Crashland

by Sean Williams

  “I’m not as charming as you,” he said with a wry grin. “I think Forest likes you.”

  “Not anymore, I bet.” She felt the situation slipping out of her control, and her anxiety rising with it, but the plan did make sense. Jesse was a lone Abstainer, not a threat. Even if Forest got word out quickly enough, Jesse might slip through unhindered by taking a different route back to the freighter.

  “Devin, you’ll go too?” she said.

  “No,” he said. “I’m staying here.”

  “But—”

  “Let me explain. If we’re going to split up, we’ll need to communicate by some means other than the Air, some way that can’t be monitored. There’s only one secure way I can think of that we can put in place quickly.”

  “Trevin,” Jesse said.

  “Exactly.”

  “But isn’t he the one who stays at home while you get your feet dirty?” asked Clair.

  “I’ll work on him. Age before beauty, right?” Angry whisperings fluttered at the edge of Clair’s hearing. “Okay. T will meet Jesse at the freighter and they’ll go to L4 together from there. I can set up closed networks so you can piggyback on our link. That way we can chat without anyone overhearing.”

  “Great idea,” said Jesse, swinging the hovercraft back to the shore.

  “But no mushy stuff, okay? It’s bad enough being around you two as it is.”

  “I’ll go with him,” said Nobody.

  “No way,” Clair immediately said. Maybe the dupe just wanted to stay in the loop, but Clair wasn’t going to take a chance on him using Jesse against her somehow. “You stick with me.”

  He didn’t argue.

  The hovercraft sped back to shore, where the three of them wrestled Sargent’s unconscious form off the hovercraft and stretched her out on the wooden surface of the pier. Their return had been noted; Sandler Jones and his crew were already converging on the scene. Clair grimaced at the thought of being around him a second longer, but there was no choice. This was the way it had to go.

  She hugged Jesse before he could leave.

  “Be careful,” he said into her ear. His breath was warm.

  “You too. Enjoy space.”

  “I will.” He grinned. “I’ll get to see the stars this time.”

  She remembered only then that he had been in Wallace’s station with her, briefly. Stars were a much better vision to cling to than Zep’s body and his father’s tortured face.

  “One last jump,” she said, and they kissed hard.

  He leaped aboard with a wave, gunned the fans, and sped off alone across the Neva Straits.

  [62]

  * * *

  WHEN THE LIGHTS of the hovercraft had faded to a twinkle, Clair turned to face the music.

  “What the hell?” Sandler came to a breathless halt in front of her. His cheeks were as red as his hair, emphasizing the odd blotches on his temple and neck. He looked down at Sargent’s unconscious form. “I thought I told you—”

  “Yes, yes,” said Devin. “One of our friends here got away. You didn’t hit him hard enough.”

  “That’s not my fault.”

  “Well, it’s not ours. We have to do something with this one before she wakes up.”

  “Take her to Agnessa’s rooms,” said Clair. “Unless there’s somewhere more secure . . . ?”

  “We have a cellblock,” Sandler said, showing his teeth. “You should’ve been in there from the beginning, if you ask me.”

  “Thankfully, no one is asking you,” said Devin. “But that’s not a bad idea in Sarge’s case. Come on. Let’s not stand out here freezing our butts off.”

  He took one of Sargent’s legs, and Nobody took the other. Perhaps out of a sense of obligation, the redhead took the PK’s right arm and waved for one of his thugs to help. Together they moved Sargent off the pier and onto solid ground. There, they were met by the same two burly men as before, and Nelly, her breath puffing in rapid clouds of steam.

  “Trouble,” she said, handing Devin and Clair an earpiece each. “Put these on so we can talk securely.”

  Clair squished the cold, clammy aug into her right ear, where it provoked a piercing but thankfully brief squeak from her ear-ring. “What’s happening?”

  “I was about to ask you the same question,” said Agnessa. “There’s a regular zombie apocalypse outside our walls.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You should see in person. Leave the PK with the boy. I guarantee they’ll both be safe. Bring the dupe with you. Nelly will take you where you need to be.”

  Clair glanced at Devin, who nodded nervously. “It’s all right. We coppertops will get on just fine.”

  Sandler Jones looked unhappy about the prospect, which Clair took as a sign that he would do as Agnessa told him.

  Nelly gestured impatiently for Clair to follow her. Clair hesitated, then did so, not seeing any alternative, even if it did mean being alone in the muster, far away from Jesse and heading into a crisis she knew nothing about. With Nobody at her side and Nelly’s breathing becoming more labored with every step, they hurried up the hill.

  She checked the PK patch. Still no multicolored dots at the muster’s gates, thanks to the absence of drones, and just two clumps of green dots converging from far away.

  Static burred in Clair’s ear.

  “Be cool,” whispered Devin’s voice. “I’m just reassuring you that we’re not out of touch. This ancient tech is easier to hack into than my tutor’s pattern bank. You’ll see a patch in a moment. Accept and we’ll able to communicate the usual ways. Be careful, though. It’s only as secure as WHOLE’s Wi-Fi.”

  Clair could barely hide her relief at hearing his familiar voice in her ear. This way, she would know if Agnessa betrayed her. She would also feel much less alone.

  Her relief didn’t last long, however. As they reached the common area and kept going, past the dorms, the sound of regular gunshots became audible, punctuating the stillness of the night in bursts of two or three.

  “In here,” said Nelly.

  She waved Clair and Nobody into a garage, where two utility vehicles with thick black wheels rested. Clair climbed into the passenger seat of the nearest while Nelly took the wheel. Nobody slipped in the back. The engine started with a click and a whirr.

  “Seat belts,” said Nelly.

  “What?”

  “Do this, like me.”

  Clair found a thin black strap by her left shoulder that clipped into a slot at her right hip. She was instantly glad of it when Nelly shot out of the garage with a loud roar.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Main gate.” The utility skidded down narrow lanes and across other common areas little different from the one she was familiar with. There were very few people out. The ones they saw were watchful and wary, stepping quickly out of the way as Nelly rushed by. Clair was thrown from side to side.

  A patch appeared in Clair’s lenses, in the shape of Devin’s face. She selected it and a limited number of the usual options appeared.

  “Uh, they’ve put me in the cell with Sargent,” said Devin over a chat. “They say it’s so I can look after her. Shall I run with it?”

  Instead of speaking aloud in return, she bumped back.

  “Have they hurt you?”

  “No. They’re pretty insistent, though. I’ll resist if you want me to, but I don’t think it’ll achieve much. You might think it necessary to dent my self-esteem a little, but I’d rather not give them an excuse to break anything more valuable than that.”

  “No, don’t fight them,” Clair sent back. “Sorry you drew the short straw.”

  “That depends on where you’re going, doesn’t it? Keep your fingers crossed the big lug here doesn’t wake up anytime soon. She’s bound to be both sore and ticked off.”

  Clair turned to Nelly.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “To the main gate.”

  “Why? Are you kicking me out?”

  “No
.” The big woman glanced at her, then back at the narrow ways ahead of them. “Don’t try your luck, though. Coming back wasn’t part of the plan you sold us.”

  “I know, and I’m sorry. It’s my fault. Any fallout’s on my head.”

  “Mighty big of you,” Nelly said. “Doesn’t help us if we’re all dead.”

  They skidded to a halt on a major road leading to a tangle of barbed wire atop a high stone wall stretching left and right to the limits of Clair’s vision. There was a guard post looming over the gate. Two giant trucks were parked in front of it.

  “Out.” Nelly walked her and Nobody around the trucks, to the ladder leading up to the guard post. “After you.”

  The gun cracked twice above her, startlingly loud. Clair hesitated on the first rung, then climbed as fast as she could. Whatever awaited her, there was no point in delaying.

  At the top she found two members of WHOLE. One, a man in his fifties with close-cropped silver hair, held a pair of binoculars that he swept back and forth across the darkened streets. The other, a woman not much older than Clair, trained an automatic weapon on the far side of the fence. Clair’s eyes tracked down to see what she was aiming at.

  “Hollow men,” said Nobody.

  There was a crowd of people milling in a circle outside the gates. Zombies, Clair thought, as Agnessa had said, because that was exactly what they looked like. They were all sizes and all shapes, and all silent, staring forward as though waiting for a signal.

  A floodlight clicked on, splashing the scene with white. Clair inhaled sharply. The area in front of the gate was covered in bodies. The faces she saw, on the bodies and in the milling crowd, were all familiar ones, belonging to Libby and Zep . . . members of WHOLE such as Cashile and Theo . . . people like Tash, Ronnie, and Oz, who had nothing to do with any of this . . . the potato-headed man from Ons Island . . .

  Most shocking were dupes of her mother and—

  “Jesse!”

  Her heart seemed to stop in her chest. He had been caught already! Had the dupes brought him here as a hostage to ensure she did what they wanted?

  He looked up at her but said nothing in return, and she realized then that she wasn’t looking at Jesse at all, just his body. There was no gun to his head, no expression of fear on his face. And his clothes were wrong. She remembered that T-shirt. . . . He had been wearing it in Wallace’s office, when everything had gone wrong.

  She understood then. His pattern had been recorded in Wallace’s private network and was available for duping too. They had dusted it off now for a final showdown. But how had they known she was there?

  Forest, she thought. It had to be.

  The dupes shielded their eyes when the light clicked on them. They were looking up at her but not saying anything, just waiting expectantly for her to do something. More were coming, winding between the empty, rotting buildings. Her eyes tracked them, estimating their size in groups of ten. She quickly reached two hundred.

  “PKs are on their way,” Agnessa whispered through the aug in her ear.

  Clair knew. Green dots were converging quickly on her location.

  “That’s good, isn’t it?” She hoped it had nothing to do with Sargent’s disappearance.

  “Depends on where you’re sitting. That wall isn’t going to hold back a substantial push from one army, let alone two. And as for a full-on fight between the two groups, we’re bound to sustain some collateral damage.”

  “Why am I here?”

  “They’re still asking for you.”

  Please don’t make me go out there, she thought with a flash of terror.

  “Talk to them,” Agnessa said. “Find out what they want. Send them home, if you can.”

  “And if I can’t?”

  We offer amnesty in exchange for the girl, Clair Hill.

  “We’ll pull you back in and see what happens.”

  Relieved that Agnessa wasn’t going to hand her over in the hope of getting the dupes off her back, Clair bellied up to the railing next to the sniper and leaned out so she was sure they could all see her. None of them seemed to be armed, which only made the slaughter at the gate more horrible. That deliberate defenselessness was a kind of weapon, she supposed, attacking people’s social mores rather than the people themselves, in the hope that they’d cave. Luckily, Agnessa was made of stern stuff. The dupes weren’t going to walk past her just because they pretended to be harmless.

  “What do you want?” Clair called down. “Why do you want to talk to me?”

  The dupe in Jesse’s body stepped forward.

  “There might not be any point anymore,” he said. “What’s he doing here?”

  Not all the dupes were staring at her, she realized then. Some of them were staring at Nobody, as though they could see right through the face to the person that lay beneath. Maybe they could, Clair thought. Who knew what new skills the dupes had learned to tell one another apart?

  From the body of Maria Gaudio, he said, “Nothing has changed. I still want the same thing.”

  “That makes you our enemy.”

  “I know.”

  “Let me make it absolutely clear that I haven’t taken sides,” Clair said, which was true. “I want all of you gone.”

  “You shouldn’t be anywhere near him,” dupe-Jesse said. “He’s dangerous.”

  “And you aren’t?”

  “Only to those who stand in our way.”

  “What about—?”

  She stopped herself in time. What about the innocent people you’ve been slaughtering just to scare the survivors into giving up their rights? Accusing the dupes of working for the lawmakers would be dangerous. If the lawmakers knew what she had figured out, their reaction would be swift and deadly. She had to wait until the source of the dupes was destroyed before she could go public.

  “What about WHOLE?” she asked instead. “They’re just sitting here, doing no one any harm.”

  “They’re dangerous in their own fashion. They belong to the past, not the future. The future is ours.”

  It was so weird to see Jesse’s mouth move and hear dupe-Jesse’s words, the opposite of anything the real Jesse would actually say.

  She hid her dismay and responded, “The future belongs to everyone.” That was the closest she dared go. “People, I mean. WHOLE are people. You’re not.”

  “Harsh,” said a dupe-Tash nearby. “Are you trying to hurt our feelings?”

  “More than your feelings are going to be hurt if you stick around here,” Agnessa said, her voice booming loudly over a public address system Clair couldn’t see.

  Headlights flashed in the streets behind the growing crowd of dupes. Clair could hear engines growling, coming closer. The cavalry, she hoped, summoned by PK Drader. She imagined him riding at the head with a gun as big as a cannon, cocked and ready on his hip—he would enjoy that, no doubt. It wasn’t an entirely unwelcome thought.

  “I know you believe that right makes might, Clair,” said a dupe of Clair’s mother. Clair hated that it was speaking in a parody of one of her mother’s favorite quotes. “Do your duty as you understand it and we’ll do ours.”

  “Just remember,” said dupe-Jesse. “Nobody’s dangerous. Don’t trust him.”

  The dupes turned to face the oncoming vehicles, squat things with many wheels and turrets that Clair hoped were water cannons protruding from the top.

  “Come back down,” said Nelly. “You’re too exposed up here, and I have a feeling it’s going to get nasty quite soon.”

  Clair let herself be led down, followed by Nobody. The lookout and the young sniper stayed behind. Neither had said a word through the entire exchange, to Clair or to anyone. Only as Clair descended the ladder did she detect a resemblance between them, in the precise line of their noses. Father and daughter, out shooting dupes together on a dark fall night. Was this the future she had to look forward to if Jesse didn’t destroy that satellite soon?

  [63]

  * * *

  NELLY DROVE THE
utility with wild haste through New Petersburg to the cellblock where Sargent and Devin had been imprisoned. Along the way something flickered in Clair’s inactive infield—another patch, this time in the steel gray of RADICAL. She accepted it and a window opened, showing her the view through Jesse’s lenses. The interior of an empty freighter booth, much like the other one but slightly smaller. In her ears, his breathing.

  “Hello?” she said. “Can you hear me?”

  “Oh, it’s working.” He sounded fantastically close, practically inside her head. “It wasn’t a minute ago. You must be in range of Devin now.”

  “What’s happening at your end?”

  “Trevin’s here.” Trevin appeared in Jesse’s field of view, waving nonchalantly as he went by—the gesture faintly forced, as though a cover for nervousness. “We’re going in a moment. Just wanted to check in first. Is everything okay there?”

  “Tense,” she said, not wanting to lie, except by omission. “I’ll let you know if anything too sketchy goes down.”

  “Thanks. Not that I can do anything about it if it does.” She couldn’t see him, which irked her. She could only access Jesse’s lenses, not Trevin’s. “We’re getting outfitted and checking our air supplies and stuff. Space suits, Clair. I’m trying to put on a space suit. Can you believe this is happening?”

  “I’m glad for you,” she said, holding on tightly to that thought—and to the door handle as the utility skidded around a corner in a shower of mud and gravel. She had forgotten to put on her seat belt. “Just do what you have to do, and do it quickly, all right?”

  “Roger,” he said. He held a clear plastic helmet up to his face, preparing to put it on. There, at last, reflected in the translucent bubble, was a glimpse of him, albeit a dark and distorted one. “Is Nobody behaving?”

  She glanced behind her. The figure on the backseat was staring at her, unmoving.

  “Talking about me?” Nobody said through his stolen body.

  Clair faced forward again.

  “He’s creeping me out,” she bumped back to Jesse. “But that’s all.”