He saw no one on the streets, and none of the buildings had lights on. He tried to convince himself that was because of Dome Daylight, but he knew that many places had lights on around the clock because of how dark this neighborhood was.
Talia didn’t say anything. He wasn’t even sure she noticed that the lawyer’s office next door was closed. It looked almost abandoned—the way that an office constantly in use looked when it was suddenly closed.
Flint felt something like despair. He hadn’t even liked the lawyer, but he had been a decent attorney. Just not a great one. Flint could afford better.
Had the lawyer been one of the collateral damage casualties of the Peyti Crisis?
Flint didn’t have time to investigate that.
He put his hand on the door knob, letting the alarm system identify him through his DNA. The warmth of his hand told the system he was alive; his movements reinforced that; and the fact that he had someone with him alerted the system to making certain that some systems didn’t even activate.
The door swung open, and Talia eased in ahead of him.
She glanced over her shoulder at him, and tried to smile. That look, the pathetic half-smile, the attempt to reassure him that she was okay, made him feel even worse.
“At least it smells good in here,” she said.
It did too. He hadn’t realized that outside smelled faintly of burned rubber. He wondered what was going wrong with the old parts of the dome filtration system now.
He let the door close behind him. The lights came up, not that it would be noticeable from the outside. He hadn’t put out his shingle in years. The entire system was instructed to make sure this place looked like it was not a functioning office any more.
Inside, it had been very functional—at least as recently as a few months ago. He had been rebuilding his computer system on Anniversary Day, as well as redesigning the interior. When he had a moment after the initial madness calmed down, he finished that redesign, with the idea that at some point, he would have to return to work here.
The environmental systems had kept the air clean, the temperature comfortable, and the dust outside of the office.
“What are we doing, Dad?” Talia asked. The question seemed like an effort.
“We’re not doing anything,” he said. “I’ve got some things to look up.”
“I can help,” she said, and she almost sounded interested.
“I know,” he said. “Right now, though, the search is a bit dicey, and I need to do it.”
She winced. She felt he hadn’t trusted her to use the systems in this office since she had nearly exposed her sisters a few years ago. Not that these girls were her actual sisters. They were the other clones from her original, Emmeline.
Those clones were all older than Talia, created at a different time. Flint hadn’t been—and still wasn’t—sure if they even knew they were clones. Talia hadn’t.
And these girls had been adopted by good families throughout the Alliance, so legally, those clones were considered human.
He didn’t know how to reassure Talia without bringing up that incident. She had gotten a lot more cautious in the past few years. He wanted to tell her that, but didn’t dare.
“I should probably be doing this work at the university or something,” Flint said, “but I doubt anyone is in their cafeteria at the moment.”
He often used places with excellent networking and fantastic research capabilities, like the Brownie Bar (which he would never go to with Talia beside him) and Dome University’s Armstrong Campus so that any weird searches he did would be untraceable to him.
“You think someone would notice?” Talia asked.
“I think we go there later in the week if we need to,” he said. “Right now, you and I would get noticed.”
That was the curse of looking different from everyone else. His pale skin and curly blond hair always attracted stares. Talia’s matching hair got the same attention when the two of them were together.
Now that she was older, and her hair combined with her copper skin and stunningly unusual eyes, she was getting other kinds of stares, the kind of stares a father knew were coming for his daughter, but never wanted to see.
“What are you searching for?” she asked.
“A financial trail,” he said.
“I want to help,” she said again.
He sighed. “Okay,” he said after a moment. “I need you to do a systems check—”
“Da-a-ad.” She made that word into three syllables, and then rolled her eyes. He smiled. He had missed the attitude.
“It’s important,” he said. “I haven’t worked here in a long time, and I need to make sure the security—”
“You can do it.” She sat down heavily on the floor near the far wall. She brought her legs in so that she was sitting cross-legged, then she leaned the back of her head against the wall. She closed her eyes.
For a moment, Talia had been back. Then he lost her again.
He wanted to try to bring her out, even though he knew it probably wouldn’t work.
“It’s not make-work,” he said. “It’s important.”
“I know,” she said tiredly. “But I’ll just screw it up.”
Then he realized what he had done wrong. He had said the word ‘security.’ Security was what had failed to protect that boy in her school. Security had failed to protect almost everyone sitting next to a Peyti clone during the Peyti Crisis, and that failed security had been initiated by the United Domes of the Moon Security Department.
He silently cursed himself. If he got caught or someone came after him because his systems hadn’t protected him, Talia would blame herself.
So she protected herself by not even trying.
“I think you’ll do fine,” he said, and knew it sounded inadequate.
She didn’t answer him. She didn’t move. He knew the posture.
She was pretending to be asleep.
He sighed, and pulled back the chair near his newly rebuilt system. He had screens all over the office, and several different networked computers. He had some non-networked ones as well, and floating flat screens when he wanted to activate them.
He didn’t want to at the moment.
He kept the vocal commands shut down, and he tapped his most powerful system to life. Then he stared at it for a long moment.
He wasn’t sure exactly how to start looking for those vast sums of money he and Deshin had talked about.
He wasn’t even certain what year to begin in.
He needed to do some background work first. He needed to try to wrap his brain around the scope of the thing that Deshin had presented him, something that should have been obvious to everyone investigating, but hadn’t been.
Someone had been planning these attacks for decades. They didn’t just buy twenty-some matching clones (in the case of PierLuigi Frémont) or hundreds of them (in the case of the Peyti). They had raised a series of clones with the idea that there would be two attacks, maybe three.
Definitely three.
He leaned his head back, mimicking Talia’s posture.
Before he did any investigation here, he needed to get DeRicci on this. He wasn’t quite sure how. How did they search for more clones?
And of what? What species? What kind?
Could they legally do that kind of search?
He didn’t know.
But he did know that he had to find out.
TWENTY-FIVE
TORKILD ZHU WAS sober. Disgustingly, horribly, sober. He had taken all kinds of clearers. They got rid of the alcohol, the nausea, the headache. They cleared the red out of his eyes, nose, and cheeks (boy, he had been drinking too much), repaired his broken capillaries, and took the puffiness out of his skin.
They would have made him feel good, except that he didn’t feel good.
He doubted he would ever feel good again.
He had looked in the metaphorical mirror and had not liked what he had seen.
Of course,
what he had seen hadn’t gotten him to change his behavior. He knew he never would.
He sat in his hotel room, hands in his hair, scanning the injunctions that Salehi had sent him. Zhu had already run them through his AutoLearn program, but that wasn’t the same as reading the documents. Dozens of them, all to be delivered in person. Salehi had already sent them to the various legal arms of the various government agencies.
But all attorneys knew that agencies were great at claiming that legal documents, particularly those sent across great distances, arrived garbled or ruined or not at all.
Zhu had to make sure that the documents got to the right people.
He had wanted to hire some legal assistants to do that, but he couldn’t. Not yet. He needed to rent some office space first.
Through his links, he had approached a few law firms here about partnering with S3, but the two lawyers he had spoken to had begged off before he even got to the meat of the case. Not because they were squeamish about representing the Peyti clones—Zhu hadn’t even mentioned that.
Just because anything to do with the Peyti Crisis put the firms in a conflict of interest. They had either lost lawyers to the crisis or they had hired some of the clones who were now under lock and key.
Zhu was finally beginning to understand why the Peyti government had gone to S3 in the first place. They couldn’t hire anyone on the Moon. Every single law firm here was tainted.
He got up, feeling fifty years older than he was. He had changed into the only real suit he had brought with him. It crinkled as he moved—real water silk, the kind that cost a small fortune. It had been a present from Berhane when he graduated from law school, and he hadn’t wanted to leave it behind.
He hadn’t fit in it after years at S3, but apparently, he had lost a lot of weight during his little binge. Which made sense, since he was using the alcohol for calories.
The very idea of alcohol made him slightly queasy, and that wasn’t because of any clearers or any anti-alcohol nanobots. The way he had behaved the last few weeks disgusted him almost as much as this case did.
Then he corrected himself: these cases, not this case.
He had to wrap his brain around the fact that he was now The Guy Who Had No Soul. He needed to think about his clients and shut off the emotions.
He had to use this as an intellectual challenge.
He checked his appearance in the actual mirror near the door, then finger-combed his hair. He looked good. Amazing what science could do. He made himself smile, then realized that was wrong.
He wasn’t going to be the smarmy attorney who smiled his way through a difficult case. He was going to be the understanding attorney, who knew how awful his job was, but how necessary it was as well.
The adult attorney, the one who regretfully worked against the Alliance’s best interest.
Then he shook his head. He couldn’t think of this case that way. He couldn’t. Because, in reality, this was for the Alliance—or at least all those billions of clones inside the Alliance.
Salehi had been right about that.
Zhu braced himself, and then he left the hotel room. Once he went to the Armstrong Police Department, he couldn’t turn back. He was committed.
But he also knew he was fooling himself.
There was no turning back.
He had committed the moment he contacted Salehi.
Zhu represented the Peyti clones, and probably would for the rest of his life.
TWENTY-SIX
THE MEETING DRONED on and through it all, the other detectives listened with a kind of energy that Nyquist had never seen before. Usually in large meetings, his colleagues squirmed. They stared into space, which generally meant they were checking their links or watching the time or maybe even working on an investigation (or playing some kind of game).
If he were Chief of Detectives, he would shut off all but the emergency links in important meetings. But since he had sometimes been one of the detectives who spent his time working rather than listening, he had never suggested that to Andrea Gumiela.
He had eased away from Savita Romey on the pretext of talking with a friend on the force he hadn’t seen for a long time. She should have caught him at that right there; he didn’t have many friends on the force, and most people knew that.
But she was like everyone else in the room—eager to have a piece of those Peyti clones.
Gumiela hadn’t mentioned the property angle. Nyquist wasn’t even certain she thought of it.
She had dealt with a lot of these clones before anyone knew that they were clones. She had known them as high-powered attorneys who came into the offices with an agenda. She had to either agree with that agenda (in the case of the prosecutors) or dismiss it somehow (in the case of the defense attorneys).
She probably hadn’t realized that much of the room had gone from thinking of the Peyti prisoners as lawyers to thinking of them as clones. As property.
And that would lead to something dangerous.
He did his best not to look over his shoulder at Romey as he eased to the front. When Gumiela stopped speaking, he sent her a message and made certain he caught her eye at the same time.
There’s something ugly happening among the detectives, he sent. Before you approve the interrogation pairs, please give me five minutes of your time.
Her gaze flitted off his, and for a moment, he thought maybe his message had gone into some kind of queue inside her communications system.
Then she did something he had never seen before: she scanned the room.
He wasn’t on a platform. He didn’t know what she saw. But whatever it was, it made her lean back almost imperceptivity. If he hadn’t been looking for a reaction, he wouldn’t have seen it at all.
Then she looked back at him. You’ll have five minutes, Detective, she sent. You better make it good.
TWENTY-SEVEN
THE LAST OF the Peyti clones had disappeared into the security doors at the Reception Facility.
Leckie put her fingers under her chin, then swept it forward, a rude gesture that meant anything from go fuck yourself to fuck off and die. She meant all of those things and so much more.
“Nice,” Willis said to her. He still wore his riot suit, but he had deactivated the helmet. “Don’t you wish you had magic in those fingertips and you could make them all explode?”
She deactivated her helmet as well. The air on the platform smelled faintly of rubber and some dry dusty thing she’d begun to think of as Peyti sweat.
“I want them to suffer,” she said. “I almost wish I could stay here, so that I could snap an arm, like you did, or accidentally stomp on one of their feet.”
“I think they should die,” Willis said still looking after them.
The other guards were filing back to the train. Eventually, they’d board it, and ride it back to Glenn Station, and for a brief moment, they would sit in silence, with nothing to do.
Nothing made her antsy. She would rather have the stupid clones to focus on than the things she’d seen last week. Or Anniversary Day.
Her hand tightened around the barrel of her laser rifle.
“They should watch each other explode, one by one,” Willis said, “and the last guy, he should be spared, so he could live with that memory forever.”
“Yeah,” she said, but her heart wasn’t in it.
Both she and Willis—and everyone else in corrections—assumed these clones had feelings, they had the ability to understand what they had done, and they felt some sense of self preservation.
And they’d acted on it, after Willis broke an arm. But that was also logic, and she knew how much the Peyti valued logic.
Although there had been nothing logical in their attacks.
She shook her head. “Maybe I’m done with this gig,” she said as she took the steps into the train car.
“Prisoner transport?” Willis asked.
“The Moon,” she said. “It’s not home any more.”
“Ah, c’mon,
Maude,” he said. “You’ll feel different when we get back to the Station.”
He meant Glenn Station. Parts of it were just fine, and other parts still hadn’t recovered from Anniversary Day. From her apartment she could see the attempts at the rebuild, and an exploded Growing Pit outside the city’s dome.
She wouldn’t feel different when she got back.
Her city would still be damaged.
Her family would still have holes through its heart.
And she didn’t know how to deal with any of it.
“Yeah, I’ll feel different,” she said, and sank into one of the chairs recently vacated by a Peyti clone.
Willis smiled at her. He thought her little crisis was over. But she meant she would feel different forever, and he meant she would feel better.
She doubted there was any better ahead for her.
So it was time to seek different—whatever that meant.
Maybe if things settled down on the Moon, she might actually have time to figure all that out.
TWENTY-EIGHT
THE PLATFORM LOWERED, and Gumiela’s team marched through the throng of detectives. Nyquist scrambled to follow. He had to push past colleagues who were pairing up, saying, “Excuse me, excuse me,” by rote. The “Excuse me’s got loud when he started shoving, but still no one seemed to notice.
He got to the door that Gumiela went through just before it snicked shut. He put his hand between the frame and the edge of the door, pushing it open, and hurrying inside.
The room off the bull pen was an extension of Gumiela’s office. She had quite the set-up. It included a full office down the corridor, a larger meeting area, and this thing, attached to the bull pen. Her predecessor had called this the media room, but Gumiela generally met the media on the steps of the police department.
She felt that the department backdrop made everything she said all the more official.
The Peyti Crisis: A Retrieval Artist Novel: Book Five of the Anniversary Day Saga (Retrieval Artist series 12) Page 16
