At first she was relieved. It was just a brief account of the ball, with emphasis on the incident of the boy who had almost died. There were interviews with people either praising Zep for his bravery or damning the entire clique. Xandra Nantakarn was unflustered in a brief clip doing the rounds. The Lucky Jump wasn’t to blame, said a representative of VIA, the Virtual-transport Infrastructure Authority, whose job it was to make the rules about how d-mat was used. A peacekeeper spokesperson wasn’t so sure.
It was news of a fairly minor sort. Clair supposed that she must have been mentioned somewhere in one of the posts, leading to the general topic’s prominence in her infield. And it was pleasing in a way. Popularity in social media wasn’t something she went out of her way to seek, like Libby did. She had never popped this way before.
Then she saw the phrase, “Zeppelin Barker and his girlfriend, crashlander Clair Hill . . .”
“Oh no,” she said, skipping to the next bump and following its link.
This one came with a snapshot of her pulling on the rope, taken through the lenses of someone at the top of the dome. This time, they got the name of Zep’s girlfriend right, but they had attached it to the wrong face. The caption on the picture of Clair read, “Liberty Zeist, discoverer of the latest crashlander ball that almost cost her boyfriend’s life . . .”
“No, no, no!”
The mixed-up name wasn’t going to save her. Clair’s face was still there, recognized by the Air and sent to her as it would be to anyone interested in Clair Hill, crashlanders, or Zeppelin Barker. Among a multitude of correctly labeled pictures of Libby were enough of Clair to be certain that Libby would see them and ask the question: What had Clair done last night to make people think she was Zep’s girlfriend?
Maybe Libby had already seen them.
Clair scrolled through the long list of bumps, looking for Libby’s name. It wasn’t there, but Tash and Ronnie’s were.
“Thought you went home with Libby,” Tash had sent earlier that morning. “Didn’t know you were still there, being a hero!”
Ronnie’s was more guarded. “Anything to this, or is it just another Airhead false positive?”
Clair didn’t know how to respond. She hugged her knees and wished she could erase the bumps not just from her infield but from the Air itself. But the vast web of wireless connectivity covering the Earth tangled everyone in information. There was no escaping it or the myriad algorithms that guided data to its destination. It didn’t matter if two or two hundred thousand people were following the story, Libby was absolutely, positively certain to notice.
How much worse would it look if Clair didn’t say something to her right away?
When Clair checked Libby’s public profile, she found a caption of an old woman on a swing with a shotgun on her lap and the words Disturb at own risk. Not encouraging.
Clair got out of bed, threw her clothes in the fabber for recycling, and dialed a set for school. While she was in the shower, she sent a message to Libby.
It’s not what it seems. Really truly honestly. Can we talk?
She deleted everything from her infield so there’d be no mistaking a reply when it came.
Libby hadn’t said anything by the time Clair got out of the shower and dressed in her freshly made clothes. The apartment was empty and tomb quiet around her. Clair’s mother regularly started work in the middle of the night. Her stepfather lived in Munich most weekdays. Clair was an only child and heartily glad of it.
For breakfast she had perfectly scrambled eggs with freshly toasted bread, low-salt butter at room temperature, and the best black coffee a fabber could find. The coffee was the only thing she truly tasted.
“Libby,” she sent, and was unable to stop once she had started this time, “did you get my message? Are you up yet? Are you feeling all right? Please call me back as soon as you can.”
She desperately wished she could stay home with her head under the covers, but skipping school wouldn’t solve anything. Being smart had gotten her parents’ parents through the Water Wars, Allison Hill, Clair’s mother, liked to say. That and never giving up. Allison claimed that Clair had inherited her maternal grandmother’s stubbornness, and that even when they argued, it was something to be grateful for.
5
“WOODWARD AND MAIN, Manteca,” she told the booth, avoiding the accusing stare of the reflection directly in front of her.
My nose is too big, she thought for the thousandth time.
A sneaky new voice internally riposted, You could fix that.
She scowled. That wasn’t cool. Improvement couldn’t be real, no matter what Libby thought, and even if it was, beauty was only skin-deep.
sssssss-pop
The door opened onto bright morning sunlight shining through dappled leaves, fresh sea air, and the sound of people arguing. Her booth was one of twenty in a line under the familiar d-mat sign of two overlapping circles
in a chunky Venn diagram. There was a man in a green suit directly in front of her. She stepped out, and he stepped inside without acknowledging her. Woodward and Main was one of several hub stations servicing not just the Manteca New Campus High School but downtown tourism as well. Sacramento Bay was busy with amateur sailors day-tripping north to Yuba City or east to Rio Vista and the Joice Islands. The fishing was good, and so were the mangroves.
Clair hugged the strap of her backpack and pressed through the crowd. The station was even more congested than usual. Two UFO-like eye-in-the-sky (EITS) drones buzzed softly over the discontented crowd.
D-mat jumps took about two minutes, give or take thirty seconds, and this one had taken her just over two. Something other than unreasonable lag time was responsible for the disturbance, then. A blue peacekeeper’s helmet stood out above a small knot of people three booths along. Clair rubbernecked to see what was going on but couldn’t make out anything untoward, and couldn’t justify standing where she was for long. People were pressing forward into the booths, anxious to be on their way, as she was.
School was crowded. A multilingual sea of kids navigated channels that curved organically between buildings four, five, and six stories high. Juniors, like Clair and Libby, were on the other side of the campus, near the gym. Clair leaned toward the practical arts—writing, music composition, and editing—with a smattering of history and soft sciences that most of her friends found boring. She didn’t know what she would do with the combination, but she figured she had time to decide. It wasn’t like money was an issue as it had been in her grandfather’s day, when fabbers hadn’t existed to make anything anyone wanted, and people had had to have jobs just to eat.
“You kids are getting smarter, younger every year,” he liked to complain, “but you never actually do anything with those smarts of yours.”
“That’s not true,” Clair’s mother had responded the last time. “What about that kid who solved the Riemann hypothesis a month ago?”
“There you go, Clair,” he had grumbled. “Why can’t you be more like him?”
“Her, Grandpa,” Clair had corrected him. “Anyway, I don’t like math.”
“Finding the right vocation is like finding the right spouse,” Allison had said with a smile. “Better to have none than the wrong one.”
Like friends, Clair thought now. And boyfriends.
Libby wasn’t at the classroom when Clair arrived, didn’t turn up with everyone else, and remained silent as they took their seats and the teacher started talking about survivor narratives of the Water Wars. When Clair checked Libby’s public profile, it listed her location as school, but that was likely to be a fake for her parents’ sake, the same as it was when she went out partying.