Vigilantes (6 page)

She put her hands over her ears, a scream building.

I can’t
, she sent him, because 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 S
3
. 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 S
3
, 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 to 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.

A hand grabbed his ankle, pulled it toward his head, and more bones snapped.

Voices said something about horrible deaths, about clones, about paying for what he had done, but he hadn’t done anything.

His shirt was wet. His entire body was wet with something warm and sticky.

The coffee, probably. It was the only thing he’d been holding.

Coffee. And not very good coffee.

He wanted to say,
Stop, please. I’m only doing my job
. Instead, he coughed out some—coffee? Too thick to be coffee. Tasted of rust or iron or something metallic. And it bubbled up from inside, but he wasn’t throwing up, was he?

The very thought made him hurt.

Something landed on his back, but he only knew that because his entire body bounced. He couldn’t feel the weight or the ground or anything. He heard more snapping, but didn’t know where it came from.

His right eye was completely closed now and his left was pressed against the ground. He couldn’t see these attackers. He had no idea who they were. They hadn’t been on the street a moment before.

He had watched to make sure he wasn’t followed. He hadn’t heard any footsteps except his own.

He’d ordered lunch for the staff.

He was a good man.

Really.

Why couldn’t they see that?

He didn’t deserve this.

He tried to tell them, but they kept kicking him, these anonymous people, these shoed feet, these attackers. They were talking, but he couldn’t hear them.

He didn’t want to hear them.

If they wouldn’t let him talk, he wouldn’t listen to them either.

He closed his left eye, feeling the eyelashes scrape against the sidewalk, and heard himself grunt. Another kick, apparently. He was going to ignore it.

It was happening to someone else.

Things always happened to someone else.

That was why lawyers existed. To handle disputes.

Not kickers. Not attackers. These people should have visited the law firm. He could have helped them.

He shuddered, wondering if someone at S
3
would take their case.

Couldn’t, though.

Conflict of interest.

Conflict.

Interest.

He sighed, then decided to worry about the legal side of it later.

Later.

After he woke up.