“Yes, yes,” said Wallace in an impatient tone. “You activated the bug at the Farmhouse. We exchanged messages. We promised you the one thing in the world you really want.”
He had walked half a circle around Gemma and come to a halt next to Mallory, drawing attention to the body, Clair realized, and to the gun in Mallory’s hand.
“I don’t reward lies,” he said. “Tell me everything you know about Q.”
Gemma blinked at him. “What about her?”
“You told us she was a kid,” Mallory said. “Some kind of prodigy.”
“That’s what she sounds like. A kid living in the Air.”
“But you’re not sure?”
“I’ve never met her. Why would she fake something like that?”
“I don’t know. That’s why we brought you back.”
Gemma stared at Wallace and Mallory with despair and hatred in her eyes, then suddenly ripped the cross from her neck and threw it across the room.
“Keep your stupid bug,” she said, voice crackling with emotion. “You’re never going to give him back to me, are you? You played me for a fool.”
“The thing is,” said Wallace, “in all honesty, we don’t care much either way. You can have as many Sameers as you like, as long as you convince us that we can trust you.”
“But I’ve told you everything I know. I swear!”
“I don’t believe in the ghosts of dead girls haunting the Air,” said Wallace. “I do believe that Clair can tell us more. The boy from Manteca here”—he indicated Zep’s body—“didn’t have the effect we were hoping for. I’ll be grateful if you can provide us with the leverage we need.”
“How?”
The smile he offered her was as dangerous as Mallory’s pistol.
“You work it out.”
Clair stared at Gemma, seeing her desperation and her thwarted hope. She had been strung out and stressed ever since the attack on the Farmhouse, and now Clair knew why. She had started expressing her doubts at the train station in Mandan, but Clair hadn’t listened. Clair was listening now, wishing she could find some way to hate her.
This wasn’t the grand treachery of Wallace and Mallory, the depths of which she hadn’t yet begun to fathom. This was an everyday betrayal, human, galling, and desperately frustrating.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Gemma snarled at her. “Who are you to judge? You’ve had it easy all your life. You have a family, and you have friends, and you have a life full of riches. You can go anywhere, do anything, be anyone you want to be. And who am I? Some mad old fool whose child died—and now I have the chance to get him back, exactly as I remember him. You’d take it, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t even hesitate.”
Clair shook her head. She could see what Gemma was doing. She was talking herself into something, something she knew she shouldn’t do. And to make matters worse, Clair knew what it was.
“Don’t,” Clair said. “They’ll never give you what you want.”
“You can talk. I asked you to look after him, but you wouldn’t do it. And even if you had agreed, I wouldn’t have believed you. You could never have protected him. And neither can I. It’s done. It’s over. We’re through.”
The brief war waging behind Gemma’s eyes was over. Clair had lost.
Gemma told Wallace, “Try Jesse.”
Mallory smiled.
73
SSSSSSS-POP
Gemma and Wallace disappeared in another null jump, and there Jesse was, spattered with Ray’s blood and caught midsentence.
“—together . . . Wait, what?”
He saw Libby’s face and started in fright even before Mallory stepped away from Clair and pointed the pistol at him.
“Don’t!” Clair cried, placing herself directly in front of the muzzle. “Please don’t hurt him. I’ve told you everything I know. Q is one of the lost girls, like Libby. She woke in the hangover and latched onto me when I used Improvement. She’s been helping me, and I’ve tried to help her, too. She deserves to know who she is, who she was, before Improvement.”
“Clair, what’s happening?” asked Jesse, standing up behind her. “Are you all right? Where’s Ray, Gemma, Turner . . . everyone?”
“They’re gone forever,” Mallory said, “unless your girlfriend tells us the truth.”
“Why would I lie?” Clair said, determined to keep herself between Mallory and him. She couldn’t bear to think of Jesse dead, not now that she had him back.
“Q is some Little Orphan Annie who latched onto you at random?” Mallory shook Libby’s head. “I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m careful,” she said. “I don’t leave leftovers.”
In the face of Mallory’s ruthlessness, Clair believed her, but at the same time she couldn’t believe her. There had to be hope for Libby, just as there was hope for Q. There had to be hope for Clair as well.
“Well, this time you made a mistake,” Jesse insisted, coming forward to stand next to Clair.
“I don’t make mistakes either,” Mallory said, her lenses flickering, “but Ant does. I think he’s too generous. This is your last offer.”
The air thinned around them again. Clair took Jesse’s hand and held it so tightly, she hoped, that not even d-mat could tear them apart.
sssssss-pop
When the machines stopped, Mallory was gone, and Dylan Linwood had taken her place.
Jesse’s father staggered backward and clutched his temple. Bruised. Fresh from his kidnapping. He looked up at them, blinking, left eye filling with blood.
“Jesse?”
“Stay away!” Jesse let go and stepped back from her, forming a triangle among the three of them. “Who are you?”
“It’s him, Jesse,” said Clair, hearing it in Dylan’s ordinary California accent and seeing his true self in the way he held himself, in his bewilderment and shock. “Really him this time.”
“Who else would I be?” Dylan said, his lined face twisting in hurt.
Jesse was speechless.
“You were captured in the street by people who work for Ant Wallace,” Clair said. Someone had to tell him. “They put you in a booth, a null jump, like they’re doing now.”
He looked down at his body, then back up at Clair and Jesse. “What have they done?”
“They duped you. Your dupes tried to kill us. We . . .” She remembered with pure visceral force shooting at him and seeing his corpse. “We managed to stay ahead of you . . . of them . . . for a while.”
“So we’re all zombies now?” He stared at her in horror.
“Don’t say that,” she said. “That’s not the way it is.”
He turned to his son. “Jesse, what are you doing here? What do they want?”
Jesse still didn’t speak. He was wrestling with all the doubts and decisions Clair had agonized over when Zep had appeared.
“They’re going to take you away again, Dad,” Jesse finally said. “They want something we can’t give them.”
Dylan was staring at Jesse, his face a mask of agony. Not because of the blow to his head. His psychic pain was palpable.
“How can I feel like this?” he said, openly weeping. “How can I feel anything at all? Was your mother right the whole time? Was I wrong not to let them bring her back?”
sssssss—
“Wait,” Jesse cried, reaching out to take his father’s arm, “wait!”
—pop
Jesse and his father vanished. Clair crouched into a ball and shook with frustration and despair. Nothing she said or did seemed to help anyone or change anything. Zep was dead . . . again. Clair had been duped. Jesse was being used against her. What cruelty had Mallory and Wallace prepared for her this time?