Twinmaker

stepped inside without acknowledging her. Woodward and Main was one of several hub stations servicing not just the Manteca New Campus High School but downtown tourism as well. Sacramento Bay was busy with amateur sailors day-tripping north to Yuba City or east to Rio Vista and the Joice Islands. The fishing was good, and so were the mangroves.

Clair hugged the strap of her backpack and pressed through the crowd. The station was even more congested than usual. Two UFO-like eye-in-the-sky (EITS) drones buzzed softly over the discontented crowd.

D-mat jumps took about two minutes, give or take thirty seconds, and this one had taken her just over two. Something other than unreasonable lag time was responsible for the disturbance, then. A blue peacekeeper’s helmet stood out above a small knot of people three booths along. Clair rubbernecked to see what was going on but couldn’t make out anything untoward, and couldn’t justify standing where she was for long. People were pressing forward into the booths, anxious to be on their way, as she was.

School was crowded. A multilingual sea of kids navigated channels that curved organically between buildings four, five, and six stories high. Juniors, like Clair and Libby, were on the other side of the campus, near the gym. Clair leaned toward the practical arts—writing, music composition, and editing—with a smattering of history and soft sciences that most of her friends found boring. She didn’t know what she would do with the combination, but she figured she had time to decide. It wasn’t like money was an issue as it had been in her grandfather’s day, when fabbers hadn’t existed to make anything anyone wanted, and people had had to have jobs just to eat.

“You kids are getting smarter, younger every year,” he liked to complain, “but you never actually do anything with those smarts of yours.”

“That’s not true,” Clair’s mother had responded the last time. “What about that kid who solved the Riemann hypothesis a month ago?”

“There you go, Clair,” he had grumbled. “Why can’t you be more like him?”

“Her, Grandpa,” Clair had corrected him. “Anyway, I don’t like math.”

“Finding the right vocation is like finding the right spouse,” Allison had said with a smile. “Better to have none than the wrong one.”

Like friends, Clair thought now. And boyfriends.

Libby wasn’t at the classroom when Clair arrived, didn’t turn up with everyone else, and remained silent as they took their seats and the teacher started talking about survivor narratives of the Water Wars. When Clair checked Libby’s public profile, it listed her location as school, but that was likely to be a fake for her parents’ sake, the same as it was when she went out partying.

“She sent me something last night.” Ronnie bumped Clair. “It was weird. Hang on—I’ll show you.”

A forwarded message appeared in Clair’s infield, which had changed to greens and grays to match the New Manteca campus. Bumps kept coming in about the crashlander ball. Another time she might have been pleased by her newfound notoriety, but not today.

Clair fixed on the message from Ronnie and blinked her left eyelid.

“It worked” was all Libby had said, about two hours after the party. “Now I’m beautiful!”

“I think she was talking about Improvement,” Ronnie said. “Check her transit data.”

Like Ronnie and Tash, Clair had close-friend privileges to Libby’s profile, which told her where Libby went and who with. Useful when Libby was running late, now it told Clair exactly where she had been the day before. There was a string of seventeen rapid jumps in the evening, when Clair and Libby had been looking for the crashlander ball, but there was also a long series of Lucky Jumps in the afternoon and another after Libby had said good night. Clair quickly tallied them up. Ninety jumps in one day. At two minutes a jump, that totaled around three hours’ lag.

Tash whistled. “No wonder she had a migraine!”

“What did she mean about being beautiful?” Clair asked Ronnie. “It can’t have worked, right?”

“Impossible,” said Ronnie. “That’s why she bumped me, I think.”

“She wants you to believe because she really wants to believe . . . ?”

“Maybe she convinced herself the birthmark was actually fading,” said Tash. “She must have been ultralagged.”

“So then she crashes,” said Clair. “And what does she wake up to . . . ?”

“Bumps about you and Zep,” said Ronnie with characteristic bluntness.

“And of course the birthmark’s still there, which makes her embarrassed as well as angry.”

Clair was satisfied that they had her best friend’s mood mapped out but decidedly unsatisfied by what that left her with. She was unable to do anything until Libby responded, and she found it impossible to concentrate as a result. Her right foot hooked around her left ankle and jiggled restlessly. Not turning up for school wasn’t especially unusual; everyone skipped now and again, even Clair. But not like this, without an explanation, a single word . . . that wasn’t Libby’s style. She was a broadcaster, not a brooder.

“Clair? Clair, are you paying attention?”

She blinked and refocused. The teacher was talking to her, and the entire class was staring.

“I’m sorry,” she said, gathering up her backpack and avoiding the eyes of her friends. “I’m not feeling well.”

That was a lie, but staying would be a waste of time. There was no faking out a live teacher. That was the whole point of school, Clair’s mom said. Anyone could cheat by copying answers from the Air; school was for learning how to cheat people.

6

Outside, Clair felt crushed by the silence. Ronnie and Tash sent bumps after her to see if she was okay. Had she heard something? Clair said she hadn’t and that she’d be coming back to class soon. What else could she do? She wasn’t sure that going anywhere would do any good. She just needed to think.

A chat request appeared in her infield.

Libby.

Before Clair could wink on it, the patch disappeared.

She thought, just for a second, about letting it go. Libby wasn’t normally so hesitant. If she really wanted to talk to Clair, she’d call back when she was sure of it.

But that didn’t fix anything now, Clair told herself. If best friends couldn’t talk through their issues, who could?

She responded with a request of her own, and it sat there for thirty seconds before anything happened. Then a window opened onto Libby’s bedroom. The shades were down, so if it was sunny outside in Sweden- somewhere, Clair couldn’t tell. Inside, the room was dark and grainy. Libby was a pale shape curled half beneath the covers. She was lying on her side with her head under a pillow.

“Why can’t I see you?” Libby said in a gravelly voice.

“I’m walking outside at school. Why aren’t you here?”

“Slept in. Mad headache.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you answer my bumps?”

“Turned everything off. It was all too much.”

“What was?”

“Spam . . . strange messages . . .”

“What kind of messages? About the ball?”

“Just strange . . . Improvement stuff. I deleted everything.”

“Oh,” said Clair, feeling as though she’d dodged a bullet. If Libby had emptied her infield and switched off her feed, that meant she couldn’t possibly have seen the news. But she would eventually. “Listen—”

“Can’t talk long. Got to sleep some more.” Libby rolled over, pushing the pillow to one side. “Don’t want to waste this golden opportunity, before Mom gets home.”

“I need to talk to you when you’re feeling better.”

“I am feeling better,” Libby said with a sigh. “Slightly. Talk about what?”

“It’s just . . . the party. It didn’t end well. There was some confusion . . .”