Twinmaker

in the center of her vision.

qqqqq . . . qqqqq

Furious, she hurried to catch up with Zep and Jesse and took the call.

“That flash was you, wasn’t it?” she said, mouthing the words so she wouldn’t interrupt Jesse’s story. “How the hell did you hack my lenses?”

“That is what I’m good at,” said the eerily childlike voice. “There is nothing I can’t get into. Nothing I have come across yet, anyway.”

“Why won’t you leave me alone?”

“I just want to clarify the connection between you and Dylan Linwood. This is something else I don’t understand.”

“He’s nothing to me. A pain in the neck. I thought he might help me understand something, but he’s only made everything worse.”

“He broadcast you against your will,” the voice said. “Is that correct?”

“Of course it is. Why are you so interested?”

“I could help you, if you wanted.”

“Like you helped Libby? No thanks. I want you to leave me alone.”

“But—”

“I mean it. If you’re not going to tell me what’s going on, stay away from me and stay away from my friends.”

There was another empty silence, until finally the voice said, in a tone that was almost reproachful, “‘Beauty is a terrible and awful thing where boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side.’”

Another quote, one Clair recognized. It was Dostoevsky this time, but there was a missing piece: “God sets us nothing but riddles,” something like that.

She agreed wholeheartedly.

The call closed from the other end, and Clair’s infield returned to normal. The last message from Libby was still in view. Clair felt no loyalty to the secrecy Improvement demanded of its users, only to Libby’s privacy and well-being.

Zep was saying, “I’ve heard that Stainer meetings are where WHOLE recruits hard-liners. Is that true?”

“I don’t know, Zep. No one’s ever tried to recruit me.”

“What about your father?”

“He never came out and said he was in WHOLE.”

“But he never said he wasn’t, either.”

Jesse nodded. “He and I argued all the time. When I was a kid, I used to talk about turning fifteen and getting into a booth and visiting my grandmother in Melbourne. Dad had cut me off from her, pretty much. He didn’t want me influenced by her. So it was exciting to imagine—because it was a little bit terrifying, too. My mother died in one of those things. Who’s to say it wasn’t going to kill me, too? When it came down to it, though, I couldn’t make myself go through.”

“That’s what you were doing yesterday,” Clair said. “When the PKs hassled you.”

He looked surprised that she was listening. “Yes. Thinking about it but never doing anything about it. The story of my life.”

A new bump from Libby appeared in Clair’s infield. She opened it, hoping.

“You can’t stand that I’m perfect,” Libby said. “Get over it or stay away from me forever.”

19

CLAIR DIDN’T HEAR much of the conversation between Zep and Jesse after that. They passed the station, and Jesse led them onto the side streets of the suburb he lived in. All Clair could think about was the people stepping into and out of the rows of shining booths, remembering games she and Libby had played when they were younger. “Guess” involved one taking the other blindfolded to a destination that they then had to determine without using the Air. “Cram or Crap” scoured the strangest corners of a fabber’s memory to find the most revolting food officially designated as edible. They had attended performances advertised in the Air just moments before the acts went onstage, braving traffic jams and instant crowds just to be there in that moment.

Libby had always been the one to push Clair into something new, and Clair the one to pick up the pieces afterward. Now, it looked like there would be no putting the pieces back together, no matter what Clair did. It wasn’t even about Zep and Improvement anymore. Clair was caught between the uncompromising extremes of competing with Libby or trying to unravel her new sense of self-worth. It was a lose-lose situation.

Clair felt a terrible hollowness in her chest, as though Libby had already vacated from her life, leaving nothing behind but the echoing sense that it was all her fault.

“If Libby would only come forward,” Jesse was saying, “if we could prove that her birthmark has really gone, then we’d have all the evidence we need to make someone act.”

“If it really has,” Zep said.

“Don’t talk about her like that,” Clair said. “Libby’s not a courtroom exhibit. She’s a person.”

Jesse’s face disappeared behind his bangs again.

“I’m sorry—I know that.”

They turned onto Jesse’s friendly neighborhood street and walked along the opposite side, sticking to the shade. No sign of the kids, but the dog droppings were still there, turning white in the heat.

“That’s my place,” said Jesse to Zep, pointing two houses along. “Don’t expect much—oh, hey, there’s Dad.”

Dylan Linwood walked through the front door of his house and stood there with his hands on his hips. He had changed since Clair had seen him. He was wearing a shirt that was even more crumpled than the one before, and there was a bruise on his forehead. One of his eyes, the left, was red where it should have been white. He looked as though he had been beaten up. But he didn’t look beaten. His expression was anything other than cowed.

Jesse raised his hand in greeting.

Dylan Linwood vanished into a giant ball of flame.

The flash, the bang, and the physical impact of the explosion weren’t simultaneous. They came in that order, spaced out over tiny slices of time that the human mind couldn’t individually distinguish. All of them outraced alarm. The electrical impulses in Clair’s nerves might have traveled much faster than the ball of flame radiating outward from the structure that had once been Jesse’s home, but the shocked tissues of her brain needed time to catch up. A second wasn’t long enough. Two seconds wasn’t long enough.

After three seconds, she found herself on her hands and knees in some bushes, coughing her lungs out. The air was full of soot and smoke. There was ash in her eyes, making her lenses sting. Her ears were ringing so loudly she could barely think, and her skin felt hot and raw, as though she had been rubbed all over with sandpaper. Her headband had come off, and she had no idea where it was. Next to her right knee, a tiny flame burned a black hole into the grass.

Rough hands grabbed her around the waist and pulled her upright. She lurched to her feet and threw up. The bile was acid and foul and seared her already aching throat. Distantly, through the whining in her ears, she heard a voice urging her to hurry. She didn’t recognize it, but she did her best to obey, fleeing the fire.

The street was transformed. Where Jesse’s home had been was now a shattered, skeletal frame issuing thick black gouts of smoke. There was almost nothing left. The apartments on either side were burning too, along with the gardens and trees lining the sidewalk. Broken glass crunched underfoot. There was debris everywhere. Bits of Jesse’s life. Bits of his dad, too, probably.

That made Clair feel sick again, but this time she kept her gorge down.

Clair blinked grit from her eyes and discovered that the hands tugging her away from the blast zone belonged to a solid woman with close-cut brown curls. She was wearing a dark-purple sweater and black jeans that, like everything around them, were now gray with ash. Her eyes were noticeably out of alignment, giving her face a lopsided cast.