“It’s my daughter,” he said, and pushed past a pile of techs. He had to get out of here. He had to make sure she was all right.
He reached the door when he heard DeRicci behind him.
“I’m going to section the dome right on schedule,” she said. “Make sure you’re nowhere near one of the dividers.”
Permission to leave. As if he needed that.
“When, exactly?” he asked. He couldn’t remember. It seemed like everything had left his mind when he discovered Talia was in danger.
“Six minutes from now.”
He set one of his internal alarms. When he got in the car, he would make sure he avoided the divider.
But he also had to figure out if he could get to Aristotle Academy fast enough to be in the correct section with Talia.
He ran out the door and down the hall, avoiding guards, avoiding people who looked both panicked and busy and lost without their links. He pulled open the stairwell and took the stairs down three at a time.
It would be a push to get to the correct section of the dome before the dividers came down.
But he would do it, no matter what.
Sixty-five
“We’re in the middle of a meeting,” Ms. Rutledge said to the officer standing at the door of the conference room. She had used that powerful headmistress voice, the one that made Talia nervous.
The guard holding Talia shifted slightly. He was clearly nervous, too.
“I know, ma’am,” the officer said in a respectful tone. “But this is important. I need to speak to the lawyers, please.”
“It will wait,” Ms. Rutledge said. “We’ll be done in just a few minutes.”
“No, ma’am, it will not, and I can’t talk to them in front of you. If you would kindly leave the room, I can talk to them inside.”
Ms. Rutledge sighed audibly and got up. One of the police officers hidden down the hallway was holding up his fingers, as if he were counting down. If he was marking time, they were running out.
Talia wanted to know what was going on. Something bad. Something these guys said Chief DeRicci wanted stopped. And the links were down. She wanted to squirm away, but she had the good sense not to. She would be interrupting something.
Ms. Rutledge got to the door. “Officer, please, tell me what it is, and I’ll see if it’s worth taking the time.”
The officer doing the countdown only had four fingers remaining. The officer closest to the one at the door hissed, “Now or never,” and the officer at the door grabbed Ms. Rutledge and threw her into the hallway.
Then he slammed the door shut.
“Now!” he yelled. “Now!”
Talia’s heart pounded. Ms. Rutledge lost her footing and sprawled on the floor. Someone should have helped her, but no one did. The guard holding Talia tightened his grip, pushing up on her nose, blocking her air.
She elbowed him in the stomach again, and when that didn’t work, she grabbed at his hand and pulled down, hoping he would get the message.
He did. He shifted his hand slightly, but he didn’t relax his grip on her.
At the same time, Kaleb’s dad and two of the lawyers stood up. Kaleb still sat at the table, looking stunned. One of the lawyers, the Peyti, tugged on his mask.
Talia had never seen a Peyti touch his mask, let alone tug on it.
It looked like he broke it.
The guard holding Talia cursed. He let her go and sprinted down the hallway toward the others.
She stumbled, her mouth bruised, then she staggered over to Ms. Rutledge.
“What’s going on?” the headmistress asked.
“I don’t know,” Talia said. “Are you okay?”
She glanced over her shoulder as she asked it. The officer near the door still held it shut. Another officer and a guard flanked him.
“Now!” the officer screamed. “I’m not kidding! Now!”
Ms. Rutledge pushed herself up. “I’m fine.”
She sounded as distracted as Talia. Ms. Rutledge leaned forward and then said, “What—?”
And stopped herself, hand over her mouth.
Talia looked at the room. The air was no longer clear. It was…orange? Yellow? She couldn’t quite tell. But Kaleb was screaming, he was clearly screaming, even though she couldn’t hear him.
Kaleb’s dad was pounding on the windows, and two of the lawyers were pulling on the door, but they weren’t getting it open. Their faces were turning red, their eyes were watering, and they were clearly yelling too.
Talia stood up. The officers had let go of the door. They were backing away.
“What are you doing?” she asked them.
They didn’t answer her.
Kaleb collapsed, then one of the lawyers, followed by another. They twitched on the floor, partially obscured by that weird-colored air. Then Kaleb’s dad dropped, and two more lawyers.
Talia was shaking. This was deliberate. They were deliberately killing the people in the room.
She took another step forward and no one stopped her.
Through the yellowish air, she saw one figure still sitting at the table. The Peyti. He had removed his mask.
She’d never seen a Peyti face outside of holoimages. He looked almost human. He didn’t seem upset at all. He still held the part of his mask that he had broken. He held it up for everyone to see, and then brought his other hand over and grabbed it tightly.
The officers froze. The guards looked terrified.
And nothing happened.
Nothing at all.
The Peyti looked at the mask.
Talia looked at the floor, the people hunched down there. If the Peyti could breathe, then the atmosphere in there was toxic. She knew that much, even though she’d never been to Peyla.
“You killed them,” she said, her voice shaking. “You killed everyone in that room.”
“Yeah,” one of the guards said and turned his back on the carnage. “We know.”
Sixty-six
DeRicci watched the clock she had put in front of her left eye. A timer, set to the exact moment when she would release the domes. Three more minutes.
She hoped to hell that Flint had paid attention to her warning; she hoped he was nowhere near the dome dividers.
She also knew she was worried about him so that she wouldn’t think about all of the people who would get hurt when the domes sectioned. Sectioning them wasn’t something she did lightly. Depending on where the dividers were, their rapid fall could cause injury and death.
She toyed with opening the links a full minute before the domes sectioned, but an order to explode the domes could go through the links as rapidly as an order to section the domes. She didn’t dare risk it.
She had to trust her people to know when those domes would come down.
She would open the links ten seconds ahead and hoped they worked all over the Moon.
Popova had moved to her side. The techs had stopped working. They were looking at her.
Goudkins stood at her other side, as if supporting her. Maybe she was. The woman had worked hard this afternoon. Even Goudkins’ partner had come into DeRicci’s office. Apparently the guy finally figured out that something was up.
He was no threat, because he couldn’t contact anyone.
One minute left. DeRicci counted down mentally along with the seconds clock. She wanted to anticipate, she wanted to be early, but she didn’t dare.
She glanced at Popova. Popova was staring at the blank screens, her hands clasped tightly in front of her, as if she were holding herself together.
Fifteen seconds.
She could feel the techs’ eyes on her.
Thirteen.
She had no idea seconds could last so long.
Eleven.
“Now,” she said, and the links opened.
The screens sprang to life, images everywhere, things she didn’t entirely understand. The floating faces returned, and so did some other images she couldn’t look at right now.
Sh
e sent the order to everyone from the conference, every Moon government, everyone in charge of domes.
Section the domes, she sent. Now.
Sixty-seven
He wasn’t going to make it. Flint had been fighting with his aircar from the moment he got in it. He’d taken off most of the fail-safes long ago, but he never thought to take off a maximum speed fail-safe. Yeah, he’d set the maximum speed fifty kilometers per hour higher than it was supposed to go, but that wasn’t enough.
He never thought he’d have to go faster than that.
And he needed to now.
He was half a kilometer away from the Aristotle Academy. For some reason, he thought the dome section was a kilometer closer. When he got into the aircar and realized his mistake, he’d tried to punch the speed, and he wasn’t able to.
So he was driving too fast and he was trying to reprogram his aircar and he was trying to stay out of the way of other vehicles because at this speed, the automatic pilot did not work, and he was only a few meters away from the dome divider when the links opened.
“This dome is going to section right in front of us and we’re going to crash,” he said out loud to his stupid aircar, hoping that at least an emergency—a proven emergency—would break the vehicle’s stranglehold on speed.
He was afraid the aircar would brake, but apparently, they were too close for that and going too fast, because the aircar shot forward. He lost control.
The automatic pilot was back, taking care of things at a speed so fast the buildings around him were blurs. The aircar ducked and swerved and slowed down.
And as it did, Flint looked behind him. The section had dropped.
He hadn’t felt it because he’d been in the air.
He couldn’t see if anything—or anyone—had gotten caught in the sectioning. And he wasn’t going to go back to help.
Not with a Peyti lawyer on the grounds of Aristotle Academy.
Not with the links back up.
He sent to Talia, I’m coming. I’ll be there in just a few minutes, but she didn’t respond. He didn’t know if her links were back up yet or if she couldn’t respond.
Half a kilometer wasn’t much at this speed. But it still seemed like it would take too long.
He set his message to Talia on repeat, and hoped to hell he would hear from her any second now.
Sixty-eight
The links opened. Bartholomew Nyquist dropped to the floor outside Interrogation Room One and covered his head with his hands. He’d been through too many dome sectionings to ever experience one on his feet again.
The building shook, and he heard the sound of falling debris. Nothing fell around him. The entire building was solid and had been fortified since Anniversary Day—at least parts of it, anyway—but that didn’t stop things from falling off desks or lights from coming out of ceilings.
He hoped the entire ceiling collapsed inside Interrogation Room One. He hoped it would fall on Uzvaan’s head and kill the bastard slowly and painfully.
But he also hoped that the atmosphere wouldn’t escape and Uzvaan’s stupid bomb wouldn’t go off.
The thought made Nyquist pop to his feet the moment the shaking stopped.
Uzvaan still sat on his chair, looking calmer than he had a right to. The mask had slipped to the ground, as had the bomb component. The air still looked yellowish, but Nyquist double-checked the reading to make sure nothing leaked from the room.
He didn’t want any change in that atmosphere. He didn’t want a bomb to go off in this building, even if the dome had sectioned.
He wanted this day to be over.
A cacophony started through his links and he welcomed it. Damage reports, updates, voices sounding stressed. He left the emergency links on, but isolated it to audio only, so that he’d hear any warning as it came in.
Instead, he went to the secure links that DeRicci had set up. Report after report of imprisoned Peyti clones. Trapped. Looking frustrated. Looking angry.
He sighed for just a moment and leaned against the wall. They’d averted the worst of it.
Now they’d have to figure out what to do with these bastards.
But they could do that. They had the clones trapped.
This wasn’t Anniversary Day times a hundred. Times five hundred.
This was bad, yes, but solvable.
And now they had prisoners. Prisoners who might know something. Prisoners who were logical and who might be amenable to making a deal to save their own skins.
He glared at Uzvaan and smiled slowly.
“Got you, you bastard,” Nyquist said softly. “We got you all.”
Sixty-nine
DeRicci had managed to stay on her feet during the dome sectioning. She didn’t want to sit down, she didn’t want to cover her head, she didn’t want to hide.
Not from anything or anyone.
Several others in the room dropped when she gave the order. She didn’t look at them.
Instead, she watched the screens, listened to the sounds that came through her links.
Once, just once, she glanced at her desk, and thought of Flint. The thought had built-in conflict: She wanted him here because she wanted his help, and she hoped he made it to Aristotle Academy without trouble.
Then she looked away. She instructed Popova to compile a casualties list in real time. DeRicci wanted to know how many were injured, how many dead, and how many of those injuries and deaths came from the domes sectioning, how many were collateral damage from stopping the Peyti clones, and how many were due to the clones themselves.
She could see, at a glance, that all of the domes had survived.
All of them.
She considered that a huge victory. One she would not celebrate, of course, because there had been casualties. But personally, privately, she pumped a tiny mental fist of joy that none of the domes disintegrated.
Somehow, her people had worked together. Somehow, even the idiots had risen above their petty politics and had managed to do something within a short space of time. Somehow, everyone managed to neutralize the threat before any of the bombs went off.
“Chief?” someone spoke behind her. She didn’t like the tone.
She turned.
A young man, one of the techs whose name got lost in the chaos of the day, had paled. He clutched a pad.
“There was an explosion about half an hour ago,” he said.
Her heart sank. She hadn’t seen it. Nor had any of the government officials contacted her.
“Where?”
“In one of the Growing Pits twenty kilometers from Armstrong,” he said.
“And another one,” said one of the middle-aged female techs, “in a mining company near Tycho Crater.”
“And a third,” said an older male tech, “in a resort not too far from Gagarin Dome.”
DeRicci let out a breath, the feeling of jubilation gone. Somehow the links hadn’t failed in those places, the domes hadn’t sectioned—
What a minute. She blinked, her brain working again. “All three of those businesses, were they outside domes or inside domes?”
“Outside,” the younger tech said.
“There were Peyti clones outside the domes?” asked another tech.
“Lawyers work everywhere,” Goudkins said drily.
“When the links went down, they knew something was up,” DeRicci said. “So the clones activated their bombs, and no one in the companies knew what was coming.”
She had known that they would miss. Only this one was on her. She hadn’t thought about all the businesses outside the domes. She didn’t dare speak her next thought either, but she had been lucky: Considering how many businesses did operate outside a dome, the fact that only three had exploded was amazing.
“Send help to all of these sites,” she said. “And get eyes on them. I want to know the extent of the damage.”
“That Growing Pit company was obliterated,” the first tech said.
“Some of the mines collapsed,” the female
tech said, “but that didn’t mean deaths, just a loss of equipment.”
“Only one building in the resort blew,” the third tech said. “I have no idea how big that building was or how many casualties there were.”
DeRicci let out a small breath. She had been through this before. She would not rest until she had answers.
Only now, she had five hundred suspects in custody, five hundred Peyti who knew something, even if it was only the name of the person or organization that ordered this massive attack.
This attack on the Moon.
This wasn’t an attack against the Earth Alliance. This was an attack against the Moon, just like Anniversary Day had been. Someone wanted to obliterate Earth’s moon.
And she would find out who. She wasn’t going to ask for help from the Alliance, especially since it looked like they were involved in some way. She would learn from Flint.
She would use any resources she had, from the police forces all over the Moon to criminals like Luc Deshin to non-security personnel like Flint himself.
She would find whoever—or whatever—was behind all of this, and she would make them pay.
Seventy
The aircar had barely stopped when Flint leapt out of it and ran into Aristotle Academy. He had been shocked at the lack of security. Not that it was down—at least outside the Academy—but it had remained at normal levels.
He would have figured after a dome sectioning, someone would have implemented high security protocols.
He still couldn’t reach anyone through his links. He suspected the problem was the network inside the Academy.
At least the building was still here. At least nothing had exploded.
And that was a good sign.
He ran inside, further shocked that no guards stood near the doors. He used a locator through his links to find Talia.
She wasn’t far from Selah Rutledge’s office.
He ran past students still sprawled on the floor, some injured, others taking care of them. The walls and ceilings of the building held, but plants had fallen over, tiles had fallen off the wall, and a couple of doors hung sideways.
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