Vigilantes (5 page)

Nyquist let the words hang. He needed the interrogation to move in a different direction, but he didn’t want to make Uzvaan more defensive than he already was.

Finally, Nyquist said, “Have you spoken to any of the others about this?”

“We are not allowed to consult,” Uzvaan said. “I imagine, however, that they are as shaken by their survival as I am. It is not something we were prepared for. It is not something we ever contemplated.”

Nyquist nodded. He wondered if the police could use this before remembering that the police had no access to the clones.

“So,” Nyquist said slowly. “This corporation, this so-called
Legal Fiction
. It raised you and you never questioned it.”

“Did you question your parents, Detective?” Uzvaan asked.

“They didn’t require me to murder people,” Nyquist snapped. He regretted the words the moment he spoke them.

Uzvaan tilted his head, acknowledging the statement. The lawyer had returned. The vulnerable being, the one who no longer understood his place in the universe, had vanished.

“For us,” Uzvaan said slowly, as if Nyquist were particularly dumb, “such behavior was normal. We did not know differently.”

Nyquist felt a flash of irritation. He had always felt that sort of irritation when he interviewed criminals who blamed their crimes on their upbringing. Although part of his mind was telling him that Uzvaan had a point. Uzvaan had been groomed to behave exactly as he had. As if he were a computer, programmed for destruction.

Nyquist tamped down the irritation. Peyti were not computers any more than humans were. And Nyquist believed that every creature had a choice in its behavior—within certain biological limitations, of course.

He asked, “When you went to law school and you learned that killing other Peyti was not only illegal, it was a major crime, when you learned that your original, Uzvekmt, was considered the most foul of all Peyti because he was a mass murderer, how did you reconcile that with your training?”

“I did not know who my original was,” Uzvaan said. “Not for decades, and even then, I was not sure I believed it.”

Denial. Apparently the Peyti were as good at it as humans. Nyquist threaded his fingers together so that his hands wouldn’t form fists.

“As for murder,” Uzvaan said. “The first thing we learned in law school, long before we learned any actual law, was that different cultures abide by different rules. What is heinous in one culture is commonplace in another. It is a tenet of the Earth Alliance, no?”

And that was why Nyquist hated talking to lawyers. They answered a question with a question.

“You believed,” Nyquist said slowly, “that you were raised in a different culture from other Peyti?”

“I
was
raised in a different culture,” Uzvaan said. “It was obvious. I was a boy raised among other boys. The standard Peyti upbringing mixes genders. I was raised in private schools, with special teachers. We were taught that it was akin to what many of the religious upbringings other cultures—including your own—provide. So I believed in our traditions, and felt we were excused for them.”

“When did you learn otherwise?” Nyquist asked.

“Anniversary Day,” Uzvaan whispered.

Nyquist sat, stunned and silent. He had expected a different answer—law school itself, something, not six months ago.

“Anniversary Day?” He finally managed.

Uzvaan’s entire face had turned blue again. “I realize it will seem odd, but when I saw the clones of Frémont
,
I understood that we were not special. We were merely tools, vessels,
weapons
.”

“And still, you put on that bomb. You tried to kill everyone at the police station.”

“What choice did I have, Detective?”

Nyquist couldn’t stand it any longer. He stood and paced around that tiny bubble. If he had been in the same bubble as Uzvaan, he would have grabbed the bastard by the head and slammed it against the desk, then asked,
What choice did I have, you asshole?

But he couldn’t reach through the walls between them.

Nyquist’s stomach churned, and he had to swallow hard to prevent himself from throwing up.

He took a deep, shaky breath. He needed to calm himself.

He had been sent here for answers.

He couldn’t get them without asking the questions.

One of the guards flashed a message across its forehead.
Is the interview complete?

Nyquist shook his head.

It hadn’t even begun.

He returned to his chair and steeled himself.

He would get through this.

Somehow.

FIVE

SHE WOKE UP screaming.

Talia Flint-Shindo sat up in her darkened bedroom, throat raw, and hoped her dad hadn’t heard. She didn’t want to worry him. More than that, she didn’t want him tearing in here in the pretend-non-panic mode that he’d been affecting since the Peyti Crisis had begun.

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—