Talia sighed and put her feet on the floor. She rubbed her sore cheek, still not meeting his gaze.
Instead she looked at the edge of the desk—the desk that hid she didn’t know how many computer screens and how much information, the desk that he wouldn’t let her touch, not even after six months of begging and trying to prove herself worthy.
“Well,” she said, “I got the stuff from the city about me. And I thought about it for a while, about the viable line thing. Then I did the math. If Mom was going to make clones to get her out of that lawsuit, she had to start them before Emmeline was born or she had to fast-grow them.”
Her dad started. He hadn’t thought of that, clearly. And that surprised Talia. She figured he thought of everything.
“It’s illegal to fast-grow,” he said. “There’s too many problems. Most of the clones don’t develop.”
“That doesn’t stop people,” Talia said. “There’s some places that deny they do it way too much. They gotta be doing something.”
“So you checked them out,” her dad said.
“All of them. I only found Speidel. You know, the one that made me. Speidel doesn’t have the technology to fast-grow.”
He nodded.
“Then I looked through all of Mom’s records to see if there was billing from any other cloning company.” Talia had taken all of her mom’s stuff, as much as she could, anyway, and had left it in the open in her dad’s apartment, figuring he could look through it if he wanted.
He kept walking around it all as if it were toxic or something. As though he didn’t want to know.
Maybe she should have taken a hint from that.
“I couldn’t find anything, which I thought was kinda weird,” Talia said. “So I looked to see if the records went back that far. They kinda did, but they didn’t. Like there wasn’t legal bills—”
“Aleyd paid the court costs,” Flint said.
“Yeah, I figured that out,” Talia said. “So I figured, okay, what if Mom didn’t pay for the clones? What if Aleyd did?”
“Good reasoning,” her dad said.
Talia felt her cheeks warm. His compliments meant something. Mostly because they weren’t idle. But she didn’t want him to know that.
She didn’t want him to know much about her, really. For a while, she’d thought she wouldn’t stay, that she’d get emancipated or something. But after a while, she realized that idea was kinda dumb. He did care about her. And she liked him, even if she wasn’t going to tell him that.
“What did you do next?” her dad asked. He wasn’t going to let this go—and this was the part she didn’t want to tell him. Everything from here out.
She straightened her shoulders. “Well, most corporate stuff is supposed to be public record unless it goes through attorneys, right?”
“Right,” her dad said. “Even though it isn’t always. Not everyone follows the rules.”
“I figured with all the lawsuits going on, Aleyd would pretend to follow the rules. No shady stuff to make the charges worse or anything.”
Her dad nodded.
“So the next time you and me went to Oberholst, Martinez, and Mlsnavek—”
Those were the lawyers that her mom had told Talia to contact if there was ever any trouble, the lawyers her dad ended up hiring to help him adopt Talia because they were already in place on Callisto when he found her.
When Talia first moved to Armstrong, she and her dad had to see those lawyers a lot, especially Celestine Gonzalez, who handled the closing of all her mom’s affairs.
Talia said real fast, “I checked in their computer system and I found some bills from the right time. Well, kinda the right time. I figured fast-grow, but these were from—”
“You what?” her dad asked.
Her cheeks heated even worse. He didn’t miss anything. Her mom might have missed the part about digging into Oberholst, Martinez, and Mlsnavek’s files because she would have heard the fast-grow part. But her dad was methodical. He didn’t seem to miss anything.
“You broke into a law firm’s computer system?” he asked.
Like he hadn’t done anything like that. She knew about the files he had from that other law firm, the ones he and Maxine Van Alen were giving to that pretty reporter woman. But he didn’t know Talia knew.
It was just that she paid attention to everything because if she didn’t, then she might miss something—and she’d missed so much growing up that she didn’t want to make that mistake again.
Not with anyone.
Especially someone she wanted to trust.
Like her dad.
“I didn’t exactly break into their system,” Talia said. “I just looked at stuff I wasn’t supposed to.”
“That’s breaking in,” he said.
She shook her head. “I had permission.”
He frowned.
“Seriously.” She sat up, feeling animated. She was proud of this part. “Nobody thinks anything about a kid in a waiting room. Especially if you behave and have a handscreen for homework and are dressed real nice. Y’know, you say please and thank you a lot, and you smile at the people who talk to you and you’re just friendly. Y’know?”
He didn’t say anything. She recognized the expression. He was going to wait her out.
She hated that.
“Anyway,” she said, wishing this was over, but not knowing how to completely get out of it without telling him the truth, “I asked one of the associates if there was some public computer I could use. I knew there wasn’t. But I figured she’d set up some kind of firewall that I could get through on some computer. I said I needed to check some references that weren’t on the public links for this homework assignment I had.”
The left corner of her dad’s mouth twitched. He was trying not to smile. That lifted her spirits a little.
“So she takes me to this bank of screens in this room off the waiting area. Turns out it’s what they call the law library, and theoretically, none of the computers are networked with the firm’s computers. But they are because they wouldn’t have a link access otherwise. I did my homework, then I looked at their billing records from Mom’s time just to see if they paid some cloning place. And they did. Only it was a month or two before Emmeline was born.”
Her dad let out a small sigh and stood, turning his back on Talia. For once, she didn’t take it personally. She saw the look in his eyes just before he moved. It was a combination of hurt and anger.
He was really furious with her mom, but he’d never said that. It made sense, though. If everything he said was true, and it sure looked like it was, Mom had lied to him more than she had lied to Talia.
He kept his back to her. He didn’t say anything, and she didn’t like the silence.
If he was going to be mad, he might as well know the worst of it.
“That was about the time the Earth Alliance found out about the deaths in the larval colony,” Talia said.
“I know.” He ran a hand through his hair. The curls sprang back up like they were specially programmed or something.
“So, I think, you know, she might have planned stuff.” She didn’t want to think about her mom that way, and she couldn’t stop thinking about her mom that way.
It pissed her off and made her sad and worried her all at the same time.
“We don’t know her plans for certain,” her dad said.
“Yeah, but we can guess—”
He shook his head as he turned around. “The billing records were Aleyd’s, not your mom’s. In the last stages of a pregnancy, there are a lot of opportunities to collect DNA. She went to Aleyd’s doctors because it was a free service. For all we know, they’re the ones who set this up.”
Talia swallowed, and to her surprise, her eyes filled with tears. She wiped at them angrily. She had thought for so long that her mom had done this, that this other interpretation felt like a gift.
“Would they do that?” she asked, her voice shaking.
“Yeah.” His voice was clipped. She co
uld follow the thought. They’d set up the clones and substitute one for the real child at birth. Who would know? Who would check for a clone mark, particularly if it was as well hidden as Talia’s was?
“She had nothing to do with it?” Talia asked.
“Probably,” he said. “We’ll never know for sure.”
But they could, if they broke into all the records. And he knew how to do that. Talia didn’t, not yet, but he could. He was really good and really smart and maybe he would do it now that he had a reason.
He sat back down. “You checked the billing records and found this company. Then what?”
“You gotta realize this was during all the meetings you had with Ms. Gonzalez. I didn’t do it all at once. I was afraid they’d catch me.”
“They didn’t, did they?”
She shook her head. “I was careful not to dig too hard, and I didn’t use the same machines all the time. Besides, if someone asked what I was doing, I was gonna say I didn’t know and I’d take my hands off the computer and pretend like I got in there by accident. Because, y’know, when you’re a kid—”
“I know,” he said. The smile was gone. “What did you find?”
“I couldn’t find all the records,” she said. “I wanted to cross-check with Disappearances, but I couldn’t get into those files at all. They weren’t accessible. I’m not sure they exist.”
“If Oberholst, Martinez, and Mlsnavek has access to a Disappearance Service, they let the service keep the records. If they have their own, they destroy the records. It’s the only way a Disappearance Service can properly function. No questions, no answers, no history. It’s better that way. And it makes it hard for me to do my job.”
She suspected as much. But she hadn’t known for sure. “I wasted a whole afternoon trying to track that down. Then I got this brilliant idea. You gave it to me, actually.”
“Me?” he said, sounding surprised.
“You wiped away my clone status when you adopted me. I’m a real person under Armstrong law now, and I’ll inherit and stuff if you want me to, but I can call myself your daughter and nobody asks about it or wants to see that mark or anything.”
“That’s not the only reason I did it, you know,” he said.
She frowned at him. She didn’t want to hear the other reasons. “I needed to be legal. That’s what you did.”
“You’re my child,” he said. “I’m not a Gyonnese. You were raised by my wife and your DNA comes from both of us. That some scientist took that DNA from another child of mine doesn’t matter. I wanted to acknowledge you as my daughter. The rest of it was just bonus.”
Her cheeks were hot again. He’d made that speech before, especially early on, and she’d always thought he was just trying to charm her. But over the last few months, she’d started to realize that he didn’t value charm much. He liked real people with real emotions and he valued honesty more than anything.
So maybe he was telling her the truth.
“Anyway,” she said, not certain how to respond, “I got to thinking about the five of them and how they’d just kinda vanished, and if they hadn’t Disappeared, then maybe they were put somewhere for safekeeping and when the case got settled, they weren’t needed any more, so they became real like me.”
He was frowning. It didn’t seem like he completely understood.
“You are real,” he said, “with or without my adopting you.”
“No,” she said. “I’m a clone, not a full-fledged human.”
“You were a human being without parents or family,” he said. “That was how the law saw you. Otherwise, you were covered under every single law that applies to human beings.”
“Whatever,” she said, waving a hand. “I got thinking that maybe after the court case, the five got adopted. And that Oberholst, Martinez, and Mlsnavek, being a law firm—and my mom’s law firm besides having ties with Aleyd—would handle those adoptions.”
“Logical,” her dad said. “I should have thought of that.”
“You couldn’t’ve found out,” Talia said. “These aren’t public records.”
“They are in Armstrong.”
“But not in the Earth Alliance. It varies from community to community.”
He nodded. He must have known that. He just hadn’t thought that the five had left Armstrong. He thought they were here, and he wasn’t willing to look for them? That struck her as strange. But she wasn’t going to get sidetracked, not when she was almost done.
“I found two,” she said.
“Two adoptions?” he asked.
“Yep,” she said. “Two adoptions at the right time period of two little girls. They were the same age—the right age, seven months younger than Emmeline. Oberholst, Martinez, and Mlsnavek doesn’t handle a lot of adoptions, so these really stuck out. And it was weird. They didn’t handle the kids. They handled the parents.”
“And you assumed that these were two of the five?”
She bristled. “I didn’t assume anything. I wrote down the names and tracked them through public records. I found images.”
“Of the girls,” he said.
She nodded, then bit her lower lip again. It was bleeding. She had to stop that. It was a nervous habit that her mom always wanted her to quit, and it had gotten worse since her mom died.
“They look like me,” she said softly.
“Yeah,” he said. “They would.”
Her heart was pounding. She’d admitted the worst to him, and he wasn’t reacting. He wasn’t saying much at all.
“I only found two,” she said because she wasn’t sure he understood. “I never did find all five.”
“Good,” he said, but he sounded distracted. He was thinking, probably going over everything she had told him.
“The information links that I found, the important documents, they’re only in Oberholst, Martinez, and Mlsnavek’s system. I didn’t do that on a public research board.”
“But you looked for those names on a public board?” he asked, and there was something in his face—a stillness, a worry, a hesitation. She wasn’t quite sure what it was, except that it made her nervous.
She wanted to lie to him, because she knew the real answer would piss him off.
“Yeah,” she said. “But it wasn’t like they were the only things I looked at on that board. I did schoolwork and I looked up some old friends from Valhalla Basin and I looked up some kids I’d met in school here. It was all jumbled up.”
“That might help,” her dad said. “After you found the images, did you look up more information on those families?”
Every week until she got passage on the first ship. Was she supposed to tell him that too?
Probably. It was probably what she needed to tell him.
She sure didn’t want to.
“I wanted to know if they still lived at the old addresses,” she said.
“And?” he asked.
“If they had other kids,” she said.
“And?”
“If they were in touch with Oberholst, Martinez, and Mlsnavek or with Aleyd or with Mom.”
“Were they?”
“One of the men who adopted one of the girls, he works for Aleyd.”
Her dad let out another one of those gusty sighs. “And the other family? Does it have a tie?”
“Not like that,” she said. “Nobody works for Aleyd anymore.”
“But they did.”
She nodded. “Both parents. They’re retired now, doing artsy stuff, I guess. They got some big payout.”
He swore. She’d never heard him sound so upset before.
Her heart pounded. “I screwed up, huh?”
“No,” he said, “it’s not your fault. I would have figured that Aleyd would have covered its tracks better.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, feeling confused. After all, he had been the one who was worried she’d started a trail. And she had, from the look on his face. Only she expected him to yell at her, and he really hadn’t yet.
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“You’d think if they were going to find homes for the other five, they’d have done it with families not connected to Aleyd.”
“Maybe they did,” Talia said. “I only found two. That means there are three more out there.”
He nodded, but the nod seemed abstract, like he was thinking about something else.
“The problem isn’t you,” he said. “The problem is that they didn’t think. They were looking short term, at the trial and the possible punishment. Then when the case got settled, they let two of the couples adopt. They probably had couples that Aleyd knew it could control fostering the children just in case one of the children had to go to the Gyonnese.”
“Ick,” Talia said. They could just as easily be talking about her. “Who would do that?”
Her dad gave her a flat look. It was almost cold. He didn’t answer her.
Probably because she didn’t need the answer. She had it.
Her mother would have.
Did, in fact. If her dad hadn’t shown up and hired all those lawyers, Talia’s legal guardian would have been Aleyd Corporation. A condition of employment was that kids whose parents died while working for Aleyd could become wards of the company.
Maybe it wasn’t her mom’s carelessness that put Talia in that position like everyone assumed. They just figured Mom hadn’t done the paperwork to protect Talia. Maybe Mom had done that intentionally.
Or maybe that had been a condition of Talia’s creation.
A headache rose from her shoulders, through the back of her neck, and into the base of her skull. Her eyes stung.
“What are we going to do?” she asked.
“You’re going to walk me through everything you found on the public links,” he said. “And then I’m going to see if anyone Tracked your trail.”
“If they did?” Her voice shook just a little.
“Then I’ll see if I can figure out who the Tracker was, and see how much danger the two are in.”
“And if no one Tracked it?” Talia asked.
“I’m going to wipe out the records as best I can. They can’t go away completely, but I can make them invisible to the casual scan.”
Talia swallowed hard. The headache was getting worse. “Will that solve the problem?”
He looked at her again, and this time his gaze softened. She had the sense he felt sorry for her.
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