Read Online Crashland by Sean Williams - Free Book Online Page A

of the field telling her that Jesse and Devin had joined her feed as well.
    Glimpses of Crystal City’s urban landscape came and went. Clare locked on to one particular frame and zoomed in as far as she could, sweeping her point of view across a stand of bushes next to a park named after the last president of the United States, Caroline J. Oswald.
    â€œCould that be someone’s arm?” she said, highlighting a particular patch of shadow.
    â€œMaybe,” said PK Beck. “We’ll check it out. Good work.”
    â€œThat’s not an arm,” Devin bumped her. “Hypervigilance and false positives. The PKs are nervous. I wonder what they’re not showing us.”
    â€œI thought you said they were doing this just to keep us occupied.”
    â€œI can’t have it both ways?”
    â€œThat siren is too annoying to be a fake.”
    â€œTrue.”
    A flash cut across the PK lens interface, distracting Clair from her task. She blinked and focused on the new notification. It had to be important to rise up out of the morass of other messages.
    When she saw what it was, everything else ceased to matter. A chat request had come through her most private channel. It was from Libby.

[10]
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    SEVERAL THOUGHTS COLLIDED in Clair’s mind at once. But Libby was dead! No, she might not be—not if her pattern had been saved in the same place Zep had come from. Should she mention it to someone? There wasn’t time—if she didn’t take the request now it might go away and never come back!
    She opened the chat and peered into a new window that opened in her infield.
    There was Libby, seen through someone’s lenses, looking exactly as Clair remembered, skinny and vibrant in sweatpants and halter, birthmark and all, standing on a bed and singing something—a jitter-punk song that had been big a few months back, “Pinch Me” by the Ponies. Seeing Libby again was like a physical shock to her entire system: not jealous Libby or Libby the dupe, but Libby, her best friend, who was generous with rice broth when needed, constantly late, and compulsively fashionable, and whose favorite aromatic oil was vanilla. Clair could smell that perfume now, as though Libby were in the room with her. It made the muscles around her eyes tighten as though she might cry. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out of it.
    Libby was dancing with great enthusiasm to her own singing, mocking the lead Pony’s distinctive hip roll, while in the background someone laughed hugely and without restraint. Clair knew that laugh. It was Zep. When he came into view to sing the chorus, Clair’s pulse knocked hard in her throat. His voice was terrible, which only made it funnier, and sadder, and more heartbreaking.
    A second laugh joined in. It was Clair’s own.
    And suddenly she remembered this moment, from before everything had gone wrong. It had been after school a month ago, while they were supposed to be studying. The room was Libby’s bedroom, and the recording had been taken from Clair’s augs. She didn’t remember saving it, but she must have. She didn’t remember that shirt Zep was wearing either.
    The recording must have been lifted from her profile by the dupe.
    But why send it to Clair now? Why use Libby’s profile to do it?
    Clair considered closing the chat, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away. Those had been happier times in every way, hanging out at each other’s places or jumping all over the world, watching as Zep competed in various contests, crashing Libby’s cliques, strolling through Clair’s favorite art galleries and making fun of the old-fashioned hairstyles. Clair had gotten along well with both Libby and Zep, and the trio had become duos at various times without jealousy or competitiveness, at least until the whole having-a-crush-on-Zep problem had surfaced. The reason it had taken her by surprise was precisely because of how content