“Gemma . . . Gemma gave me some codes before we left Escalon, while we were testing the helmets.”
Clair quashed a momentary resentment that she hadn’t been told. Zombie girl. Jesse’s voice was choked, as though something horrible had happened. “What did she say to you?”
“They got Arabelle.”
“‘Got’?”
“Killed.”
Clair saw a flash of Zep’s broken face.
“For real?”
“I wouldn’t lie to you about something like that.”
She believed him. This was the woman whose shoulder he had wept on, who had told him to be brave. Clair had trusted her and put her hopes for answers and safety in her hands. A crippled woman in a wheelchair . . . and now she was dead.
Clair’s insides roiled, but she didn’t have time to dwell on it. Q was flashing her.
“Clair, I have multiple targets radiating out from the center of Oakdale. Two of them are coming in your direction.”
She nodded. Forewarned was forearmed, she supposed.
“What happened to ‘Dylan Linwood’?”
“He is in transit again, and I can’t tell where he is going. He’s moving around in a way I can’t explain.”
“Maybe he’s just a decoy, designed to distract us,” she said, taking inspiration where she found it. “Maybe we can use the same trick against him.”
“What do you mean, Clair?”
“We’re supposed to be meeting an airship,” she said, reaffirming her faith in Arabelle’s plan. “Can you see it the same way you’re seeing all this?”
“There is air traffic over Stockton. One of them is heading in the direction of Maury Rasmussen airfield.”
“That must be it.” She hoped it was. “If you copy its profile and send copies in different directions, anyone watching the same data as you won’t know which one is the real one.”
“Clever! They’ll either have to chase all of them down or concentrate on some at random. I’ll try it, Clair. If you maintain radio silence, it should give you some time.”
“That’s all we need.”
“Clair?” said Jesse, opening the line between them again.
“What?”
“Lights behind us. We might have been seen.”
They were just coming out of Oakdale. She didn’t want to look behind her for fear of losing her balance.
“Shit. The turnoff is still over a half mile away.”
Jesse switched off the headlights, and the bike roared beneath them along the suddenly invisible road.
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.