Vigilantes

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

A hand grabbed his ankle, pulled it toward his head, and more bones snapped.

  Voices said something about horrible deaths, about clones, about paying for what he had done, but he hadn’t done anything.

  His shirt was wet. His entire body was wet with something warm and sticky.

  The coffee, probably. It was the only thing he’d been holding.

  Coffee. And not very good coffee.

  He wanted to say, Stop, please. I’m only doing my job. Instead, he coughed out some—coffee? Too thick to be coffee. Tasted of rust or iron or something metallic. And it bubbled up from inside, but he wasn’t throwing up, was he?

  The very thought made him hurt.

  Something landed on his back, but he only knew that because his entire body bounced. He couldn’t feel the weight or the ground or anything. He heard more snapping, but didn’t know where it came from.

  His right eye was completely closed now and his left was pressed against the ground. He couldn’t see these attackers. He had no idea who they were. They hadn’t been on the street a moment before.

  He had watched to make sure he wasn’t followed. He hadn’t heard any footsteps except his own.

  He’d ordered lunch for the staff.

  He was a good man.

  Really.

  Why couldn’t they see that?

  He didn’t deserve this.

  He tried to tell them, but they kept kicking him, these anonymous people, these shoed feet, these attackers. They were talking, but he couldn’t hear them.

  He didn’t want to hear them.

  If they wouldn’t let him talk, he wouldn’t listen to them either.

  He closed his left eye, feeling the eyelashes scrape against the sidewalk, and heard himself grunt. Another kick, apparently. He was going to ignore it.

  It was happening to someone else.

  Things always happened to someone else.

  That was why lawyers existed. To handle disputes.

  Not kickers. Not attackers. These people should have visited the law firm. He could have helped them.

  He shuddered, wondering if someone at S3 would take their case.

  Couldn’t, though.

  Conflict of interest.

  Conflict.

  Interest.

  He sighed, then decided to worry about the legal side of it later.

  Later.

  After he woke up.

  SEVEN

  NYQUIST STARED AT the Peyti clone across from him. Uzvaan’s face was still blue with shame, his hands at his sides. The android guards had returned to their corners.

  It almost felt like Nyquist and Uzvaan were alone inside this watery tunnel, linked by their gigantic environmental bubbles.

  “Let’s go back to law school,” Nyquist said, as if Uzvaan hadn’t sickened him a moment before. “Who paid for your education?”

  “The corporation,” Uzvaan said.

  “Under what name?” Nyquist asked.

  Uzvaan said the Peytin name again.

  “No one questioned the name Legal Fiction, sending kids who looked alike to law school?” Nyquist asked.

  Apparently Uzvaan did not see the irony, because he continued to stare at Nyquist.

  “Our schools do not use DNA for identification,” Uzvaan said. “It is considered a violation of privacy. And how we appear is our business. Like your enhancements are.”

  “I was talking about the name,” Nyquist said. “Legal Fiction.”

  “The name has other meanings,” Uzvaan said. “I cannot vouch for the schools. I can merely assume that they chose to accept a different meaning for the name.”

  “Schools,” Nyquist said. “They sent you all to different schools?”

  “Yes,” Uzvaan said. “There are thousands of law schools on Peyla and even more off Peyla that cater to Peyti. All law schools must include an Earth Alliance track.”

  “You didn’t go to school with the other members of your—what do you call it? Team? Unit?”

  “No, we did not go to school together,” Uzvaan said quietly.

  “That must have felt odd,” Nyquist said.

  “We were prepared for it,” Uzvaan said. “We were removed from the compound in our last year, and trained one on one.”

  “In bomb-making?”

  “In Peyti standard curriculum,” Uzvaan said. “We were tested rigorously in it.”

  “And if you failed—?”

  “I did not fail,” Uzvaan said. The lawyer never entirely left him. It was deeply a part of him, perhaps more than he realized. That single sentence, both filled with pride and denial, was legal in its brilliance.

  Uzvaan had not failed, so he didn’t know what happened to the failures. And he was being trained alone at that point, so he could claim he had no knowledge.

  “Did the others you were raised with go to any other school besides law school?” Nyquist asked.

  “Not to my knowledge,” Uzvaan said. “But law school is a particularly good way for the Peyti to move around within the Earth Alliance.”

  Nyquist was about to ask his next question when he realized what Uzvaan had just said.

  “Are you saying that you weren’t all assigned to the Moon?”

  “I am, Detective,” Uzvaan said. “You know that.”

  He had suspected it, but he had not had confirmation. DeRicci had warned the Earth Alliance. No one had let her know whether or not more Peyti clones had been found.

  “So there are more bombs coming,” Nyquist said softly.

  “That I do not know,” Uzvaan said. “I only know my mission, not the mission of others.”

  “Your mission,” Nyquist said, “was it specific to this date and time? Did it change?”

  “No, the date did not change. I have known that date my entire life.”

  Nyquist froze for a half moment. Uzvaan surprised him. Nyquist had expected this attack to be a Plan B—the kind of attack that would only occur after something else failed.

  But apparently these masterminds, to use Flint’s word, did not plan for failure. DeRicci had been thinking of this all along. She’d been worried another attack would happen. She seemed to understand how this was organized.

  Or maybe she had just been planning for a worst case scenario. Maybe she had felt that there would be waves of these attacks until the goal was achieved, whatever that goal was.

  “You have known the date your entire life,” Nyquist repeated.

  “Since I could recall.” Uzvaan’s tone was flat. “I knew I had a creation date and an end date.”

  That was the second time he had referred to an end date.

  “Not a death date?” Nyquist said.

  Uzvaan leaned back a little, as if the question surprised him. “No, because death could come at any time.”

  “So what was the end date?” Nyquist asked.

  “The maximum length of my life,” Uzvaan said. “We all had maximum dates.”

  The hair rose on the back of Nyquist’s neck. “Were the maximum dates all the same?”

  Uzvaan turned blue again. Why would that question embarrass or distress him?

  “We were not allowed to talk about our creation dates or our end dates,” he said.

  “Why not?” Nyquist said.

  “Such things are personal,” Uzvaan said.

  “Would you get killed if you broke that rule?” Nyquist asked.

  “I do not know,” Uzvaan said. “I did not break it.”

  The silence hung between them for a moment. Uzvaan had given that answer quickly. Nyquist knew that was a lawyer answer, parsing the question on its face rather than for its meaning.

  Nyquist needed to be careful. He didn’t have a lot of time to ask Uzvaan questions. Nyquist couldn’t play verbal games. He needed to frame his questions as carefully as possible.

  “What else weren’t you allowed to talk about?” Nyquist asked.

  “Our assignments,” Uzvaan said.

  For a moment, Nyquist thought perhaps he meant study assignments—h
omework and the like. Then he realized he truly did not know what that word meant.

  “Explain assignments,” Nyquist said.

  “We were told when we were ten what our future would bring. We were sorted and given a life assignment. We could not discuss it with anyone else.”

  “What was your life assignment?” Nyquist asked.

  “I was to become a lawyer in the Earth Alliance,” Uzvaan said. “I was told I had an aptitude.”

  “Were you assigned to the Moon?” Nyquist asked.

  “I was to make the Moon my priority,” Uzvaan said. “If I did not receive that assignment, I would be considered a failure.”

  Nyquist shuddered. That failure thing was convenient. Whoever the mastermind was, he could weed out his candidates, leaving very few to do the work.

  It was wasteful, if one looked at the clones as tools, like Uzvaan had said. A tool with even the slightest flaw did not move forward.

  The amount of money behind this scheme was stupendous.

  “You are quiet now,” Uzvaan said.

  Nyquist looked at him. At least Uzvaan’s skin tone had returned to normal.

  “Yeah,” Nyquist said. “I was just thinking how vast this was. Did you have any idea how many others there were in your—religion or whatever you called it?”

  “We knew we were one among many,” Uzvaan said. “But if we saw someone else who might have been from our group outside of a group, we were not to talk to them about anything we learned.”

  “So the lawyers here on the Moon,” Nyquist said, “you guys never held a meeting.”

  “We held many meetings,” Uzvaan started, and Nyquist just about exploded with irritation.

  “About your upcoming end date or your team or unit or past,” he snapped, clarifying before Uzvaan could finish his damn lawyer answer.

  “We were forbidden from doing so,” Uzvaan said.

  “But you did meet,” Nyquist said.

  “As lawyers, as colleagues,” Uzvaan said. “We met the way that all lawyers meet, about cases and clients and our work.”

  “There’s no Secret Society of Peyti Clone Lawyers, huh?” Nyquist asked. He couldn’t hold the question back.

  “Not that I know of,” Uzvaan said, taking the question seriously. “Nor is there a Moon-based organization of Peyti lawyers who are not clones. I know that some of the human lawyers formed one, but the Peyti did not. At least on the Moon.”

  Nyquist let out a breath. He hadn’t expected Uzvaan to volunteer any information so that last was a surprise.

  “Because it was forbidden?” Nyquist asked.

  Uzvaan looked down. “Because it might be misconstrued.”

  Nyquist let the words echo for a moment. “Were you being watched?”

  Uzvaan looked up at him. Uzvaan’s eyes seemed even more liquid than usual.

  “I do not know,” he whispered.

  “They didn’t tell you they’d supervise you?” Nyquist asked.

  “I assumed they watched,” Uzvaan said. “We had been watched our entire lives.”

  “But you had no proof?” Nyquist asked.

  “I had no contact with the people who raised me from the moment I moved to the Moon,” Uzvaan said.

  “Did you think that unusual?” Nyquist asked.

  Uzvaan let out a small sigh. “I tried not to think about it at all.”

  Nyquist shook his head. “When you did think of it?” he asked, letting his irritation show.

  “I assumed they were watching and I was following the rules,” Uzvaan said.

  “Did other clone lawyers die because they didn’t follow the rules?” Nyquist asked.

  “I did not know which lawyers had an end date and which ones did not,” Uzvaan said.

  That was a curious way to state the mission of the clones.

  “So, you didn’t think that your clone siblings or whatever you called the other clones of Uzvekmt had the same mission you did?” Nyquist asked.

  “We were not allowed to discuss our assignments,” Uzvaan said.

  Nyquist let out a frustrated breath. Now he remembered why he preferring interrogating humans. At least he could pretend to understand what they were talking about.

  He had no idea what was normal for a Peyti or not, what was normal for most Peyti or not, how distinct Peyti culture was—he knew none of it. And he would have thought—just a few hours ago—that he knew a lot about Peyti culture, including how many damn subcultures had spun off of it.

  “You didn’t assume they had the same assignment that you had?” Nyquist asked.

  “It is not advised to assume anything,” Uzvaan said.

  He’d said that in the past, when Nyquist had been interrogating Uzvaan’s clients, and Nyquist had thought the sentence an example of Uzvaan’s fussy lawyerly precision.

  Now, Nyquist wondered if Uzvaan’s unwillingness to assume anything had been simple self-preservation. If Uzvaan had only acted on the facts as he knew them, he would have made fewer mistakes.

  Nyquist let out a deep sigh. Normally, in an interrogation like this, he would have brought in specialists. He would have found someone who understood Peyti culture. He would have brought in someone who actually spoke the language and understood the nuance better than a computer program would have—not that he could access one while in here.

  “All right,” Nyquist said. “Let’s be clear. What, exactly, was your assignment?”

  Uzvaan closed his eyes. His entire body shivered. He turned from gray to bright blue to gray again.

  Normally, Nyquist would have assumed that Uzvaan was breaking such an important stricture that the very act of doing so terrified him at a deep level.

  But Nyquist was going to take Uzvaan’s advice and not assume anything, at the moment, anyway.

  “My…assignment…” Uzvaan said, his voice trembling, “was to end twelve days ago at the appointed hour. I could choose my location, as long as my location was occupied by others and was inside an established organization.”

  Nyquist’s face grew warm. He made himself concentrate on the words, but not on their implications. Even though what Uzvaan told him meant that the others probably had the same assignment—and yes, Nyquist was assuming that.

  “I had to be on the Moon,” Uzvaan said. “I could not contact anyone about this assignment. I had to go to my end quietly. I could not complain. Complaining was failure.”

  And he’d die if he failed. Didn’t Uzvaan see the illogic of this? He was going to die anyway, so what was the price he’d pay for not doing the deed?

  “I was to use a specially designed mask, which would arrive in my mask-upgrade packet before the end date,” Uzvaan said.

  Nyquist wanted clarification of that, but he knew better than to interrupt.

  “The mask would contain the means to the end, as you humans would say. If I did not understand how to use it, it did not matter. I had to try and risk the failure. There would be no additional instructions. To contact the mask maker or anyone from my past would be to fail.”

  Good God. Nyquist clenched a fist, mostly for something to concentrate on, so that he wouldn’t ask questions.

  “I was not to tell anyone what I was assigned. Not at any point,” Uzvaan said.

  He had said that before, so clearly that instruction got repeated often.

  “I was told as a ten-year-old—”

  He did not say “child.” Nyquist found that revealing.

  “—that I would go on to law school for the Earth Alliance. I would qualify for one of three law schools, all the best in the Alliance. To do anything else would be to fail.”

  Nyquist clenched his other fist.

  “I would graduate close to the top of my class, but not at the top of my class. I was not to call unneeded attention to myself,” Uzvaan said.

  Because, Nyquist knew, to do so would be to fail. But he didn’t say that.

  “I would become a defense attorney. I would serve at the Impossibles for the minimum amount of time, an
d then only accept interviews from Moon-based firms. If I did not get any interviews with Moon-based firms, I was to go to the Moon on my own, and apply for work as a law clerk or legal assistant and work my way up to partner, if possible. The timeline was not as certain here, nor as important, as long as I practiced law on the Moon.”

  Uzvaan met Nyquist’s gaze.

  “I was not to make attachments outside of work. I was not to spend my money extravagantly. I was not to call attention to myself. To do so would be to fail.”

  Nyquist hated that repetition, and he wasn’t Uzvaan. How deep had that concept been drilled into the clones?

  “I was not to leave the Moon in the final year of my existence. I was to proceed to the end moment calmly and without regret. I was to act professionally at all times. I was not to tell anyone that time was nearly up.”

  Uzvaan closed his eyes again, slowly, as if he could not bear to look at Nyquist.

  Then even more slowly, Uzvaan opened his eyes. His skin tone remained the same for the first time in their entire meeting.

  “I followed each and every instruction. I did not deviate, even when I wanted to. One could argue that I am breaking the rules now, but one could also argue that the rules no longer apply because I no longer exist. The end date did come. I did not physically die. But I am no longer Uzvaan. I am nothing.”

  So that was how Uzvaan justified this conversation. Or this series of conversations.

  Nyquist waited. He wanted Uzvaan to be done before continuing.

  They sat in silence for several minutes. Finally, Uzvaan said, “That is the entire assignment, Detective.”

  Nyquist wanted to ask the psychological questions. He would have if this were a standard crime. But it wasn’t.

  “You mentioned a mask upgrade packet,” Nyquist said. “I’ve never heard of that. I thought Peyti got their masks locally, in the various shops here on the Moon.”

  Uzvaan shifted a little in his seat. “I do not know about other Peyti,” he said. “Ever since I left for school, I have received a mask upgrade packet each quarter. I was told I could only use those masks or it would impact my health adversely. The older I got, the more I believed there was some kind of tracking within the mask, something that allowed them to watch over me.”

  “Them?” Nyquist asked.