Twinmaker (18 page)

“I’m not going anywhere unless you tell us where,” Clair said.

“Escalon. We have a cache there. Once we’re away from here, we’ll have more options.”

“Like what?” asked Clair.

“I’ll tell you,” Gemma said, “if you tell me who your hacker friend is.”

“Uh, that’s harder than you think.”

“Well, the same goes for us.”

Clair looked at Zep, who shrugged.

“All right,” she said. “That far. Then we talk again.”

“Agreed,” said Arabelle.

“I haven’t agreed to anything,” said Jesse.

“You’re not staying behind.” There was steel in the crippled woman’s voice. “I won’t let you.”

“Why not?” he asked her, fists balling in frustration. “Why won’t you tell me what’s going on?”

The phone’s shrill ring cut the argument short. Ray called Clair’s name from the hallway in puzzlement.

“It’s that friend of yours again. Says it’s urgent.”

Clair squeezed past Arabelle and took the phone from him while everyone watched her. “Hello?”

“Surveillance has changed in your vicinity,” said the voice of “q,” sounding faintly tinny.

“What kind of change?”

“All EITS drones within camera range have been detoured along alternate routes. Not only that, but crowd-sourcing allocations for the surrounding area have been reduced to zero, so the drones are flying on internal reckoning only.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that the Manteca Municipal Authority is effectively unmonitored for two blocks around you, and the blind spot is widening.”

Clair bit her lip. “Someone’s up to something, and they don’t want to be seen doing it. Any sign of
him
?”

“None, but I too am blinded by the lack of data. I can’t tell you anything until I can hack into a satellite or something.”

“Okay. Thanks for letting us know. We’re heading out now.”

“Be careful, Clair.”

“I will.”

CLAIR PUT THE handset back in its cradle and hurried back to the living room. Zep was waiting for her, looking

rumpled and rubbing his chafed wrists, but at least he was free. Jesse had gone reluctantly with Gemma, Big-Ears, and Arabelle to the back of the house. Only Ray remained, back at his post by the front door.

Zep limped across the room and took Clair into his arms.

“My hero,” he said.

“I’m glad you’re okay.”

“Me too, frankly.”

Her laugh was choked, but she told herself that was because he stank of stale sweat and tension. She leaned into him, grateful for his solidity and unafraid for once if anyone saw it.
What happens behind a Faraday shield
, she thought,
stays behind a Faraday shield
.

“You haven’t hit on me once today,” she said.

“I’m not the one with the gun in my pocket, in case you’d forgotten.”

She laughed and held him more tightly still.

“Don’t tell me you’re disappointed,” he said.

“Can I be honest?” she said. “I’ve been chased around the world and shot at. My parents were threatened. Libby might have brain damage. You’re hurt. I can’t even think about anything else at the moment.”

“Maybe when this is over—”

“Don’t say it.”

“Why not? I mean it.”

He brushed an errant curl from her forehead. She kept her cheek pressed against his chest, suppressing a sudden gulp of emotion.

“I just don’t get you, Zep. Why would you
ever
choose me over Libby?”

“Are you really asking that?”

She shrugged, not sure what she wanted him to say.

“Libby could never do what you just did,” he said. “You faced up to a pack of terrorists and got them to do what you wanted. You know how to figure things out. You can handle yourself. And you know what’s right, too, or else we’d have had this conversation weeks ago.”

She looked up at him, not sure she’d heard him correctly. “Really?”

He rolled his eyes. “Hell yes. You’re fine as limes, girl. Too good for me, if you really want to know the truth. Look at how I sat there like a useless lump while you did all the negotiating.”

“Don’t,” she said, not wanting to hear him put himself down.

“See? You’re always saying that.”

She pulled out of his arms, although doing so betrayed every muscle in her body.

The phone shrilled once more, then went silent.

“That’s the signal,” said Ray, joining them. “Come on.”

They followed him up the hallway.

“Just tell me,” said Zep, “who
is
this friend of yours who keeps on calling? None of your usual troop could hack their way out of a paper bag. Well, maybe Ronnie, but—”

“Quiet,” said Gemma. She was peering through the curtains at the rear of the house.

Big-Ears had his hand on the latch of the door that led out into the yard.

“I’ll tell you later, Zep,” Clair whispered to him. Of the rest, she asked, “What are you waiting for?”

“Our ride,” Gemma said.

Clair couldn’t see anything remotely mobile past Gemma’s head. The yard was long and narrow. It was crowded with ornamental fruit trees and flower beds, creating an irregular canopy through which a redbrick path meandered. The path terminated in a gate. Beyond the gate was a lane of some kind—a relic of the original urban layout, back when there were roads for cars to drive on.

The phone rang a second time, and Big-Ears opened the door.

Now Clair could see it, after a fashion. There was something in the lane, hulking low and silent. Whatever it was, the starlight didn’t seem to touch it. It had edges but no visible sides, just an outline. It wasn’t even a silhouette. On the other side of the lane was a tree, and Clair could clearly see its trunk though the thing that stood between it and her.

Big-Ears edged out into the yard, followed by Gemma. Ray indicated that Clair, Zep, and Jesse should go next, with him and Arabelle bringing up the rear. Clair lined up with the rest, glad that someone else was making the decisions. Jesse didn’t protest, perhaps feeling the same way.

The air was fresh and lively, scented with the sea and late-flowering plants. The only sound was the whining of Arabelle’s chair and the rustling of leaves. It was so dark under the arbor that Clair could barely see Gemma’s back. Patches winked to life in her lenses, but she had more important things to concentrate on just then, such as putting one foot in front of the other and not tripping over the edge of a loose brick.

The shots took her completely by surprise.

The first dropped Big-Ears like something had reached up from the shadowy ground and pulled him down. One moment he was in the lead, waving with a cupped hand for them to hurry, the next he was gone.

The second shot might have been an echo but for the way Gemma jerked. The bullet struck her right shoulder and buried deep, gifting her with all its considerable momentum. She spun 180 degrees to face Clair, fumbled for something at her waist, and then she, too, fell to the ground.

Clair was already ducking into the shadows and raising the pistol she didn’t know how to use. People were shouting. She didn’t hear the words. Two more shots cracked the night, and this time she saw the muzzle flashes, bright-yellow flames that came and went faster than lightning. The shooter was on the roof of the safe house, aiming down along the yard. A bullet whizzed over her head; then Zep was on her, pushing her down, under cover.

Ray was returning fire from her right. Clair rolled over under Zep’s protective weight, planted her elbows on the ground, and braced the pistol in both hands. She had seen plenty of movies. Aim and pull the trigger—what could be easier?

Chances were, she told herself, that she wouldn’t hit anyone anyway. But she had to try before someone else was shot.

More muzzle flashes from above. The shooter had moved. She adjusted her aim and pulled the trigger. The pistol boomed much louder than she had expected, and the kick was like catching a ball from a great height, hard on both her wrists. She fired a second time, and then red crosshairs appeared in her vision with an arrow pointing left. She shifted the pistol and the arrow shifted with it. When it was centered on the crosshairs, she fired again and kept firing until the magazine was exhausted and her hands had lost all feeling.

Ringing silence fell. Ray darted out of the shadows and scrambled onto the fence and from there to the roof. No one fired at him. A spotlight flared behind her, casting the scene into crisp black-and-white relief.

There was a body sprawled against the gutter; it had slid there and gotten stuck, leaving a red smear in its wake. Ray approached warily and shoved it with the sole of his boot.

The body tumbled off the roof, hit the ground, and sprawled faceup in the glare. The shooter had been hit in the stomach and throat. His flesh was ripped and bruised.

Did I do that?
It seemed incredible to Clair. Out of panic and darkness had come this unexpected reality, sickening her to the stomach.

There was worse to come. It was Dylan Linwood’s battered face that stared back at her, a single bloodred eye gaping like something from an Edgar Allan Poe story. She knew that it would haunt her dreams forever.

The cry Jesse emitted was all pain and surprise. Even through Clair’s gunshot-deadened ears, she could hear the depths of his hurt. Ray dropped down next to the body and did his best to keep him away.

“We have to move,” Arabelle was saying. “Clair, you have to get up. Don’t freeze on us now.”

Why would she freeze on them? Because she might have killed Dylan Linwood? Clair didn’t know who should take credit for that—“q” most likely had guided her hand, via the gun’s sights. Anyway, the reason she wasn’t moving had nothing to do with Dylan Linwood.

“Move, you big lug,” she said to Zep, elbowing him in the belly. “It’s over.”

He didn’t move. She rolled half over and looked away too late.

The bullet that had narrowly missed her had caught him under the left ear, entering just behind his jaw and tearing a violent path through the base of his skull, destroying the top of his spinal column and sending fragments of bone and metal all through his brain. His right eye bulged as though someone had pushed at it from behind. His expression was one of absolute bewilderment.

Clair was covered in his blood and hadn’t even noticed.

“Come on,” said Gemma over the roaring in her ears, “or we’re leaving you behind.”

“NO,” SHE SAID. Her voice sounded like something ripped from the depths of her chest. She was moving without thinking, slithering out from under Zep’s body and brushing herself down, feeling his blood on her hands and hating herself for the instinctive revulsion she felt.

“That’s it. Come on.”

Gemma pulled at her, forced her to her feet for the second time that day. Clair fought her, not wanting to accept anything that was happening to her. She had seen Gemma fall to the ground, but now she was upright, bleeding from her shoulder, and very much alive. Why was she standing when Zep was not? Why was Clair?

“We can’t leave him,” she said, wrenching herself free.

“You really want to stay here and wait for the PKs? Two guns, two dead bodies, one murderer. That’ll wrap things up nicely for them. Couldn’t be simpler.”

Clair stood over Zep and told herself to do as the woman said. Her legs felt as unreliable as saplings in a storm, though. She could feel the world turning, rotating, uncaring. Her hands were still numb from firing at Dylan Linwood. The numbness was spreading in a wave to encompass her entire body.

Ray pushed past her, practically dragging Jesse to the lane. Two new people dressed in black came the other way, lifted Arabelle from her chair, and carried her after them.

The spotlight clicked off, leaving Zep’s and Dylan Linwood’s bodies in darkness.

As though the same switch were connected to a circuit in her head, Clair found herself moving, not consciously noting where or how, but moving all the same, tucking the pistol into her pocket and hurrying after the others. She didn’t want to be left behind.

The vehicle she had glimpsed before was still in the lane, a narrow, segmented, many-wheeled contraption the sides of which were slippery with illusions. Clair might have walked right into it but for the door open on its side. The space within was matte black and crammed full of people. Ray grabbed her under one arm and shoved her to the front. There was a space next to a young brown-haired boy who looked barely ten. He stared at the blood on her with wide eyes.

“Let’s go!” called Ray, slamming the door shut and falling into a space of his own.

The vehicle shifted beneath her and whined quietly through the darkness. The patches winked out. The vehicle was a Faraday cage like the safe house, safe from everyone outside. A trap for everyone inside.

“See any drones?” asked Ray, his voice carrying clearly over the electric engines.

“Clear,” said a small, thin-faced woman driving at the front of the cabin. She was dressed in black like the rest of them, with a close-shaved scalp visible under a full-vision helmet. Clair’s lenses synced automatically to a feed from the driver’s point of view, the only feed available. The vehicle was moving smoothly through suburbs covered by the eye-in-the-sky drones, weaving and curling around trees, benches, and water features. Dark colors and shapes swept down its sides like an urban waterfall, decreasing the likelihood that anyone outside would notice its passing.

“We’ll get away, don’t worry,” said the boy next to Clair. “The ATAC is camouflaged and the drones are dumb.”

Through the numbness of her senses she heard
attack
and must have looked confused.

“All-Terrain Active Camouflage vehicle,” he explained. Maybe he was talking out of nerves. He must have heard the gunshots. He could certainly see the blood. “Jesse’s dad designed it for us.”

“And now you’ve killed him,” said Jesse to everyone in the vehicle, breaking the silence of his emotional shutdown. “
Really
killed him. What happened—he got away the first time? One attempt wasn’t enough, so you had to have another crack at it?”

“He was firing at us,” said Ray. “Remember that?”