In the space of twenty-four hours, she had learned she was clone, that her mother had lied to her about almost everything, and that her mother was dead. By the end of that week, Talia had left everything she’d ever known to move in with a man she’d never met before, one who claimed to be her father even though, by Alliance law, he didn’t have to.
She was angry, she was sad, and she was lonely, and he didn’t know what to do about any of those things.
He pushed himself away from the desk and walked over to the chairs. He sat in the one next to hers and put his hand on her back. The knobs of her spine felt sharp beneath his palm.
“Talia,” he said gently.
She didn’t move. She was breathing quietly.
“I know you’re awake,” he said.
She let out a large gust of air and sat up so fast he had to move his hand so that she wouldn’t slam it against the back of the chair.
“Now you got half the Moon spying on me,” she said.
“I didn’t catch you,” Murray said defensively. “It was the captain.”
But Talia ignored him. “You got them to change the rules. I paid for passage. My info checked out. They should have let me board.”
Flint took all that in without a blink. She shouldn’t have been able to book passage without her parents’ permission. Nor should her information have checked out. He wondered what she had done to make sure she seemed like a legitimate traveler.
“I didn’t get anyone to change any rules,” Flint said. “You just happened to get a captain who was cautious.”
A captain who probably wanted to make sure the teenager in front of him had the actual right to travel on his ship. Flint wondered what age Talia had tried to pass herself off as this time. Eighteen—the age of human majority throughout the Earth Alliance? Or younger with a pass?
“You know, if you gave me access to your ship, this wouldn’t be a problem,” Talia said.
“You couldn’t fly my ship if you tried,” Flint said. His ship, which he’d named the Emmeline long before he knew about Talia, was a state-of-the-art space yacht with more equipment than most ships ever carried.
“It’s probably got an autopilot,” Talia said.
“I disabled that feature years ago.” Flint hadn’t disabled it because he’d been afraid someone else would try to use it. He had disabled it because he liked to pilot the ship on his own. He wanted the autopilot to be something he had to program, not the default that the ship always used.
“Of course you did.” Talia put her head on her knees and closed her eyes.
Flint looked over at Murray, who was watching them closely, listening to every word. Flint suddenly realized he wanted the conversation to be a lot more private.
“Thanks, Murray,” Flint said. “I appreciate the fact that you contacted me.”
“No problem,” Murray said. Then he leaned over the desk. “Hey, kid.”
Talia sighed.
“Kid.” Murray clearly wasn’t going to shut up until Talia acknowledged him.
She raised her head and gave him such a sullen glare that Flint felt color rise in his own cheeks.
“Your dad’s one of the most stand-up men in Armstrong,” Murray said. “You should give him a chance. Stop running. See where you really are.”
“I’m not running,” Talia said. “I’m investigating.”
Flint felt the color leave his face. She hadn’t said that before. What was she investigating?
“Investigating?” Murray said. “Trying to be like your dad? It takes training to be good at investigation. Maybe you should ask him to make you an apprentice or something.”
“I’ve been asking him,” Talia said. “He won’t.”
She had asked him to train her to be a Retrieval Artist, before she even knew what that was. Retrieval Artists specialized in finding the Disappeared, people who went missing on purpose, usually to avoid prosecution or death by any one of fifty different alien cultures. The Disappeared were usually guilty of the crimes they’d been accused of, but by human standards, most of those crimes were harmless.
The work itself was dangerous, not just for the Disappeared, but also for the Retrieval Artist, his family, and his friends.
But Flint hadn’t told Talia much of that, only that she wasn’t ready to become a Retrieval Artist.
So she asked him to teach her the techniques he’d learned as a detective on Armstrong’s Police Force.
He had said no. He didn’t want her searching for the Recovery Man who had kidnapped Talia’s mother, setting all of these events into motion. Nor did he want Talia to look into her mother’s past.
Flint hadn’t even looked too deeply into Rhonda’s past. He was angry enough at her for lying about Talia, and for putting their family in danger with her work. He didn’t want to know what else she had done.
“Then your father’s probably got some good reasons for saying no,” Murray said.
Talia made a rude noise and was about to say something when Flint said, “Talia, that’s enough.”
He put a hand under Talia’s elbow and helped her to her feet. She was as tall as he was. When he’d first met her, she hadn’t been quite that tall. She’d been lanky, though, and she still was, growing into the body that she’d eventually have.
Talia wrenched her arm from his grip and rubbed her elbow as if he’d hurt her. She grabbed a small pack with her things and slung it over her shoulder.
She didn’t look eighteen, but she looked older than thirteen. She was so tall and sure of herself. She glared at him, then stomped out of Traffic Headquarters.
The stomp, at least, was pure thirteen.
“Better you than me,” Murray said.
“I have a hunch you’ve been through this before,” Flint said.
“And I’m glad it’s done.”
Flint grinned at Murray, then followed his daughter into the corridor.
“You should let me go,” she said.
“On your investigation?” Flint couldn’t quite keep the sarcasm from his voice.
“I’m not running away. I’ll be back. But one of us has got to do this, and saying you won’t doesn’t help.”
“What do we have to do?” Flint asked.
“We have to find them,” she said.
He didn’t know who she was referring to. “Who do we have to find?”
“My sisters,” Talia said.
He froze beside her. He hadn’t heard this before. Had Rhonda had other children, children he didn’t know about? “Sisters?”
“The other clones.” Talia said that as if he were the stupidest man on the Moon.
Maybe he was.
But he understood the temptation she was feeling. He wanted to find those children, too. Only he wouldn’t let himself.
“For all we know, Talia,” he said softly, “they weren’t viable from the beginning.”
“Oh, they were,” she said. “I know they were. I got the cloning documentation.”
Flint felt a deep shock run through him. “You what?”
“I got the authorities to send me my documentation. I’m the sixth of a viable line. You know what that means, right?”
“Wait,” Flint said, feeling confused. “There’s documentation? I was told it was destroyed.”
“Most of it was,” Talia said. “But they have to keep the records of a clone’s creation. I couldn’t get who I was cloned from or how many clones were made or what happened to the others. I just got the records of the day I was cloned and the fact that I came from a viable line. That’s the important thing, you know. The word viable.”
She was going too fast for him. He frowned. He had tried to get this information right after he’d met Talia. When he couldn’t do it on his own, he had had his attorney, Maxine Van Alen, subpoena the records. Neither of them could obtain a single document.
Speidel, the corporation that had cloned Talia, had told Flint that the documentation had been destroyed.
“Who sent you this i
nformation?” Flint asked.
“The City of Armstrong sent it,” Talia said. “I was reading that clones are entitled to their day-of-creation document, so I requested mine.”
Flint let out a small sigh. Of course. He hadn’t thought of the day-of-creation document. It was like a birth certificate—proof that a clone actually existed.
Sometimes getting information was a lot simpler than he—and lawyers like Van Alen—made it out to be.
“A lot of information had been redacted,” Talia was saying, “but the day I was created was there, and the fact that I come from a viable line.”
A viable line. Flint ran a hand across his chin. He knew what that meant. It meant that all the clones created from the original’s DNA survived.
“There are five others, then?” he said.
“At least,” she said.
At least. Talia was number six. And Talia was thirteen. Emmeline, had she lived, would have been sixteen.
Had Rhonda kept the youngest? Flint felt as confused as he had when he learned that Rhonda had created a clone of their daughter in the first place.
Why create six viable clones?
“There could be more,” Talia said. “But there are at least five. They’re just like me. Only older.”
“Older?” he asked.
“They’re twenty-nine months older. All of them.”
Twenty-nine months. Flint did the math. Emmeline would have been seven months when the first clone was made.
Flint had assumed that the clones made before Emmeline died were nonviable. He had assumed they had never breathed, never even managed to develop much past early cell division.
He assumed that Rhonda had tried a final time years after Emmeline’s death, and this time, the cloning had worked, creating Talia.
But what if Rhonda had created those five clones—those five children—as a diversion from the real Emmeline?
And what had happened to them?
“See?” Talia said. “You want to find them, too.”
He did and he didn’t. But Talia had opened a door, one that probably should have remained closed. If the other five clones were alive, then Talia may have just endangered them.
“We have to talk about what you did,” Flint said. “And we can’t do it here.”
Talia glared at him. “You make it sound like I did something bad.”
“No, I didn’t say bad.” He sighed. “But you might have been incautious.”
“Incautious?” Her eyebrows went up. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “But there’s a reason your mother didn’t tell us about the other clones. And I’ve come to realize this year that when your mother kept a secret, she needed to.”
Talia’s eyes grew wide. She clearly recognized the truth of what Flint had just said.
“What are we going to do?” she asked.
“We’re going to go to my office,” Flint said, “and figure out exactly what’s going on.”
Three
Bartholomew Nyquist stood in the middle of the fake forest, annoyed at the fake breeze that blew through his hair. He wanted someone to shut the breeze off—it was disturbing his crime scene—but so far, the owners of the Hunting Club weren’t cooperating.
The forest itself was intriguing—nothing like the ones he had visited on Earth during his various vacations. Although this one had real trees (oaks, he would guess, and maybe a few firs) and real grass, it still felt fake.
Maybe it was because all the trees were the same height and the same distance apart. Or maybe it was because the ground was level—something that was unusual in parts of Armstrong, let alone most places he’d visited on Earth. The dirt path threw him off as well. Something went through and raked the dirt every few minutes, smoothing it, so that it looked like nothing had ever touched it.
There were no footprints of any kind. Not even his own.
He had sent the two street cops who had initially responded to some screaming from the Hunting Club’s forest to see the Hunting Club’s owners. Nyquist’s links didn’t work in the forest, which irritated him.
Police and emergency links were supposed to work everywhere in Armstrong. He would make sure to file a complaint against the Hunting Club, one that would stick. The fact that the victims here couldn’t send for help probably contributed to their deaths—especially considering the street cops were only a few meters away when the attack happened.
That bothered him. In fact, the entire attack bothered him. He recognized the female victim. It was the reporter, Ki Bowles. He’d met her six months ago, and hadn’t really liked her.
But he’d followed the news stories about her firing, which wasn’t the kind of thing that usually held his attention. But shortly after he met Bowles, he’d nearly died on a case and it had taken most of those six months to heal. During that time, he’d watched a lot of vids, followed too many unimportant news stories, and gotten addicted to the crap the Gossip reporters put on the various nets.
He was trying to wean himself from all of that, but he was having a tough time. He’d hoped, when he finally came back to work, that the job would distract him.
So far, it hadn’t.
It might now.
He knelt beside Bowles’s body. She’d been slashed pretty good, probably with the laser knife that lay a few meters away. Her stunning face, which she had decorated with distinctive tattoos, was in tatters, her throat nearly gone. She’d bled out, which was something that almost never happened anymore.
Blood had spattered down her dress, onto her legs and her shoes. He wouldn’t be able to tell what other wounds she had until the coroner’s office had cleaned her up.
Behind her lay the body of a man Nyquist had never seen before. The man was big and muscular—real muscles, not those enhanced things or the kind men built up in a gym. His arm had been slashed, and the side of his face had come off.
Nyquist wasn’t sure what the guy had died of—neither wound would have been deadly in and of itself—but maybe he had bled out as well.
If that was the case, then both bodies had been here for some time.
Nyquist couldn’t find much else. The dirt beneath the grass smoothed itself out, just like the dirt on the path. The grass didn’t remain flat like Earth grass either, which led him to believe that something or some program fluffed it up. He’d lost footprints, he’d probably lost trace evidence, and he’d lost all signs of the struggle.
He had no idea whether Bowles and the man were attacked together or separately. He had no idea how many attackers there had been.
And he had no idea what the attackers had been after.
The techs hadn’t arrived yet. Nyquist had been the second one to the scene. He didn’t have a full load of cases—hell, he didn’t really have cases at all—and the moment that two unidentified bodies had been found at the Hunting Club had come across the links, he’d sent a message to Andrea Gumiela, the chief of detectives, requesting the case.
Location probably means we have a celeb case, Gumiela had sent back to him through his links. You up for this?
Meaning could he handle a case that not only had the usual pressures, but also the press itself, the questions, the possible fame, and the potential damage to his own reputation?
Maybe when he’d been a younger detective, he would have fled the case the moment Gumiela had posed the question. The last thing he wanted was to be famous. But Nyquist had grown jaded with the job. Now he knew that fame was as fleeting as everything else. He might become the point man on the case, the one every reporter interviewed, but three years from now, no one would remember or care.
Nyquist crouched next to Bowles’s body. She had never been a conventionally beautiful woman, but she’d had an attractiveness, a charm, that made her almost irresistible. That charm was gone now. Even without the damage to her face, she no longer seemed pretty.
She had been one of those people who was greater than the sum of her parts. He wouldn’t have t
hought it. If he’d had to describe her before this, he would have said that it was her beauty that had given her an edge, not the fact that she had personality to spare.
He sighed. Gumiela had been right. It was a celebrity murder case. The question was simple: Was Bowles the target or had she gotten between the killer and his intended victim? Or were there more victims in the fake woods here, just waiting to be discovered?
His links were still off. The street cops were obviously having no luck with the Hunting Club’s owners. He would have to deal with them himself.
He stood and ran a hand through his thinning hair. He hated leaving the scene before the techs arrived, but he was going to have to. He needed link access, he needed the damn breeze shut off, and he needed the stupid forest to stop recreating itself.
He was lucky it hadn’t swallowed the bodies whole.
He stepped past Bowles’s body to the path when four techs arrived. He recognized two of them, and let out a small sigh of relief.
Techs carried their equipment as they had done since the dawn of the profession. They needed their kits, and they were so cautious with evidence handling that they made sure everything remained with them.
The two techs he recognized were nearly as old as he was, and had been with the department just as long. The first, a slender woman named Hadassa Leidmann, had already put on her clean suit. Only her head showed above it, her hair shaved tight against her well-formed skull.
Next to her, Adyson Owens carried his suit over his arm. His black hair was pulled back into a ponytail, but his face was clean-shaven—the result of a lawsuit that the department filed against him and won.
Nyquist didn’t recognize the other two techs, who were suited up just like Leidmann was. He waited for the group to reach him along the path.
“It’s a mess,” he said, “and not in the way you’d expect. This forest is self-cleaning. I sent some street cops inside to shut the place down, but nothing’s happening. I’m going to have to do it.”
Owens glanced at the building, several meters away. “I can go.”
Nyquist couldn’t imagine Owens negotiating with the owners or managers of an upscale club. The man had enough trouble with interdepartmental regulations—not the ones that required meticulousness on the job, because Owens was one of the most meticulous and thorough techs in the entire department—but the ones that regulated appearance and personal habits. Nyquist could just imagine the owners of the Hunting Club looking down their enhanced noses at Owens and treating him like the employee he was.
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