Twinmaker

62

RAY WHISTLED WHEN they emerged from the four-wheeler, but Clair ignored him, hating the treacherous heat in her cheeks. While Jesse went back to his engine, Clair cracked open the car door again in order to check the plan’s progress. Over two thousand people were watching now, most of them Abstainers. She had lost a lot of crashlanders. Not surprising, she thought. Nothing much was actually happening. Not in front of the drones, anyway. She considered telling the world that she herself had used Improvement and might be in the process of becoming someone else but decided that would only undercut her message. She had to be the girl taking on VIA, no one else.

She might have lost some crashlanders, but she had gained some train hobbyists and also an entirely new following, one that made her feel uncomfortable. For every action, she knew, there was an equal and opposite reaction, and so for every supporter she gained an objector. They ranged from knee-jerk skeptics, who—like her—simply didn’t want to believe that anything could go wrong with the system everyone relied on, to rabid pontificators intent on eviscerating everything she espoused. Some of them were trolls, provoking arguments in the time-honored fashion of the antisocial, but the vitriol was intense regardless. She had to force herself to read it. Thankfully, Ronnie and Tash and a handful of other supporters were busy defending her, so she didn’t have to respond every time.

The death threats bothered her most, as they were supposed to. It wasn’t just the nature of the messages—she had already been living under the threat of violence long enough for that to have lost some of its urgency. It was the way she was targeted personally, using data anyone could access: places she went, people she knew, timetables she followed in her normal life. Sometimes her family was mentioned as well, which couldn’t help but make her worry. She hadn’t thought they might be in any more danger too.

She considered reporting the threats to the peacekeepers and decided in the end not to, not specifically. She put them up into the Air, for all to see. The threat of violence only added to the buzz. And if someone did try to kill her or someone she loved, the story would take even longer to go away. Her ghostly fame would linger.

Cold comfort, she thought. Then she wondered if that was something she would ordinarily have thought, and thinking that threatened to send her down a slippery slope of self-doubt. She fought it off by remembering how it had felt to kiss Jesse. That had been all her, she was sure of it, as was the confusion she felt now. She wondered if he felt the same knot in the stomach, but didn’t have the opportunity to ask him. There were always people around; there was always something more important to think about. She sensed that he might be deliberately keeping himself busy, and she tried to do the same. They were in the middle of something far too important to muddle with feelings, after all.

The train passed Pittsburgh and switched to a line that led through the Philadelphia Keys. Once, Turner said, the tracks had gone all the way to Atlantic City, but now that Atlantic City was under the Atlantic, the line stopped six miles earlier, at Pleasantville. There, they would meet the submarine.

Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Pleasantville, Clair thought. They had once been abstract addresses attached to certain friends and entertainment possibilities, but soon she would have passed through all three of them and the spaces between. In a train car, in real time.

“I need to send a coded signal to the submariners,” Turner said. “Can Q help me with that?”

“If you give it to me,” Clair said, “I’ll bump it to Q.”

He agreed.

“The signal is ‘No one is coming to Lincoln Island.’ That’s all.” He recited the address, a string of characters that meant nothing to Clair.

They cracked the door again, and Clair passed the message on. As they waited for a reply, she thought about the message and its connection to submarines. Captain Nemo was probably the most famous submariner in literature, and his name meant no one in Latin. Also, Lincoln Island was where he had died. She hoped that wasn’t a bad omen. On the other hand, nemo was also Greek for I give what is due. So maybe it evened out.

Q declared that the signal had been delivered, and they shut the door again.

Turner brewed hot chocolate over a fuel cell as they went over the details of the plan. There would be a short drive to the docks in Pleasantville, during which they would be vulnerable.

“But nothing will happen, will, it?” Jesse asked. “No one will do anything with the world watching.”

“Hope for the best,” said Clair, “plan for the worst.”

“Spoken like a true soldier,” Turner said, opening a map of the Manhattan Isles and moving on to their underwater route along the Jersey peninsula. There were a number of possible landing points, including a seaport on Thirty-fourth Street and another in Brooklyn Heights.

“The most direct way to get there,” said Gemma, “would be by the flooded subways. “Penn Plaza sits right on top of one of the old stations.”

“It’ll be sealed up, surely,” said Ray, “and not very public.”

“But safer,” said Turner, looking to Clair.

Clair didn’t want to be the one to decide. Jesse had thrown her with the possibility that her thoughts might not be entirely her own. What if Mallory or someone else was forcing her to make bad decisions, or worse: decisions that might lead them right into a trap? How could she tell the difference?

“Direct is better,” said Gemma. “A parade might get us attention, but we’d also be more exposed. That makes me nervous.”

Turner nodded, and with that decision made, the strategy meeting broke up.

They went back to waiting in their own ways, Turner and Ray playing cards, Gemma sitting alone, Clair and Jesse lying on bedrolls that were still next to each other, although the physical distance between them had taken on a much greater significance now. Jesse settled into a comfortable position on his side, with his right hand under his left cheek. His hair draped like a curtain over his face. One green eye was barely visible, still open, looking at her.

He whispered, “Was that ‘hope for the best’ line from . . . you know?”

“No. Arabelle said it once.”

He looked relieved but also puzzled. “She was never a soldier.”

“I think she thought she was,” Clair said. “Every second of every day, WHOLE’s fighting the entire world.”

“Who knows what it’ll look like when they’re done with it?”

“As long as the dupes aren’t in it any longer, the world will automatically be a better place.”

Clair felt him shift slightly so his toes touched hers. She resisted the impulse to roll over and fold herself against him. Slowly, his eyelid drooped shut, his breathing slowed, and he was asleep.

She didn’t want to sleep. Her dreams bothered her. To keep herself awake, she thought about VIA, and the case she was going to make. Murder. Kidnapping. Identity theft. Conspiracy. All manner of information crimes. Mental rape.

As long as these sound like crimes, she told herself, I’ll know I’m still me.