Crashland (2 page)

Clair sagged back into the plastic seat. It squeaked under her. She didn't realize how tense PK Forest made her until he left the room.

“His face bothers you, doesn't it?” PK Sargent put her hands on the table and folded them neatly in front of her. She was wearing a commitment ring on one finger, a simple white gold band. “Freaked me out too, when I first met him.”

Clair leaned her head back and closed her eyes. She was tired and hungry and her elbow hurt.

“You're wasting your time, PK Sargent. You should be out there trying to find those dupes who got through before the crash, not in here trying to good-cop me into telling you whatever it is you think I'm not telling you.”

“Is that what we're doing? Good cop/bad cop? You should know that the Inspector hasn't got a bad bone in his body. He's a very smart cop, and if you're lying about anything, he'll know. Do you want to know how?”

Clair sighed. “I'm not lying. Everything I've told you is true.”

“It's because of his face,” Sargent continued as though Clair hadn't spoken. “There's something wrong with his nerves. He needs muscle therapy to move anything above the neck, and even then he can't just let it happen like normal people do. He has to consciously make every twitch and glance, because people can't bear to be around him otherwise. Sometimes he uses that to put people off guard, and I suspect he's doing a bit of that to you now, just to see how you react. That's why the Inspector is so good at spotting liars. He knows things about people's faces that they never dreamed of.”

Clair sat up again and opened her eyes. Sargent smiled, revealing white, even teeth. If she was trying to put Clair off guard in her own way, it was working, but only because Clair was too exhausted to fight back.

“Why do you call him that?”

“The Inspector? Because that's what he would have been, way back when, before we were all called PKs. Old names like that are partly why I joined up. My nickname as a kid was ‘Sarge.' It's an old army rank. You know what the army was?”

“Of course.”

“Sorry, don't mean to patronize you. And I know I'm babbling. I do that when I'm nervous.” Sargent's long fingers wound and unwound around themselves. “This is big, Clair, perhaps the biggest thing ever, and it's taking longer to fix than anyone thought. The AIs that run VIA didn't boot up when the system restarted. There might have been deliberate sabotage; it might just be damage caused by what Q did; either way, VIA can't operate safely without them, not without producing even more dupes or killing more people. We're all worried about what's going to happen if we can't get d-mat working again soon. Do
you
know what's going to happen?”

Clair shook her head. “I . . . wasn't expecting to be here, remember?”

Sargent's mouth turned down at the corners. “That can't have been an easy thing to do. The hardest, probably. And the bravest under the circumstances.”

Something broke inside Clair, something she had been holding in ever since she had arrived in the booth in Penn Plaza. She had been expecting to see Turner Goldsmith and a bag of grenades. In her heart and in her head, she'd been ready to die by her own hand to stop Wallace. Instead, she had been alive, and another Clair Hill had died, and there was Jesse, and the peacekeepers, and then the world had ended.

Her chest convulsed. It was like her body was trying to vomit, but all that came out was a single sob, startlingly loud in the cramped space.

She put her hand over her mouth and twisted her lips tightly together. Her eyes were hot and aching, but she promised herself that she wasn't going to cry. Not while so many people were worse off than her.

“Are you all right?” Sargent said.

Clair nodded. She didn't trust herself to speak.

“If I was playing good cop, I'd be patting you on the back right now and saying something stupid like ‘There, there, it'll be all right.'”

Clair nodded again, heartily glad Sargent hadn't done that. She didn't know how she would have reacted. Screamed, maybe. Called her a liar at the very least.

“Here's how I think it's going to go down,” Sargent said. “Lawmakers are struggling right now. If we don't want to, we won't have to charge you with anything.
You
didn't kill anyone;
you
didn't break parity. The Clair Hill who did that is dead. But we can't let you go, either. It's not safe outside, not until the dupes who got through before the system crashed are rounded up. We don't have an exact number, but there are thousands of them, and we have to act on the assumption that they're still trying to kill you. So you need protection. We can provide that. We can move you away from here without anyone knowing. We can hide you while things settle down. It's our job to keep the peace—and as the Inspector says, you are part of that process. We have a responsibility to you along with everyone else. Keeping you safe is
my job
. I want you to know that I'm good at it.”

Clair took a deep breath and lowered her hands. She felt as though the immediate emotional crisis had passed, and if Sargent's little speech had something to do with that, no matter how small, then she was grateful. There was so much in her head, so much pressing her to act, to find Libby and Q, to finish whatever needed finishing, to do anything at all other than sit around talking. But she didn't feel like she would explode into a thousand pieces if she wasn't careful, not so much, not anymore.

“How many?” she asked.

“How many what?”

“People died . . . when d-mat crashed.”

Sargent blinked but didn't look away. Her eyes, a clear jade green, seemed to cloud over. “There's no direct way to tell, with VIA still flatlined. But reports are coming in. It looks like hundreds, maybe a thousand.”

Clair's shoulders slumped. “That's my fault.”

“What? Don't be ridiculous.
We
shut it down. If we hadn't, the world would be up to here in dupes.” Sargent raised a hand to the considerable height of her shoulder.

“But people will blame me. They know I was coming to talk to Wallace. They know I was with WHOLE. They're bound to think that WHOLE attacked VIA and I was part of what happened next.”

“WHOLE
dreams
of taking out VIA. Turner Goldsmith was a tin-pot terrorist who never stood a chance of anything until you came along.”

“He was more than that,” Clair said, startled to find herself defending someone she had thought crazy just days ago. WHOLE might have been a bunch of hardline Abstainers yearning for a world without d-mat, but they weren't evil. “People don't know anything about what Turner was really like. They're afraid of WHOLE, and now they'll be afraid of me, too.”

“There's no need to worry about that, Clair. Until someone proves to us that you're a criminal it's our responsibility to keep you safe. If you'll let us . . . and under certain circumstances, even if you won't.”

That made Clair sit up straighter. Her hands balled into fists on her thighs.

“So I could be innocent and you could keep me here anyway?”

“If your safety made a critical difference to an important investigation, yes. But not literally here. We'd take you somewhere much more comfortable, depending on how long you'd be with us.” Sargent studied her sideways. “Don't look so worried. I'm not telling you this to threaten you. You asked, remember?”

“Yes, but I didn't expect you to be so honest.”

“Why not? I'm an honest person.” Sargent smiled quickly—another brief flash of her white teeth, and then they were gone. “You know what they say about civilization being just three meals away from savagery? Maybe it's the same with d-mat. What if this is the last conversation I ever have? I don't want it to be even partly bullshit.”

Clair didn't want to smile, but she did. Not because Sargent had said anything funny. Quite the opposite. Clair needed to smile because otherwise she would have to cry. And once she started, she wasn't sure she would ever stop.

“Does my mom know where I am?”

“Yes.”

The uncomplicated answer made her feel stronger. She tried another.

“Is Jesse okay?”

“Yes.”

“Now I know you're lying,” she said, although she wanted it to be true, very much. He had helped her; he had encouraged her; he had seen something in her. And she had seen something in him too. They had kissed. Then she had destroyed his world. “Everyone he knows is dead. His home was blown to bits. None of it was backed up. He has nothing to go back to.”

Sargent shrugged and said, “That's not how he sees it.”

Clair blushed. “When can I talk to him?”

“Soon, I hope. Your mother, too.”

“She's
here
?”

“D-mat . . . broken . . . remember?” Sargent smiled. “No. I meant over the Air. That's working fine. When you get your privileges back we'll be able to put you through to her. She's in protective custody, in case the dupes try to take her hostage again.”

Clair thought of her mother in a cell like this one, and Jesse in another cell, and she asked herself what
she
had to go back to, at that moment. She was the girl who'd taken on d-mat and won. The girl who'd sacrificed herself,
killed herself
, and lived. The girl who couldn't save her best friend, and had betrayed the new friend who'd tried to help her. What awful thing was she going to do next?

“If you want to make a difference,” Sargent said, “tell me everything you know about what happened to Zep.”

Clair came out of her thoughts with a sudden shock, as though she had been dropped naked into a bath of icy water.

“ZEP IS DEAD,”
Clair said, wondering how there could be any doubt about that even though she desperately wished it wasn't so. “He was shot.”

“Yes, by a dupe outside the safe house in Sacramento Bay. We don't have a body but his blood was found at the scene, plus other evidence strongly suggesting that what you say is true.”

“What kind of evidence?”

“Uh . . . brain matter. You really don't want to know.”

She really didn't.

“Why are you asking me if you already know what happened?”

“Because it's not just about Sacramento Bay. It's about what happened on the station as well.”

“Wallace brought him back and Mallory shot him again.” More memories. Clair shuddered. “I told you all of that.”

Sargent leaned forward, her eyes cloudy again.

“Zeppelin Barker came back from the dead,” she said. “That's supposed to be impossible.”

“Jesse's dad did too—”

“Yes, but Wallace had captured Dylan Linwood's pattern much earlier. He kidnapped Dylan specifically to dupe him, by forcing him into a booth so he could be scanned. Not Zep. Zep was just some random kid—sorry, but you know what I mean—just someone who got in the way. So where did the pattern come from? Wallace didn't know he'd need him later to blackmail you. There was no forcing him to be scanned, and any transit patterns should have been erased days earlier. How did Wallace get hold of it?”

“Zep was an earlier version of himself.” Clair forced herself to recall his confusion and shock on finding himself where he hadn't expected to be. Exactly as Clair had felt on returning to New York, after the station had blown up. Zep had jumped from his dorm in Shanghai to meet her at school, and later a copy of him from that jump had been brought back, exactly as he had been but minus the memories of everything that had happened since that day. This version of him may not have experienced the events in the safe house, he might have been a few hours younger than the Zep who had first died, but he was completely real and alive in a way that still tore her up on the inside. “He didn't know what was going on.”

“Keeping a pattern after transit is illegal,” Sargent said. “It leads to copying—and worse, editing copies to change what's inside, as we've seen in the last few days. No one's supposed to do it.”

“Obviously Wallace did,” said Clair.

“So what if the data's still out there? What if we could bring Zep back again? I think we'd be obligated to do it. Saving lives is what PKs do, right?”

“I guess.” Clair didn't know where this was going, but she would take every small hope where she could get it. “You could save the lives of everyone who died in the crash.”

“Exactly what I was thinking,” Sargent said, leaning forward with sudden intensity. “I want to find those patterns. I want to convince the Consensus Court to let us bring them back.”

The lock snicked and the door opened. Sargent leaned away from her. Clair realized only then how close their heads had been, like they were sharing a secret.

“The law specifically forbids the reactivation of the patterns of people who have been declared legally dead,” said PK Forest as he circled the table and returned to his chair. He held something in his hands, a bundle wrapped in white paper. “Unless we find compelling evidence that Zeppelin Barker is still alive, he cannot be reactivated, pattern or no pattern. It would be profoundly inequitable. Here.”

He offered Clair the bundle. She didn't move.

“You could at least sound sorry about it,” she said.

Flick
.

“I am not sorry. We call it ‘reactivation,' but it would really be resurrection. Death is an essential part of human life. Society lacking that basic constraint would be . . . terrifying. Remember Mallory Wei.”

Clair did. Her fate was a living hell. If Wallace had had his way, she might have repeated the cycle of resurrection and suicide forever.

A glance at Sargent told her that she was thinking something similar.

But did that mean it was wrong to bring back someone who died unnaturally young, too young to have really lived at all, who might actually
want
to come back? She wasn't just thinking of Zep, but Libby as well, and everyone else killed by Improvement. If their patterns could be found, they could be saved. . . . Wasn't what Sargent wanted to do the same thing
she
had been trying to do all along? Their means were different, but their ends were the same.