“We could light a fire,” said Ray. “Set off an alarm for real, and then they’d pay attention to us.”
“Great idea,” said Jesse. “If no one comes, we either suffocate or burn to death. Let me see if I can find a lighter—oh, wait, there isn’t one.”
“Quit it, both of you!”
They were getting on one another’s nerves. The office was bigger than some houses, but it seemed to be getting smaller fast.
“We just need to think,” she said.
Clair went into the tiny service room and checked the fabber’s menus. Its memory contained no weapons, drills, radios, explosives, or anything useful at all. After that pointless search, she checked for more mundane things like food and drink. VIA provided a fine choice of coffees, at least. She ordered a pot and three mugs. They could share it while they tried to find a way out.
Jesse sniffed warily at the coffee and then took a sip. Deciding it probably wouldn’t poison him, or that he didn’t care if it did, he drank the rest.
“What are they waiting for?” he asked. “Are they trying to freak us out?”
“Maybe making us sweat a little is their way of telling us they won’t be pushed around,” Clair said. “If that’s the case, I’m happy to wait them out.”
She sat in a chair and crossed her legs. It wasn’t impossible that there was a camera on them right now, recording their reactions.
Ray checked the door for the hundredth time.
“Guys,” he said, “I can hear something out there.”
Clair and Jesse were at his side in an instant.
Ray was on his hands and knees, with his right ear pressed hard against the right-hand panel.
“Sounds like hammering,” he said, “or gunfire. I can’t tell which.”
Clair crouched next to him and listened, the door coolly metallic against her skin.
For some seconds all she could hear was the beating of her heart. Slowly a less familiar sound rose to prominence: a distant, percussive thudding that lacked the regularity of a machine. Its source wasn’t nearby, but as she listened, she thought it might be getting louder.
Clair ran back to her chair and picked up her empty coffee mug. She raised it above her head and banged it against the door, shouting, “Hey! You have to let me talk to someone! Open the door—please!”
She was picturing Turner and Gemma, armed to the teeth like Ray had been, blasting their way up through the building. Could they possibly be fighting all of VIA on their own, plus the peacekeepers who would automatically come to VIA’s defense? It seemed impossible, unless . . .
Q.
Suddenly she could see it playing out in her mind. If the sub had done nothing more than trip an alarm by docking in the underwater station, triggering the shutdown and an accidental imprisonment of Clair and her friends, Q wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between that and Clair being held captive. And she wouldn’t take it lying down.
Clair suspected Q herself didn’t know exactly what her capabilities were. She lived in the Air; she had access to the entire accumulated knowledge of humanity. Clair wondered if VIA was in the process of finding out exactly what those capabilities were.
And the world was watching. How many people were going to be hurt now? How bad was it going to make the Counter-Improvement cause look?
70
SHE BANGED AT the door again and again.
“Hey, answer me!”
The mug shattered, and she recoiled, blinking ceramic flecks from her eyes.
The pounding was definitely louder.
“Clair, look.”
Jesse was pointing at the door. Her coffee mug had left deep scratches in the paint. Beneath was a shiny surface that looked like metal at first glance, except it was too reflective. It did more than gleam. It was so shiny, it looked like a shard of perfect mirror.
Clair leaned closer, puzzled.
Why go to the trouble of making the doors out of mirror and then painting over them? Why use it as a door at all?
What if it wasn’t just a door?
Clair stood up and turned a quick full circle, taking in the space around her. The windows were sealed tight: the shutters were painted too. The ceilings were unbroken, and they were also painted. Using a sharp sliver of broken mug, she worried at a carpet seam until it came up: more mirror.
The room wasn’t a room. It was a giant d-mat booth.
“Clair?”
She barely heard Ray trying to get her attention. Why build an office inside a booth? She could think of one reason: so Wallace could move from meeting to meeting without leaving his desk. VIA was a global company and its executive director no doubt a man in demand. People could come to him or he could go to them. Maybe he liked doing the latter without even getting out of his chair. Maybe this was his management style, to be the guy who dropped in rather than the guy who summoned from afar.
Clair could accept that.
But why lock them inside it? Was it a coincidence or something more sinister?
“Clair? Can you feel it?”
She blinked. The hammering was audible now and getting noticeably louder by the second. Occasionally, the floor shook. It sounded like a full-on war out there. A completely unnecessary war caused by VIA locking Clair in. Wallace couldn’t have provoked Q more effectively if he’d tried. Or Turner. Capturing Ray, one of WHOLE’s own, would give Turner the perfect excuse for “direct action.”
With that thought, the missing piece fell into place.
“Oh no,” she said.
“What?” Jesse was watching her.
“I’ve figured it out.”
“Figured what out?”
“It’s Turner. That’s what this is about.”
“Why Turner? How?”
“The dupes steal someone’s body. What if they steal someone’s memories as well? That means they’d know where Turner was the moment they duped Arabelle—but they couldn’t take him from the Skylifter because it was too public. So they shot it down and sent in the dupes.” It all made horrible, blinding sense to her now. “That didn’t work, but they didn’t try again because they didn’t need to—all thanks to me!”
“Why,” asked Jesse. “What have you done?”
She hated the wariness in his eyes.
“Nothing,” she said, “except ignore Gemma, because she was right. She was absolutely right!”
It was getting hard to talk over the hammering of guns.
“They’re just outside,” Ray said, backing away from the door.
“Don’t let them in,” Clair said in rising desperation. “They have to stay outside!”
But the double door was already sliding open, as it had to for the plan to work. Q had to be fooled into thinking she’d unlocked the door herself. It couldn’t be damaged by explosives. The space within the room had to be resealable.
“Clair!” The cry came from the drone, which was the first through the gap. Q’s triumph was palpable. “You’re alive!”
“Not for much longer if you don’t do as I say,” she said, running to the first actual person into the room—Gemma, singed and smelling like century-old slime. She wrenched the pistol from Gemma’s hand and emptied the clip into the walls.
“Get out!” she yelled. “Get out now!”
Jesse and Ray dived as bullet after bullet ricocheted around them. Then Clair’s finger was wrenching the trigger to no avail, the pistol making nothing but a click-clicking sound. Empty.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Gemma asked her, eyes wide with fury.
Clair ignored her. She turned to get another weapon and found Turner right behind her, raising his hands in placation as though she were the crazy one, and he hadn’t put them all in danger just by stepping into the booth.