“What kind of hobbyists?” asked Clair, feeling the darkness thickening around her like tar.
“People who fly aircraft. In this case, airships.”
She didn’t know such things still existed. “Why an airship?”
“Well, they’re more mobile than vehicles and safer than d-mat,” said Arabelle, “and they’re both highly visible and impossible to sneak up on. We’ll be safe there.”
“If we get there,” said Gemma.
“Hope for the best,” Arabelle said, “plan for the worst.”
“Uh . . . I’ve never ridden an electrobike,” Clair admitted, unsure for the moment whether she would be going anywhere with anyone. All she wanted was answers, not de facto membership in their clique.
Jesse broke his long silence to say, “Then I guess you have two choices: stay behind or learn.”
Arabelle glanced at him. Her lips pursed.
“We’re not leaving anyone behind,” she said. “Clair, you can ride pillion with Jesse.”
Clair didn’t know what that meant, but she knew a reprimand when she heard it.
Jesse looked down into his lap again and didn’t say anything.
Escalon wasn’t quite a ghost town, but it showed few signs of life. Most of the buildings were abandoned, their windows broken and roofs slowly collapsing inward. Even at night everything looked desert brown. Clair watched the d-mat sign go by with longing. Who knew when everything would go back to normal and she could travel that way again, without fear of being tracked down and murdered?
There would be no normal, she thought with a dull heart, without Zep, without Libby, without being able even to go home. . . .
The cache was in a squarish Art Deco building that might once have been an old movie theater. The ATAC trundled between the theater and the church next door and swung around the back, where there was a large clear space overhung by shabby eucalyptus. The vehicle came to a halt with a barely perceptible jerk, and its motor’s steady hum ceased.
“Okay, people.” Gemma hauled herself out of her seat, moving wearily, gingerly, protective of her injured shoulder. She was drenched in blood like Clair, but Gemma’s was all her own. The rear door unsealed with a squeak. Clair’s menus returned the moment the cage was broken. There was a patch from “q,” and she answered it by text only, hoping her mask was still in place.
“You’re in Escalon, I see,” said “q.” “It’s lucky no one else can find you. You’re a wanted person now.”
“Murder?” she sent back, misspelling the word twice before sending it.
“Not yet. Get the pistol into a booth so I can dispose of it and no one will ever match it to the bullet that killed Dylan Linwood.”
“Can’t get to a booth right now,” she said, still sick to her stomach at the thought of killing anyone, whether he was Dylan Linwood or not. “These guys are WHOLE, remember? It’s not really on their agenda.”
“Understood. Are you friends with them now too?”
Clair didn’t know how to answer that. The voice sounded more childlike than ever, convincing her that it really did belong to a kid somewhere. A kid who was for some reason obsessed with her and her friendships—but Clair could accept that for now, just so long as “q” continued to help her.
Everyone piled out into the still, cold air. Clair scanned the urban nightscape around her, expecting gunshots at any moment but hearing nothing out of the ordinary. This was her chance to run, she thought. She could head for the scattered lights of Escalon, those faint glimmers of civilization, and leave the mad world of WHOLE behind her forever.
The memory of Dylan Linwood’s body falling from the roof made her stay. She wasn’t part of civilization anymore, and until she understood why, she was stuck with Gemma and her disheveled band. It was either that or be pulled in by the PKs . . . or worse, she thought. How many other assassins were roaming the night, looking for her right now?
They would be safe at the airship, she told herself. She had to believe that, or she might as well give up now.
A stocky, silent woman with long black dreadlocks took Cashile to a small door at the back of the hall, and the rest followed. Although the walls looked on the verge of collapse, the lock on the door worked just fine. The hinges gleamed in the starlight.
The old theater was a garage, a word Clair had never had cause to use before. Inside the main hall were a dozen sleek electrobikes not dissimilar to the one Dylan Linwood had driven to school that morning, except these were more solid and had larger, spokeless wheels. They resembled ink-stained quicksilver cheetahs, frozen in midstretch. Cashile climbed over them like a hyperactive cub.
“Fully charged and ready to go,” he said with a grin.
“We’ll leave one minute apart,” said Gemma, doing a credible impersonation of someone able to stand on her own.
“I get my own bike, right?” broke in the kid.
“But you still ride out with your mom. No radio contact unless it’s an emergency. They’ll be hunting us. You can count on that.”
31
THE FRONT DOORS opened, and the ATAC trundled inside, looking like a low-backed, eyeless lizard with eight lumpy wheels for legs. Its chameleon skin shifted and changed as it entered its new environment, taking on the appearance of straight lines and flat surfaces with remarkable effectiveness. When it stopped moving, it very nearly vanished.
“Ammo over there,” said Ray, pointing Clair in the direction of a chest near the ATAC.
Then he mounted his electrobike and throttled it into motion. Without a word, he steered it to the front doors and disappeared into the night. Motor noise rose and fell at his command, and then all was silent again.
Clair opened the ammo chest and stared blankly at a sea of casings and magazines. How would she know what fit her empty pistol? Did she even want to reload it? Hadn’t enough people died that night?
A strong tap on her shoulder alerted her to the presence of the dreadlocked woman at her side. Cashile’s mom wrote her name with a fingertip in the dust on the top of the chest: THEO. Theo held out her palm for the pistol. Clair gave it to her and watched as she expertly handled it. Sections opened, closed, came off, and went back on like some kind of magic show. Then Theo turned back to the chest. She produced a box of bullets and loaded the magazine. It held fourteen tapered copper-sided shells that seemed enormous to Clair’s eyes.
Theo also filled a second magazine, which she handed over, along with another box of bullets and the gun itself. Clair juggled them all, wondering when she might possibly need so much firepower. Was this her life now?
“Uh, thanks,” she said, feeling like a child.
Theo just nodded.
Clair carried her lethal armfuls to where Jesse was waiting next to one of the electrobikes with a bottle of water in each hand. Wordlessly, without meeting her eyes, he gave her one of the bottles. She put the ammo in her backpack and worked out on her own where to stow it in a baggage compartment. Clair put the loaded pistol back in her pocket, hoping against hope that she would never have to use it again. Part of her still resisted the idea that she was about to go riding anywhere.
“Are you armed, Jesse?” asked Gemma.
“No,” he said.
“You should be.”
“Dad didn’t hold with guns, so I won’t either.”
“Maybe if he had, he’d still be with us.”
Jesse glanced at Clair, and she could see naked confusion in his eyes. What was he telling himself had happened back at the safe house? That Clair had shot his father for breaking a lifetime of not using guns and shooting at her, or that she’d shot an impostor in his father’s body? Either possibility seemed ghastly and unlikely.