“I don’t know that it’s that simple. You told me the truth, so I know you’re you right now.”
“What if that changes?”
“Is that likely?’
“You’ve got me worried now. What if I start . . . doing things?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Putting people in danger . . .”
He didn’t answer, and she looked up at him, afraid to see that he might be staring at her as if she were an alien.
He wasn’t. He was grinning.
“Danger?” he said. “Like we’re on a picnic right now?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I do. And, you know, maybe this is a good thing, in a way. Maybe it wasn’t really you who shot the dupe back at the safe house.”
“But what happens if they can’t reverse it? What if . . . ?”
She hugged herself, thinking terrible thoughts.
Five days had passed since Libby had used Improvement. Four days for Clair.
“I’m so frightened,” she said, and burst into tears.
“Hey,” he said, moving closer. “Hey, don’t. I’m sorry. This isn’t what I wanted. . . .”
“What did you want? Why did you bring it up?”
“I had to be sure. I had to know.”
Clair put her face into her hands.
“What if I had lied?” she asked through her sobs. “What would you have done?”
“I don’t know, and you didn’t lie, so it doesn’t matter.” He awkwardly took her into his arms. “It’s okay. You’re going to be all right, I promise.”
“How do you know? How do you know I won’t go crazy and kill everyone?”
“I’ve lived with crazy people all my life,” he said, “and I don’t think you’re one of them.”
She returned his hug, wishing she could stay right there all the way to New York.
“I’m sorry you’re stuck with me,” he said into her hair. “I bet you wish—”
She shut him up the only way she could: by kissing him. Only afterward did she think of her puffy eyes and snotty nose. Only afterward did she wonder at how easy it was, compared to Zep. She just put her hands on either side of his face and pulled his mouth to hers. Her lips parted without hesitation and his tongue sought hers, and she was surprised by how gentle it all was. His goatee tickled her. He smelled of engine grease and tasted faintly of mint. But when she closed her eyes, she saw only him in her mind, not the shadow of someone else, and there was no feeling of doing something wrong. Quite the opposite.
Her heart began to race in an entirely ungentle way, and she didn’t want to believe it at first when she felt him pulling away.
“What?” she asked, blinking at him.
“I was just . . . no, forget it.”
There was a questioning look in his eyes.
“You’re wondering if that was really me?” she said.
He blushed. “No. I mean, yes. I mean, I hope it was. I mean . . . Oh God, could I be stupider?”
She dropped her eyes, feeling her face freeze. The same question occurred to her now, but directed at herself, not him. Just days ago, she had been mooning after Zep, and now here she was, practically throwing herself at another boy. What was she thinking? Was she thinking at all?
“You’re not the stupid one,” she said, meaning every word. “I’m sorry.”
Jesse made a sound that might have been a laugh, and somehow she managed the same in reply. It was either that or cry again.
62
RAY WHISTLED WHEN they emerged from the four-wheeler, but Clair ignored him, hating the treacherous heat in her cheeks. While Jesse went back to his engine, Clair cracked open the car door again in order to check the plan’s progress. Over two thousand people were watching now, most of them Abstainers. She had lost a lot of crashlanders. Not surprising, she thought. Nothing much was actually happening. Not in front of the drones, anyway. She considered telling the world that she herself had used Improvement and might be in the process of becoming someone else but decided that would only undercut her message. She had to be the girl taking on VIA, no one else.
She might have lost some crashlanders, but she had gained some train hobbyists and also an entirely new following, one that made her feel uncomfortable. For every action, she knew, there was an equal and opposite reaction, and so for every supporter she gained an objector. They ranged from knee-jerk skeptics, who—like her—simply didn’t want to believe that anything could go wrong with the system everyone relied on, to rabid pontificators intent on eviscerating everything she espoused. Some of them were trolls, provoking arguments in the time-honored fashion of the antisocial, but the vitriol was intense regardless. She had to force herself to read it. Thankfully, Ronnie and Tash and a handful of other supporters were busy defending her, so she didn’t have to respond every time.
The death threats bothered her most, as they were supposed to. It wasn’t just the nature of the messages—she had already been living under the threat of violence long enough for that to have lost some of its urgency. It was the way she was targeted personally, using data anyone could access: places she went, people she knew, timetables she followed in her normal life. Sometimes her family was mentioned as well, which couldn’t help but make her worry. She hadn’t thought they might be in any more danger too.
She considered reporting the threats to the peacekeepers and decided in the end not to, not specifically. She put them up into the Air, for all to see. The threat of violence only added to the buzz. And if someone did try to kill her or someone she loved, the story would take even longer to go away. Her ghostly fame would linger.
Cold comfort, she thought. Then she wondered if that was something she would ordinarily have thought, and thinking that threatened to send her down a slippery slope of self-doubt. She fought it off by remembering how it had felt to kiss Jesse. That had been all her, she was sure of it, as was the confusion she felt now. She wondered if he felt the same knot in the stomach, but didn’t have the opportunity to ask him. There were always people around; there was always something more important to think about. She sensed that he might be deliberately keeping himself busy, and she tried to do the same. They were in the middle of something far too important to muddle with feelings, after all.
The train passed Pittsburgh and switched to a line that led through the Philadelphia Keys. Once, Turner said, the tracks had gone all the way to Atlantic City, but now that Atlantic City was under the Atlantic, the line stopped six miles earlier, at Pleasantville. There, they would meet the submarine.
Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Pleasantville, Clair thought. They had once been abstract addresses attached to certain friends and entertainment possibilities, but soon she would have passed through all three of them and the spaces between. In a train car, in real time.
“I need to send a coded signal to the submariners,” Turner said. “Can Q help me with that?”
“If you give it to me,” Clair said, “I’ll bump it to Q.”
He agreed.
“The signal is ‘No one is coming to Lincoln Island.’ That’s all.” He recited the address, a string of characters that meant nothing to Clair.
They cracked the door again, and Clair passed the message on. As they waited for a reply, she thought about the message and its connection to submarines. Captain Nemo was probably the most famous submariner in literature, and his name meant no one in Latin. Also, Lincoln Island was where he had died. She hoped that wasn’t a bad omen. On the other hand, nemo was also Greek for I give what is due. So maybe it evened out.