Clair forced herself into the light and opened the door a fraction wider. As the drone’s cameras watched, she smiled and gave a defiant thumbs-up. According to the stats on her profile one thousand, two hundred thirteen people watched her do it, her parents among them.
Hi, Mom, she thought. Look at me, seeing the world.
There actually wasn’t that much to see, though. Just old farmland to the horizon, left to go to seed.
She shut the door. The train chattered on.
“I’m going back to sleep now,” Turner told her. “Thank you for keeping me company. It has been agreeable, as some old French guy might have put it. I like your energy. It gives me hope to fight alongside someone young like you.”
He went back to his empty bedroll, and she sat on her own for a few minutes longer, staring at her cracked and dirty fingernails. Agreeable wasn’t the word she would have used, and fight bothered her even more.
61
CLAIR OPENED THE door again as they passed through Chicago. Kids ran alongside the train as it rolled by, like something from an old movie. Her heart warmed at the thought of Abstainers all along their path loyally responding to Turner’s call. Then it occurred to her that without d-mat in their lives, there was probably nothing for them to do. To the children waving at her, stuck in the same place day in and day out, Clair’s expedition might have all the cachet of a real, live circus.
After Chicago, Clair lay on her sleeping bag, not sleeping but not entirely awake, either. She was thinking about ways to improve her statistics, to maintain interest before the spotlight moved on. She had no idea how people stayed famous all their lives, particularly the ones who never seemed to actually do anything. At a certain point, she supposed, fame became something bigger than the person possessing it. It could even live on after the person died, like a ghost—or perhaps more like Q did in the Air, still vital in its own way, changing and evolving with the times. Clair never wanted to experience anything like that. Once Improvement and the dupes were dealt with, she wanted to go back to being a nobody again. Except maybe for the odd crashlander party or two.
Clair got up and used the toilet. When she came out, Jesse was leaning into the open hood of the four-wheeler to see what lay inside. He looked long and thin in a uniform designed for stockier men.
“Dad tried to teach me about engines like these,” he said. “I wasn’t interested.”
“I thought you studied exactly this kind of thing at school.”
“Only if I had to. Anything with wheels bored me out of my skull unless I was riding it and going fast. I wish I’d paid closer attention now.”
She watched him, thinking fondly, Killer with a screwdriver. They hadn’t got on well at first, but she felt that she understood him better now. He had kept her going while they were running from the dupes, and he had backed her plan long before anyone else had. She was sure she wouldn’t have had the guts to go ahead with it if Zep had been there. Zep had been fun to be with, but he wasn’t as pragmatic as Jesse. Jesse, she was sure, would have thrown the rope rather than thrown himself off the observatory.
“Are you okay?”
She blinked, not realizing that she had been staring.
“Fine,” she said, then added, more honestly, “Tired. Nervous.”
“That’s all?”
She frowned. “Why?”
He straightened and glanced at the others.
“Let’s talk,” he said. “In private.”
“Okay. Where?”
“Here.”
He opened the door of the four-wheeler and waved her inside. She slipped across the front seats, and he followed her, shutting the door softly behind them.
Jesse braced himself with one hand on the steering wheel, facing her.
“What’s up?”
“I just want to ask you,” he said, “if you used Improvement.”
She stared at him for a long moment, the lightness that had been in her stomach turning to lead. He was looking right at her, and she was looking right back at him, but weirdly she felt as though she were shrinking into her body, vanishing behind her eyes into a tiny point that peered out at him through layers of dirty glass.
“Clair?”
She snapped back to normal.
“Yes,” she said. “How did you know?”
“I rewatched the video of Dad in Gordon the Gorgon’s office,” he said. “Last night, while I was trying to sleep. She asked if you knew someone who had used Improvement, and you hesitated before saying that yes, you did. There was something in your face—I don’t know what it was, exactly. Like you felt guilty, and not just because of Libby. It came and went so fast, I didn’t notice it before. I can see it now, though, when I watch the video again.”
Because he knows me better too, she thought.
“And there’s all the superhero stuff,” he went on, although she really wished he wouldn’t. “Shooting the dupe, keeping your head when all I want to do is roll into a ball, the strategizing. I thought it was your true calling, remember?”
She did remember, and she cursed herself for feeling like a fraud.
“But Improvement didn’t work,” she said. “My nose hasn’t changed.”
“Is that what you put on the note?”
“Yes.”
“Why?
“Why do you think?” She screwed it up self-consciously.
He shook his head. “How many times did you do it?”
“Sixty, seventy—I can’t remember the exact number.”
“Maybe your nose hasn’t changed because you haven’t used d-mat for a while. Maybe it takes time for the physical changes to kick in. The other stuff might happen more quickly.”
“What stuff? What are you saying, exactly?”
“You heard what Gemma said. People who use Improvement have their brains taken over.”
“But Gemma also said that it doesn’t affect everyone.”
“That’s true. Have you had any of the symptoms? Headaches, mood swings?”
She thought of the pounding in her skull that had been plaguing her for days, which she’d thought was caffeine withdrawal and stress. And she remembered the strange moment of clarity after Mallory had killed herself, and her shaking hands on the way to meet the train. They were shaking again now. She tucked them firmly between her thighs.
“I did it after I saw your dad the first time,” she confessed, unable to meet his eyes. “I used it until Q noticed me, but it didn’t seem to do anything, so I didn’t mention it to anyone. . . . I didn’t think it was important. . . .”
But you’ve changed, Gemma had said. The words reverberated through her mind, reinforced by the sudden certainty that they were true. Zep had noticed. Jesse had noticed. Gemma had noticed. Since using Improvement, she had become a different person. But was it because of Improvement or because of everything that had happened to her? Was Clair 2.0 her or someone else entirely?
She wondered if Libby had felt the same. What had it been like to have her mind taken over by another? Was it like a war or an unstoppable, insidious creep, like the tide rising over the shore? Did Libby’s thoughts and decisions still feel like hers, as Clair’s did now, even as they slowly became someone else’s?
The rhythmic patter of the wheels on the tracks was repetitive and insistent.
Mallory . . . Mallory . . . Mallory . . .
“Are you going to tell the others?” she asked Jesse.
“Why?” he asked. “Do I need to?”
“Don’t you think you should, if someone’s trying to take me over?”