Crashland (29 page)

Through this urban wasteland Jesse drove with a steady hand, the hovercraft smoothly gliding over pitted roads that hadn't seen a car for decades. The sun hung low on the horizon, a bloated red ball casting very little heat. Clair wished she hadn't ditched her armor so soon, bloody though it was, and hugged herself for warmth. The cold air kept her in a state of desperate alertness. When she closed her eyes, all she saw was Nobody's stolen face, over and over, pressing in on every side.

She shuddered. Sargent put an arm around her.

“We should have fabbed you a jacket,” she said, which only reminded Clair of her mother.

Fortunately, their destination was already in sight. Ahead hung several lighter-than-air craft of various sizes and shapes, some fat like plums, others long and thin like cigars; one had the likeness of a celebrity whose fame had peaked ten years ago. Small airplanes and gyrocopters circled them like gnats, flashing navigation and warning lights. Several plumes of white smoke trailed up from the area below, which Clair couldn't see thanks to the intervening buildings.

“There are barricades ahead,” said Trevin. “I suggest we take to the water.”

Jesse angled the hovercraft to the left, following the next road downhill. The straits were gray and uninviting. Clair braced herself as they swept over an embankment, but there was no perceptible difference to their forward motion when they hit the water. Spray whipped up around them, making her face feel colder than ever.

The coastline receded until it was some fifty yards away, then Jesse began following it around to the east, the shadowy bulk of the abandoned city on their right, forested slopes to their distant left. There were birds flying overhead, perhaps ordinary seagulls, but Clair couldn't hear their cries over the fans and the chattering of her teeth.

More lights appeared as the muster itself hove into view. It looked like a small town, with piers and roads and lots of low buildings, lit by yellow electric lights.

“We're being hailed,” Jesse shouted over his shoulder.

Two other craft were speeding toward them, spotlights getting brighter by the second.

“Decelerate,” Forest bumped back rather than yelling over the fans. “Do not provoke them.”

“Surely they know who we are,” said Devin.

“It will not hurt to allow them the appearance of superiority.”

“I didn't come here to be taken prisoner.”

Clair couldn't stand their bickering.

“Stop the boat,” she shouted to Jesse, “or hovercraft, whatever you call it. Kill the engines. We'll wait here and let them come to us. Be ready to run if I tell you to.”

The pitch of the fans took on a deeper, descending note and the hovercraft began to sway on the choppy water as its forward motion eased. Over the ebbing of the engines, Clair heard a twin nasal whine that had to be the two boats approaching. She stood up and, ignoring the cold, went to stand next to Jesse, where she would be most visible.

Jesse looked up at her.

“They're trying to call you,” he said.

She opened her hide-the-world icon long enough to find a patch marked
AA
. She accepted the chat request.

“So you've come crawling back to us,” said a woman in a challenging voice, high-pitched and accented. Agnessa Adaksin, Clair thought. It had to be.

“I should have come sooner,” Clair admitted, “but I'm not crawling. If you don't want me here, I'll go.”

“Why
are
you here?”

“I need somewhere safe to think things through without people trying to kill me all the time. You can offer me that.”

“Why would we?”

“Because you owe me,” Clair said, aware that she was taking a huge gamble. “I'm the girl who killed d-mat.”

“If so,” Agnessa said, “you didn't do a very good job.”

There was a long pause. Clair had nothing else to say.

“You can come in . . . but that's not why. We'll talk about what I owe you when you get here.”

The chat closed. Clair glanced up at the approaching boats. They changed course, angling around in two broad circles that would take them back to the landing.

“Follow them in,” said Clair. “We're okay for now.”

The hovercraft moved beneath her, and she went back to her seat.

“There are mines ahead,” Devin bumped her. “You can see them in satellite views.”

“We'd better follow those boats closely, then,” she bumped back.

“What I mean is: she could have let us sail right into them, but she didn't. That's a positive sign.”

She nodded, accepting that this might be true but not letting herself relax. They were surrounded by explosives that could detonate at the slightest wrong move. If that wasn't a metaphor for her life, she didn't know what was.

“So that's why you wanted us to come by sea,” she bumped Devin. “When were you going to tell us?”

“If she had let us keep coming unguided,” he bumped back. “Or if you hadn't stopped. We're all in the same boat, Clair.”

“Hovercraft.”

“As long as it keeps us afloat, I don't care what it is.”

THE LANDING WAS
crowded with boats and ships as varied as the blimps above. They were led to a pier where a delegation of men and women in plain clothes awaited them, all carrying weapons. None were actually pointed at them, but Clair was conscious of being watched from all sides. There were no drones overhead, just people peering at them from every vantage point.

With a final whirr, the hovercraft skated to a halt next to the pier. Jesse threw out a rope, which one of the burlier men caught and tied around a mushroom-shaped metal protrusion. When it was secure, Clair stood up and let herself be helped to shore by a woman with high cheekbones and short, curly hair. And, Clair noticed, just four fingers on each hand. Clair remembered Dancer and the members of WHOLE she had met before. She told herself to expect more such injuries. People who claimed to be injured by d-mat were a key source of recruits.

When they were all on the pier, the woman said simply, “Follow.” Not Agnessa Adaksin, judging by her voice. She led them uphill, away from the water, and Clair felt exposed every step of the way. None of them belonged in WHOLE territory, except for Jesse.

He stayed by Clair's side, taking her hand when he was able to and waving her ahead of him when he wasn't. His deference was calculated, she was sure, to send a message to those watching.
If you accept me, then you'll have to accept her, too
.

She hoped that was what it meant. It could equally be read as,
Don't mess with me, or my kick-ass girlfriend will have words
. Clair didn't feel terribly kick-ass. She felt filthy and desperate, pushed so far beyond her comfort zone that she could barely remember what it was like back there, let alone how to return to it. Here she was taking comfort from an Abstainer, after all. Clair 1.0 would never have imagined that.

Clair 1.0 had had no idea, she thought, about so many things.

Their escorts stopped at a locked double door in the side of a low L-shaped building. Still saying nothing, the escorts opened the doors and waved them inside. The doors shut off the frigid world behind them, the Air with it. Their escorts stayed outside.

A long, white corridor stretched ahead of them, up the long arm of the L. The air stank faintly of antiseptic.

“Up the hallway, door on the right,” called a voice that belonged, unmistakably, to Agnessa Adaksin. “Don't make me come get you.”

Clair took a deep breath. “What is this place?”

“It's my prison,” she said.

Clair hesitated. This was too weird. Her courage finally failed her—her knees were literally shaking. Someone else was going to have to guide them the rest of the way.

Fortunately Sargent stepped forward to take the lead. Noises from the room at the end of the corridor reached them as they filed toward it. Some kind of heavy, wheezing breath. A constant mechanical hum. The light spilling out of the room was electric white, almost painfully bright. As Clair stepped into it, she blinked and made out two figures, not one.

The first was a hefty woman with hair in dreadlocks and a long, patterned smock. She was bending over the second figure, a tiny woman curled up like a child on a high-tech hospital bed. All Clair could see of the second woman's face was a narrow, pointed chin under a plastic hood that fitted almost entirely over her head.

The big woman's expression was guarded to the point of being hostile.

“Agnessa?” Clair said.

The woman lifted her eyes as though they were idiots.

“That's Nelly,” said a voice from a speaker set into the side of the hood, the same voice that had spoken to them by the door. “She's my nurse. This body is my prison. Watching people's reactions is one of the few pleasures it brings me.”

They were all standing around the bed now, glowered at by the nurse, who didn't seem to be armed, but Clair bet the leader of WHOLE had defenses she wasn't revealing.

“Where do I look?” Clair asked, wondering what the expression on her face revealed.

“Anywhere you like. I'm currently viewing you through a camera at the end of the bed, but I could just as easily be in the corner behind you, or the hallway outside. I talk to you through the Air, through speakers like these, or through more secure means if I need to. I am anywhere I choose to be, virtually.”

“But your body is here thanks to . . . ?” prompted Devin.

“Stroke,” she said. “One damaged cell in one thin vein wall, and I am as you see me. It could have been worse, I'm very aware of that: I could be dead or a vegetable. But even so, locked-in syndrome is no fun. Without telepresence I'd have gone insane years ago.”

“Was fault ever acknowledged?” asked Forest.

“By VIA? How easily you jump to that conclusion.” She laughed, and the sound was as rich and full as though it came from a human throat. The body on the bed didn't move at all. “This had nothing to do with d-mat, unlike your face, PK Forest. . . . Yes, I know about that. The things you discover when you have all the time in the world to look. The great Inspector, upholding the regime that made him a cripple: there'd be something truly poignant about that if it weren't just . . . sad.”

Clair stared at Forest, searching his features for any sign that what Agnessa said was true. But of course there was none.

“Blame is overrated,” he said.

“A man with nothing to live for would say something like that,” she said. “At least I still have my soul. I can atone for what I've done. You . . . all of you . . . are beyond hope.”

“We're not here to discuss philosophy,” said Devin.

“Indeed. You want somewhere safe . . . to think, you said.”

There was no way to tell, but Clair knew that Agnessa was looking at her.

“Yes,” she said, because that was the simple truth. “We've learned a lot about the dupes . . . at least I think we have . . . but I need access to the Air to work out what it is, and we can't have that and hide at the same time. This might be the safest place on Earth right now, because you don't have any booths or fabbers. If we can just stay here for a day or two, until we work it out—”

“What's to stop the dupes from dropping a missile from orbit on us, like they did in Antarctica?” interrupted Agnessa. “There's nowhere on Earth truly safe from these people.”

“They appear to be divided into at least two factions,” said Jesse. “One of them doesn't want to kill Clair. The other . . . We're not sure about him, but we think he'll hold off for a while. We should be safe.”

“‘Should be'? That's hardly a ringing endorsement. And to what end?”

“That's . . . complicated.” Clair rubbed at her forehead. She flinched when flakes of brown rained down in front of her eyes. Dylan Linwood's dried blood clung to her like a grotesque kind of camouflage. “One of them told me that I've known something all along, without knowing it, something important . . . if that makes sense.”

“Not really. Why would a dupe tell you anything that you could use against them? That doesn't make sense.”

“This is why I need time to think. And I have to try. Running hasn't worked. Fighting hasn't worked. What else is there? Give up and let Ant Wallace win?” Frustration had her hand shaking. She dropped it back down to her side. “Never.”

Agnessa said nothing for a minute that seemed to last an hour.

“Leave us, all of you except Clair,” she said. “I want to talk to her alone. Then I'll talk to Jesse. Nelly, show our guests to the waiting room.”

The big nurse made ushering motions with her hand, and after a moment's hesitation the others obeyed. Clair watched anxiously as they left, nervous about being alone with the leader of WHOLE. She was so different from what Clair had imagined. Instead of a revolutionary leader in combat fatigues at the head of a ragtag army amassed in the grim north, she was a crippled old lady who looked like she would die in minutes if unplugged from her machines.

Nelly pulled the door closed behind her with a solid clunk and Agnessa said, “Pull up a chair. Sit next to me. You're looming.”

Clair looked around and saw a stack of plastic chairs in the windowless corner of the room. She lifted one off and put it by the bed, so Agnessa would have been looking at her if her eyes weren't covered by the hood.

“You're nothing but trouble, Clair Hill,” the old woman said. “Everywhere you go, you sow discord and strife. Do you mean to, or does it just follow you around like a bad smell?”

Clair opened her mouth to protest that it wasn't intentional—all she wanted was a quiet life—but Agnessa's throaty laugh stopped her before she could say anything.

“When you get to know me better, you'll understand that I mean that as a compliment.”