“Tell us about Improvement,” Clair said. “Tell us about the dupes.”
“Or else?”
Mallory raised the pistol and placed the barrel under her own throat. Before Clair could move, Mallory pulled the trigger and folded to the floor like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
Arcady rushed into the booth, calling for a medical kit. Clair stared in shock. It was too late to do anything. She had more blood on her face and hands—Libby’s blood, this time, and the face of her best friend was ruined in her memory forever. No amount of effort was going to get Mallory to tell them her secrets now.
Jesse turned away, looking as though someone had punched him in the stomach.
Clair wondered why she didn’t feel more shocked. Mallory had been a living being, a person as vital as any other. Even if she was a dupe in a stolen body, even if other versions of her could be created a thousand times over, identical to the version that had been standing in front of Clair just moments ago, she had been alive. Now she was dead. She had thrown her counterfeit life away without a moment’s hesitation, as she would throw it away no matter how many times they tried to bring her back. That made the dupes seem only more formidable.
Yet Clair felt calm and focused. Clarified, like she had crossed some kind of emotional threshold—or saturation, perhaps, after too many shocks in a row—and emerged stronger on the other side.
Or else it would hit her later, when she could afford to let her guard down.
“Are you going to be okay?” she asked Jesse, putting a hand on his shoulder.
He nodded once, a bit too quickly, like he might be about to throw up.
“Secure the body,” said Arcady, giving up any thought of resuscitation. “It’s time to make plans.”
55
THE COUNCIL OF war took place in the Farmhouse’s main hall.
“We’ll leave immediately,” said Turner. “We’re putting you all at risk.”
“I think that’s for the best,” said Arcady without hesitation. “We’ll help you as much as we can, but this isn’t our fight.”
“They murdered your people too,” said Jesse.
“They died defending our turf. That’s what we do. If the dupes come back, we’ll be ready.”
Clair imagined an army composed of infinitely replaceable, Improved dupes and said nothing. What could she say? Hunkering down wouldn’t solve anything. Libby, the real Libby, was still out there somewhere, frozen in a data server even after Mallory had destroyed the copy of her body. The dupes made making bodies look easy, as long as parity wasn’t broken. The mind was the hard part.
Clair wasn’t going to give up on Libby, no matter what Libby had told her to do. Clair was going to finish Improvement, one way or another.
“What is your intention?” Arcady asked them. “Where are you planning to go?”
No one spoke for a long moment. Clair was waiting to see what Turner would say. Presumably WHOLE had other hideouts like the Skylifter, where they could slowly rebuild their numbers. It couldn’t be easy assembling any kind of operational core when Abstainers were scattered all over the world, steadfastly refusing to make use of the main means of getting around.
“I still like Clair’s plan,” said Jesse. “Take it up with VIA. It’s their problem, ultimately. They’ll have to fix it.”
“You’d be exposed all the way,” said Arcady. “Who knows what would be waiting for you in New York?”
“And VIA is toothless,” said Ray. “The watchdog hasn’t even barked in years.”
“You obviously haven’t smuggled any illicit molecules recently,” said one of the farmers. “Or tried to sell a bootleg Mona Lisa.”
“And we have evidence,” said Jesse, glancing at the rows of bodies.
“If the dupes try to attack us,” Clair said, “we could end up with several of the same body, which would really clinch it.”
“But we couldn’t take them all with us,” said Ray.
“I know,” she said. “We’d just take Libby.”
Libby was where it had all started. It would end with her, Clair swore.
“You don’t really think VIA’s going to let us walk up to the front door with a corpse over our shoulders and stroll right in?” Ray held his hands above his head as though someone had stuck a gun in his back. “There’ll be security sweeps, background checks, the works. Look at us. If you were VIA, would you let any of us in?”
Clair did look. They were still in pajamas and shirts, except for Gemma, who must have slept in her clothes. They were splattered with blood and stained with pasts no ordinary citizen would boast of. Ray was right. They wouldn’t get near the place.
But why was Ray asking her this? She might have proposed the plan to Turner, but Jesse had been the one to suggest VIA in the first place. Why weren’t they looking to him as well?
Because she had stopped the dupes, she supposed, and because she was doing most of the talking now. That made a kind of sense, but it didn’t mean she had the answers.
Gemma and Turner were suspiciously quiet. Maybe they had already made up their minds, and it didn’t matter what anyone else said.
Then an idea came to her that blew all her doubts away.
“They’ll let us in,” she said, “because we’ll make it impossible for them not to.”
Everyone was looking at her now, not just Jesse and the surviving members of the Skylifter.
“Do tell,” said Ray.
She told them about the crashlanders. Then she reminded them of the video feed Dylan Linwood had put out into the Air. Zep had joked about her being famous for a day, and there was some truth to that: Arcady had seen the video, and he couldn’t have been the only one.
“I thought that was a bad thing at first,” she said, “because of the way it made me look, but now I think we can use it to our advantage. Both the crashlanders and Abstainers are communities primed to latch onto something new or controversial. They’re completely different, and neither is huge, but they draw attention because people outside them disagree on whether they’re good or bad. People talk about them, and talk about what they’re talking about. If we can make the crashlanders and the Abstainers talk about us, I think we can really make something pop.”
“Something like what?” asked Jesse.
“We don’t hide the fact that we’re going to VIA HQ in New York. The exact opposite: we tell everyone—anyone who’s interested. We promise them something worth seeing. Like Ray says, we’ll be exposed when we leave the farm; there’ll be drones all over us as soon as we’re back in civilization. They’re the eyes of the world, and if they’re on us because we’re giving the world a show, the dupes won’t dare act, not up close when they can be seen as well. Home is where the harm is—that’s what my mom says: we think we’re safe when we’re hiding, but we’re not. Let’s come out of hiding and let the world protect us.”
“The drones in Manteca were compromised,” Gemma reminded her. “They couldn’t see anything.”
“Q can help with that,” she said, hoping that was true.
“What if they hit you from a distance or make it look like an accident,” said Arcady, “like they did with the Skylifter?”
“Enough people will know what really happened,” she said, hoping that would be true as well. “Who could ignore something like that? Especially if we spread the word widely enough. There’s no reason we can’t fight this on more than one front at once. Improvement started with a note that told people to keep it a secret. So maybe we should issue a note of our own that does the exact opposite.”