Fingers snatched at her. Someone spat. Jesse kicked at a man with Clair’s face who grabbed her hair from behind and tried to pull her from the flatbed. The man let go and fell back into the crowd, laughing. After that, Q’s drone dropped low over Clair and dive-bombed anyone who tried to get too close, whether they seemed physically threatening or not. Clair couldn’t decide if they were genuinely outraged or just wanting to be part of the show. Perhaps a bit of both.
Clair’s scalp was still stinging when they reached the pier. There were just two peacekeepers to press the crowd back as Turner brought the four-wheeler to a halt and they climbed out. The PKs said nothing to Clair and Clair said nothing to them. They had made their position clear: they were staying on the fence, neither helping nor hindering. If things got ugly in public she could count on them to intervene, but up to that point she was on her own.
The sub floated low in the water, long and dark like a killer whale. A hatch opened on top, and two people emerged, a man and a woman both dressed in tight-fitting gray. The woman seemed unfazed by either the crowd or the drones. Clair wondered at the kinds of things she’d seen, the odd requests she’d fielded in the past. Odder than anything Clair could imagine, she bet.
“We’re really doing this?” she asked.
“Looks like it,” said Jesse.
Clair shouldered her heavy pack and followed him to the ladder at the end of the pier. A skinny seaman— one of three who had emerged after the first two—helped her find her footing on the swaying surface of the submarine. There was no handrail. The sea’s mood was black and choppy, like the crowd.
Turner was standing over the opening in the hull, guiding people through. Ray was coming last, carrying Libby’s body in his arms. Gemma had a heavy bag in one hand, one of the two that Clair had seen in the back of the four-wheeler. No one had explained what they were.
Clair took off her backpack and lowered it down through the hatch into reaching hands. Then it was her turn. The drone deactivated its fans and was carried down after her.
The submarine had a single cramped passageway running its entire length. Packs were piled into every available niche. Clair picked a spot at random and didn’t move, afraid to touch anything. The air was thick and close. She didn’t want to think of suffocation, but it was hard not to.
Jesse squeezed in next to her.
“Exciting, isn’t it?” he said.
She gulped a half sob, half laugh.
“Are you for real?”
“No, seriously. This is terrific. I’ve always wanted to go underwater.”
“You’ve never been diving?”
“Not for an hour and a half,” he said. “And not without getting my clothes wet.”
The hatch clanged shut above them, sounding an unimaginable distance away. All connections to the Air died.
Clair noticed Jesse’s fingers twitching.
“I’ve patched into the sub’s HUD,” he told her. “It has a cavitation hull, a magnetohydrodynamic drive system, and a miniature reactor so it can stay under for months. Officially, we stopped developing these things after d-mat came along, but this could be a knockoff of a military design, or even a genuine decommission. It’s hard to say.”
“
“No wheels, you see.” He grinned. “And the drive system has applications off the Earth, where I really want to go.”
“You’re picturing yourself in a spaceship right now, aren’t you?”
“If I am, what does that make me?”
“A big nerd. The biggest imaginable.”
His smile only broadened as a rising thrum filled the submarine.
It was a shame, she thought, that d-mat had made spaceships obsolete, along with planes, trains, and everything else. He deserved to get what he wanted. So did she, but what she wanted seemed so much harder to obtain, even after Ant Wallace’s offer to meet with them. She wanted Libby back and the chance that there was someone else in her head permanently revoked. She wanted her world back again, exactly as it had been.
Jesse’s eyes were moving, following the sub’s internal operations by sound alone. She groped until she found his hand and squeezed it in hers. He glanced at her briefly and smiled. Then the engine noise rose, the floor shifted beneath them, the sub descended, and they were on their way.
65
CLAIR COUNTED THE time as it passed. Sixty seconds per minute. Sixty minutes per hour. It was like meditation. Motion was hard to track underwater, but deep in a primal part of her, the part that had evolved with an innate sense of movement and momentum, she knew that she was being propelled ever nearer to her destination.
When she wasn’t counting, she was thinking. And what she was thinking about were the two heavy bags Gemma had carried with her into the submarine. It was clear they contained supplies of some kind, but it wasn’t food, or else they would have been opened on the train. They clanked. She didn’t think it was bottles of cider to bribe Ant Wallace with.
The more she thought about the bags, the more certain she was that she had made a grave tactical error.
“Where’s Turner?” she asked Jesse in a whisper.
“Forward, I think. Why?”
“‘Direct action,’” she said, quoting the phrase that Jesse had asked Turner to clarify, back at the Farmhouse. “He never said what that meant. What if he’s using me as cover in order to get close to VIA and do something stupid?”
“Like what?”
She didn’t know, but those bags could hold a lot of guns, grenades, or god only knew what.
“If he does do anything,” Jesse said, “VIA will never help us.”
“I know, but perhaps that’s a small price to pay from Turner’s point of view.”
Clair could see it all too easily. Turner, fighting a decades-long war against d-mat, had come out of hiding . . . for what? To help save a few lost girls? Was it more likely he was intending a suicide run that would strike right at the heart of his enemy—and destroy his mutated genes in the bargain?
“Do you think Gemma knows?” asked Jesse.
“If she does, she’s not talking.” Gemma seemed tense, but she
Jesse nodded.
Clair leaned out into the narrow corridor and saw Ray nearby.
“Tell Turner to come back here,” she said. “I need to talk to him. It’s urgent.”
Ray nodded, and a minute later the leader of WHOLE joined them.
“What is it?”
“Change of plan,” she said. “I want you to drop me and Jesse off early.”
Both Turner and Jesse looked at her in surprise.
“Why?” Turner asked.
She kept her voice steady, even though inside her doubts were stirring. This
She could only let the facts speak for themselves.
“One,” she said, “we’re being too predictable. That makes it easier for the dupes if they decide to spring anything on us that might look like an accident. Also, it’s bad for ratings, me being down here instead of up there.
