Twinmaker

55

THE COUNCIL OF war took place in the Farmhouse’s main hall.

“We’ll leave immediately,” said Turner. “We’re putting you all at risk.”

“I think that’s for the best,” said Arcady without hesitation. “We’ll help you as much as we can, but this isn’t our fight.”

“They murdered your people too,” said Jesse.

“They died defending our turf. That’s what we do. If the dupes come back, we’ll be ready.”

Clair imagined an army composed of infinitely replaceable, Improved dupes and said nothing. What could she say? Hunkering down wouldn’t solve anything. Libby, the real Libby, was still out there somewhere, frozen in a data server even after Mallory had destroyed the copy of her body. The dupes made making bodies look easy, as long as parity wasn’t broken. The mind was the hard part.

Clair wasn’t going to give up on Libby, no matter what Libby had told her to do. Clair was going to finish Improvement, one way or another.

“What is your intention?” Arcady asked them. “Where are you planning to go?”

No one spoke for a long moment. Clair was waiting to see what Turner would say. Presumably WHOLE had other hideouts like the Skylifter, where they could slowly rebuild their numbers. It couldn’t be easy assembling any kind of operational core when Abstainers were scattered all over the world, steadfastly refusing to make use of the main means of getting around.

“I still like Clair’s plan,” said Jesse. “Take it up with VIA. It’s their problem, ultimately. They’ll have to fix it.”

“You’d be exposed all the way,” said Arcady. “Who knows what would be waiting for you in New York?”

“And VIA is toothless,” said Ray. “The watchdog hasn’t even barked in years.”

“You obviously haven’t smuggled any illicit molecules recently,” said one of the farmers. “Or tried to sell a bootleg Mona Lisa.”

“And we have evidence,” said Jesse, glancing at the rows of bodies.

“If the dupes try to attack us,” Clair said, “we could end up with several of the same body, which would really clinch it.”

“But we couldn’t take them all with us,” said Ray.

“I know,” she said. “We’d just take Libby.”

Libby was where it had all started. It would end with her, Clair swore.

“You don’t really think VIA’s going to let us walk up to the front door with a corpse over our shoulders and stroll right in?” Ray held his hands above his head as though someone had stuck a gun in his back. “There’ll be security sweeps, background checks, the works. Look at us. If you were VIA, would you let any of us in?”

Clair did look. They were still in pajamas and shirts, except for Gemma, who must have slept in her clothes. They were splattered with blood and stained with pasts no ordinary citizen would boast of. Ray was right. They wouldn’t get near the place.

But why was Ray asking her this? She might have proposed the plan to Turner, but Jesse had been the one to suggest VIA in the first place. Why weren’t they looking to him as well?

Because she had stopped the dupes, she supposed, and because she was doing most of the talking now. That made a kind of sense, but it didn’t mean she had the answers.

Gemma and Turner were suspiciously quiet. Maybe they had already made up their minds, and it didn’t matter what anyone else said.

Then an idea came to her that blew all her doubts away.

“They’ll let us in,” she said, “because we’ll make it impossible for them not to.”

Everyone was looking at her now, not just Jesse and the surviving members of the Skylifter.

“Do tell,” said Ray.

She told them about the crashlanders. Then she reminded them of the video feed Dylan Linwood had put out into the Air. Zep had joked about her being famous for a day, and there was some truth to that: Arcady had seen the video, and he couldn’t have been the only one.

“I thought that was a bad thing at first,” she said, “because of the way it made me look, but now I think we can use it to our advantage. Both the crashlanders and Abstainers are communities primed to latch onto something new or controversial. They’re completely different, and neither is huge, but they draw attention because people outside them disagree on whether they’re good or bad. People talk about them, and talk about what they’re talking about. If we can make the crashlanders and the Abstainers talk about us, I think we can really make something pop.”

“Something like what?” asked Jesse.

“We don’t hide the fact that we’re going to VIA HQ in New York. The exact opposite: we tell everyone—anyone who’s interested. We promise them something worth seeing. Like Ray says, we’ll be exposed when we leave the farm; there’ll be drones all over us as soon as we’re back in civilization. They’re the eyes of the world, and if they’re on us because we’re giving the world a show, the dupes won’t dare act, not up close when they can be seen as well. Home is where the harm is—that’s what my mom says: we think we’re safe when we’re hiding, but we’re not. Let’s come out of hiding and let the world protect us.”

“The drones in Manteca were compromised,” Gemma reminded her. “They couldn’t see anything.”

“Q can help with that,” she said, hoping that was true.

“What if they hit you from a distance or make it look like an accident,” said Arcady, “like they did with the Skylifter?”

“Enough people will know what really happened,” she said, hoping that would be true as well. “Who could ignore something like that? Especially if we spread the word widely enough. There’s no reason we can’t fight this on more than one front at once. Improvement started with a note that told people to keep it a secret. So maybe we should issue a note of our own that does the exact opposite.”

“Anti-Improvement?” said Jesse. “No, Counter-Improvement. That’s better.”

“But we only mention Improvement and the damage it does,” Clair said. “That’s important. Anything else will make us look crazy. Really crazy, I mean.”

“Even though it’s true?” said Arcady.

“Let’s not overcomplicate things. No one will believe us until they see it with their own eyes. If the dupes come out of the shadows to take us down—that’ll do it. If they don’t and we get to VIA with the body—that’ll do it too. Either way, it’ll all come out. When VIA says it’s happening, everyone will believe.”

“What if VIA’s involved?” asked Turner. “The dupes have to be directed by someone.”

“Do they? I really don’t think VIA would be so stupid as to attack their own system—”

“But if they are, what then?”

She thought for a second. “They’ll still let us come. Their best shot will be to discredit us, not destroy us. As long as we stay in the public eye and don’t use d-mat, they can’t engineer an accident or dupe us. They can’t do either without exposing the truth or breaking parity, so we’ll be safe.”

“What about peacekeepers?” asked Arcady.

“Technically, we haven’t done anything wrong,” she said. “They’ve got no grounds to bring us in, and we’ve seen no sign that they’re likely to. Maybe they’ll turn a blind eye if we’re in trouble, maybe we can’t entirely trust them, but they won’t act openly against us.”

“And what about you?” asked Jesse. “Your reputation is also at stake. What’s everyone going to think when you out yourself as . . . well . . . one of us?”

“It’s only temporarily, and I reckon my reputation is pretty shot already.” She offered him a smile but didn’t look any lower than his neck. He still hadn’t put a shirt on and she didn’t want to blush again, not when she was busy arguing her case. “Thanks, though. Maybe we can show the world that being controversial is not such a bad thing when you’re right.”

“I think . . . ,” Gemma started to say, then stopped when people looked at her. She raised her chin. “I think we should do it.”

Clair stared at her. She was the last person Clair had expected to come out in favor of the idea.

“Really?” asked Ray. He looked as startled as Clair felt.

“Yes. It’s better than sitting here waiting for the hammer to fall.”

“I agree,” said Turner, and Clair was doubly amazed.

“We need to go for one simple reason,” he explained. “If VIA won’t listen, WHOLE will be there to take direct action.”

“Uh . . . what does that mean?” asked Jesse.

“It means whatever it needs to mean.”

“I’m not a terrorist,” said Clair.

“No one’s asking you to be one,” Turner said.

There was a tense silence around the table, but Clair felt that was as close to a consensus as she was ever going to get.

“All right, then. Great. So how do we get there?” she asked. “We certainly can’t walk.”

“I know a way,” said Arcady. “You can hitch a ride with train hobbyists.”

“You’re kidding, right?” said Jesse.

“No. We use them all the time. There’s a line running right across our property, and engines go by once a day—east at dawn, back west at dusk. You catch the next one, you’ll be on the east coast in two days, maybe sooner.”

“What happens then?” asked Gemma. “We swim?”

“We won’t have to,” said Turner. “We’re going to take a submarine.”

“Now you’ve got to be kidding,” said Clair.

“I am not.” He folded his arms, his expression betraying no trace of humor. “You want a spectacle, that’s exactly what you’re going to get.”