Five people looked up as they walked in. The only one Clair recognized was Gemma.
“If it hadn’t been for your friend Q, we’d have given up on you,” Gemma said. Her cheeks were flushed, but the rest of her was as white as bone, and she moved her shoulder as though bearing a great burden. She nodded at Ray, who had come up the elevator with them. “Where is it?”
Ray hooked a thumb at where the body rested under a tarp.
“Bring it through. If we’re quick, we might hack into the lens feed. Be careful, though. The body could be booby-trapped.”
Clair hadn’t considered that possibility. From the sharp downturn of Jesse’s mouth, she guessed he hadn’t either.
“Which one of you is Turner Goldsmith?” Clair asked as the body disappeared through the right-hand door, followed by Gemma and the others.
“Turner’s upstairs,” said a woman in her twenties with disconcertingly mismatched eyes—one blue, the other green. “He’ll call when he’s ready. I’ll show you where you can freshen up.”
“Right now, I don’t care about freshening up,” Clair said.
“It’s through here.” The young woman ignored her protests, opening the other door and showing Clair and Jesse a toilet area. There were four cubicles crammed around two tiny basins. “Go easy on the water, but help yourself to soap.”
Clair started to argue. They hadn’t raced all night to get to the airship, dodging dupes every step of the way, only to be left on the bench like they didn’t even matter.
“I’ll be back when Turner sends for you,” the young woman said, talking right over her and following the others through the right-hand door and shutting it firmly in her wake. The sharp click of a lock left Clair in no doubt that she wouldn’t be able to follow.
Clair went to call Q, but her lenses were empty of anything other than a simple menu broadcast by the Skylifter itself. The Air was jammed.
She put her hands on her hips and looked around in annoyance and disappointment. So much for Turner Goldsmith telling them what to do.
“Buffalo,” said Jesse, his fingertips dancing across virtual menus.
“What?” She didn’t mean to snap, but she couldn’t help it.
“That’s where we’re headed, according to the flight plan. North until we hit the westerlies. From there, northeast over Washington, Montana, maybe into Manitoba and Ontario, then south for a landing in Buffalo.”
“What’s in Buffalo?” asked Clair.
“Maybe nothing. It could just be a ruse, in case anyone’s watching.”
“Fantastic.”
“We’re in a Skylifter,” said Jesse, as though he still couldn’t believe it. “No wonder no one ever knows where Turner is!”
Clair leaned her forehead against the sweeping plastic window, fighting tears of frustration and exhaustion. The ground below was already impossibly distant, a hazy brown plain, crinkled and dotted with faint geometric shapes still visible despite nature’s reclamation of the land. The plains were bounded to the east by jagged mountains—the Sierra Nevada, muscular stone in all its brutality.
Somewhere down there, Libby was in just as much trouble as she had ever been. And being high above it all, Clair thought, wasn’t solving anything.
You’d better have answers for me, she said to herself, or I swear, Turner Goldsmith, I’ll pop your balloon and bring you down to earth myself.
43
SINCE SHE HAD nothing better to do while she waited, Clair used the bathroom to freshen up and emerged feeling gritty and greasy under damp clothes she would ordinarily have recycled without a second thought. The source of the coffee smell turned out to be a well-used filtration unit behind a hatch in the wall, with a selection of mismatched mugs stained from frequent use. There was a whole miniature kitchen in there, with a small freezer and what looked like a fabber but was in fact a microwave oven. She just poured herself a coffee, adding lots of milk and sugar. Her stomach ached, but she wasn’t remotely hungry.
The Air was still jammed, Q with it.
“Any word from the others?” she asked Jesse.
“Nope,” he said. He was lying flat on his back in the center of the room, with his arms folded across his eyes.
She sat down next to him, needing a means of keeping her hope alive. “How well do you know these people? Can we trust them?”
“I’ve known some of them most of my life. Abstainer meetings are like AA meetings—everyone has a testimonial. I heard those stories over and over, but they obviously didn’t tell me anything important, like who was really in WHOLE and who wasn’t.”
His voice was full of self-blame and irritation. Clair had moved past that. For now, she was determined to learn everything she could about their captors, in case that was indeed what they turned out to be.
“Are those testimonials secret?”
“I guess not. Are you asking?”
“Yes,” she said bluntly.
He sighed. “All right. You remember Aunt Arabelle . . . ?”
“Two left feet. And Gemma: she lost her son to Improvement.”
“Yes, well, I’d never heard that before. Ray’s wife died in transit—just arrived dead for no reason, and they couldn’t revive her. Theo, Cashile’s mom, had aphasia thanks to d-mat: she could understand but couldn’t speak.”
“What about Turner Goldsmith?”
“I don’t know what his story is. There are lots of others: someone had a son whose mind was wiped; someone else’s mom died of the same cancer as George Staines. And, oh, hey, this is a good one: there’s a girl who used to come to meetings with this guy she said was her brother. But he was older, way older, like thirty years or more.”
“Don’t tell me d-mat prematurely aged him,” Clair said.
“No, it’s better than that. They’re actually twins. Have you heard that story about a girl who was hung up in transit . . . ?”
She gaped at him. “You want me to believe that’s real?”
He rolled over and lifted his arms off his eyes to look at her. “Some urban legends must be based on truth, Clair. They can’t all be lies, even if most people want them to be.”
“Do you believe it?”
Jesse looked down at his feet. They were bare, revealing calluses she normally associated with natural-sport players like Zep. She supposed he just walked a lot. In the last two days, her blisters had developed blisters.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But I don’t automatically disbelieve it, not after what we’ve seen.”
“True. I’m not sure I’d believe our story if someone else told it to me: Libby and Q, the dupes of your dad . . .”
He rolled away, and she let him go, understanding. It was too early to talk about that, although she desperately wanted to know the truth of it. She couldn’t imagine how it must feel to see a parent die not just once, but over and over again. It was a hellish thought, too much to take in quickly.
The whole situation was too much. She had thought getting to the airship would solve all her problems, but here she was, sitting on a cushion in bright sunlight, avoiding the raw ache where Zep had been and wondering if Libby knew what had happened to him. She couldn’t begin to guess how Libby might be feeling if she did. Would she blame Clair? Clair would give everything to talk to her best friend as they had talked before . . . when the only issues they’d had had to worry about were school, captions, and chores. Nothing had seemed insurmountable then.