“Back to the hall,” he said, unashamed of his nakedness. “Safety in numbers.”
Clair reached down and pulled Q to her feet. She was whimpering and limp. Arcady’s rifle came to bear again.
“It’s okay,” she told him. “She’s a friend.”
“She’s dressed like one of them.”
That was true. The uniform of the dupes was a thick black bodysuit with hood pulled back. Maybe that was how they had gotten past the security systems: some kind of infrared camouflage.
“Q duped the dupes,” Clair said in a steady voice that barely sounded like her own. “She can explain for herself.”
53
BY THE TIME they were in the hall, Q’s hands were shaking, and her teeth were chattering. Arcady put her on a table at the center of a growing audience. Clair tore a sleeve off her farm shirt and tied it around Q’s bullet wound. The cloth immediately turned a bright, sodden red.
“Shock,” said Ray, examining her.
“Are you a doctor?” Arcady wasn’t watching anyone living. He was staring at a double line of bodies: dupes on one side, sentries on another. The body count was about equal, eleven in total. No Dylan Linwood among the dupes this time: his cover was blown. “That’s a flesh wound, nothing serious.”
“This has nothing to do with the bullet,” said Clair, finding it easier to argue with him now that he’d put on some pants. “I’ve seen it before. Her mind doesn’t fit Libby’s body. She needs to go back into a booth and d-mat out of here.”
“Sorry,” said Arcady, “but that’s not going to happen.”
“If she doesn’t, she might be permanently injured,” said Jesse, pressing through the crowd to stand on the other side of Libby’s body, opposite Clair. Her face grew warm. He was wearing pajama pants and no top, and his chest hair looked very dark against the paleness of his skin. “Just look at her. You can tell she hasn’t done it right.”
Arcady said, “What I mean is she can’t leave. We have no way of connecting to the outside world, even if we wanted to. No way at all.”
“Not true.” Q tried to sit up, but the pain was too great. Jesse helped her onto her elbows. “That’s how we got in here. By d-mat.”
“Aren’t you listening to me?” said Arcady again. “Our system is closed.”
“All systems are leaky. You receive weather reports and software updates, don’t you?”
“Yes, but—”
“The thin end of a wedge. One crack is all it takes. One line of code to widen the crack . . . one executable in your private net, one custom chip built from scratch in a booth, one transmitter to widen the bandwidth. . . . Step by step, they get in deep. It took them fewer than eight hours to slave your booths to their data. If I hadn’t been watching, I would never have been able to piggyback on their signal.”
“You led them to us,” said Arcady, rounding on Turner. His voice quivered with fury. “You brought them right to our doorstep.”
Turner was standing to one side with a blanket over his shoulders. He had been quiet ever since the principal purpose of the breach had been revealed to him. I’m looking for Turner. “I’m sorry. We had no idea they would respond so quickly.”
“And you could have stopped this,” Arcady accused Q. “You did nothing to warn us.”
“She’s here, isn’t she?” said Clair, taking Q’s hand in turn and holding it tightly, trying in vain to still the dancing muscles.
“Clair is right,” said Turner. “Q put herself at risk. Without her, we might all be dead now.” He shivered and pulled the blanket tighter around him.
“Or worse,” said Arcady. Then he shook his head. “Whatever. We’re pulling the plug on the damned machines. I’ll take an ax to them myself.”
“Not yet,” Jesse insisted. “First, she needs to go back into the booth. Otherwise, she might . . . I don’t know . . . die or something.”
A ring of worried, puzzled faces stared down at Q as she quivered and shook on the table. She was very pale, and her eyes were barely open. Jesse brushed sweat-dampened hair back from her forehead.
“How come the dupes can do this,” Ray asked, “and she can’t?”
“They’ve had more practice,” Clair guessed.
“I’ll give you . . . ,” Q started to say, but the twitching of her jaw muscles made it hard for her to continue, “. . . give you the woman . . . who was supposed to be here.”
Clair gripped her hand tighter. “Yes, of course. Someone must have been on their way already, in Libby’s body, otherwise Q couldn’t be here now. There’d be a parity violation.”
“So what?” asked Arcady.
“The dupes were expecting this other woman. They called her . . .” It was on the tip of her tongue. “Mallory. They deferred to her. She might be the one giving the orders.”
“All right,” he said, cautiously. “We’ll trade your friend for one of theirs. Then we use the ax.”
“On her?” asked Jesse.
“On the machines, of course. We’ll worry about the rest when we have her.”
54
TWO FARMERS LIFTED Libby’s body and carried her through the Farmhouse. Clair stayed close, still holding Q’s hand. Q’s grip was getting limper by the moment. Her eyes were now completely closed. When they reached the booth—a big industrial machine shaped like a water tank with a curved, sliding door—they laid her on the floor inside and stepped back.
“Are you okay from here?” Clair asked, the last to leave.
Q’s head nodded fitfully. “It h-hurts, Clair. I j-just want it to s-stop.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
Q shook her head.
Clair lingered a second longer, still troubled by this broken vision of Libby’s body. Then she let Q go. The door slid shut behind her. The machine hummed and hissed, cycling matter and data in furious streams. It seemed an age since Clair had last been near a booth, let alone standing inside one.
“The dupes Improved Arabelle,” she said to the others, “and Theo, too. The dupes fixed the errors in their patterns before bringing them back. Gemma said that Improvement is like duping . . . and now we know it’s the other way around, too.”
“Is that how you knew they were dupes?” asked Jesse.
“That and the guns they pulled on me.”
Gemma was pale and staring at Clair in horror. Her fists were clenched.
“They won’t get a second chance,” said Arcady. “Not here. That I promise you.”
The booth chimed and the door began to slide open. Farmers and members of WHOLE alike raised their weapons. Clair stepped closer. Finally, she had a real shot at finding out who was behind all this. She tried to stand tall in her one-sleeved shirt and willed herself not to flinch, no matter what she saw.
Inside the booth stood a lone girl dressed all in black. It was as though d-mat had rolled back time. Libby’s body was uninjured and showed no signs of trauma. There was no sign of the birthmark, either.
“Hello . . . Mallory,” said Clair. The name felt strange on her tongue, directed at someone who looked exactly like Libby.
The woman tensed, but the pistol at her side stayed where it was. Her head tilted slightly to the right.
“So you know my name,” she said. “Don’t think that makes you special. It won’t change anything.”
The woman spoke with a voice that was neither Libby’s nor Q’s. The inflection was harder, more controlled. Confident, even when she was staring down a dozen angry men and women.