Twinmaker

“Don’t apologize. If anything, I should thank you for what you did back there. I was completely out of ideas. It was clever of you to figure it out.” She paused before adding, with all the parental firmness she could muster, just in case the owner of the voice was a child, “But please don’t spring something like that on me again. If you’re going to muck around with my pattern, you have to warn me in advance. You have to ask my permission.”

“I promise I will, Clair. I’m sorry.”

“No, really, don’t apologize. Just, well . . . I don’t know. Hopefully there won’t ever be a next time.”

Her mind reeled at the implications of what “q” had told her, but there were greater issues calling for her attention. She looked around, still worried about people creeping up on her while she was distracted. She knew this station. It was four blocks away from school, putting her northwest of the WHOLE safe house.

“Why did you bring me here?” she asked. “You could have sent me anywhere you wanted. What’s so special about Manteca?”

“You have to go back for your friend Zeppelin Barker: that is what you said in South Africa. You can’t just leave him behind. And this is where he is.”

Clair almost laughed even as she was reminded of the predicament Zep was in. “You know who those people are, right? The ones who are holding him prisoner?”

“I do not. Their identities are obscured, even when they are connected to the Air.”

“That’s because they’re WHOLE, and they eat people like me and Zep for breakfast. At the very least, you could’ve given me a gun before sending me back in there.”

“I could if you wanted me to.”

Clair rubbed her brow with the knuckles of both hands. She had been joking about the gun, but not about Zep. Rescuing him was critical, if she could only find the energy to get moving again. She felt like every vein in her body was full of mud.

“What I’d like more than anything is a cup of coffee.”

“Go to the third booth on the right.”

She forced her weary legs into motion and jumped to the front of the queue.

“Sorry,” she said to the commuters whose journeys she was briefly interrupting. “I’m expecting something.”

The door opened, revealing a plastic box big enough to hold a large melon. It had an identity patch addressed to Carolyn Edge. Clair pressed her right palm against the patch until it flashed green and unsealed. Then she took the box back to the bench and eased the lid open.

The first thing that hit her was the scent of fresh coffee. It was like a shot of energy straight to the brain. The insulated mug it came in wasn’t drawn from her private pattern catalog, and the brew, she suspected, wasn’t her favorite, but that was okay. It was still caffeine—and if someone was looking for her, the less evidence she left of her presence, the better.

Next to the mug was a bundle of fresh clothes and a pair of sneakers. Again, not her favorites—lightweight travel gear in grays and blacks, anonymous and easy to layer—but at least they looked to be her size. The new clothes went with her new identity or mask or whatever it was, she assumed. There was a new backpack, too, the same nondescript color scheme as the clothes.

Inside the backpack was an automatic pistol.

She touched the cold metal with the tip of one finger.

No, she told herself, this is crazy.

Or was it?

In all her life, she’d never fired a gun. Her parents had never owned one. But when people started pointing them at her, didn’t it make a kind of sense to point one back? It wasn’t as if she had to actually fire it or anything.

Clair shoved the pistol under the clothes, well out of sight, and stuffed it all into the pack.

She wanted nothing more than to shower and drink her coffee in peace. A headache was throbbing behind her right eye.

Reprisals, she thought, remembering something Gemma had said in the safe house. The man WHOLE is trying to kill . . . That was what “q” had called the person holding her parents hostage. That person had turned out to be Dylan Linwood.

Distant pieces of the puzzle were slowly starting to come together, but what good did that do her? She couldn’t call Libby. She couldn’t call her parents. She couldn’t call her friends. She couldn’t call the peacekeepers without giving her location away. Clair had escaped from one cage only to find herself caught securely in another.

“One piece at a time,” she reminded herself. If she could get Zep out of the safe house, that would be a start. At least she wouldn’t be alone in the cage then.

“Can I call up a map?” she asked “q.”

“Yes, Clair. I will advise you if you are about to do anything dangerous.”

There was a public bathroom one block to the north, worth going out of her way for. She didn’t want to arrive anywhere looking like a refugee.

She slung the pack over her shoulder, threw the empty mug and box into a bin, took one last look around her to make sure Dylan Linwood really wasn’t still following her, and set off.

27

ONE HOUR LATER, after a lonely walk under stars as crisp and cool as a cosmic chandelier, Clair strode up to the safe house door and waited. She didn’t need to knock. She knew Ray or someone else would be watching.

The door opened after thirty seconds. Gemma stepped out. The door closed behind her and clicked shut.

“We didn’t expect to see you again,” Gemma said. Her face was unreadable in the darkness. There was no porch light.

“I didn’t expect to see you, either.” Clair held the pistol at her side, not hidden but not aimed at anyone either. A bluff like Gemma’s had been. This time, Gemma appeared to be unarmed.

“You should have told me,” Clair said.

“About what?”

“About Dylan Linwood.”

Gemma looked surprised but unrepentant. “You’ve seen him, then?”

“He tried to kill me.”

Gemma nodded and said, “We couldn’t tell you about that. You wouldn’t have believed us.”

“How long have you known he was a traitor? And how on earth did he survive that explosion?”

That earned her a long, measuring stare.

“You’d better come inside. Your boyfriend is making my life a living hell.”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” she said again.

Gemma knocked on the door, a quick rat-a-tat, and it opened. Clair’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness. Ray looked pissed off. Clair didn’t care.

“I’ll be out of touch for a bit,” Clair told “q.” She squeezed the pistol grip tightly, feeling as though she were leaping off a high dive. Gemma followed her into the house, too close for comfort, but no one tried to search or disarm her. No one said anything. All the menus in her night-darkened lenses were dead.

She found Zep in the living room, sitting on the couch, with wrists and ankles secured by plastic ties. Jesse sat next to him, not tied but not exactly one with his captors, either. Big-Ears stood over them both with his arms folded. Arabelle, in her wheelchair, blocked the door to the back of the house, long-fingered hands resting loosely in her lap.

“Clair!” Zep tried to get up, but his bindings prevented him. Seeping blood had stained the bandage around his thigh bright red. “What are you doing here? You shouldn’t have come back.”