He hoped to hell DeRicci’s people were good. He would tell his own officials to make sure they didn’t find more clones on their own security feeds. He had no idea if they would.
But he didn’t want to fail at this. If someone was going to fail, it couldn’t be him.
He couldn’t lose Tycho Crater—again.
Sixty-one
Talia hovered. She never hovered. She was usually outrageously decisive.
But seeing Kaleb inside that conference room, his head down, made her nervous. His father’s face had grown red, and his gestures curt, almost violent. One of the men sitting next to him actually put a hand on Kaleb’s father’s arm, as if to calm him down.
Ms. Rutledge didn’t seem upset. She had templed her fingers, and was tapping them together as she listened. She wasn’t watching Kaleb’s father.
She was watching Kaleb.
Talia stood a few meters away, mesmerized. She really needed to get back to class, but she didn’t want to leave this. She wanted to know what was going to happen.
One of the security guards looked up and frowned. Then he glanced at his companion who seemed to be working really really hard not to show any surprise.
But something had happened.
Talia felt the beginnings of a headache, and heard an ache in her ears. She recognized this feeling. She’d had it once before, in her closet in Valhalla Basin, after those idiots who killed her mother—who would kill her mother at that point, but hadn’t yet—shut off the links.
She was just imagining it. No one shut off all the links in Armstrong. It just wasn’t safe. Armstrong was all about safety.
She tried to access the school links, and couldn’t. Maybe the school system was down.
Then she decided to use her private link to contact Kaleb, see if he wanted her in there. The message she planned to send bounced back at her, something that had never happened on any links before. At least to her. At least here.
“C’mon, honey.” A security guard put his arm around her waist and pulled her backward. “We need to move you.”
He was already moving her. She elbowed him—hard— in the stomach. Nobody touched her without her permission. Nobody. Not after what happened with her mom all those years ago. Talia took care of herself and didn’t let anyone force her to do anything.
The guard grunted, but didn’t let go. He pulled her behind one of the plants.
She sent a help message to her dad—Something’s weird. Get here at once!—through her emergency links, and that message just fizzled.
The emergency links were down, too.
She struggled. “Let me go.”
“I can’t, hon. We have to get you out of here. Let’s get you to class, okay? Where are you supposed to be?”
His voice sounded calm, as if he weren’t holding her in a death grip. Five Armstrong police officers came down the hall, pointing and nodding. They didn’t seem to be using links either.
Had they come to arrest Kaleb’s father?
She planted her feet, hard, and the security guard couldn’t budge her. “What’s going on?”
“It’s none of your business, hon,” he said. “Let’s get you out of here.”
“It is too my business!” she said loudly, even though she wasn’t exactly sure why.
“Shut her up,” one of the police officers hissed, “and take her somewhere else.”
“I’m going to need help with that,” the guard said.
“We can’t spare anyone,” the officer said. “Don’t cause trouble, kid, or we’ll have to restrain you.”
“You can’t do that. My dad works with Security Chief DeRicci. They’ll—”
“This is on their orders,” the officer hissed, his voice very soft. “Now shut up and get out of the way.”
Something about his tone convinced her. She stopped struggling. The guard tried to pull her down the hall, but she kept her feet planted hard. He’d have to lift her to move her.
She wasn’t going to yell any more, though.
“I can’t check the specs,” one of the other officers said to one of the guards. “Every room here have its own environmental system?”
“Of course,” the guard said.
“Where do we get to it?” the officer asked.
“I’ll show you,” the guard said.
They took off at a run down the hall.
Talia stared at the conference room. No one in there seemed to notice what was going on in the hallway. Kaleb had raised his head, but his hand shielded his eyes.
He looked miserable.
She wanted to catch his attention, but she couldn’t. The guard held her arms. She’d been in that conference room once. It was soundproof, so it didn’t matter how much she yelled.
Still, she felt like Kaleb should know something weird was going on. If nothing else, it would stop the stupid talks about him leaving school. It would give her a chance to think about whether she wanted to help him or not.
Maybe she wouldn’t have to do anything. Maybe the police were here for his dad. Her dad knew she was worried about that whole family. Maybe he had told Security Chief DeRicci. Maybe they found something. Maybe they could arrest him, and Kaleb would become the state’s problem.
She wanted Kaleb to be the state’s problem.
The police officers had moved into a weird line, like they needed to see each other to relay information.
Only one stood in the hallway now, and he looked really, really nervous.
He gave a small hand signal to his other officers. The guard put his hand over Talia’s mouth. His fingers smelled of onions. She tried to move away, but his grip got tight.
The police officer opened the door to the conference room.
“I need to speak to the lawyers, please,” he said. “Outside. Right now.”
The lawyers looked at each other, clearly confused. But they didn’t get up. No one did.
And Talia had a feeling that was a very, very bad thing.
Sixty-two
DeRicci’s office was a hub of activity. Techs she barely recognized scanned information from every part of the office, sitting everywhere, including the edge of some of the planter pots. Flint stood at her desk, tapping away, looking stressed. That Earth Alliance investigator, Goudkins, bowed over some kind of pad, recording information or making notes or doing something during this time of silence. DeRicci wasn’t sure what, and at the moment, she didn’t care.
Goudkins couldn’t communicate with anyone. Hell, no one could communicate, and DeRicci hated that.
But she liked it, too. It meant that she didn’t have to worry about this Earth Alliance investigator for another thirty minutes or so.
Popova was in the other conference room with the remaining Earth Alliance investigator, trying to get him to take the afternoon off so he wouldn’t see what was going on. Eventually they would have to trust him, but DeRicci didn’t want to think about that right now.
In fact, all she could think about were the screens someone had lowered in the center of the room. Just before she left for the conference, she set up the screens to show law enforcement offices all over the Moon. She had opaqued the screens so they wouldn’t bother anyone else, but she wanted the screens working when she came back.
She looked at the blank screens. She hadn’t thought about her one, simple, important, order. Keep the links down. They were down now, and she couldn’t get information—at least not the information she wanted.
She wanted to know how well it was going. And she had no idea. Because all she could learn was negative right now. No one had reported an explosion, no one knew of a dome breach, no one heard of some Peyti going nuts on the street.
Or if they had heard, they couldn’t report to her.
She used to hate her links. Now she hated the silence. She wanted everything back to normal, but she had no idea what normal was any more.
She threaded her fingers together, took a deep sigh, and waited.
She couldn’t do anyt
hing else.
Sixty-three
Bartholomew Nyquist wasn’t much of an actor, but he knew the importance of his role this afternoon. He had to remain calm and pretend like everything was normal, even though the links had gone down and he had to catch one of hundreds of mass murderers who had infiltrated the Moon.
He greeted Uzvaan, the Peyti lawyer who represented Ursula Palmette, Nyquist’s old partner and the woman who had tried to bomb Armstrong on Anniversary Day. He had told Uzvaan that Palmette had information, that they were bringing her to the precinct to question her again, and that Uzvaan probably wanted to be present.
Since Uzvaan worked in a law office nearby, it hadn’t taken him long to get here.
Most of the detectives in the First Detective Unit were gone, tracking down other Peyti clones. No one had said anything when the orders came through; they had all looked at each other with a resignation that he found familiar.
This was the new normal. They would constantly be under threat until they figured out who or what was behind the attacks. That they faced clones again didn’t surprise Nyquist. He felt weirdly unsurprised by it, maybe because of the discussions he’d had with Flint.
What had surprised Nyquist was the fact that the clones were Peyti. Somehow he had gotten it in his head that these attacks were human-based.
“They’re bringing her to Interrogation One,” he said to Uzvaan.
Uzvaan clutched a small pad in his long fingers. He always carried one. He was slender, even for a Peyti, and fussy about everything. Nyquist had known him for years now, and always thought of him as a competent lawyer, but not a great one. He sometimes seemed like he wasn’t paying attention, which Nyquist had always thought of as strange in a Peyti. Usually they had a fanatical attention to detail.
Uzvaan didn’t move. He tilted his head. Nyquist tried not to look at his mask. If he hadn’t been told about the difference, he might not even have noticed it. The mask looked a little thicker on the bottom. That was it.
“Are the links off here?” Uzvaan asked.
Nyquist had expected the question, but it still made his heart race to hear it. “Yeah. They went down a few minutes ago.”
“This does not worry you?”
“Everything worries me,” Nyquist said, “but we’ve had issues like this for weeks now. I think someone has been monkeying with our system.”
Uzvaan did not visibly react to that. Instead, he turned and headed toward the interrogation rooms.
Nyquist wasn’t sure what kind of reaction he wanted to see from Uzvaan, if any. He’d always found Uzvaan unreadable, even for a Peyti. And he used to think Uzvaan was nondescript, rather forgettable. He would have been hard-pressed to describe him at all. Privately, Nyquist used to think to himself that Uzvaan looked like every other Peyti, and then Nyquist would worry about that thought, thinking maybe it was bigoted.
Now he realized that Uzvaan did look like other Peyti that Nyquist had seen. He hoped that his colleagues were taking care of those Peyti. Because he had to take care of this one.
“I do not understand what she can tell you now that she has not already told you,” Uzvaan said as he pulled open the door to the interrogation rooms.
“We’ve gotten some fascinating information concerning the zoodeh,” Nyquist said truthfully. “I think some of our assumptions might be wrong. We can shorten her sentence if she can give us information of value.”
Uzvaan grunted, as if in acknowledgement. He headed toward Interrogation One. He certainly knew his way around here.
Nyquist’s heart was pounding.
“I do not know why you could not have talked with her in the prison,” Uzvaan said.
“I would’ve thought she’d be happy to have a day on the outside,” Nyquist said.
“Since when do you care about her happiness?” Uzvaan asked.
Nyquist smiled slightly to himself. That was the Uzvaan he knew.
“I don’t,” Nyquist said. “I have information here that I’m not taking near that prison.”
“You are afraid it will be compromised?” Uzvaan asked.
“I’m sure of it.”
They reached Interrogation One. The window was clear, showing no one in that white-on-white room.
“I’d find out where she is,” Nyquist said, “but my links are still down. Why don’t you just wait in there, while I check.”
Uzvaan shook his head, and for a moment, Nyquist thought they might have a problem. “You do realize that each minute I sit in there wastes my time. She is not a paying client. I will bill this to the city itself.”
“That’s not my concern,” Nyquist said. “But I’ll do what I can to get her here faster.”
Uzvaan went inside the room. He peered at the white table as if it were covered in filth.
Normal procedure meant that Nyquist left the door open. But there was nothing normal about this afternoon.
He slammed the door shut and locked it. Then he hit the control panel hidden in the wall and immediately changed the environment inside Interrogation One to Peyti Normal.
Uzvaan whirled. He grabbed his mask by the bottom and removed the bomb. Then he took off the mask itself.
Nyquist wasn’t sure he had ever seen a maskless Peyti before. Uzvaan looked less intimidating, not more. Blue flooded his face, and for a moment, Nyquist wondered if the environmental mix was wrong.
Uzvaan threw the mask on the table and squeezed the bomb.
Nyquist shook. He reached for his own weapon, not sure what would happen.
But the bomb did not go off.
Uzvaan’s skin continued to cycle through a variety of colors. Then he tossed the bomb across the room as if in fury.
Nyquist had never seen an angry Peyti before.
“You do not have the right to hold me here,” Uzvaan said through the open intercom.
“Oh, yeah, I do,” Nyquist said. “We just got a recording of that. You tried to bring down the entire station. And yes, I know what you were holding. You might want to think about your own defense, counselor. Because what’s going to happen to you in Earth Alliance courts won’t be very pretty.”
Then he shut off the intercom, and moved away from the window so that Uzvaan couldn’t see him.
Nyquist leaned against the wall and closed his eyes for a second. One down. Hundreds more to go.
He had no idea if the other takedowns were going well. He hated the silence on the links. But he now knew why that silence was mandatory.
He set up an automated message to go to DeRicci the moment the links returned:
I have one of the bastards in Interrogation Room One. He’s neutralized.
Nyquist took a deep breath and opened his eyes. His instructions were to remain in case something went wrong with the environment, the interrogation room, or the bomb.
He hoped to hell this thing would get resolved soon, because he felt like a potential victim just standing here.
And he hated that feeling more than anything else.
Sixty-four
Flint double- and triple-checked the information in front of him. He couldn’t get past the feeling that he had missed something. He used this time when the links were down to review everything he and the others had done.
His neck ached. So did his back. He hadn’t moved for hours. His eyes burned because he sometimes forgot to blink.
He had also ordered the techs in the room to review their information. Goudkins had started reviewing information as well, because she couldn’t communicate with the Alliance at the moment.
DeRicci paced, clearly too distracted to think about anything else. Flint thought that was all right, because she wasn’t the best with information gathering.
He hadn’t found any clones that his system had missed, so he couldn’t quite figure out where this odd feeling came from. He had dispatched some security guards in this building to the first floor because one Peyti lawyer had arrived with a delegation from Moscow Dome, trying to extort some nonexistent money
out of the United Domes of the Moon. That Peyti lawyer had been a clone.
The guards were supposed to move him to a different section of the building and then change the environment in that area. The fact that nothing had exploded yet probably meant the capture of the Peyti clone had been successful.
But Flint still couldn’t figure out the cause of his unease. Clearly his eye had seen something that registered with his subconscious, but not with his conscious brain. His main concern was always Armstrong, so he decided to go through its files first.
And then he found it:
A Peyti lawyer—a Peyti clone of Uzvekmt—had entered the Aristotle Academy about the point when Flint had dropped off Talia. The lawyer worked for one of the most respected firms in Armstrong.
Flint had seen a crowd of people surrounding that kid who had started the melee the day before. Maybe that crowd hadn’t been handlers for the father, like Flint had assumed, but lawyers.
Lawyers trying to protect something, or do something, or change something.
He wished the links were open, the networks were open, the information system was open. Because he needed to hack into the law firm right now and see if Kaleb Lamber’s father was a client.
Hell, Flint needed to get in touch with Talia, right now. She had to get out of that building.
He tapped the computer screen, shutting down the program.
“I gotta go,” he said to DeRicci.
She looked at him as if his words made no sense. “Go where?” she asked.
“One of the lawyers is at Aristotle Academy,” Flint said. “With Talia.”
Goudkins looked up, so did a few of the other techs.
“You can’t go anywhere, Miles,” DeRicci said. “It’s not safe.”
“It’s not safe for her,” he said.
“If something had exploded, the dome would have sectioned,” DeRicci said. “It hasn’t. She’s all right. You have to trust that this will get taken care of. It’s in your files, right?”
“That’s how I found it,” Flint said.
“Then someone is on it,” DeRicci said. “You have to trust them.”
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