“So who’s in charge of d-mat right now? Anyone?”
The peacekeepers had no good answer to that.
A bump appeared in her infield. It was from Q.
Clair let Jesse and the PKs argue while she took the message.
“I understand now” was all Q said.
“Q! Thank God,” she said. “I was worried about you.”
“You broke your promise.”
“Promise? What promise?”
Then Clair remembered.
“Q, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have lied to you, but I had no other choice. I knew you’d try to stop me. You do understand, don’t you?”
“I do,” said Q.
A peacekeeper spoke up unexpectedly.
“I’ve just had a flag come up under the name Dylan Linwood,” she said.
Jesse’s face lit up. “Where?”
“Paris.”
“I have him too,” said another peacekeeper. “My flag says Moscow.”
“And I see him in Sydney,” added another. “Others, too: Arabelle Miens, Jamila Murray, Theo Velazquez —”
“They’re in Tokyo,” called another.
“Berlin.”
“Manhattan—”
Clair pictured what was going on with frightening clarity. The system was still working, but not the way it was supposed to. With Quiddity broken, the dupes weren’t limited to just one of them at a time. How long until they outnumbered every peacekeeper on the planet?
On Jesse’s face, hope had been replaced by shock, mirroring Clair’s own frantic realization.
“Q?” she sent out into the Air. “Q, how do we stop the dupes?”
“Mumbai,” said PK Drader.
“Calcutta.”
“Naples!”
“Q? Answer me—we need your help!”
Q did answer, and the bump was damning in its brevity.
“Friendship has to be earned.”
Clair stared at it for a second, her own words flung back at her, wondering if something as simple as this could cause the end of the world.
She wouldn’t be responsible for that.
“Let the system crash,” Clair cried. “Make it all stop! There could be hundreds of them already— thousands!”
Orders flashed silently between the peacekeepers and elsewhere. Clair thought of all the commuters in transit, everyone trying to fab a meal or a change of clothes, every industry, every creator. She imagined crowds forming, tempers flaring, lives halting in their tracks. How many people would disappear in transit? How many would arrive incomplete or damaged in ways she couldn’t imagine? How many would blame her if they knew what she had done?
“It’s down,” a peacekeeper said, sounding as though even he couldn’t believe what he was saying. “The global network has crashed.”
A sense of stillness crept across her, across the plaza, across the city, as though someone had cut the power to the entire planet.
Clair kept her hands up. The PKs’ weapons were still pointed at her, and no wonder. She had accomplished everything WHOLE had ever dreamed of. She had killed d-mat. She had turned the world upside down.
“Q?” she asked. “Q, answer me, please.”
Silence. The world rang with it.
“Now what?” Jesse asked.
Clair looked around her in awe. There was an answer to that question—there had to be—but she had no idea where to start looking for it.
. . . change anything.
Change everything,
if you want to.
Author’s Note
This book is dedicated to Caroline Grose.
Sincere thanks to Jill Grinberg and Anne Hoppe, twin champions of the meme. Also to the keen-eyed Eva Mills, Amanda Nettelbeck, Stella Paskins, Kristin Rens, Hilary Reynolds, and Sophie Splatt; expert advisers Katelyn Detweiler, Judy Downs, Ruth Estelle, Evan Goldfried, Justine Larbalestier, Nicholas Linke, Garth Nix, Sarah Shumway, Matthew Snyder, Laurel Symonds, Scott Westerfeld, and Sebastian Yeaman; Linda Shaw for vital physical maintenance; Sputnik for keeping the main thing the main thing; Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett for “the murdering Twinmaker”; and the (mis)quoted: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Fyodor Dostoevsky, John Keats, Alfred Korzybski, Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld, George W. Russell, William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Theodore Sturgeon, and Oscar Wilde. Finally, to John Harwood, who reminded me that you don’t need to burn down the house to roast a pig.
About the Author
Photo by Scott Westerfeld
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