“I want to talk to him again,” she said, coming to an instant decision. “I want your father to tell me everything he thinks he knows.”
“Uh . . . I don’t think he’s going to like that idea—”
“I don’t care. Can you call him?”
“I tried. He’s not responding.”
“Try again. If he’s lying, he needs to take it back. And if he’s right, against all the odds, Libby might be in real danger.”
“I know,” said Jesse, “Libby and everyone else who used Improvement, but what can I do? What can you do? It was her choice to do it. Whether it works the way it’s supposed to or not, it’s on her, right?”
Clair was about to deny that she would ever abandon Libby like that when it truly struck her that she, too, was one of Improvement’s potential victims. If Dylan Linwood was right, she and Libby were in exactly the same boat.
“You look like hell, Clarabelle,” said Zep from behind her. “And no wonder.”
She turned, wondering if he was reading her mind. “What?”
“The video. I saw all of it except for when I was in transit. Fifty people have sent me the link since then. That’s the most popular Gordon the Gorgon has ever been. You too. It’s popping in the wake of the crashlander thing.”
“Oh, great,” said Clair.
“Soon you’ll be famouser than famous—until some cat meme takes your place, anyway.” He actually looked jealous.
“Don’t. It’s not helping.” She pressed her palms hard into her temples, wishing she could squeeze out a solution. Her infield was full of bumps, distracting her.
“Do you think it’s real?” Zep asked in quieter tones. “Nine girls in six months?”
“It can’t be, can it?” said Jesse. “There’d be no missing that kind of correlation.”
“Not if no one’s looking. . . . Hey, you’re the Stainer kid. Son of the lunatic himself.”
Zep held out his hand, and Jesse warily shook it.
“Nice entrance back there, by the way,” Zep said. “Bet you’re looking forward to going home and facing the music.”
“I’m going there now,” said Jesse. He was speaking more to Clair than Zep. “I’m really sorry it went like this.”
“It’s not over yet,” she said. “I’m going with you.”
“What?” Zep looked from Clair to Jesse and back again. “Are you crazy?”
“Maybe, and maybe he is too. But I can’t leave it here.” Fury and frustration were making her hands shake. “He’s going to talk to me properly, and I’m not leaving until he does.”
“All right,” said Jesse, looking resigned to an awkward replay of the previous night’s confrontation. “I’ll leave the bike here. We’ll walk together.”
“You don’t have to do that,” said Clair.
“Don’t worry about the bike,” he said, misunderstanding her concern. “I’ve got a spare if this is stolen. That’s the trouble with Dad’s plan to reeducate the world. He can only make so many things, which makes them valuable, which makes people copy and fab them so anyone can have their own. It’s stupid. He’s stupid.”
Jesse stopped himself. He had wrapped a chain through the front wheel and fastened it to a water fountain.
“Screw school,” said Zep. “I’m going too. This is for Libby, right?”
Relieved, Clair could only nod.
18
SHE SCANNED HER infield as they headed for the school gate. The small crowd had completely dispersed, and the drone had gone with it. There was no physical sign that anything untoward had happened at school that day. The aftershocks were all semantic, with Clair’s lenses still full of strangers bumping her, her news grabs filling up with related topics and caption updates, and nags from both of her parents. They had seen the video, like everyone else. She expected another nag the moment they noticed her leaving school.
She sent them a quick note telling them she was all right and would explain later. She said the same thing to Ronnie and Tash and deleted everything else, including the blinking call path from her string-of-q’s stalker. She concentrated on matching Jesse long pace for long pace as they left school and headed up Woodward. His head was down, so she couldn’t see his eyes through his hair, just his mouth and the unhappy shape it made.
“You think Dad is some kind of mad bigot,” Jesse said, “but he wasn’t always that way. Mom used d-mat, and they were married for ages before they had me. She came from Australia. Her family still lives there, but we don’t have anything to do with them now.”
“So he used to be cool,” said Zep. “That doesn’t help us now, does it?”
“I just mean there’s a reason why he’s the way he is. One night when I was very young, there was an outage all down the west coast, as far inland as Utah. It was the tail end of a run of errors that stretched from the superconductor grid right back to a particular powersat, where some astronaut had messed up the routine maintenance a week earlier. There are safeguards against this kind of thing, of course, buffers, backups, blah-blah, but in this case they all failed. Tens of thousands of transits were interrupted. I have the exact number somewhere. The outage lasted less than a second, but that was long enough.”
“Long enough for what?” asked Zep.
“Nineteen people died that night,” Jesse said. “My mother was one of them.”
“Dude, that sucks.”
“It does,” Clair agreed, feeling a modicum of understanding, then, perhaps even sympathy for Jesse’s father. But the bulk of her feelings were for Jesse. She couldn’t begin to imagine what it would be like to lose her mother that way, literally in the blink of an eye.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“You don’t have to be sorry.” Jesse was emerging from his shell of hair as he talked, first his nose, then his eyes, which gleamed in the afternoon light. “You just have to understand. VIA was keen to pin the blame on someone else. It was a terrorist action, they said. WHOLE, specifically. They never revealed how WHOLE had done it—for fear of copycats, they said. It didn’t change what happened, and that’s why Dad would say that d-mat can never be trusted. Because you can’t trust the people who are supposed to make it safe.
“You might think he’s nothing but an asshole,” Jesse concluded, “but Mom’s death is at the heart of everything he does. All he really wants is for everyone to be safe. He wants to protect me like he couldn’t protect her.”
“You make him sound like a saint,” said Zep.
“Oh, he’s definitely not one of those. You saw the video, right?”
Clair’s attention was tugged away by two new notifications that had appeared in her infield. One was the q’s again. The other was a bump from Libby.
“You just can’t help yourself, can you?” the latter said. “You just won’t leave well enough alone.”
So, thought Clair, she had seen the video too.
“I’m sorry,” Clair sent back. “I was worried.”
The return bump was almost instantaneous. “You don’t trust me.”
“I do, I swear. I tried Improvement like you told me to, but it didn’t do anything.”
“I don’t believe you. You’re jealous. You want to ruin it for everyone, just like Dylan Linwood.”
“What if he’s right?” Clair bumped back, acknowledging the risk she was taking by even raising the possibility with Libby. “What if Improvement has hurt you somehow?”