I don’t? Are you going to shoot me?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “I know you don’t. You’re not a killer. You’re just a kid who’s out of her depth, like Cashile was. If you’re not careful, you’ll drown too.”

  The mismatch between the boyish face and the all-too-knowing voice was stripping Clair of her resolve. She had to get past the dupe, but she couldn’t shoot him, even if he only looked like a child.

  “Who are you really?” she asked.

  “We don’t have names anymore,” he said. “We’re the hollow men.”

  “Like the poem.”

  “I don’t know anything about a poem. That’s just what we call ourselves.”

  His ignorance shouldn’t have surprised her. He was a killer, not an English major.

  “Where’s the other one?” she asked.

  “Behind you,” said a voice.

  She spun around and saw another Cashile coming down the same hill over which the birds had flown.

  [21]

  * * *

  HER MIND BALKED at the sight. Even though she knew what the dupes were and what they were capable of, this
was the first time she had seen indisputable evidence that someone other than herself had been duplicated. Here she was talking to two identical people, except for their minds. If she’d entertained any doubts that VIA was truly broken, they were now completely dispelled.

  “You’re probably wondering why we’ve come to you like this,” said the second Cashile. He had a slightly different accent from the first. “It’s not to fight you. We’re unarmed.” He held out his arms and wiggled his child’s fingers. “We just want to talk, that’s all.”

  “About Q,” she said, swinging the pistol between the two of them, not believing for a second that they meant her no harm.

  “Yes. Tell us where she is or there’ll be no more talking.”

  She imagined them clamming up like kids having a tantrum. “What makes you think I know?”

  “If anyone does, it’s you,” said Cashile-1. “If you don’t, then we don’t need you.”

  “Your only chance of surviving is to tell us.”

  Clair fired once at Cashile-2. He was coming too close. The bullet sprayed the dirt a yard in front him. The recoil kicked the gun up in her hand with surprising force, and he stopped dead. She was glad she hadn’t missed and accidentally shot him, even if he was a dupe. Birds scattered in all directions, abandoning the tiny valley that probably had been theirs alone for years.

  “If I don’t tell you, I’m dead,” she said. “If I do tell you, I’m probably dead too. It’s kind of lose-lose for me.”

  “Wallace’s offer still stands. Help us and you get your friends back. We’ll even throw in Jesse’s dad, if you like.” Cashile-1’s smile perfectly matched the other’s. “We’re not unreasonable.”

  “You’re murderers and liars”—noting as she said it the implied confirmation that Jesse’s father’s original pattern still existed, somewhere, along with the patterns of her friends. “I’d be insane to trust you.”

  “You trust Devin Bartelme, don’t you? The difference between us is not as great as he would like you to think.”

  Clair raised her eyebrows. “What do you mean?”

  “Come with us and we’ll tell you.” The Cashiles were closing in again. “Let’s get off this rock and go somewhere civilized.”

  “No.” She backed away.

  “Devin has already left, you know. He’s abandoned you to save his own skin.”

  That was entirely possible. He’d had time to get to the lighthouse by now.

  “That means the booth is tied up,” she said. “It’s just you two and me now.”

  “There are other booths. The next dupes you meet won’t be so reasonable.”

  Clair couldn’t afford to doubt that. What had happened to PK Sargent was proof. Maybe the Cashiles genuinely wanted to make her see reason, but their dual purpose could be to delay her until the killers arrived. The distinction between tell us or die and tell us and die was a thin one. Which faction did these dupes belong to?

  “I’m going to the lighthouse,” she said. “You can either try to stop me or let me go. Or come with me, I guess.”

  With a reasonableness that made Clair feel like she’d slipped into some kind of dream, Cashile-1 said, “We’ll come with you, of course. Can’t have you wandering around on your own. You never know what could happen.”

  Warily, she set off along the valley again, with one Cashile on either side of her. At first she tried to stay ahead of them, but that way she couldn’t see both at once, which only made her more nervous. They settled into an easy lope, the three of them side by side, as though going out for an afternoon stroll through the countryside.

  “Hollow men,” she said, finding the silence as uncomfortable as the veiled threats. “Don’t you have any hollow women?”

  “It’s a convenient phrase,” said Cashile-2, with a glance at Cashile-1. “And it is from T. S. Eliot, since you asked. Some of us are better read than others.”

  “How many different, uh, hollow people are there?”

  “A surprising number. You might think it’d be simpler to be all the same, but it’s not. Different people have different strengths and weaknesses. You don’t want an army of soldiers who all share an identical blind spot, physically or mentally.”

  “Is that what you are, then, an army?”

  “We could be,” said Cashile-1. “We’re prepared to fight, anyway.”

  “And you don’t mind the thought of dying after a few days in someone else’s body?”

  “We’ll always come back. That’s the deal. We do this, and we don’t ever die.”

  “But you don’t live in your own body. Or is that still out there, somewhere?”

  Cashile-2 shrugged. “What does it matter? A body is just a body. It’s what’s inside that counts.”

  Once again Clair struggled with the absurdity of the situation. Here she was arguing philosophy with dupes on an island in the middle of nowhere while people all over the world were stranded and dying because of the crash. Why were the dupes being so frank all of a sudden? It made a welcome change from being shot at or blown up or hassled about Q, but it didn’t make any sense.

  Then she realized with a jolt: they were trying to make her understand.

  Clair almost laughed—did they really think she would ever accept them or what they did?—and stopped herself in time. The lighthouse was in view, a stubby finger protruding from a brick fist relatively high up on a headland. This unexpected chance to learn more about the dupes wasn’t going to last much longer.

  “You’re not like the others I’ve met,” she said. “There’s one I’ve seen a couple of times. . . .”

  “He calls himself ‘Nobody,’” said Cashile-2.

  “Yes,” she said, surprised. That was exactly who she had been thinking of. He had been in her dupe, and before that in Dylan Linwood’s body in California. He had tried to kill her both times.

  “We know all about him,” said Cashile-1 with a roll of his eyes.

  “He’s one of the first,” said Cashile-2. “The boss asked him to retire once, but he wouldn’t. Which wasn’t a problem while he was . . . useful . . . which I suppose he still is, in his own way.”

  “He wants me dead,” Clair said. “Is that what ‘the boss’ wants?”

  Another exchanged glance. “Nobody’s way off program. You can’t tell us what we need to know if you’re dead.”

  Clair nodded, not taking that as definite confirmation that there were two factions among the dupes, one of which wanted her dead. Maybe the Nobody dupe was under separate orders to terrorize her into capitulating.

  “Are you officially telling me that Ant Wallace survived?” she asked, trying to maintain the chatty tone. “He must have if that deal he offered is still on the table.”

  “We’re not officially telling you anything,” said Cashile-1, with bright coyness. “But if you want to trade information, now’s the time. . . .”

  They had reached the path leading to the lighthouse. Another figure was walking in the same direction as them, along the weathered tarmac, so their paths crossed. Clair froze. It was Dylan Linwood, dressed exactly as Clair had last seen him, in scruffy shirt and shorts, left eye filled with blood. She stopped short of actually running, but only just, as she remembered all the times he had threatened her and chased her in the past. In her mind the worst of the dupes were synonymous with his ominous, craggy face. She took this as a sign that the warm and fuzzy get-together was over now.

  “See reason, Clair,” said the Linwood dupe. He put himself on the path in front of her, forcing her to stop. The Cashiles stood behind her so she couldn’t run. “You don’t have any options left.”

  He didn’t sound like Nobody, but he was right regardless. The Linwood dupe had a pistol in his hand, pointed at her just as hers was at him. The question was: if it came down to it, who could fire first?

  Clair took a deep breath and looked down at the path, trying to prepare herself for what surely had to come. There was no trail of blood from Devin’s injury, which was worryin
g. Maybe the Cashiles had been lying about him reaching the lighthouse, and he had collapsed after she had left him. Maybe the dupe of Jesse’s father had killed him. There was her motivation to shoot dupe-Dylan, she told herself, if she needed one. Killing a wounded, unarmed teenager in cold blood warranted some kind of retaliation.

  “I can’t tell you anything about Q,” she said. Why did no one ever believe her about this? If she’d said it once, she’d said it a hundred times. “I don’t know anything about Q. No more than you do, honestly. So if you’re going to kill me, you might as well do it now.” She gripped the pistol tightly and braced herself. “Or try to.”

  The dupe of Dylan Linwood moved with fluid speed, wrenching the pistol from her grasp before she could pull the trigger. He tossed it to Cashile-2 while Cashile-1 whipped Clair’s other pistol out of her holster. Suddenly she was standing unarmed in the center of a ring of dupes, all of them pointing deadly weapons at her. Her eyes filled with acid tears of embarrassment. Shit.

  “We’re not going to kill you, Clair,” said Cashile-1, “even if you really don’t know anything about Q’s whereabouts. You still have some value as a hostage.”

  “And while you might be prepared to throw it all away to spite us,” said Cashile-2, “we know Q wouldn’t let you. That’s how the crash happened in the first place, right?”

  Don’t be so sure about that, Clair wanted to say. She might not do it a second time. But convincing them of that point could mean a death sentence, so she stayed silent. No more frank exchanges with the enemy, not when they had the upper hand.

  “This way,” said the third dupe, indicating the path up to the lighthouse.

  As they walked her up the hill a fourth figure stepped into view at the entrance to the lighthouse, and her heart sank. How many dupes did Wallace need to bring her in?

  But this dupe had red hair and was holding a boxy contraption in both arms, wires draped behind him.

  “Clair, watch out!” Devin cried.

  The box flashed, and Cashile-2 flew backward in a pink mist.