“You can’t be here,” she said, pushing him to the door. “This is what they want. Your secret—your life—”
Dawning understanding transformed Turner’s expression into one of panic. The d-mat booth was a trap, and Clair was the bait. Q had led Turner right into it—Turner, with his immortality genes, just waiting to be scanned and dissected. Everything else was incidental.
She seemed to think much faster than reality was moving. Turner—door—now. Her body weighed tons. She willed it to move more quickly, screaming at herself for being so slow. Turner was even slower and heavier than she was. She grabbed his shoulder and her muscles burned. He was a mountain that took an age to move an inch.
Even as she strained, she wondered: How had VIA known?
The door was already closing. Ray slipped one arm into the gap and tried to pull it back, but the door wasn’t staying open for anyone now that Turner was inside. Ray screamed as the metal mouth closed on him. Blood sprayed. There was a terrible crunching sound.
The d-mat process started the very instant the room was sealed. Clair’s wild shots had damaged nothing, changed nothing.
ssss—
The room was much bigger than a normal booth and contained much more air. That gave her more time—but to do what? Jesse stared at her in hopes of an explanation. Turner was bent over Ray, pale-faced. Only Gemma seemed calm, fatalistically resigned.
—ssss—
“Q, can you stop this?”
“This booth isn’t connected to the public domain. It’s a private network, and I don’t know how to access it.”
“Well, find out fast!”
“I’m sorry, Clair. I did the wrong thing again. I didn’t realize—”
—ssss—
Clair’s ears were stinging. Jesse was backed up against the wall, red from neck to thigh with Ray’s blood. She felt the air grow Himalaya thin as she pushed past her would-be rescuers in order to be near him.
“You always wanted to try d-mat,” she said. “I’m sorry it had to be like this.”
He swallowed.
“At least we’re—”
—pop
71
CLAIR BLINKED. THE room was the same, right down to the scratches on the walls. The light was the same. The air smelled the same. Except for the pop of her ears, she wouldn’t have believed she had gone anywhere.
But there was no Jesse. No WHOLE. No blood. No empty gun in her hand. She stared around her in shock.
The pattern had been altered in transit. Everything but her and the room’s furniture and decorations had been edited from the space contained within the mirrored walls. What had happened to the data she couldn’t guess. Saved elsewhere? Erased? She hoped with all her heart it wasn’t the latter.
She took a hesitant step and noticed something that was new—a weird giddying sensation, as though the floor were moving under her in ways she couldn’t consciously determine.
The doors to the office opened, and two people walked in. One looked exactly like Libby, except for two very important things: her birthmark was missing, and so was the light in her eyes. She was like the room around them, with everything that made her special edited out. She held a steel-gray pistol in her right hand.
The other person was Ant Wallace. Of course it was, she thought. It had to be him. He looked exactly like his picture in the Air: round faced, in his fifties or so, with an open expression and care lines around his eyes. Perhaps a little shorter than Clair had expected, he was jacketless, in shirtsleeves and silk tie, with charcoal suit pants and patent leather shoes. His right hand was outstretched in welcome.
She backed away, confused and scared at the same time.
“No?” he said, raising the hand in imploration, then lowering it. “Understandable, perhaps. Your plan to shame VIA into action would have been a good one, had I not been behind Improvement all along.”
The doors closed, giving Clair the barest glimpse of what lay outside. Another corridor, but not the one she had come through before. She was definitely in a different place. Wherever she was, there was no access to the Air: her lenses were completely blank.
“And the dupes as well?”
“They’re aspects of the same thing, as I think you’re beginning to appreciate.”
The woman in Libby’s body came closer and pointed the gun so the barrel was only a hand’s span away from Clair’s head. She was wearing a simple black dress in a heavy fabric, some kind of wool weave, perhaps, with a black suit jacket over the top and black leather shoes with a low heel. Her blond hair was pulled back to expose her neck. She wore no jewelry and looked classy and cool, a decade older than the girl Clair knew.
“You don’t frighten me, Mallory,” Clair said, forcing herself not to flinch. She met the woman’s cold stare and searched it for any sign of recognition. Surely there was some hint of Libby left, some shred of Clair’s best friend who still remembered who she had been, remembered her. “I know you won’t kill me.”
The woman holding the gun frowned. The barrel dipped slightly.
“How do you know my name?”
“From the Farmhouse, of course,” said Wallace with affable authority. “She’s resourceful.” He moved around behind the desk and sat casually in the chair. “That’s why we want to reward her, not punish her. Isn’t that right?”
“Reward me for what?”
“For bringing Turner Goldsmith to me. Without you and your plan, he would’ve gone to ground, and we would’ve lost him again. For all our assertions to the contrary, mistakes do happen, and we don’t always learn from them. The error that allowed Turner Goldsmith to live so long is one such, but now that he’s safely uploaded and awaiting analysis, we can make up for lost time. His genes are going to be very useful indeed. I will live young, well, and long enough to do everything I want. Isn’t that all anyone desires?”
Wallace glanced at Mallory in Libby’s body. A microexpression that might have been a frown flashed across his features. “Well, maybe not everyone. But the point is valid. You’ve helped give me what I want, and I think it’s time we returned the favor.”
The d-mat booth came to life around them again. Clair put her arms around herself and held on tight, afraid of what might be changed this time.
sssssss-pop
Zeppelin Barker was in the room, not three yards from her.
Her heart jolted.
Solid, blond, and tanned, dressed in track pants, sneakers, and a vest sporting the school colors. No bullet wound. Living, breathing, real. She could smell him.
He was already reacting in puzzlement to an environment he hadn’t expected, adopting a wary crouch and looking around until he saw her.
“Clair? What’s going on?”
Clair didn’t know what to tell him. There were just the two of them in the room now. Wallace and Mallory—it seemed simplest to call her that—were gone. The faint sense of giddiness remained, so Clair guessed that she and the room had been d-matted nowhere this time—a null jump, Arabelle had called it. The pattern had been edited again en route.
But . . . Zep?
“What are you doing here?” she asked him. “Where did you come from?”
“The dorm. Remember? That Abstainer freak sending the feed from Gordon the Gorgon’s office? Don’t tell me I missed the end of it. . . .”
He looked around again as though trying to match his last memory with this new moment. Clair was struggling to do the same thing. If the last thing he remembered was leaving the dorm to come join her at school, that meant he was a copy taken from the last time he had used d-mat. The original Zep had gone on to get shot, while an echo of him—this version of him—had survived in storage somewhere. And now he was alive again, missing the last hours of his life and the last few days of Clair’s, but otherwise exactly as he had been.