Twinmaker

33

“ARE YOU CRAZY?” Clair shouted. “Don’t forget you’re risking my neck too.”

“How can I forget? I can hardly breathe with you strangling me.”

Clair didn’t dare let go. All she could do was close her eyes and hope he knew what he was doing. There were no streetlights. An accident in the dark would kill them as surely as a bullet from “Dylan Linwood.”

“Keep your fingers crossed there aren’t any potholes,” he said. “I’m using an infrared HUD, but it’s still not easy to see anything.”

She didn’t have any spare fingers to cross. They were gripping him too tightly.

“Two hundred yards to the next turnoff,” she said, keeping a close eye on the map despite her terror.

They swayed sickeningly to avoid something.

“What was that?”

“Cat,” he called back to her. “Where’s that corner?”

It was on them with unexpected speed. “Here, Jesse—turn here!”

They barely braked, then took the corner with a screech of rubber.

Orange Blossom was a minor old road that shook and juddered them.

“Slow down!”

“Just want to make sure we lose whoever’s on our tail.”

“You sure there was someone?”

“I don’t know. But someone got Arabelle, and I’m not going to wait until someone else starts shooting at us.”

“No, let’s not do that,” she said. “I’m the one sitting on the back. . . .”

They followed Orange Blossom for 5 miles, running parallel to another river as it snaked and crawled across the dry land. The vegetation was marginally more lush, and the air felt damp. Clair was thirsty. She would have given anything for a drink.

“These people,” Jesse said over the intercom. “They can’t be PKs, or there’d be drones everywhere. So who are they? What do they want?”

“Whoever they are,” she said, “they’re organized, and they’re fast. The first time we saw them was just after your dad started his anti-Improvement thing.”

“Lots of people already know about Improvement. The invite has gone to thousands, maybe millions of people.”

“Yes, but no one thinks it’s real. Without evidence, it’s just an urban myth.”

“Do you think it’s real?” he asked.

Clair thought of Libby, who had made no attempt to contact her since declaring their friendship ended.

“It must be real,” she said. “Or why would the people shooting at us be so upset? Your dad found evidence proving it did something, and there is such a thing as bad publicity.” She spoke from experience.

He shrugged under her tight grip. “I guess so.”

She felt nothing but weary acceptance, perhaps even relief. Fighting the idea of Improvement had been exhausting. Now it was time to accept it and start fighting the people responsible for it.

Clair wanted to ask Q if she could find the source of the data Gemma had given Dylan Linwood. There might be more of it, and there might be other people she could call for help—if they weren’t already in trouble too, maybe running for their lives like Jesse and Clair.

But she said nothing, remembering Q’s warning about maintaining radio silence. The longer they stayed quiet, the greater their chances of slipping like ghosts into the night.

The next town was approaching. Orange Blossom became Sonora Road, which led into the tiny, abandoned hamlet of Knights Ferry, where they turned left.

Jesse glanced in his mirrors, checking what lay behind them. Clair’s shoulder blades itched.

“Eyes forward,” she told him. “There’s another turnoff coming up.”

“I don’t see one.”

“The map says it’s right there, supposedly.”

“Here?”

Jesse swung off the tarmac and onto a dirt track. The wheels slipped for an instant, then found traction. There was a road, but it was gravelly and rutted, barely there at all.

“Whoa,” said Clair, hanging on tight. The bike almost slipped over as they took the first corner. “The map said it was a road. Is this a road?”

“It’ll have to be.”

“Well, keep following it until it runs out. Then I’ll tell you where to go.”

“It runs out?”

“The map is not my territory, okay? Go easy. I’ve never done this before.”

Jesse drove punishingly hard, trying to put distance between them and whoever he thought was behind them. They had to reach the airship before their pursuers caught up or found a way to cut them off. Clair swore she wasn’t going to end up like Arabelle, dead in a ditch somewhere because she hadn’t gone fast enough.

It was rough going, though. What should have been a quick mile-long stretch of straight road was in fact a nightmare of switchbacks and whipping branches. The night was clear and full of stars, but there wasn’t enough light to see what lay in the scrub to either side of the track, and Jesse kept the headlights carefully off.

“That way,” she said, pointing northeast over his shoulder.

Tulloch Road was paved, but it had fragmented over time. Jesse frequently cursed and jerked the front wheel to avoid potholes and jagged cracks in their path.

“There’s a dam ahead,” she said, mazes and puzzles shifting in her mind. “We’re supposed to go east when we reach it and head from there to Jamestown. That would be the sensible thing to do.”

“Nothing about this is sensible.” Jesse sounded weary and impatient. “Are you sure we’re not completely lost?”

“Are you sure we’re being followed?”

“We are. I’m positive now. They’re not using headlights, but I can see their exhaust in the HUD. A long way back, but definitely tracking us.”

“So quit griping. We need to do something about that, and fast.”

“Like what?”

“Let’s call the others. Tell them we’re on track for our rendezvous, but say it’s Columbia airfield, not Maury Rasmussen. The people looking for us are bound to be listening in, so they’ll go northeast to Columbia while we go north across the dam. From there, we’ll be back on paved roads and making better time.”

That was a slight exaggeration. It would be paving all the way if they skipped Jamestown and went instead through an exotic-sounding place called Copperopolis five miles to the north. She hoped they could make it work. Everything below her navel felt compacted and numb.

“Okay,” he said. “And if you’re so sure . . . you make the call.”

Clair took a deep breath and held it for a second, reviewing the plan to make sure there was nothing she had forgotten.

“All right.” Emptying her lungs in an anxious gust and drawing another deep breath, she prayed the nervousness she felt wouldn’t show in her voice.

“Halfway to Jamestown,” she said over the radio. “On schedule for Columbia.”

She waited, hardly daring to breathe. Gemma, she was sure, would work it out if she was still alive. Gemma was grating, but she was nothing if not smart. . . .

The airwaves crackled.

“Confirmed” came Gemma’s voice. “I’m in Chinese Camp.”

“On our way to Telegraph City,” said Ray. “Got ambushed, so we’re coming the long way around. Don’t leave without us.”

“Don’t you take too long,” said Gemma. “What about you, Theo and Cashile?”

No answer.

“Theo? Cashile?”

Nothing on the airwaves but crackle and hiss.

“Continue as discussed. Maintain radio silence.”

Gemma clicked off, and Clair felt a sudden rush of fatalism. If Theo and Cashile had been caught as well, there could be no reasoning with the people following them. Not even a kid was safe.

“Do you think they fell for it?” asked Jesse, sounding as sick as Clair felt.

“Maybe.”

“You’re not sure?”

“I’m sure we’re not in the clear yet,” Clair said, worrying at the situation as she would a ragged hangnail. “Whoever’s following us must be using infrared, like you. That means they’ll be able to see us, no matter which way we tell them we’re going.”

“Right. The motors on this thing are the brightest heat sources around.”

“Could we cover them up? Dig a hole or something?”

“We don’t have time.” Clair felt Jesse shake his head.

“How much time do we have?”

“For them to catch up if we stop? A minute or two, max.”

“We’ll have to think of something else, then.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Give me a second.”

She didn’t need a second. She already knew what they had to do. Saying it was the hard thing.

Of the two of them, she had the most left to lose. She still had a life out there, waiting for her to escape the people chasing them and reconnect. He, on the other hand, had lost almost everything—which made what he did have left all the more precious.

There was no point stalling any longer in the hope of coming up with another solution or of someone else making the decision for her. The road, such as it was, wouldn’t last forever.

“We have to ditch the bike,” she said.