“Safe from who?” asked Clair. “Have these guys done something we should be concerned about?”
“If you’re in WHOLE, you’re automatically on the PKs’ watch list,” said Jesse.
“Yes, but we’re not in WHOLE. Why are we hiding?”
“They’re WHOLE?” Zep asked, eyes wide.
Big-Ears came back with bottles of water for the four of them, and a fifth for Ray, who appeared from the front of the house to give a status report.
“Drones still flying,” Ray said. “The fire’s out, though. So that’s something.”
“My father is dead,” said Jesse. “That’s something.”
There was a moment’s awkward silence.
An image struck Clair out of nowhere, perhaps inspired by Arabelle’s crippled feet. It was from a cheap-scare story Clair had been told when she was younger, about a girl who’d gone into a booth but not arrived at her destination. Her pattern had gotten hung up in the back end of a file system and wasn’t discovered until someone stumbled across it during a routine cleanup twenty-five years later. VIA brought her back perfectly well and whole, but by then her parents had died and all her friends had young families of their own. The girl found herself in an entirely new world, cut off from her life like a time traveler. So the story went.
Clair was beginning to feel that way. This shadow world of broken families, sabotage, and conspiracy wasn’t the world she wanted to live in. It wasn’t even supposed to exist. The world she knew had regulations and AIs to make sure of that. Billions of people traveled by d-mat every day without evidence of harm. Arabelle’s feet were horrible to look at, and it made Clair shudder now to think of them, but they weren’t evidence of anything, really. Maybe she had been conceived near one of the old radioactive waste dumps before they were cleaned out. Maybe the feet were fakes.
WHOLE was the one with the track record of social disruption and violence, not VIA. And now we’ve seen their faces, added the part of Clair that enjoyed too many bad horror movies.
But it didn’t make sense. Why would WHOLE blow up Dylan Linwood when he had gone to such efforts to expose Improvement? If anything he had said was true, it actually made more sense, crazy though it seemed, that VIA might have been behind his death.
Clair wasn’t willing to go that far. She had enough to trouble her as it was. If improvement was hurting people, and someone was trying to cover it up . . . and if Dylan had been targeted by this someone because of his stunt . . . why hadn’t Clair been too?
The question rocked her. Dylan Linwood might have masterminded the stunt in the principal’s office, but she had been part of it as well. She had been asking questions. Was there a bomb waiting at her house too?
Not since childhood had she felt such an intense yearning to see her parents. It was like an adrenaline hit times ten.
She drank heavily from the bottle and swished the water around her mouth to get rid of the taste of vomit and ash. Ray resumed his watch at the front door. No one seemed in a hurry to go anywhere, except Clair.
She wanted to find out more about Improvement, but that wasn’t worth anyone else getting killed or hurt. Looking after herself and Zep had to be her first priority now. She would decide what happened to them, not Gemma and Arabelle.
“How are you feeling, Zep?” she asked. “Up for a walk?”
“I can’t feel my leg at all now, so I guess that’s a yes.”
“Good.” She stood up and held out her hand.
“About time,” he said.
22
“YOU’RE LEAVING?” ASKED Jesse, blinking at her in surprise.
“Come if you want to,” said Zep. “But we’re not sticking around any longer. You’re not going to stop us, are you?”
Big-Ears looked up at Zep, who was easily a foot taller and wider than him.
“Uh . . . wait.”
Clair and Zep were already on their way to the front door, where Ray barred their way with his arms outspread.
“Come on,” said Zep. “You’re not doing your reputation any favors.”
“We are the good guys. You don’t want to meet the bad guys.”
From behind them, deeper in the house, came a shrill, electric tone. Ray turned to stare up the hallway, eyebrows bunching in puzzlement.
“It’s too early,” he said.
Clair understood. That sound came from a telephone. The antique landline she had seen earlier was probably the only way to get signals in and out of the Faraday shield.
But that wasn’t her concern. While Ray was distracted, she ducked under his arm and lunged for the door. It opened smoothly.
“Hey—”
Zep pushed him to one side and followed Clair out into the light. The smoke-dimmed sun was bright. Daylight hues stirred in her lenses: greens, blues, and whites. Patches winked and flashed as she reconnected to the Air. Out of the Faraday cage, into the fire.
“Which way?” asked Zep.
“We came from the left,” she said, leading him up the path and onto the street. Ray didn’t follow, and neither did Gemma and Big-Ears, who had joined him. Jesse craned past all of them, curious or concerned enough to come see what was going on.
“You’re making a mistake,” Gemma called.
“I really don’t think so,” Clair said.
Gemma stayed just inside the door, where the sun barely touched her, and where, presumably, there was no possibility of a drone seeing her. There was a pistol in her hand, held close to her chest. It wasn’t pointed at Clair, but there was no mistaking its meaning.
It’s just a bluff, Clair told herself, even as she wondered why Gemma needed to bluff. What did it matter to WHOLE if she and Zep left right then?
“Let’s split up,” said Zep. “I’ll go that way.”
“Clair!”
She hesitated. That was Jesse’s voice.
“The phone call was for you!” he shouted.
“So take a message!”
Zep was already limping away from her, raising his middle finger to Gemma as he went.
Gemma raised the gun. She didn’t fire, but now Jesse had seen it. He stared at the gun in shock and horror, which reassured Clair that Gemma had to be bluffing. The gun was out of character, or at least something Jesse had never seen before.
“Go after them,” said Gemma to Ray and Big-Ears. “Don’t let them do something stupid.”
Clair ran. Away from WHOLE and away from Zep.
The nearest corner was three houses away. She reached it in seconds and turned hard, skidding on the ash-slippery pavement.
Something whined in the sky far above. Clair glanced up and saw an eye-in-the-sky drone hanging in the air above her. Drones ran on crowd sourcing, directed from place to place by community service volunteers who tapped into EITS feeds as the whim took them. Events of interest, criminal or not, drew in watchers until a threshold was reached and peacekeepers were summoned.
Clair waved her hands above her head to attract the attention of the drone. It noticed her but didn’t raise any audible alarms. Someone running along a straight road was much less interesting than the fire burning a couple of blocks over. Lots of people waved at drones.
Clair turned right instead of left on Jesse’s street and ran away from the smoldering wreckage as quickly as she could. Her second sprint for the day was taking its toll, thanks in part to all the soot in her lungs. She threw a quick glance over her shoulder to check if anyone was following her and saw Big-Ears take the corner behind her, head down, eyes glaring under furious brows at her.