Vigilantes (12 page)

And if Talia used the word stupid one more time, even though she wasn’t saying it out loud, someone would probably call her on it.

Then she shook her head. Too late. She was already calling herself on it.

Critical, critical, critical. She rubbed her eyes again. She was being too critical. She couldn’t stop thinking about what a screw-up she was. If only she hadn’t started the fight with Kaleb. If only she had kept quiet about the Chinar twins.

If only she hadn’t told anyone about how mean Kaleb could be, he wouldn’t have been in that room with that Peyti lawyer—that Peyti
clone
lawyer—and Kaleb, at least would have been okay.

The
school
would have been okay, and she could be there this afternoon.

She’d hated it there in some ways—Dad said it wasn’t challenging enough for her, but it was the best they could do—but she liked it, too. She actually felt like she belonged.

She
had
felt like she belonged.

Or at least, belonged more than she had belonged anywhere else since her mom died.

Damn tear. Another one was creeping down her cheek. She wiped it, felt the chapped skin.

This had to stop at some point. A human being (a
clone
, for godssake) didn’t have that many tears. She’d have to run out at some point, right?

The door to the waiting room opened, and Whatsisname Llewynn (“call me Evando”) was standing there, looking down at her. She popped to her feet so that she was as tall as he was and could look him in the eyes. They had a bit of reflection, and she wondered if he had enhancements so that he seemed more empathetic than he really was.

“Miss Flint,” he said.

“Flint-Shindo,” she corrected. If he couldn’t even get her name right, then how could he understand what was going on with her?

“I thought we’d finish our entry interview,” he said, as if she hadn’t spoken. “I want to make certain we pair you with the right team.”

She glared at him. She could walk right now. The security team that Rudra had sent with her was just outside the building, probably bored and pacing, and they could all get coffee or something before going back up and explaining why Talia left.

And that would be hard enough, because she wasn’t sure why she would have left. Because this was all stupid? (There was that word again.) Because she didn’t want the help? Because she didn’t
need
the help?

Her eyes lined with tears.

Dammit. She didn’t want the help and she couldn’t stop crying. Maybe some kind of enhancement would be better.

“Talia?” Whatsisname Llewynn (“call me Evando”) said in a tone that sounded even more patronizing than the tone he had used a moment ago.

“Talia Flint-
Shindo
,” she said, knowing she sounded bitchy, feeling bitchy, knowing she could get even more bitchy, feeling so very bitchy in fact that he had no idea what was coming at him. “That’s my name. And I didn’t give you permission to call me Talia.”

He smiled at her, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes. “I get the message,” he said. “Your father made you come here. That’s all right, Talia, we can work with—”

“No,” she said, “‘we’ can’t do anything if you don’t respect me. I’m Talia Flint-Shindo, and you need to respect that.”

“All right, Miss Flint-Shindo,” he said, and to his credit, he didn’t put any sarcastic emphasis on her name, “let’s go into the back and talk about what we can do to help you.”

You can’t do anything
, she wanted to say.
You can’t do anything at all
.

But she didn’t say it. Instead, she followed him down the stupid corridor to his stupid office where they had had a stupid discussion just the day before.

He’d get one more day of stupid discussions. One more. And then she was outta here. Because she had no idea how this could help anyone, let alone her.

THIRTEEN

THE POLICE NEVER arrived. The coroner did.

Seng had the prime spot near the door so that she could see Zhu’s body. The ambulance attendants had set up a crime scene perimeter, the first time she’d seen one up close. It was made up of a red light beam that could actually burn if an unauthorized someone tried to cross it.

The attendants reminded her of that as they placed the light in front of the door, warning her and Rosen and Vigfusson that they would have to leave via a different exit as long as the lights were there.

She had nodded at that, and hadn’t moved. She was recording everything, just like Rosen and Vigfusson were.

Two hours after the call and no police. One attendant had taken the ambulance and left on a new assignment, while the other waited impatiently. He contacted the authorities several times and made a disgruntled sound each time he let his hand fall from his ear.

At one point, his gaze met Seng’s and he shook his head. He was angry, too.

She made a note of the name emblazoned across his uniform, the ambulance number (when it was still there), and the licensing information. If this came to some kind of court case, she wanted him as a witness.

Every now and then, she would make sure she recorded his face.

Then she would look down at poor Zhu, his features slack, his skin growing paler and paler by the minute. It just wasn’t respectful to leave him there.

Not that it had been respectful to kill him, either.

“What do you think is going on?” Rosen had whispered to her about ten minutes in.

She shook her head. She didn’t want to talk about anything, at least not aloud, and she didn’t want to have a discussion along links. One of the few motions she had won in the Impossibles had been a motion to download all of someone’s logged link contacts. She didn’t want any discussion that she had with Rosen or Vigfusson to show up on some court’s docket.

The longer she waited, the more her fear decreased. Anger replaced it. She didn’t care what this was about. No one deserved this kind of treatment, particularly not from the authorities.

She had just downloaded AutoLearn for Armstrong’s local laws when the coroner’s van landed where the ambulance had been.

The van was blue and larger than any vehicle she had seen so far on the Moon. The back double doors opened and the coroner emerged. He was a slight man, with curly hair and a petulant lower lip.

He wore a whitish uniform that identified him as Brodeur, so she looked him up while she watched and discovered he was Ethan Brodeur, who had been with the coroner’s office for ten years.

That little detail, at least, made her calm down.

“What the hell is this all about?” Brodeur snapped at the attendant. “Where’s your vehicle?”

“It left an hour ago.” The attendant’s voice was calm, but his cheeks were growing red. “And don’t yell at me. These good people—
lawyers all
—had called in the emergency over two hours ago. We got here as fast as we could, but no one else is responding.”

“What is wrong with the Armstrong PD?” Brodeur asked. He snapped his fingers and a younger man emerged from the back of the van, carrying some equipment.

“Um, that’s the issue,” the attendant said. “I’m going to send you security footage from this building.”

Seng nodded despite herself. That was what the attendant should have done. She hoped he used a secure link, something the Armstrong Police Department couldn’t access easily.

But that wasn’t her problem, at least, not at the moment.

Brodeur started in shock, gave the attendant a sharp look, and then shook his head once.

“Well,” Brodeur said. “That explains it.”

“Explains what?” the attendant asked.

“Why
I
got the call from APD.” Brodeur smiled wryly. His gaze swept the area, meeting Seng’s for just a moment, as if he wanted her to hear what he was going to say next. “They don’t like me in the police department. They actively try to keep me off cases.”

Seng let out a small breath.

“What does
that
mean?” Rosen whispered to her.

She shook her head, trying to silence him. She had an idea. She suspected they didn’t like this coroner because his exams didn’t hold up in court, the police felt he was doing a sloppy job, or because he had caught the police doing something shady in the past.

She voted for competence. Because the coroner was aware that the police didn’t like him, which incompetents usually didn’t notice.

Still, she made a note.

“You don’t need me anymore, right?” the attendant said. “I mean, I shouldn’t have been here anyway, but someone had to keep an eye on this crime scene.”

“You did a good job,” Brodeur said, then patted the attendant on the arm. The gesture probably hadn’t been meant as patronizing, but it was.

Brodeur didn’t notice the attendant’s grimace. Brodeur was already looking at the body.

He crouched beside it, holding a position that allowed Seng to see what was going on. The ambulance attendant half-walked, half-ran down the sidewalk. He was probably going to catch one of the local trains that ran a few blocks from here.

No one except Seng watched him go. Then she turned her attention back to Brodeur.

“Never seen anything like it,” Brodeur was saying to his assistant. “The cops aren’t like that in this city.”

The assistant, a young man with jug ears and a large nose that could have used some judicious cropping, clearly hadn’t seen the footage. He looked confused.

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

Brodeur was taking imagery of the body, passing his hands over it, getting
in situ
stills. Seng hadn’t seen a technique like that since she worked in New York, years ago.

“Don’t you recognize this guy?” Brodeur’s voice rose. He wanted all three lawyers to hear this. What was he about? “He’s the one who came to the station, and to our office, with injunctions.”

“He works for the
clones
?” The assistant looked down at Zhu as if he had some kind of plague. “Is that why the cops won’t come to the murder site?”

“I don’t know what they’re thinking,” Brodeur said, “but this guy sure didn’t make any friends in Armstrong.”

Then he stood and grabbed something that looked like a pipette from the equipment bag. Seng had no idea what the pipette thing was, only that Brodeur seemed to think it important.

He looked over his shoulder, his gaze meeting hers again.

“Those clones tried to kill everyone in this dome,” he said, and it seemed like he was speaking directly to her. To remind her? To warn her? To let her know he was on the side of the cops, even though they didn’t like him?

“That’s not going to interfere with your work, is it?” Vigfusson snapped, as if he had been part of the conversation all along.

Brodeur looked over at him. “It already interfered with my work. This body wasn’t properly handled. Those two hours are going to make any prosecution difficult.”

“We recorded everything,” Seng said. “Plus the building footage, which I’ve been routinely downloading, will also show that no one tampered with the body.”

Brodeur raised his bushy eyebrows in surprise. “Well, then. Maybe it didn’t interfere as much as I thought.”

He bent over the body, then used the pipette thing as if it were gathering something. Fluids, maybe? Seng didn’t know.

After a few moments, Brodeur looked up and waved his fingers in front of his face. He was obviously looking at some kind of screen through his links. Processing the information? Checking on something?

She threaded her fingers together, then twisted them, feeling the pain echo through her hands. The pain kept her alert.

“Was he alive when you found him?” Brodeur asked them.

Seng and Vigfusson both shook their heads.

“My links said he wasn’t breathing,” Vigfusson said. “I did everything I could to revive him, but my chips—which, granted, aren’t as sophisticated as yours—believed he hadn’t been breathing long enough to prevent any kind of revival.”

Brodeur’s lips thinned, and his eyes narrowed. “What do you use?”

Vigfusson answered with a brand name that Seng didn’t recognize.

“Figures,” Brodeur said, and returned to his work.

“Hey!” Vigfusson said. “What do you mean, ‘figures’?”

Seng’s heart was pounding.

“I mean,” Brodeur said as he rocked back on his heels, “that you should look at who makes your cheap chips before you actually buy them. Your chip was made by an Earth-based funeral service. Their free-medical-chip business was shut down when it was determined that not only did they fail to revive an injured person, they also notified the funeral service when the person died.”

Vigfusson looked at Seng with alarm. Her mouth was dry. She’d heard of things like that, but never paid a lot of attention. This kind of corruption had never concerned her before, so she hadn’t felt the need to focus on it.