Q, the dupes of your dad . . .”
He rolled away, and she let him go, understanding. It was too early to talk about that, although she desperately wanted to know the truth of it. She couldn’t imagine how it must feel to see a parent die not just once, but over and over again. It was a hellish thought, too much to take in quickly.
The whole situation was too much. She had thought getting to the airship would solve all her problems, but here she was, sitting on a cushion in bright sunlight, avoiding the raw ache where Zep had been and wondering if Libby knew what had happened to him. She couldn’t begin to guess how Libby might be feeling if she did. Would she blame Clair? Clair would give everything to talk to her best friend as they had talked before . . . when the only issues they’d had had to worry about were school, captions, and chores. Nothing had seemed insurmountable then.
Three days had now passed since Libby had used Improvement.
However much time she had left, it was too little to make amends, too little for everything they’d planned to do together. Too little for the lifetime they were owed. Improvement had to be stopped, no matter what.
Clair took her shoes off and put them next to Jesse’s so they would dry. Then she propped herself against the window, facing inward. There was a picture of a blue cow on the wall directly opposite her with the name DAISY written underneath. Impossible to tell if Daisy was the cow or the kid who had drawn it. Clair stared at the picture, feeling the warmth of the coffee spreading through her body, radiating outward from her chest like the heat of the sun. The actual sun provided no heat at all, and the window behind her head was cold. The caffeine should have woken her up, but instead she grew sleepy. Apart from a brief nap at the dam, she hadn’t slept since she had last spoken to Libby, before Improvement, the dupes, WHOLE, everything. Her head throbbed in time with the propellers.
At least she wasn’t trudging over anything or holding on to anything for dear life. Moving without effort felt like the most amazing miracle in the world.
Clair’s eyes drifted shut as she teased at the many problems facing her, looking for solutions that weren’t there. Staying awake was hard, too hard, but she would do it if she had to, like she had done everything else.
44
SHE WOKE WITH a fright an unknown time later. Someone was calling her name.
“Clair? Can you hear me?”
She sat up and stared wildly about her. The voice was coming from the tubes in her ears. She knew who it was, but where she was and
“Clair? Are you all right?”
She was on the Skylifter with Jesse, abandoned by WHOLE while Turner Goldsmith remained aloof in his roost above. But she had been dreaming of Zep and Dylan Linwood’s battered faces, over and over, and of her own face too, reflected in the walls of a d-mat booth, growing more and more monstrous until the versions of her at the edge of visibility looked barely human.
The images took some effort to dispel, and no wonder, she thought. She had been hunted halfway across California. She had seen people shot and killed. She lived in a world where people could take someone out of one body and put them back in another one, over and over. Nightmares were the least of her problems.
Meanwhile, the voice in her ears was still calling her name.
This voice belonged to Q.
“Yes, yes, I’m all right.” Clair sat up and put the middle fingers of her right hand against a stabbing pain between her eyes. “How did you get through to me? The Skylifter is jammed, isn’t it?”
“I can get anywhere that isn’t Faraday shielded. The first thing I did was hack the habitat’s firewalls by bypassing its usual routers and—”
“Okay, spare me the details. I failed IT in school, as you probably know. Give me a second to get my act together.”
She looked around, blinking. She and Jesse were still the only people in the big semicircle. He was snoring softly, undisturbed by either her rude awakening or bad dreams of his own. There was no way to tell how long she had been asleep.
Her eyes were drawn to the view, to the perfect blue dome above and the endless sheet of white far below. The cloudscape was alien and strange. There were valleys and trenches, wide plains, and the occasional towering hill.
She automatically went to access her lens menus, to see where she was, but of course the Air wasn’t available, and that frustrated her, made her feel more trapped than did locked doors and silence.
Clair stood on wobbly legs and crossed in stockinged feet to the miniature kitchen. She supposed she should at least try to refuel in the hope of making her brain work. In the freezer, she found several single-serve portions of precooked lentil stew, and she fiddled with the microwave controls until she worked out how to set it to defrost. She felt distant from herself, not entirely there, but awake enough to solve that puzzle. While it whirred and rattled—an antique like the Skylifter itself—she filled a bottle of water and drank deeply from it, tasting metal strongly against her tongue. Her mouth was furry and dry.
The stew was boiling hot in patches, crunchy cold in others. It satisfied a need and nothing else. The details of the dreams faded as she ate and talked to Q. If Turner Goldsmith was going to ignore her, she’d get what answers she could from elsewhere.
“Okay,” she said, mouthing the words but not speaking them aloud out of respect for Jesse’s ongoing slumber. “Let’s start with Dylan Linwood. Tell me how someone can copy him when he’s supposed to be dead in Manteca. Doesn’t that raise a . . . what did you call it?”
“Parity violation alarm.”
“Right, one of those.”
“Parity hasn’t been broken because Dylan Linwood isn’t listed as dead.”
“What?”
Q patched a series of windows into her lenses. The Linwood home in Manteca, peacekeepers combing through the rubble. The results of detailed forensic studies. A news feeder intoning, “First responders describe the scene as a bomb site, provoking speculation that the reclusive fad artist destroyed his workshop in order to go even farther underground. No bodies have been found. His son, Jesse Linwood, has not been located for comment.”
“Is someone trying to cover this up,” Clair asked, “or just clean up as they go?”
“I believe it’s the latter,” said Q. “Municipal reports list no bodies found at the safe house, either. Spent casings, evidence of gunfire, traces of spilled blood—but no actual bodies.”
“No bodies at all. Does that mean Zep isn’t listed as dead either?”
“He is not, Clair, and neither are the members of WHOLE intercepted en route to the airship.”
“What about Libby?”
“I have located Libby in Italy. Her caption is unchanged.”
Clair shook her head to shed the last lingering memory of the dream.
“Any mention of me?” she asked. “Am I still wanted by the peacekeepers?”
“You’ve been officially listed as a missing person. Your parents are calling it a kidnapping. It’s causing a lot of buzz in the wake of the video Dylan Linwood posted.”
Clair couldn’t imagine what her parents were going through, and it made her throat close up to think of them. Better, she told herself, to move forward in the hope of getting safely back to them.
“Okay, so Jesse’s dad isn’t a parity violation because he’s not listed as dead. But someone’s still copying him as fast as people can kill him. Like you did to Libby. She’s still very much alive, according to you, and yet you created another one of her in Copperopolis. How did you do that? Did you use a private network.
