He kept looking at her like she was broken. Maybe she was. She couldn’t stop shaking half the time, and tears threatened at the weirdest moments.
She pulled the blankets around herself and scrunched the pillows to support her back. Then she waited, trying to make up a good lie to convince her father that she really was all right.
But he didn’t hurry in here like he had on previous nights. Of course, this afternoon she’d been clear-headed enough to hack into her bedroom’s security system and make the room soundproof.
Her dad wouldn’t approve. He would say, What if someone broke in and attacked you? How could I protect you?
But for someone to break into this place, they’d have to actually get in. That meant going through the apartment building’s ridiculously tight security system, getting through the doors and windows that she and her dad had enhanced themselves, and getting past her dad—who was an unbelievably light sleeper.
He would probably find it ironic that she had soundproofed the room. She used to be more security minded than he was. Part of that was because of what had happened to her on Valhalla Basin.
A group of hired thugs had imprisoned her in her own bedroom closet before kidnapping and ultimately killing her mother. Not that they actually used a weapon to kill her mother; she had killed herself. But she wouldn’t have if the thugs had left her alone.
Talia sighed and eased a bare foot out of bed. The room was cold. She’d turned down the temperature because she had figured out that she slept better in the cold, but that made getting up uncomfortable.
As frigid as the air was, she had to move around. She couldn’t stay in bed any longer. Not with the nightmare still lingering.
She took a deep breath and grabbed her robe. She slipped her feet into her furry slippers. If she raised the temperature, the apartment’s system (which they weirdly called House, even though this wasn’t a house) might alert her father that she was awake, and he’d come in here despite her precautions.
She didn’t raise the lights, either. This room had become so familiar to her, she could pace it in the darkness without hitting anything. She’d had a lot of sleepless nights in the past twelve days, and that didn’t count how badly she had slept in the years since she moved in with her dad here on the Moon.
When those thugs had broken into her home, they had stolen more than her mother. They had stolen Talia’s sense of security, maybe forever.
She sighed and walked in a circle around her bed. One wall had a dressing table with the girly things her father thought she should love. The table had a non-networked master computer, which she really did love, because she could do all kinds of research on it and use it to develop programs. The only person who shared that computer with her was her father. That one thing had been non-negotiable for him, and it was a small price to pay for the freedom to let her brain roam.
There were a couple of chairs, and a full virtual reality/holochamber that had come with the apartment and which she doubted she would ever use.
Reality was tough enough. She didn’t want to confuse herself with made-up realities.
She sighed and sat on the edge of the bed. She was exhausted. That was part of the problem. If only she could sleep.
The stupid therapist that her dad insisted on taking her to this week had told her to record the nightmares the moment she woke up.
It’ll be like exorcising a ghost, the stupid therapist said. The more you talk about what you’re seeing in your dreams, the less power those dreams will have over you.
Yeah, right. She’d looked up dream aversion therapy and had seen just how controversial it was.
First, the stupid therapist would get her to talk about the dreams. Then he’d make her use a chip to actually record them. Then he’d play them back in the daylight, in a protected environment.
Only she didn’t want her brain to be examined like that.
Her dad told her to cooperate fully with the stupid therapist—that she needed to trust him—but she had her doubts.
He might find out that she was a clone, and right now, in Armstrong, clones were considered evil. She’d actually heard some otherwise intelligent people say that cloning twisted the DNA and made every single clone into a potential psychopath.
Even as a kid, discovering her background for the first time, she’d known enough science to know that wasn’t true. The clones were physical copies of the original, nothing more. And maybe not entirely that. Because the originals usually got subjected to a different environment in the womb, one that clones rarely experienced.
Clones were completely different creatures than their original. And, Talia suspected, clones—grown in a controlled environment—were probably more stable, healthier, and saner than any original could be.
She kept that opinion to herself. She hadn’t even told her dad that theory.
Talia stood again, because her heart was still pounding. Half her brain was still in the nightmare.
Maybe she could banish it all on her own.
She wouldn’t repeat it into any recording device, but she could review it.
She’d never tried that before.
The nightmare had started at the Armstrong Wing of the Aristotle Academy, which her dad had enrolled her into because it was the best private school in the city and, he believed, it was the safest. But the school hadn’t been safe during the Peyti Crisis.
She covered her face. If she was going to do what the stupid therapist wanted her to do, she couldn’t just review the nightmare, she had to dive into it.
That wouldn’t be hard.
She flopped on her back onto the bed, put her right arm over her eyes, and took a deep breath.
She’d been walking down the hall with Kaleb Lamber. God, he was a jerk. She hated him, but he was the best-looking guy in the school, and he looked at her like she was pretty.
Only he was mean to everybody, including her, and she had yelled at him, and now, he said, he wanted to talk about it, that maybe something else was going on, and she’d seen it. She’d seen it in the way Kaleb’s dad treated him, like Kaleb treated everyone else, as if they were idiots in training and not as strong as he was.
She was feeling compassion for Kaleb, and she didn’t want to. She didn’t want to like him or even feel anything positive for him. For days, she hadn’t even looked at his face because he was so handsome, and just thinking that, thinking how handsome he was on the outside and how mean he was on the inside, seemed like thinking something positive.
He asked her to forgive him for being so mean. His face was yellow. At first she thought it was because of the environmental change—Peyti normal, no human could survive that—and then she realized his skin was yellow and black in a pattern of an open human hand.
I don’t want to go home, he said. Talia, please. Say you forgive me. Say I belong here. Help me—
She tried to help him. He was in that room now, the room she could see even with her eyes open. Her stomach clenched and the air smelled of onions. The room was the Academy’s conference room.
Her links were off; she couldn’t reach her dad or Kaleb or Mrs. Rutledge or anyone.
Kaleb was all alone in that room with his dad, who was hitting him, and a Peyti lawyer, who played with its mask. The lawyer looked like every other Peyti to her, gray and long limbed, fingers like sticks. Only its eyes were different. They glowed red.
Your lawyer, she sent to Kaleb. He wants to kill you. Get out of there.
Then the Peyti lawyer disassembled part of the mask that covered half his face, squeezed the part in his hand, and the room exploded. She stood there, as debris rained around her like images of Anniversary Day, when nineteen domed cities on the Moon suffered horrible explosions. She felt like she was watching a vid, not experiencing anything.
Kaleb was in pieces now, crying, saying, Talia, I don’t want to go home. Say you forgive me—
She put her hands over her ears, a scream building.
I can’t, she sent him, be
cause her links worked now. I can’t forgive you. I can’t help you. You’re dead.
You’re dead.
She sat up, her heart racing. She always woke up at that point. The nightmare wasn’t an exact memory. It was wrong in so many ways, but it felt absolutely true.
What was true was this: She had stopped Kaleb from beating up the Chinar twins because he said they were clones (they weren’t), and in doing so, she had actually started a big fight in the cafeteria. She and Kaleb had gotten into trouble for it. Her dad got mad at her, but Kaleb’s dad—he must have gone way beyond mad. He wanted to pull Kaleb out of school and leave him at home, which Kaleb didn’t want.
Because Kaleb had had a bruise on his face that last day, and something about the way he was, something about what he was trying to tell her, made her think that he didn’t want to go home because he was scared his dad was going to hurt him.
Her stomach ached. She popped off the bed as if it were causing the nightmares. Kaleb had wanted her to join him in that conference room. His dad and his dad’s lawyers, including a Peyti, were meeting with the headmistress, Mrs. Rutledge, to discuss Kaleb’s future at the academy.
Talia had lurked outside because she had felt so confused. Part of her thought maybe she should help him, and part of her thought he was the meanest kid she knew, and he should get what he deserved.
And while she was having that thought, her links shut off, a guard grabbed her, putting his onion-scented hands on her, and dragged her away from the conference area.
But not before she saw the entire conference room’s environmental system change to Peyti Normal—a yellowish color. The Peyti lawyer removed his mask and squeezed it. Had the environmental system still been set at Earth Normal, the damn lawyer would have blown up the entire school, maybe even blown a hole in the dome.
But her dad, working with Noelle DeRicci, the Chief of Security for the United Domes of the Moon, had figured out what was going to happen and ordered a change to environmental systems all over the Moon to Peyti Normal, just in time.
The problem was…no human could survive without a mask in Peyti Normal.
Talia watched ten people die.
She watched Kaleb die. He screamed and screamed, then collapsed, and twitched. And died.
Talia wiped at her face. It was wet again. Those stupid tears fell no matter what she did. She couldn’t stop them.
Her dad, who had left the Security Office to get her out of the Academy, had arrived just after everyone died. He had thought then—he still thought now—that she was upset because she would have been in the room, because she would have died if she had been in the room, but that wasn’t it.
Her dad didn’t seem to understand that if she had died, it would have taken a few minutes, and then she’d be done. She wouldn’t have known any of this stuff. She’d be okay.
She was upset that Kaleb had died. In front of her. When she still didn’t know how to feel about him. She didn’t like him, but she was beginning to understand him, and she was starting to feel sorry for him, against her better judgment, and she thought maybe—
She shook her head. Her brain always stopped there. Right there, because she didn’t want to get past the maybe.
Her dad had asked her, just once, if she was angry at him for the death of those ten people. They were, in the words of the press, collateral damage. If they hadn’t died, then every city on the Moon would have suffered dozens, maybe hundreds, of explosions. Millions of people would have died.
Millions more would have died, because millions died on Anniversary Day. Her dad said, and Noelle DeRicci said, and everybody said that this was the second attack aimed at the Moon, related, somehow to Anniversary Day, only this time, the good guys managed to stop it.
In the nick of time.
And that was true.
She wasn’t angry at her dad for stopping it. She’d helped him with some of the stuff he needed to do to figure out who was hurting everyone, even though she hadn’t found the Peyti lawyers. Her dad had done that.
She didn’t have to forgive him for that. She was proud of him. Her dad saved lives.
It was just—God, she was stuck. She didn’t know how to feel about Kaleb. And she didn’t want to be sad about his death.
And she was scared.
Scared of the Peyti lawyers. Not because they were lawyers or because they were Peyti, but because they were clones.
Just like she was.
At her dad’s insistence, she had kept her clone identity secret. She didn’t have to be told it was a liability, and that had been before twenty clones of PierLuigi Frémont had killed people all over the Moon on Anniversary Day, before these Peyti lawyers (clones of some famous Peyti mass murderer) had tried to kill even more people during the Peyti Crisis.
She knew that regular humans hated clones.
Everyone hated clones even more now.
Her entire face stung. Her skin was chapped, and the tears, flowing down their familiar path, covered the dryness with salt.
She hated it. She hated it all. She hated what the Moon had become, what Armstrong had become.
What she had become.
She wanted to go back, back to Valhalla Basin with her mom (who had lied to her, who hadn’t told Talia that Talia was a clone, who had made it sound like Talia’s dad hated her when he hadn’t even known that Talia existed). Talia wanted to go back to a time when everything seemed simple.
She sank onto the floor.
Nothing would ever seem simple again.
SIX
THE CUP OF coffee was warm in his hand. Torkild Zhu stopped just outside the building that housed the new offices of S3. He had to pull the door open because the automated building computer hadn’t been programmed to accept his codes yet. It was one more thing he had to do, and he had decided to wait until all the new hires were completed.
Privately, he hoped that he’d be able to assign one of them to do this kind of scutwork. He was already growing tired of the details.
Still, he’d been heartened as he finished his walk to the office. He had watched five potential job seekers go into the building ahead of him. That made him smile. He’d been having so much trouble getting anyone to apply, and even more trouble finding qualified candidates.
Most of the unemployed lawyers on the Moon (and there were lots at the moment, since many of the Peyti clones had run law firms) had conflicts that prevented them from representing the clones—provided the attorneys wanted to. Of course, most of them didn’t want to.
Zhu wouldn’t have either if his colleagues had died in a room where the environmental system had shifted to Peyti Normal because another colleague wanted to blow the entire building to smithereens.
Zhu tried not to be empathetic about that, too. He tried not to think about it at all.
If he had done what he had intended when he traveled all the way back to the Moon a month ago, he might have been one of those attorneys sitting in one of those rooms, dying as the oxygen fled and the poison atmosphere fell around him.
Or he would have lost friends or acquaintances at least. Colleagues. That was the word. He would have lost colleagues.
At least the clones weren’t his clients. His client was the government of Peyla, the Peyti home world. Already, in the week since the Crisis, Peyti had been denied admission into Armstrong’s port. Each Peyti had had a different reason for being refused, but the pattern was pretty clear. And it was starting to happen all over the Alliance.
Since Peyla was part of the Alliance and had actually been one of the early members of the Alliance, the Peyti government was taking quick action. Even though everyone knew that Peyti lawyers were the best in the business, the Peyti government had hired S3, a well-known human law firm, to take this case.
The Peyti were incredibly smart. They didn’t use their own to fight this battle; they used troops that they knew could win.
Zhu was rather proud to be part of those troops. Or maybe he could attribute his good mood t
o the fact that he’d walked past Sevryn’s and managed to start his day, without bodyguards.
He’d conquered his fear, and that was always the first step toward getting anything done.
Even if he had gotten a bit of mediocre coffee out of it.
He debated tossing away the coffee. The new place simply didn’t have as good a brew as Sevryn’s—probably because it didn’t use Earth-grown beans—and he would miss that. But the cream-cheese-and-orange bagel he’d bought was a delicious new treat, one he’d have as often as he could.
He’d already ordered lunch for the crew upstairs. The new place would deliver.
Yeah, he was proud of himself. He saw that short walk as one of the first steps toward accepting how hard this job would be, and how much intimidation would be built in.
“Torkild Zhu?” a male voice asked behind him.
“Yes?” he asked as he turned, half-expecting to see some young lawyer clutching a tablet loaded with resumes and recommendations. Instead, he saw half a face and the blur of an arm.
Then something hit him on the side of his head. The sound cracked inside his skull, and his vision went white for a moment. There was no pain, but he knew that would only be temporary. He’d hit his head before and—
A foot hit his stomach, a kick so hard that his breath whooshed out of him. Then another something—an arm? A fist? A weapon—hit his back. His kidneys. This time, he felt the pain, ripping through him.
It would have taken his breath away, had he had any breath left.
He sent something—a scream, maybe?—through his emergency links. Or so he hoped. Because his brain felt odd, warm, and his right eye was closing even though he had been hit on the other side of the face.
He wanted to say, Don’t. Don’t hurt me. Stop. But he couldn’t control his mouth. He toppled forward.
Someone kicked his side, and someone else jumped on his back. If he could fall through the sidewalk, he would have, but the ground kept him in place. So his bones gave instead, cracking and snapping.
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