Hollowgirl (24 page)

Clair Three

OPENING THE CONNECTION
took closer to thirty minutes, nowhere near long enough for Clair to accept that it was real.

Devin's plan to contact her other self had actually worked.

The signal was sporadic and suffered greatly from interference. Wallace was fighting them, she assumed, although Devin thought it might be a sync issue. Time did move oddly inside the Yard, it turned out: sometimes faster, sometimes slower, always unpredictably. Eve Bartelme thought the problem with the signal was something
else entirely. She muttered dire warnings about an “entity” at work, which was what RADICAL called AIs like Q. Given that the only one they knew about
was
Q and she was helping them, Eve's warnings were ignored as paranoid.

Occasionally a blocky, low-res image got through, revealing a gathering of around fifteen people in a low-ceilinged, bunker-like space that Q told her was an underground prison. Clair recognized nearly all the faces. It was her own that looked like a stranger's.

Clair—Clair
Two
, she had been told to call her—was seated front and center. There was a blue-and-green checked beanie on her head. Clair was wearing a beanie too, to keep out the cold; hair kept straying past her ears to tickle the side of her face. There were no hairs straying onto Clair Two's face, and her right shoulder and arm were bound tightly. No one had said anything about a Clair One, but it was easy to suspect the worst, judging by how everyone looked. They had made progress, but it had come at a cost.

She understood that feeling well. Her heart had initially leaped to know that Jesse was alive. Then her heart had broken on seeing the way Clair Two looked at him, with a longing that matched her own.

Hope for the best, plan for the worst.

After days of dashed hopes, she was getting pretty good at the planning part.
All part of being Clair 7.0,
she told
herself. The survivor, attempting to make amends. Alone.

“Who's the new guy, the one in red?” she asked during one of the downtimes. She was standing next to real-world Q in Kari Sargent's body—who the other Q had suggested they call “Q-prime”—on the bridge of the
Satoshige
, a snow-dappled forest unfolding slowly beneath them. Embeth had reduced both altitude and speed to avoid a storm brewing ahead. Lightning flashed regularly, but Devin said it was likely to blow itself out soon, and with luck and its wind at their backs they would easily make up the time they had lost.

“Evan Bartelme of RADICAL.” Kari Sargent's lenses flickered as she scrolled through data the two Qs had squeezed out of the connection. “A relation, I assume.”

“He's Mom,” said Devin Bartelme from the South Pole.

“Say what?” asked Sandler.

“A very old version of mom.”

“Shhh,” said Clair, “they're back online again.”

“We're looking at images Zep brought back with him from the exit chamber,” said Dylan Linwood, his voice crackly with static.

More grainy pictures appeared in Clair's infield, of a massive space with curving glass windows. The size was all wrong, but something about the perspective rang a bell.

“It's Wallace's office,” she realized. “Bigger than it should be, but that's definitely the place.”

Zep nodded. Clair was so glad to see him, along with all her friends. That they were alive was like the sun breaking through the gray clouds, however briefly. “Everything about the building is twisted, like it's been magnified.”

“They're hacking the Yard on a grand scale in there,” said Ronnie. “It makes sense there'd be side effects.”

“Could we do the same thing down here?” asked Jesse. “There aren't many of us, but if we could magnify things somehow in our favor . . .”

“The exit is the cause,” said the Q inside the Yard. She sounded almost perfunctory, as though dealing with more important things elsewhere. “Without an exit you will not achieve the same effect.”

“Still, there must be something you can do along those lines,” said Clair. “You're already ripping around the Yard. Who knows what else you can do if you put your minds to it?”

“We'll get a team on that,” said Dylan. It was disconcerting, seeing him without his red eye and lacking the malign intelligence of Nobody speaking through his mouth. “If the exit is in Wallace's office, what else does that tell us?”

Clair thought about the location of the doorway with respect to the office's layout. Better to concentrate on that, she told herself, than what this awkward reunion meant for her.
Save the world, and ignore the rest.

“I think that door originally led to another small room,”
she said. “There's not much in there.”

“Just a toilet,” said Jesse, “and a coffeemaker . . .”

“And a fabber,” said Clair Two from inside the Yard. “A mirror.”

Memories, Clair thought, that the three of them shared.

“It was where I made the chip that got me into the space station,” said Q-prime. “The pattern of that chip is what my other self is using to make this connection.”

The other Q didn't deign to comment.

“So why don't we use it to come out there?” asked Zep.

“We have booths,” said Devin, “but we're up against the power problem again. Also, that chip or whatever is barely capable of carrying this conversation, let alone an entire person. “

“We might need to physically access the servers,” said Q-prime, “to open the connection wider. That's why we're on the
Satoshige
.”

“Presumably Wallace will have some way to open the exit,” said Ronnie. “He's the one who's blocking it.”

“There's no chance we can talk him around?” asked Clair. “I mean, I don't really care what he does in there as long as he lets everyone else out.”

“He won't do that,” said Clair Two. “If we're out there while he's in here, there's nothing to stop us from shutting down the Yard.”

“We could do that anyway,” said Sandler. “Then see how he feels.”

“He doesn't respond well to threats,” said Libby. “You guys know that, right?”

That was very true. Clair had only to look out the window at the ash-strewn Siberian landscape to appreciate how dangerous Wallace was when cornered. If he learned she was already on her way to Lake Baikal, who knew what he might do to the innocent people inside the Yard—such as her parents—to make her stop?

“Start bringing in people he might use as hostages,” she said. “That's what I'd do. Just to be safe.”

“Agreed,” said Clair Two. Then she hesitated, as though choosing her words carefully. “You should know that we've captured Cameron Lee.”

Clair felt a rush of heat sweep through her, but not good heat, which she could have used. The bridge of the
Satoshige
was perpetually drafty and the air outside bitterly cold. This heat was like a sickness.

“What are you going to do with him?” she asked, and if she could hear the strain in her own voice, then so could Clair Two.

“He's with the other hollowmen we've captured,” said Dylan, “in the one booth we left intact. There's a dead man's switch. If any one of them so much as looks at us wrong, they'll all be erased.”

Too good for him,
Clair wanted to say, but instead she just nodded.

“And Mallory's dead,” said Libby.

The heat ebbed somewhat at that. Mallory was as much a victim of Wallace as anyone else. Libby had survived her. That was revenge enough.

“Anything else I need to know?” she asked.

There was a short, tense silence that told her all she needed to know about the missing Clair One.

“Doesn't matter,” she said. “When you're ready.”

“Let's move forward,” said Kari. Clair had to remind herself that it was the real Kari talking, not Q inside Kari's body. “Our goal is to break Wallace's hold on the Yard, and to do that we need to get into the exit chamber. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” said Evan Bartelme.

“Agreed,” said Dylan Linwood.

“Agreed,” said Clair Two. “But Wallace will know that. All he has to do is keep us out.”

“Exactly, so we'll have to go about it on more than one front,” Kari went on. “Here's what I suggest. RADICAL works on getting the channel ready on both ends, inside and outside the Yard. WHOLE, since they were the first to get a handle on ripping, can make new hacks that will get them into the VIA building in some way that can't be blocked. The rest of us will put together a conventional approach: attacking the front door, in other words. Wallace will definitely be expecting something obvious; it would be wise not to disappoint him, or he'll look elsewhere.”

“And you'll be our backup plan,” said Clair Two to Clair
outside. “What do you have out there, apart from a giant floating head?”

“According to old records,” said Q-prime, “there's diving and drilling equipment at the top of the borehole. Thanks to layers of snow and ice, it should have escaped the chain reaction. If we can't access the exit via the interface we'll find there, we'll go ahead with our plan to hack into the hardware itself.”

“It's bound to be booby-trapped,” said Kari.

“I know,” said Clair, feeling sympathy for the huddle of desperate people in the Yard, but what reassurances could she offer them when there were none for her? Except to say, “We won't make any mistakes. This is the time we get it right,” and hope it was true.

No one said anything in response to that, and eventually she realized that the picture was frozen. The sound was gone. The channel had closed again.

Clair sighed. It was exhausting, juggling the reality of her world and that of the Yard. Outside, she had nothing. Inside, Clair Two had everything. But outside was real and inside was an illusion. And Wallace remained.

Wallace, the master of the only door in and out of his kingdom. He would know that contact had been made, even if he couldn't decode their signal. He would recognize a challenge when he saw it.

“Do you think they've got a chance in hell?” Sandler asked.

Clair turned her attention from the icy view to the inside of the bridge. Everyone was watching her, waiting to see how she'd respond. It wouldn't help them to hear what she was thinking, she was sure.

Any victory without Jesse would be hollow, for her.

There were some things Clair 7.0 wasn't allowed to hope for.

“In hell?” she said. “No. But in the Yard, while I'm in there with them? Absolutely.”

Sandler rolled his eyes. “Just because there're two of you doesn't mean you need to be twice as cocky. Or twice as annoying.”

He went back to preparing patches in case they passed through another hailstorm. Clair chalked that up as a partial victory in the ongoing verbal battle between them. That was something.

Swaying slowly from side to side, the
Satoshige
plowed on through clouds piled high like mountains.

Clair Two

WHEN THE IMAGE
of Clair Three and the inside of the floating head froze for the umpteenth time, Clair almost sobbed with relief. The pain was coming and going in
waves, crashing higher and arriving a little quicker each time. But passing out in front of her other self was not an option. She would rather die . . . and felt like she just might.

“Back to the hospital with you,” said Kari. “No, don't try to stand up. We'll get you a stretcher. You remember what those are? Standard issue for sick people. Like wheelchairs. And hammers, for application to the head when patients don't do as they're told.”

Clair didn't protest. Kari was talking nonsense, which meant she was worried, and she only worried when things were serious.

“Don't knock me out,” Clair tried to say.

“What?” Kari leaned in close.

“Keep me awake. I promise not to get up again, but I need to know what's going on. I don't want . . .”

“To be left out, I understand.” Kari nodded. “I'll do what I can.”

That wasn't what Clair had been about to say.
I don't want to dream.
That was what she didn't want to do. She had enough nightmares and foreign memories in her head already without Clair One's added to the mix.

She could feel them now, crowding her. The whiteness of the exit chamber and the redness of her blood as it dripped to the ground. Wallace's unreliable charm, and Kingdon's calmly furious mien. The pain of being shot in the shoulder, so uncannily like her own. And then . . .

Clair didn't know why she was experiencing this now. Wasn't Clair One dead?

Maybe the memories, once part of a girl called Clair in the Yard, belonged to all Clairs in the Yard, whether they wanted them or not.

Clair One looking in the mirror and seeing Nobody's face reflecting back at her . . .

She didn't want that thought messing with her unconscious. She was Clair Hill, and at some point soon, she was sure, she would start to grieve.

“You take her legs,” said Kari. Zep did as he was told. The mixture of colored lights in the hub shifted around her. She felt herself lifted and laid out flat, the scratchy woolen beanie that had belonged to a random Yeti slipping off her head. The tides of pain became confused and found new rhythms. Around her the world moved while she stayed still. Colors changed. She blinked—

—and blinked again to find that time had passed, bringing her miraculously back to her bed in the makeshift hospital, as though she had ripped there through desperate force of will.

But no. When she checked her lenses she saw that only ten minutes had passed. There was something stuck to her neck that hadn't been there before: a patch delivering welcome numbness through her veins. The pain was manageable now, and yet her thoughts kept flowing. Kari was as good as her word.

“Okay now?” Kari asked her, leaning into view. The yellow light caught her short hair, making it look like straw.

“Yes, thank you.”

“Thirsty?”

“God, yes.”

Kari went away and came back with a cup and straw.

“Have you ever had your palm read,” she asked while Clair tentatively drank, “or seen a psychic? Did they say that you were going to lead the weirdest life ever?”

Clair smiled and shook her head.

“Me either,” said Kari. “But here we are. Grand, isn't it? Think of the stories we'll tell our kids. They'll never believe us.”

Clair's throat felt full again, but not from sadness. It amazed her that, despite the perils of the Yard and all the uncertainties of the world outside, Kari was thinking about the next generation. In its way, that was a more potent tonic than the painkillers, or even the water, pure and refreshing though it was.

She let go of the straw with her lips and Kari leaned back into her seat.

“Ray's gone to get your folks, and everyone else connected to us,” she said, “Billie among them. Jesse told me how Clair One got past me. I'm angry at myself, and at her, but I know no one's to blame, not really. I was stupidly tired and she didn't know better. We should have . . . Actually, I don't know what we could have done to stop
her. She was as stubborn as you are, funnily enough, and you don't like to believe that people are evil. Not even people like Mallory or Nobody. Hell, you probably still think Wallace can return from the dark side, don't you?”

Clair didn't know what to say. She knew what her mother had taught her, which was that people usually knew the difference between right and wrong, and they usually tried to do the right thing over the wrong thing, no matter who they were. But there were different kinds of rights and different kinds of wrongs, and when someone was trying to juggle lots of things at once, it was easy to get them mixed up. One of the reasons people tied themselves in such knots of indecision, Allison Hill said, was because what they knew and what they wanted to think were often different things.

That's why, Clair reminded herself, people needed lawmakers and peacekeepers working in open consensus to remind them of how they should behave. That's why people who thought they were above the law, like Wallace and Kingdon, could be so dangerous and had to be stopped. They wouldn't listen to the people trying to untie the knots, so they didn't see the nooses around their own necks until it was too late and the knots began to tighten.

“I think Wallace is worried,” said Clair. “That'll make him more dangerous than ever. We have to be careful he doesn't wipe everything and start over again.”

“If that was an option, wouldn't he have done it already?”

Clair didn't know the answer to that question. Maybe there were risks associated with turning the Yard off and on again, himself with it. Maybe he was irrationally afraid of that moment of nothingness between being and then being again, just as some people were afraid of using d-mat or falling asleep at night, for the same reasons. That it didn't feel like anything at all was maybe the most frightening thing of all.

Clair One was dead, and apart from the cessation of the glitches, she still felt nothing.

Someone stirred. Clair looked up, hoping it was Jesse, but it was a patient on one of the other impromptu hospital beds.

“You have other people to look after,” Clair said.

Kari nodded. “You'll tell me if you need anything?”

Clair promised. And she meant it. She wanted to get better fast. If there was going to be an attack on Wallace's fortress, she had to be part of it.