Clair nodded, wishing he’d slow down.
Her dupe: that was why Clair couldn’t access her messages. The Air wasn’t designed to recognize the same person twice. That meant she was still cut off from her friends, her family, her entire world. The other Clair had stolen her life!
Then there was Jesse’s dad. He wasn’t the only one Clair hadn’t been able to find: Libby was missing also. And Zep. If their patterns were in one of Wallace’s secret caches, then it all depended on what had happened to . . .
The station!
“It . . . blew up?”
“An orbital asset was lost fifteen minutes ago,” said one of the peacekeepers. Narrow shoulders set on an angle: PK Drader, she remembered, although her lenses remained dismayingly empty. “What do you know about that?”
“I know. . . .” Clair shook her head, feeling a deep sense of dislocation. “No, I don’t know. I shouldn’t be here. That’s all. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. Where’s Q? What did she do?”
“Beats me,” said Jesse. “But listen. This is the best thing of all. Angela Kadri—head of security, remember?—she’s been helping the PKs. They accessed the Improvement files. They know who, how many, why, all of it. And you’re not in there, Clair. You’re not one of them. You weren’t selected!”
She gaped at him, finding this news the hardest somehow to accept.
“I wasn’t Improved?”
“No. You’ve been you the whole time!”
The right body, Wallace had said. Not just any will do.
“But . . . how do you explain the way I’ve been feeling, the things I’ve done?”
“All you.”
“Shooting the dupe, destroying your bike . . . everything?”
“Saving our lives? All you, Clair.”
She couldn’t believe it.
You don’t know what you’re capable of until you try.
Clair was certain that killing herself for the sake of her friends wasn’t what her mother had had in mind.
But if the station was gone, that meant her plan had worked. Turner was gone too, physically blown up and erased—since his pattern had been cached in secret on the station—and so Wallace and Mallory had been blown up with him. The threat was over. Improvement and the dupes were finished.
Jesse hugged her, and for a moment she didn’t care that he was hurting her arm again.
“Uh, Jesse . . . ,” she said, looking over his shoulder.
“Yes?”
“What’s going on now?”
Jesse let go of her, brushed the bangs from his eyes, and looked around them.
The peacekeepers’ weapons were still raised. More than that: they were all pointed at her.
“We have a developing situation,” said PK Drader. “D-mat is on the verge of crashing. We have multiple shutdowns and jams. People are missing. We think the parity violation is the cause. You, Clair.”
“I can explain,” she said, pulling away from Jesse and raising her hands. She remembered the plan with perfect clarity: it had been hers, and it had been flawless, but it hadn’t ended the way it was supposed to, with her blown up along with the station, a glitch safely erased. “Q must have broken the rules in order to bring me back. She restored me from the last pattern available, the last d-mat jump I took before . . . what I did up there.”
“And Q is . . . ?”
“She’s the child of Qualia and Quiddity, the AIs.”
“She’s what now?” asked Jesse, wide-eyed.
“And you asked this Q to crash the system?” PK Drader’s face was hidden behind his visor, but his voice was grim.
“No. It was her decision. She did it to save me. But whatever’s going wrong with the system can be fixed, right?”
“Where is Q?” the peacekeeper asked. “We need to talk to her before the system collapses completely.”
“Shouldn’t you be talking to someone in VIA?” asked Jesse.
“VIA’s mandate is currently under review by the OneEarth administration.”
“So who’s in charge of d-mat right now? Anyone?”
The peacekeepers had no good answer to that.
A bump appeared in her infield. It was from Q.
Clair let Jesse and the PKs argue while she took the message.
“I understand now” was all Q said.
“Q! Thank God,” she said. “I was worried about you.”
“You broke your promise.”
“Promise? What promise?”
Then Clair remembered.
Always and forever.
“Q, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have lied to you, but I had no other choice. I knew you’d try to stop me. You do understand, don’t you?”
“I do,” said Q.
A peacekeeper spoke up unexpectedly.
“I’ve just had a flag come up under the name Dylan Linwood,” she said.
Jesse’s face lit up. “Where?”
“Paris.”
“I have him too,” said another peacekeeper. “My flag says Moscow.”
“And I see him in Sydney,” added another. “Others, too: Arabelle Miens, Jamila Murray, Theo Velazquez—”
“They’re in Tokyo,” called another.
“Berlin.”
“Manhattan—”
Clair pictured what was going on with frightening clarity. The system was still working, but not the way it was supposed to. With Quiddity broken, the dupes weren’t limited to just one of them at a time. How long until they outnumbered every peacekeeper on the planet?
On Jesse’s face, hope had been replaced by shock, mirroring Clair’s own frantic realization.
“Q?” she sent out into the Air. “Q, how do we stop the dupes?”
“Mumbai,” said PK Drader.
“Calcutta.”
“Naples!”
“Q? Answer me—we need your help!”
Q did answer, and the bump was damning in its brevity.
“Friendship has to be earned.”
Clair stared at it for a second, her own words flung back at her, wondering if something as simple as this could cause the end of the world.
She wouldn’t be responsible for that.
“Let the system crash,” Clair cried. “Make it all stop! There could be hundreds of them already—thousands!”
Orders flashed silently between the peacekeepers and elsewhere. Clair thought of all the commuters in transit, everyone trying to fab a meal or a change of clothes, every industry, every creator. She imagined crowds forming, tempers flaring, lives halting in their tracks. How many people would disappear in transit? How many would arrive incomplete or damaged in ways she couldn’t imagine? How many would blame her if they knew what she had done?
“It’s down,” a peacekeeper said, sounding as though even he couldn’t believe what he was saying. “The global network has crashed.”
A sense of stillness crept across her, across the plaza, across the city, as though someone had cut the power to the entire planet.
Clair kept her hands up. The PKs’ weapons were still pointed at her, and no wonder. She had accomplished everything WHOLE had ever dreamed of. She had killed d-mat. She had turned the world upside down.
“Q?” she asked. “Q, answer me, please.”
Silence. The world rang with it.
“Now what?” Jesse asked.
Clair looked around her in awe. There was an answer to that question—there had to be—but she had no idea where to start looking for it.
. . . change anything.