Twinmaker

Clair made her face a mask, feeling as though she’d been punched in the guts. He was supposed to call, she thought.

“Well, have fun,” she managed to get out, although it felt like hauling heavy rocks out of her chest.

“Oh, I will. And I’ll think of you while I’m doing it.”

“What?”

“You could use a little fun in your life, Clair. Maybe you should try it. See what happens. You might be pleasantly surprised.”

“Are we still talking about . . . ?”

“Improvement, of course. Look what it’s done for me. Instead of lying there being critical, why not do something to better yourself? What are you afraid of?”

“I’m not afraid,” Clair said.

“Yes, you are. You’re afraid of being beautiful like me. You think I did the wrong thing, and now you’re trying to steal what belongs to me.”

Libby’s pale face stared directly at Clair, just for an instant, in naked challenge.

“That’s not what I’m doing,” Clair said. “That’s not what I think. . . . It’s confusing. . . .”

“I bet it is,” said Libby. “Instead of trying to fix my life, why don’t you concentrate on the mess you call your own?”

The window closed while Clair floundered, lost for something to say. For a moment, there were no words at all, just a seething roar in her ears. She could only stare into space while she tried to decide what she felt most: anger, guilt, jealousy, or grief. Was this the end of her friendship with Libby?

She fell onto the bed and ground the heels of her hands into her eyes, willing herself not to cry. She wanted to call back right away and apologize—but what for, exactly? For having a connection with Zep that didn’t include Libby? For not believing in Improvement? For trying to help?

She wasn’t going to apologize, she promised herself. And it wasn’t about Zep or anything obviously superficial and in the moment. If it had really been about a single kiss, maybe Clair would have let Libby have her time in the crisis spotlight, safe in the knowledge that it would blow over soon enough. She could live with that for the sake of eventual peace. It was what Libby had said about being Clair’s project that stung the most. Like it wasn’t just as often the other way around—Libby trying to drag her off to things Clair wasn’t interested in, safe in the knowledge that Clair would either enjoy it or make things work out when they didn’t. That was why they worked as friends when they were so patently different from each other—and now Libby didn’t want it to be that way anymore. She wanted to break the central dynamic of their friendship, which was that it went both ways.

Clair could hear her own breathing echoing back to her from the confines of her room. It was fast, as though she had been running.

The story Clair had told Jesse earlier that day came back to her now. Food poisoning thanks to bad chicken had kept her out of school for a week. Her friends had sent her get-well messages through the Air, but that hadn’t been enough for Libby. She had brought around a pot of congee that she said was an old family recipe—fabbed a generation ago and perfect, Libby said, for settling a bad stomach. It had made Clair feel better, but not just because of the rice broth. Because Libby had known that Clair felt in need of more comfort than the Air could provide, and Libby had been there for her. She had felt, in that moment, that Libby would always be there, whenever Clair needed her.

It goes both ways, she thought again.

Libby might be acting hatefully toward her at the moment, but that didn’t mean they weren’t still friends. What if she was still looking out for Clair now? What if Libby, in her own way, genuinely thought she was giving Clair good advice?

13

CLAIR SAT UP and flicked her bedside lamp on. The light made her blink, but it echoed the sudden feeling in her mind that she was seeing the situation in an entirely new and important light.

Libby was one hundred percent certain that Improvement worked.

Dylan Linwood was one hundred and ten percent certain that anything to do with d-mat was evil and that Improvement was just one example of the system causing errors.

Both were asking Clair to believe them.

Who would Clair rather was right? Whom did she trust?

She didn’t even have to think about it. Not the madman who built bikes for a living and ate plants he grew in the dirt. Not the conspiracy nut who wished there was something seriously wrong with Libby so he could use her for evidence against the system he hated. Not the insecure father who put Clair down in order to look tall in front of his son.

There were two possibilities: Improvement was all in Libby’s mind, or the global network was broken.

Clair would rather discover that all of VIA’s safeguards were useless than that a man like Dylan Linwood was right.

It was the middle of the night in Maine, but that didn’t matter. It was day for half the world. Clair got out of bed, got dressed in yesterday’s clothes, and moved quietly through the apartment to the dining room, where she fabbed notepaper and a pen. Gone out, she wrote for her mother’s benefit. Will call. That way there was no chance of being talked out of it, should a bump wake Allison up.

On a second piece of paper she wrote, My nose is too big. Like, HUGE. Help! Then she added the code words and folded the piece of paper in four and slipped it under the elastic of her underwear, so it pressed against her hip.

She was going to make things right between her and Libby by proving Dylan Linwood wrong.

Clair left the apartment and headed up the hall. Clair had never had d-mat at home. She counted herself lucky that the apartment building she lived in had a booth on each level, opposite the fire stairs that led down to the sidewalks, which no one ever used. That meant she only had to worry about the weather at the other end of her journey.

For the immediate future, there would be no other end to worry about.

“Lucky Jump,” Clair told the booth as the door slid shut.

The lights flared. The air thinned.

sssssss-pop

Her face in the mirror was unchanged. Of course.

She didn’t wait for the door to open.

“Again.”

sssssss-pop

“Again.”

sssssss-pop

“Again . . . no, wait.”

The booth was still and silent around her. An infinite number of Clair Hills stood motionlessly, wondering if her haste was a little ill-considered.

There were in fact three possibilities she needed to think about. One, Improvement was Libby’s fantasy; two, Improvement was a global hack; or three, Improvement happened in a private network.

Everything everyone had told Clair constantly reinforced the certainty that Improvement, if it worked, couldn’t operate in the public domain. VIA’s network was absolutely secure. She could jump the normal way a million times without changing the polish on her toenails one iota.

So for Improvement to work, it had to be as Clair’s mother had said: it had to be by the third option. That meant the note would have to operate as a signal to someone watching, someone who would reroute her from the public network to another place entirely—kidnapping her, in effect, if only temporarily, before returning her to the