Hollowgirl (9 page)

EVERYTHING WAS QUIET
in the caves apart from a low murmur of conversation from the members of WHOLE that Clair couldn't overhear. She found a blanket and a spot that wasn't too cold or damp, and made herself as comfortable as she could on the cold stone with her parka zipped up tight. From behind her, under a ceiling covered with twisting rock straws, came a steady drip of water, like the ticking of a crystalline clock. She concentrated on that rather than on Clair One, Q, and Wallace—or her
mother, or Billie, or any living person who might or might not be in the Yard and need saving right now.
Don't think about the exit,
she told herself,
or reconnecting with the outside, or rebuilding everything that is currently only numbers.
She would deal with that later, when she had gotten some sleep. Out of the ashes, she swore, a phoenix would be born. But the fear remained:
unless Wallace finds me first . . .

When she slept, she dreamed of rising oceans and clouds of ash. Lightning struck all around the horizon, creating a flickering electric cage. She was afraid of the light. It was alive somehow, and yet the sound it made was a hissing crackling noise utterly unlike anything natural. If it touched her, she knew, she would become like it and never be able to turn back. The thought terrified her so much she couldn't breathe.

A rough hand shook her awake.

“Clair.”

She blinked and sat up, flinging the blanket from her. Dylan Linwood was bending over her.
Dupes.
She needed to run.

Only it was Dylan Linwood for real, this time, not Nobody.

“What? What is it?”

“Your pet peeker wants to talk to you.”

“Wallace hasn't found us?”

“No.”

Clair wiped sleep from her eyes. It was hard getting her thoughts in a line, perhaps because she had been asleep less than an hour.
Peeker. PK. Kari.
“What does she want to talk about?”

“She didn't say.”

Maybe she had found the exit, or Wallace, or both. Dylan held out a hand and Clair let herself be pulled up. His palms were callused from a long life of making everything he needed, instead of using a fabber like an ordinary person. That could be her one day, she thought, depending on what kind of Abstainer she would be. She hadn't considered the finer details of her pledge. Maybe just giving up d-mat would be enough. . . .

Jesse was standing behind his father. His hand was much softer than Dylan's. He took her along the ramp that led to the cave entrance. Immediately outside, waiting silently in the night air, they found Aunt Arabelle in her wheelchair, reading an old novel called
Decompression
. Ronnie had made Clair read it once; it was about a man trapped deep underground by a d-mat outage, which seemed almost too appropriate.

The old woman looked up as they emerged, then indicated the hall's rear entrance with a tilt of her head.

“I don't think I need remind you,” she said, “that just one electronic peep could bring the hounds of hell howling down on us in an instant.”

Clair had seen it happen too often to forget. On one of
those occasions a dupe in Arabelle's body had been
walking
, thanks to Improvement.

“I'm glad you're okay,” she told the old woman.

“This?” Arabelle looked around. “This isn't
okay
. But I'll take it if it allows us to do what needs to be done.”

Clair nodded awkwardly, feeling that her gesture of goodwill had been rebuffed, and left Arabelle to the book.

It was night, but still seemed bright to Clair's cave-adjusted eyes. The scent of living trees was very strong. Somewhere in the undergrowth, an animal called plaintively, persistently.

Kari was sitting in the shade on a low stone wall, staring into the distance with tired eyes. Her lenses showed complex geometric shapes coming and going in rapid succession, indecipherable from the outside. Clair didn't realize that Kari had noted their presence until her lenses abruptly cleared and she looked up at them, blinking to focus on the real world.

“What are you doing up here?” Clair asked her.

“I'm watching Billie,” Kari said. The silver spot where PK Drader's bullet had struck her gleamed in the moonlight.

“We're supposed to be keeping a low profile,” said Jesse, tapping the corner of one eye.

“PK protocols,” Kari explained, “plus a little help from Q's mask. Ordinarily I would never abuse my power to access
information I'm not supposed to have, but I figure since I'm the only honest PK in here, I can give myself permission.”

“Is Billie all right?” Clair asked, seeing through her chatter.

Kari nodded. “Safe as long as I don't try to talk to her. Turns out I do care about her staying alive, after all.”

Clair sat down next to her and took her hand.

“It's okay,” Kari said. “Wallace has found other cards to play.”

A video feed appeared in Clair's infield. She winked on it. The face of a familiar woman appeared—middle-aged, stern-jawed, big-haired, with a British accent: Lawmaker Kingdon.

“Serious catastrophes demand severe sacrifices.” LM Kingdon wasn't wasting words on a soft opening. “While lawmakers and peacekeepers struggle to determine the nature of this situation, we have made the extraordinary decision to suspend the Consensus Court—temporarily, but necessarily—until the cause and those culpable can be found. Every resource available to us—every drone, every algorithm, every able volunteer—will be required to mete out justice. We beg your patience during these trying times, and your forgiveness. We all bear the brunt of this unforeseeable calamity with dignity, dedication, and determination. The rot
will
be rooted out. The lost
will
be avenged. A new day
will
dawn.”

“And she'll be in charge of the sun,” said Clair, groaning
under the weight of a burden she hadn't yet shrugged off. Either inside the Yard or out, Kingdon was determined to be on top, and to stamp down anyone who would resist her along the way. “What's she talking about? Behind the flag-waving, I mean. What's she actually going to do about us?”

“She's called a census,” said Kari. “Everyone is required to go through d-mat within the next twenty-four hours in order to create a global roster of survivors. They'll weed out any suspects along the way. Anyone refusing will be arrested.”

“So we keep our heads down,” said Clair. “How does that change anything?”

“Drone production is up ten
thousand
percent. They're searching the areas around Harmony under the assumption that you can't have gone far from where you were last seen.”

That was a good assumption. The Mystery Caves were only twenty-odd miles from the town.

“Okay, this is bad,” Jesse said. “We have to move.”

Clair agreed, but she wasn't ready to run just yet. Not until she knew where she was going.

“Have you heard from Q?” Clair asked.

“Yes. She wants to talk to you.”

“Well, that's a change.”

Kari looked down at Clair's upturned face.

“Q isn't avoiding you deliberately,” she said. “The
glitches interfere with her, just like we thought.”

“Sure, but . . .” Clair was embarrassed to be talking about this with Jesse listening. “Look, I spent so long thinking about her and wanting to find her, but she was there the whole time . . . in you . . . and although I get why she went away again . . .”

Kari put an arm around her.

“Q is massively important,” she said, “to you and me. To everyone. When she was inside me, in a strange way I was inside her, too, which gives me some insight into what she felt like then. But that's nothing compared to what she's like now. She's a goldfish, you know—growing as large as the container that holds her? The Q I knew was a me-sized version of her. In here I barely know her at all.”

“But she still talks to you.”

“Not as often as you probably think,” Kari said. “She's the same with me as she is with you, like you have to drag her away from something much more important just to answer a simple question.”

“I still can't believe Q was you,” said Jesse. “Isn't that as bad as being duped?”

“No, because Q promised me she was going to give me back.” Kari smiled at him. “I believed her.”

“How do you know she didn't make you believe her?”

“She promised me that, too . . . and I guess I just wanted it to be true.”

“If wishes were fishes, my dad says,” said Jesse, “we'd
be up to our ears in goldfish.”

“Yes, but make enough wishes and one of them is bound to come true eventually.”

SHE WANTS TO
talk to you,
Kari had said. There was only one way to test that theory.

“I'm right here,” Clair bumped Q while Jesse and Kari talked about the politics of duping.

A chat patch instantly appeared. Clair winked on it.

“I tried bumping you, but you didn't answer,” Q said. She sounded far away and distracted, but it was her.

“Earlier? I was underground, not to mention asleep.”

“So Kari told me. I forgot all about sleep.”

“Didn't you do that when you were inside her?”

“Reluctantly.”

Kari and Jesse's discussion was a distraction. Clair moved farther along the wall.

“Where did you go, Q? Where were you when we needed you?”

“I didn't go anywhere, Clair. I was busy.”

“Doing what?”

“There's no easy way to explain it.”

“Please try.”

Clair worried that she was pushing too hard, but Q didn't sound annoyed.

“I mentioned earlier that breaking parity in here might be causing the glitches. That was indeed the case. Outside, breaking parity crashed the d-mat network. In here, where all matter is information, the d-mat network is a fundamental part of the Yard, and the problem got worse very quickly. I took some steps . . . drastic steps. Only time will tell if what I did will work permanently.”

The glitches were markedly less intrusive, although Clair still felt as though the shadows were watching her sometimes.

“Well, that's good. Thank you. You said something about Qualia earlier. How does she fit into this?”

“She doesn't. Not anymore.”

Clair waited for an explanation, but that was apparently all she was going to get.
Probably for the best,
she thought; it was unlikely she would have understood anyway.

“I overheard your conversation with Sarge,” Q said, using PK Sargent's nickname, and suddenly she sounded like her old self again, chatty and open, not the new, distant Q. “I'm sad you feel like you don't know me anymore, because I feel the exact opposite. Isn't that what friendship is? It's not just helping each other, or testing each other, but understanding each other better and better as time goes on. Isn't it?”

“There's a quote like that,” said Clair, warily calling on the earliest thing they had shared, a love of words.

“Yes, from Seneca: ‘One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood.' I find it interesting, the way he phrased it. Why not the other way around?”

“I guess understanding someone doesn't always mean you'll be friends,” Clair said. “Sometimes you can know too much about someone.”

“Was that the case with your birth parents?”

The question took her by surprise. Q's tone had shifted again, back to direct questions and unsentimental inflection. “What do you know about them?”

“Only that they separated before you were born. I've yet to determine why.”

Clair knew very little about her birth father. He was an engineer, her mother had told her once, who worked in space. For all they knew, he could have died years ago.

“You've looked into my family's history?”

“Of course. Did you know your mother's mother was an Abstainer?”

“Seriously? Mom never mentioned that.”

“Why not?”

“I don't know. It doesn't matter, I guess.” She rubbed one hand along the cool, rough stone next to her thigh. “Who cares about what some old lady I never met did, or my real
father? Oz is my dad. Even if he and mom split up over something stupid, he'll always be that to me.”

Cheerful Q returned. “And you'll always be my first friend, Clair. No matter what happens.”

Clair wished Q had a face. It was so hard to read what she might mean beyond the words.

No matter what happens
sounded almost ominous.

“I'm glad,” Clair said. “Just don't ever call me Clair Two.”

“I will never do that,” Q replied. “Although both of you
are
Clair Hill, which raises serious philosophical questions. Does the fact that I've known
you
longer mean that you and I are better friends? Does the fact that
she
is more akin to the Clair I first knew mean that I should feel closer to her?”

“Ah, I get it,” Clair said, understanding how it felt to have divided loyalties. “You're
my
friend, remember? Clair One has no idea who you are. She didn't meet you until a few hours ago.”

“I hadn't thought of it that way. Experience must be shared, so people can change in tandem.”

Just like Jesse and I did,
Clair thought, with another knock to the heart.

She told herself to concentrate on what she had, not what she had lost.

Q wasn't a human being. She had all of human knowledge in her mind, but the understanding of an entirely new being, one who had none of the usual assumptions
that Clair herself had been raised to have. One who was still learning.

Clair said, “You'll always be my first friend who's . . . who's something entirely new. We need a word for what you are, don't we?”

“I have come up with several, but none of them sound very good. I'm happy being just Q. The one and only.”

“That you are,” Clair said, wishing she also had better words to express her gratitude. “If we're ever going to beat Wallace and Kingdon, it's thanks to you.”

“And to you,” said Q. “They fear you because you should not be here. You are breaks in parity and you also know the truth about them. That makes you dangerous.”

Clair looked down at her hands. They were scuffed and scratched and looking very different from Clair One's, who was still wearing the nail polish she had put on the day of the crashlander ball.

It was all very well to know that she, Clair Two, had been brave once. The thought of doing it twice . . . It was almost too much. But what choice did she have? If she had to run, she had to run. One day soon, she swore, it would be time to turn and fight.

“I will be here to help,” Q told her, her new, distant tone returning somewhat jarringly midsentence, “barring any further unforeseen circumstances.”

There were too many qualifications to that statement for
Clair to take much reassurance from it.

Q ended the chat and Clair turned her attention to Jesse and Kari Sargent, taking in everything she had just learned.

“Is everything okay?” he asked. “You look . . . frowny.”

Clair rubbed the bridge of her nose. The saving-the-world part of her plan was proving elusive. “You're right: we're going to have to move somewhere more secure,” she said. “Do you want to tell your father or should I?”

Jesse made a face. “He's already pissed off at me for bringing you here. So I vote you, but I'll come with you for moral support.”

He pulled her to her feet, and there was something more than just muscle memory in the way his fingers gripped hers.
Alive. Really real.

“I'm going to sit this one out,” said Kari. “Plenty more spying to do out here.”

Clair wished she could join in. After talking to Q about her mother, nothing would have made her happier than seeing with her own eyes that she and Oz were okay.

“If only Kari could see out of the Yard,” Jesse said as they headed back to the cave entrance. “I'd give anything to know what it's like outside.”

“You don't want to know,” Clair said.
What we accidentally did.

He stared at her for a long time, as though seeing right into her, then said, “Right.”