Crashland (5 page)

There was another way of getting around that wasn't d-mat
.

A RISING CLAMOR
from everyone in the room indicated that she wasn't the only one startled by this development.

“Ah,” said a high-pitched voice that wasn't surprised at all. “The shadow road. I wondered.”

She looked around. It was Devin who had spoken, aloud for the first time.

“OneEarth has its own network,” PK Forest explained. “We call it Net One, but it is referred to as ‘the shadow road' by conspiracy theorists.”
Flick
. The merest glance, acknowledging Devin. “For emergencies only, completely isolated from the main trunks and with its own independently serviced control software.”

“So you can be reasonably sure Wallace never touched it.” Devin nodded knowingly.

“Exactly,” said Sargent. “It's not as extensive or as fast as anything VIA had, or as reliable, and it's already running well above its usual carrying capacity, so don't expect any miracles.”

“‘Needs must when the devil drives,'” Forest said. “This is the first stop of two, intended to throw off anyone who might be watching. We will be here for a minute or so until the next transit window opens. You will be reconnected to the Air at the other end, but all geographical data will be scrambled. The safe operation of Net One is something we are keeping secret for now. The barracks is in Crystal City, not far from the center of Washington, and sudden jumps in location would be a giveaway.”

In Washington, Clair promised herself, she would renew her efforts to find Q. If she could help bring d-mat back to everyone, maybe that would restore the world's faith in her.

Jesse suddenly pounded the arms of his chair.

“Don't you people ever
ask
? Fuck!”

Everyone stared at him, and he retreated back into the seat a little.

“I'm sorry, but not everyone thinks this a
good
thing. Maybe taking d-mat offline for a while is a positive step, giving people time to think about what it really means, how it's being used, without taking it for granted like they usually do. . . .”

He sounded like his father—a heretic in the church of d-mat—and for a second Jesse even looked like him. There was a defiant jut to his jaw, and a fire in his eyes that Clair had never seen before. She stared awkwardly elsewhere, not wanting to look at him like the others did. They clearly thought he was crazy for having objections to something they all thought was normal.

There was one other person who wasn't watching him, though, and that was PK Sargent. She was staring at Clair with an intense expression, as though she had just realized something important. Clair was about to ask what it was when her dupe broke the awkward silence.

“Charlie says hello,” she said, kicking backward with both feet against the floor and sending her chair rolling headlong toward Clair. She ducked under PK Drader's widespread arms and kicked again, accelerating.

Clair barely had time to raise her hands when she and the dupe collided, spilling them both onto the floor. She landed on her bad elbow and hissed in pain. Clutching her arm to her chest, she tried to roll away from the dupe, but how could she possibly outrun
herself
? The chain of the cuffs caught Clair around the neck and for an instant she was being strangled.

Booted feet surrounded them. Drader and Forest pulled the dupe up and away from Clair, one on each arm. Clair wrenched free and scrabbled backward across the floor, clutching her throat. The dupe's face was like nothing she had ever seen—her own features twisted in a snarl that looked barely human. Clair couldn't tell if the dupe was angry or in pain. The sound she made was incoherent, a forceful groan through grinding teeth.

Then, with a loud bang, the front of the dupe's orange jumpsuit exploded.

Someone screamed. People scattered to all corners of the booth. Clair was hit on the side of her face by something hot and wet, and the air was suddenly full of stinking yellow smoke, through which it was hard to make out anything or anyone. She reached out for something to hang on to, then found Jesse. He was on his feet already and helped her to hers, blinking and gaping with shock.

The dupe lay flat on her back in the center of the booth with one arm bent awkwardly underneath her. The midriff of her jumpsuit was a gaping hole, and judging by what Clair could barely glance at, so was the midriff of the dupe.

“Did someone shoot her?” Jesse said over the sound of coughing. “It looks like she blew up.”

Clair cautiously approached the body, covering her mouth with one hand. A tiny voice whispered in her ears, a voice saying words she couldn't quite make out. She tilted her head and blocked her ear with one finger. It seemed to be coming from her augs. Something about
didn't see that coming
.

Was it issuing from the body?

The corpse twitched, and Clair jumped backward, bumping into Devin. Blood dripped from his hair.

“She did blow up,” he said. “Can't have been a real bomb or the shadow road would've picked it up. Chemical and fat stores, probably, triggered by the body's natural electricity. Didn't know dupes could do that.”

Clair stared at him in disbelief. He sounded
fascinated
. That was almost as horrible as what lay on the floor in front of her.

Around them, the other occupants of the booth were regaining their feet. Incredibly no one was hurt. Covered in gore, and Tilly/Xia had thrown up, but not actually hurt.

“Didn't someone once say the dupes were booby-trapped?” Jesse wiped his hands on his jumpsuit, succeeding only in smearing blood everywhere. “Guess that's one way of getting rid of the evidence.”

“There are no secrets anymore,” said Devin. “It doesn't make sense.”

Clair felt sick to the core at the sight of her own dead body, but she couldn't look away. It was almost too horrible. The dupe's face was locked in a terrible grimace that looked
pained
the longer Clair stared at it.

“She went for me,” Clair said. “She tried to hurt me, maybe kill me.”

“Again, why not earlier?” asked Devin, scratching his head and looking even paler than usual when his fingers came away red. “Unless something triggered the booby trap, and she decided to use it to her advantage. But what was the trigger . . . ?”

Shock and awe. Never gets old, just keeps changing faces
. . . .

“Can anybody else hear that?” asked Clair. The whispering was still there, one voice talking in a constant stream at the edge of her hearing, the words just beyond understanding.

The dupe's body twitched again, making everyone jump backward. Devin returned to his corner, well away from the corpse.

A droplet of sweat trickled down Clair's back between the orange fabric of her prison jumpsuit and her skin.

“This is vile,” said Jesse. “Can't we just get out of here?”

“There is nowhere to go except by Net One,” said PK Forest, his blank expression seeming even more out of place in the context of such chaos. “We are in a relay station one mile underground. We will be on our way any second now, though, straight to Crystal City this time. We have priority, under the circumstances.”

“No,” said Sargent, speaking for the first time since they had left New York. “Wait, we shouldn't—”

chug

The room quaked again.

chug

Sargent put herself in front of Clair as the dupe made a sound that could have been a cough and then exploded a second time.

Clair screamed in a mixture of anger and horror. There was more blood, more smoke, and if possible she felt even more of a shock that such a thing could possibly keep happening
to her own body
. Several sharp pinpricks pierced her exposed skin, and she heard cries of pain as well as fright from her fellow travelers.

“What the
hell
?” PK Drader cried out.

“Secondary detonation,” Sargent said, pressing Clair as far from the body as she could. “Common terror tactic. Triggered by d-mat, I think.”

Clair peered past her, even though she didn't really want to see. The body was now on its side, and this time it had burst open down its chest and face, putting splintered ribs and skull on display. Clair glanced hastily down at her jumpsuit and saw a tiny thornlike protrusion sticking out of the orange fabric. Bone, she realized with disgust. She hastily brushed it off, grateful to Sargent for protecting her from the worst of it. All around her, people were making sounds of discomfort as they removed the ghastly splinters. Tilly/Xia retched again.

“Your eye, PK Sargent,” Devin called out from his corner. “You might want to do something about that.”

Sargent touched her face in puzzlement, and Clair saw a bone fragment sticking out of Sargent's tear duct like a malignant eyelash.

“Doesn't that hurt?” asked Jesse.

Sargent just stared at him.
Shock
, Clair thought. She had been all business before; maybe it was catching up with her now. Clair sympathized.

“Here, let me,” Clair said, tugging Sargent's shoulder gently downward. “You're no good to anyone half-blind.”

Sargent resisted for an instant, then gave in. She looked up and away as Clair opened the lids of the injured eye with one hand and with the other reached for the splinter.

“I'll try to be gentle.” That was what her mother would have told her.

Sargent didn't even wince when the splinter came out.

“There.”

“Thank you,” said Sargent stiffly. She blinked and a single red tear trickled down her cheek.

“How did you know that the shadow road was going to make it explode again?” Clair asked her, carefully not thinking of the dupe as
her
anymore.

“It made sense. Any unexpected transit would mean the living dupe had been discovered, triggering the explosive response. I should have thought of it sooner.”

“That explains why Libby's body didn't blow up in the train or submarine,” said Jesse, flicking away the last of his bony splinters. His jumpsuit looked like he had been wrestling with a cactus. “I wondered about that.”

“The second blast did more than frighten,” said Devin. Everyone else was hugging the walls, staying as far from the body as possible in case it blew up a third time. He alone approached it, extending the toe of one delicate shoe and shifting the body slightly. The floor beneath the dead dupe was a bloody mess. Through the hole where carpet had been Clair saw a cracked mirror surface. The booth was damaged.

“If this had happened before the last jump,” Devin said, echoing Clair's own worried thought, “and you had stopped us jumping, PK Sargent, we could've been stuck a mile underground.”

Sargent's ears turned a shocked red. “I didn't know. I was afraid of what a second jump would trigger.”

“Not an unreasonable fear,” said PK Forest.
Flick
. The doors were opening. “Of no consequence now. We have arrived.”

Through the door came a peacekeeper dressed in body armor, followed by the sound of alarms.

“I THOUGHT YOU
said these barracks were secure,” said Jesse to PK Drader.

Drader was a solidly built man of average height, with crooked shoulders, one higher than the other, a round face, and slightly protruding ears. His chin was dark with stubble and his uniform had seen better days. Under the fresh blood spatter there were smears of building dust and soot from the action in New York.

“They were supposed to be secure,” he said with a questioning look at the PK who'd just come in.

“We came under guerrilla attack on our northern fence line the moment your patterns were processed,” explained the PK. “We've identified six known dupes and spotted another three unknowns. Crystal City is on full lockdown.” She saw the mess in the center of the room. “Shit. This is one of only three operational cages. Get these kids out of here and I'll call the techs in to see if they can fix it.”

Clair bristled at “kids,” but PK Forest was already hustling her and Jesse out of the room ahead of him. PK Sargent followed, looking around her at the blank, gray walls as though expecting to be somewhere else, with Devin tagging along behind her. Clair looked over her shoulder. The prisoners in orange suits looked pale and lost, stuck in the booth with the body and PK Drader. The peacekeeper nodded at Jesse and raised a hand in farewell. Jesse didn't respond.

Clair refused to feel sorry for Tilly or Xia or however she thought of herself now. So what if she had turned herself in? She shouldn't have done what she did in the first place. Who knew what the real Tilly might have grown up to become but now wouldn't? Unless somehow Clair could find her pattern and reactivate her, too . . .

Was that her mission now, Clair wondered—to hunt down all the lost girls and boys and bring them back? At what point did she draw the line?

“This way.” PK Forest hurried them along a series of corridors that looked identical to the ones in New York. Only the alarm was different, a piercing, repetitive siren that made her want to cover her ears. At least the air was fresh, a welcome change from the foulness they'd left behind.

“Where are we going?” Clair asked, filled with the same anger that had fueled her on the station. The dupes had attacked her in a secret d-mat booth in peacekeeper HQ, and now they had come after her in Crystal City. They weren't going to let her escape easily. Doing nothing in response was only going to get her killed. “What are we going to do?”

She had originally planned to look for Q. Now the dupes were the bigger problem. But how was she going to stop them? She was just a sixteen-year-old girl with a sore elbow, a bruised throat, and a boy she liked but was still getting to know, a long way from anywhere familiar.

“Someone? Anyone?” She wasn't going to be ignored.