Crashland (3 page)

“Open it,” Forest said, indicating the package. He was watching her closely.

Clair did as she was told. Inside was a sandwich, but not just any sandwich. She could tell instantly that it was an alfalfa-and-peanut-butter sandwich on
pain de mie
bread.

“How did you get this?” She stared at him in outrage. “It's from my private profile. You can't access this without telling me. That's not fair!”

Flick
.

Forest raised his hands in appeasement and smiled almost charmingly. “This is me telling you that we are satisfied now that the other you is an illegal duplicate, and accordingly her ownership of your profile has been revoked. You will shortly gain full access, with new security provisions to ensure you aren't hacked again. We have no more reservations about your claims of selfhood. You are legally Clair Hill. Please eat.”

Clair didn't pick up the sandwich. It was her favorite comfort food, but it didn't comfort her now. “What does that mean, exactly? That I'm not legally dead and never have been? Or are you making an exception for me?”

“
That
would be inequitable,” said Sargent with a sharp look at Forest.

“It would indeed.” Forest folded his hands in his lap. “Existing laws do not necessarily provide the best moral compass in these circumstances. What if they were to tell me that you could not legally remain alive? I can assure you that I would not feel compelled to shoot you where you sit.”

“Well, that's a relief.”

“Do not be too relieved. We have methods of dealing with inconvenient duplications that do not involve violence. It is not an uncommon crime.”

Clair looked from Forest to Sargent and back again. Forest's smile hadn't changed. It was a pretty good approximation, although it was beginning to look a little fixed. He clearly wasn't joking.

“We need you, Clair, and you need us. That is the simple truth of it.”
Flick
. “Now, the sandwich. In a moment you will be too busy to eat, and I do not want you starving on my watch.”

“The Inspector hates it when that happens,” said Sargent.

That broke the smile. Forest shot Sargent a look of mild rebuke, perhaps for her use of the nickname, then settled back into a mask of blank impassivity.

“It was a test, wasn't it?” Clair said. “I recognized the sandwich.”

“It wasn't that. You were upset about us accessing your profile,” said Forest, “rather than what we might have found in it. That was what convinced me.”

“I was already convinced.” Sargent nodded encouragingly. “Eat up, and be glad the fabbers are still working. Remember, three meals . . .”

Clair ate the sandwich.

SHE HAD BARELY
swallowed the last mouthful when her lenses flickered, startling her, and notifications began pouring in. Her infield immediately jammed. Bumps and caption updates from family and friends rose to the surface while everything else crowded in the background. It was a very dense background.

At first glance, all everyone was talking about was d-mat. Or, rather, the lack of d-mat. People were stuck in places both ordinary and weird. Most were at home, school, or work, but some were on the summit of mountains or on the bottom of oceans or in the middle of deserts, huge distances from anywhere civilized. Families had been torn apart. Friends were looking for friends. Public warnings flooded in from PKs and other branches of the OneEarth administration, telling people to stay out of booths for the time being. There were rumors of accidents and partially transmitted bodies and wild speculations as to what was going on. There were protests and petitions for action, and the occasional violent clash with the PKs. Clair could sense a global panic mounting.

She blanked her caption and searched for something from Q.

The only message in her inbox was the last Q had sent.

Friendship has to be earned
.

Clair felt just as ashamed as she had the first time she read it.

“I know you can see what's happening,” she sent in reply. “Please come back. I'm sorry I broke my promise. We need you.
I
need you.”

She might have said more, but she didn't want to beg while the peacekeepers were still watching her private profile. She could see a notification from them informing her of the fact. A quick glance at her public observers showed the PKs at the very top there too, followed by a large number of people, familiar and unfamiliar. Friends from school rubbed shoulders with celebrities and people she'd never heard of. One was a lawmaker called Kingdon who Clair assumed PK Forest had allocated her, now that Clair was legally recognized. The woman had sent her a brief message:

Don't feel you're alone in this, Clair. Let me help you. I'm here if you need me.

Clair didn't pursue the offer then. She didn't know what she needed. The total number of people following her was hypnotic, in the hundreds of thousands already and growing before her eyes. So much for her dream of going back to an ordinary life once Improvement was dealt with.

In addition to the bump from LM Kingdon, there were dozens from her parents, swinging wildly across the spectrum of emotions. They were hard to read, and Clair sent a reply to the least crazy-sounding, telling them that she was okay and would call soon.

Before she did that, though, she had to know what her mother had been reading about her.

This was the most difficult thing of all.

For starters, the Abstainers thought she was a hero. Clair Hill was the girl who killed d-mat—never mind what she herself thought about that. She didn't want to be a hero, particularly not for a cause she didn't agree with. All she had wanted to do was stop Improvement and save Libby.

Then there were friends and acquaintances who felt betrayed by what they thought were her actions. Some called her a liar, others a dangerous fearmonger. To them she was the girl who killed d-mat for personal fame. Those who had supported her now felt that she had made them look foolish. It was going to take a lot to rebuild that trust.

Clair searched for word from her closest friends. Ronnie was home in Florida, anxiously surfing the Air through her augs, but Tash was in a jungle in South America, hacking her way through vines to get back to civilization. Tash had sent Clair a message that said simply, “You broke the world WTF!?!” Ronnie was ominously silent. Clair was too nervous to send them messages of her own, for fear of what her friends might say back.

The peacekeepers, at least, had issued a statement saying that the testimony offered earlier by someone claiming to be Clair Hill, effectively a confession that she had made up everything about Improvement, was false and that the real Clair Hill was now reinstated. That saved her the trouble of explaining about dupes and how she had become one—because that still sounded crazy, even in the world as it was now—and it made her numbers pop even more. But the dupes and Improvement and Ant Wallace and the station and anything that really mattered were all being swamped by the much more important crisis the world had to deal with, which was that it had effectively ground to a halt.

Hospitals were no longer just a jump away, and neither were peacekeepers or refuges for those under threat. And what about prisons, some of which had no doors at all, only d-mat booths: How were the guards going to get in and out? What about people working in space? What about the crashlanders trapped somewhere called the Cave of Crows over a mile below the surface of the Earth, where they had held their latest ball?

How was Clair going to fix
this
?

Someone took her hand. She blinked out of her infield and realized that the real world had changed around her. The seats formerly occupied by Sargent and Forest were now empty. Sitting next to Clair in the interview room's fourth chair was the one person who hadn't bombarded her for explanations via the Air.

Jesse
.

Her throat felt so full and tight that she couldn't speak.

“Are you all right?” He was studying her face. She didn't know what it showed, but if it was anything like the emotional turmoil she felt inside, she was amazed he could bear to look at her. “I tried calling your name and you didn't seem to hear—oh, okay.”

She had pulled him to her and wrapped her free hand around his neck. It felt so good to be close to him, so safe and familiar. He had lost his world, and so in a very real way had she. But they still had each other. She wasn't alone, for all that LM Kingdon might think she was.

He returned the hug with both arms. His chin rested heavily on her shoulder and she closed her eyes, breathing into his hair. Again she found herself fighting back tears. They had been through so much. They had
survived
so much. It felt like it really meant something. And it did. They wouldn't have gotten this far without working well together.

She pulled back from him and looked down at their hands. It amazed her how tightly they were holding on to each other, and how right it felt that she could cling to him and he didn't mind.

“Sorry I didn't notice you,” she said. “Lots to catch up on.”

He nodded. “Too much. I've hardly looked at my augs. I'll never respond to everyone. Apparently we're famous now.”

She had seen his name mentioned in the Air almost as often as hers.

“I know,” she said, but without any sense of accomplishment. This kind of popularity was what Libby had wanted, not her. It wasn't something she had earned. She was under no illusions that the people talking about her knew or cared about who she actually was.

Also, being famous wasn't going to stop them from being killed this time.

“Are you going to make an announcement?” he said.

“Me?” Her heart sank at the thought. “Can't you do it?”

“People probably think I'm a joke. The last thing they saw me saying was . . . well, you know.”

That you had a crush on me for years
, Clair didn't say,
and I barely noticed you
. More fuel for the Clair-is-a-bitch crowd.

Jesse looked so anxious, so uncertain, that her heart ached. She kissed him to put that ache to rest, and because she wanted to. The world was ending. Zep might or might not be dead. Her friends hated her, and god only knew when she'd ever go home. But he was here, and he tasted like spearmint. She hoped her breath wasn't too awful—and then, for a wonderful moment, she wasn't thinking at all.

When they pulled apart, her heart was pounding. How had he learned to kiss like that?

“Uh, I'm not sure if we won or lost,” she said, struggling to bring her thoughts back to the present.

“Won, definitely,” he said, pulling at the collar of his orange jumpsuit. He looked as flushed as she felt. “Improvement is finito. Wallace, too.”

She didn't know how much he knew about the space station and what had happened up there. It was a conversation she didn't want to have.

“And d-mat? Is that finished too?”

He looked uncertain again. “Abstainer, remember?”

“But you've used it now. It wasn't so bad, was it?”

“Only because I was forced to. Given a choice . . .”

“You're still you,” she said. “I don't understand the problem.”

“I'm still me,” he said. “Maybe that's just it. It hasn't changed my feelings on this or anything.”

There was an awkward silence.

“Let's not get stuck on this,” he said.

He was right. There were more important things.

“I'm trying to figure out what happens next,” she said, not wanting to raise bringing back Zep or Libby while Forest might be listening. “What have the PKs told you?”

“Well,
apparently
they're moving us,” he said with his usual suspicion of authority. “They say they've got some kind of ultrasecure barracks in Washington, where they're taking everyone involved in the case. Hopefully not to vanish us into some bottomless pit, never to be seen again.”

“Why take us anywhere at all? No, scratch that.” She understood. The peacekeepers really were treating this seriously if they were packing up all their witnesses and getting them as far from VIA HQ as possible. “
How
are they moving us?”

“I don't know. They didn't say. By road, I guess.”

She didn't like that thought. The memory of being chased across the back roads of California was still vivid and painful.

“I'm not sure I want to,” she said.

“Me either,” he responded, and as he kept talking she realized that he misunderstood that she'd meant going by road versus going
at all
. “I think they should just cut us loose. We've done nothing wrong. We don't know who the dupes really are or what they want. We don't know who the psycho killer is who's pretending to be my dad—but at least they know now that he wasn't a murderer or a terrorist. Dad just wanted . . . just wanted me to be . . .”

Jesse looked down and his hair fell forward again.

“It's okay,” she said, and immediately regretted it. Nothing about their situation was
okay
.

He shook his head but didn't look up.

“They've declared him dead, you know,” he said. “They've given up on him. But I know what I saw . . . what
we
saw, on the station . . . and I don't know what to think. Would he let us bring him back if we could find him again? Would we be allowed to?”

Clair frowned, wondering what he was doing even thinking along those lines. Maybe someone had put the possibility of resurrection into Jesse's head just like Sargent had with her. Were they being tested, somehow? If they said the wrong thing, would they be dropped into that bottomless pit in Washington and never let out? The door opened behind them, and Sargent herself leaned in. “We're leaving. Did Jesse tell you? I'll give you a minute if you like and then I'll come back and get you.”