Twinmaker

35

THE DAM LOOMED ahead of them, a vast wall of concrete rising like some ancient concave monolith from the riverbed. Its sluice gates were open; there was no need for either irrigation or power generation anymore, so the river just rushed straight through. But the structure remained as a testimony to a time of terrestrial mega-engineering, one of many such structures scattered all over the globe. Dams, bridges, tunnels—all functionally useless now, for most people.

“Look for somewhere we can get off without being seen,” she said, her voice throaty from suppressed emotion. “I presume this thing can keep itself upright for a while?”

“It’ll travel along a straight line until it hits something,” he said almost proudly, steering the doomed bike up the old riverbank to the eastern side of the river, where the road curled up onto the top of the dam itself. There was a narrow access road along the top whose safety barriers looked so rusted and fragile, a determined child could push through them.

Jesse took them around the end of the road to where the bank on the far side dipped down behind the dam. There he brought the bike to a brief halt.

Clair hopped off and flexed her stiff legs, feeling a thousand tiny pains.

“Wait,” she said, taking the extra ammo from the baggage compartment and shrugging the backpack over her shoulder. She took off her helmet and slung it on one arm. “Okay. Go.”

He hesitated, and she would have sworn she saw him pat the chassis farewell. Then he climbed out of his seat and used the handlebars to push the bike back up the slope. Crouching down behind it, he lined it up, fiddled with the controls, and dropped facedown onto the ground beside it to present a lower profile for anyone looking for them in infrared.

The bike accelerated away from him as he slithered back to join her. Would the engines be hot enough to cover the absence of the passengers? Clair hoped so. She also hoped that Jesse had had the forethought to angle the bike’s trajectory so it would fall to the left, not the right. They needed the person following them to see it die.

Halfway across the dam, the bike hit an irregularity in the road surface. Its back wheel lifted momentarily off the ground and then slewed right out from under it. The bike tipped onto its side and in a shower of sparks crashed through the rusted safety barrier—to the left. Engine shrilly singing and wheels futilely spinning, the bike sailed over the edge and followed a perfect arc out into space.

Clair craned her head and watched it as long as she dared.

“Now we find out if that’s enough to get them off our tail,” she whispered to Jesse, pulling him farther downslope, away from the road.

“You’d better hope so,” he hissed back at her. “Dad made that bike with his bare hands. . . .”

He stopped. The whining of another bike was rising up from the valley below.

“That’s not a Linwood,” Jesse said. “Too noisy, too inefficient. But powerful. Could be a PK bike.”

“Quiet,” Clair hissed, flattening herself against the backside of the dam and holding her breath as tightly as she held the pistol.

Their pursuer’s bike rumbled up the path and stopped at the top. Clair held her breath and waited. Would the person hunting them assume that Jesse and Clair had died in the crash and move on, or stick around to investigate more closely?

The person on the bike did nothing for over a minute, then put the bike back into motion, heading away from the dam and on the wild-goose chase Clair had set for them, chasing a phantom airship across the California countryside.

“Well, hell,” Jesse said. “It actually worked.”

“Told you it would.”

Clair felt no triumph. She didn’t relax until the sound of the bike had completely faded, and she told Jesse not to move for another five minutes after that, just to be sure. She wasn’t about to be caught halfway across the dam, exchanging a wild goose for sitting ducks because they were impatient.

“You ever play strategy games?” Jesse whispered as they waited.

“No. Why?”

“You should. You’d be killer at them.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re good at this. I’d have been caught five times over by now on my own. You’ve missed your true calling.”

“Hardly,” she said, fervently not wanting that to be true. Clair would rather be like Tilly Kozlova. She had famously only started playing piano in her teens and within two years had gone on to perform in the world’s most prestigious theaters. “You have your own skills,” she offered in the hope of taking some of the attention off her. “You can drive, for one.”

“And I’m killer with a screwdriver,” he said. “Never underestimate that.”

They sat still together, the wind whistling downriver forming an atonal counterpoint to the river’s basso continuo directly behind her. She could literally feel it through her back, the distant roaring of turbulence in concrete and steel piping. She wondered how long it would take to reduce the whole structure to rubble. A thousand years? A century? A decade?

“Look on my works, ye Mighty,” she thought, “and despair. . . .”

“Clair?” Someone was shaking her. “Clair, wake up.”

She jerked her head so hard, she banged it against the concrete, instantly dispelling a vivid dream about sandstorms and sphinxes.

“Sorry,” she said. “I just closed my eyes for a second.”

“Yeah, right. You were snoring. We’d better get moving. We haven’t got all night.”

Clair didn’t want to check the time. She didn’t want to move even her eyeballs. The tiny fragment of sleep had completely perforated her resolve.

He tugged her again.

“Come on, Clair. We’ve got to get to the airship and talk to Turner. He won’t wait for us forever.”

She forced herself upright. Everything from her brain all the way down to her feet felt like rubbery mush, and she had no doubt she looked as bad as she felt.

“Who is this guy, anyway?”

“Which guy?”

“The one on the airship Gemma said we’re going to meet.”

“Turner Goldsmith? You’ve never heard of him?”

She shook her head.

“No one knows where he is or what he looks like. I’ve never met him. I’m not sure if even Dad did. But if the World Holistic Leadership has a leader, it’s him. He’s supposed to be amazing.”

“And he’ll tell us what to do?”

“I guess so. Gemma said he knows what’s going on.”

“She’d better be right. I’m not going all that way for nothing.”

It would be a relief, she told herself, to let go like she had in the safe house, and allow someone else to give the orders. Jesse was right: being late wasn’t an option. If the airship left without them, then everything she had done would be for nothing. She’d end up like Arabelle and Theo and Cashile. And Zep.

With heavy footsteps, she followed Jesse up the slope. The backpack was heavier than it had been before—she was sure of it.

The wind was rising. She hugged herself and tugged her head in close to her shoulders to stay warm.