The Peyti Crisis: A Retrieval Artist Novel: Book Five of the Anniversary Day Saga (Retrieval Artist series 12) (15 page)

She longed to trip it, but she didn’t. She was barely holding herself back.

The others started moving down the aisle. A few of them passed her, and more than one looked at her. She thought she saw shock in their eyes.

They had expected to be killed by the guards but not hurt? Or had they simply not thought about this part at all? They were so used to the respect accorded to lawyers in this culture. The change in treatment was starting to get to them.

Good. They had to realize that their lives would be hell from now on.

She would do everything she could to guarantee that.

SEVENTEEN

MILES FLINT SAT in his home office, pretending to work. He had one lamp on over the antique desk he had bought on a whim. It didn’t have screens or any kind of computer link. It was just a piece of furniture—a table with only one space cut out of it for a chair—and he usually enjoyed spending time at it.

Today, it was just a piece of furniture. And the apartment was too damn big for two human beings to share.

The office was on the opposite side of the apartment from bedrooms. When he and his daughter Talia first looked at the place, he had initially thought that a good arrangement. Now, he hated it.

He had to go through the living room to get to the “personal” side of the apartment.

This place was not just huge, it was embarrassing. He hated showing off his wealth by owning one of the largest penthouse apartments in Armstrong. But he had acquiesced when Talia begged him to get an apartment for the two of them, not the house he had wanted.

Her mother had been kidnapped out of a house in Valhalla Basin, before Flint had even known that Talia existed. That had been the crisis which introduced him to his daughter. She had mostly recovered from it, at least as far as he could tell, but certain things made her dig in her heels.

Staying away from houses had been one.

Making him keep his promise about letting her pick out the apartment had been the other.

She hadn’t wanted this apartment because it was showy, but because it had the best security in the city, and because it had bathrooms so large that Flint’s real office in Old Armstrong could have fit into just one of them. Talia loved her amenities, or she had until a few days ago.

Now, she didn’t seem to love anything.

Flint ran a hand through his blond curls and made himself breathe. He had been a high-level computer programmer, a police officer, a police detective, and a Retrieval Artist. He had dealt with murderers from several species, saved lives, handled harrowing circumstances, and lost a child to an even more harrowing circumstance. His wife had betrayed him, not once, but dozens of times in the cruelest possible ways, and he had survived.

In fact, he had thrived—or he wouldn’t be able to afford this place.

What he hadn’t been able to do was comfort his daughter after her experience a week ago. She had left her room for meals, where she sat sullenly, staring at the food before she forced herself to eat it.

She wouldn’t talk to him. Her lovely copper skin had become sallow, her cheeks chapped, her blue eyes—so like his—red-rimmed.

He knew she’d been crying. When she would finally fall asleep, he would sneak into her room, and see the damp spots on her pillow. Sometimes he even saw a tear leak out of her closed eyes.

She wasn’t faking sleep, either. The sadness had followed her into her dreams, giving her no respite.

During the Peyti Crisis, she had been at school. Flint had thought her safe. He had put her in Aristotle Academy, the best school on the Moon, the place where everyone from high-end government officials to the exceedingly wealthy sent their children both for a good education and for protection against whatever might threaten the families.

But the Peyti clones who had attacked the Moon had been “sleepers,” a term that Chief of Security of the Moon, Noelle DeRicci, had started using the day after the Crisis, and one that everyone in the media had picked up. It didn’t quite fit: those Peyti clones weren’t sleeping. They were taking advantage of their differences and their intellects to ingratiate themselves in human society.

The Peyti were fragile-looking aliens, who wore masks that obscured most of their face, and enabled them to breathe in a human environment. The masks, it turned out, also masked their identities. Humans had grown accustomed to thinking that all Peyti looked alike, and the Peyti clones had taken advantage of that.

They
had
looked alike. There were hundreds of them, all clones of something quite rare in Peyti culture, a mass murderer who had committed genocide decades before. That wasn’t a coincidence, as everyone on the Moon knew.

Flint stood, and slipped his hands in the back pockets of his brown pants. He wore a sweater over them because he’d been cold since this last attack, even though the temperature controls in his apartment hadn’t changed in the last week.

He’d been affected by this second attack—hell, he’d been affected by the first attack—but not as badly as Talia.

Talia, who had forbidden him from sitting in the living room. The living room was the center of the apartment, and if he sat there, he could hear her rustling about in her room. He could also hear her sob, or at least, he had heard her on the first day after the attacks.

Then he had gone in and comforted her until she pushed him away. The sobbing had stopped, but the tears hadn’t, and he had no idea what to do about it.

He had been consulting with several networked psychologists, mostly people he had known when he worked with the police, and they just told him to give her time.

But his daughter was strong and brilliant, and this kind of collapse was unlike her. She had survived an attack by her mother’s kidnappers, and she had survived not just the loss of her house, but the loss of all she had ever known.

Including her identity. Because the great shock for Talia, in addition to learning that her mother had lied to her about pretty much everything, was the fact that Talia was not an original child. She was not a natural-born human being.

She was a clone of Emmeline, Flint’s natural daughter, who had died in a day care center when she was an infant. Flint had learned that Talia’s mother Rhonda had cloned Emmeline several times for purposes of her own. Most of those clones were older than Talia, whom Rhonda had kept and raised as a natural child, until everything fell apart around her three and a half years ago.

When Flint got Talia, he had adopted her immediately. He had done so for two reasons: He wanted her to feel valued and loved, but he also wanted her to be a legitimate human being in the eyes of the Earth Alliance. His actions had legally declared her a natural human being, even though she had a day of creation document instead of a birth certificate.

The hatred of clones inside the Alliance—and on the Moon especially—had only gotten worse since the Anniversary Day attacks.

Flint hadn’t been out in public much since the Peyti Crisis, but he suspected that what had once been acceptable hatred had probably become some kind of vitriol.

For that reason alone, he had been glad his daughter had barely come out of her room—at least on the first day after the attacks. But now, he wanted her beside him. He had vowed, after he had looked one of the Peyti assassins in the eye at Talia’s school, that he would make sure that one clone alone would come to justice. What was between him and that Peyti was personal.

But he hadn’t been able to deal with that Peyti; he hadn’t felt comfortable leaving Talia alone—and he had no one to ask for help. Those he trusted to stay with Talia were busy with their own problems in these days after the crisis.

He walked to the door of his office, hovered there for a moment, then walked back inside. He should have been researching Uzvekmt, the Peyti mass murderer on whom the clones were based, or figuring out what these clone lawyers had worked on throughout their years on the Moon. He should have been tracing their origins, but he hadn’t had the ability to concentrate the way he wanted to.

He could only think of Talia.

His links chirruped, and the sound caught him off-guard. He didn’t have an aural setting for his link alarms. He frowned, and examined the link, and realized that it was an inactive private link that he hadn’t used for nearly a year.

His frown deepened before he remembered that he had given that link out just recently and only because that link wasn’t associated with anyone or anything else.

Luc Deshin.

Flint wasn’t sure how he felt about Deshin. Deshin had given him good information about the Anniversary Day attacks before the Peyti Crisis, and they hadn’t really spoken since. Deshin’s odd little son, Paavo, went to the Aristotle Academy, and both men had seen each other the day of the crisis.

Flint had already been at the school—he had hurried there to save Talia, only to discover her outside a clear barrier. People—humans—had died in that room when the school had changed the room’s environment from human to Peyti normal, deactivating the bomb on the Peyti lawyer’s face.

Among the dead was a boy whom Talia had claimed she disliked. Only the boy had done something just that day which had confused her, and made her feel guilty about his death at the same time.

Flint had guessed that she was feeling guilty over wishing the boy dead, but she claimed that wasn’t it. She said she wasn’t mourning the boy, and Flint believed that. But something about the boy’s death—about the fact that she had witnessed his death—had triggered this breakdown.

The link chirruped again, and Flint hesitated. Deshin had proven himself trustworthy on the Anniversary Day attacks. He also loved his son, something completely in evidence during the Peyti Crisis. Deshin had swooped into the Academy, gathered Paavo in his arms, and hadn’t moved for what seemed like hours. The boy had clung to him, clearly feeling safe.

Flint knew whatever he thought of Deshin and Deshin’s various enterprises, that the man was capable of great love.

Flint sighed and sat down on one of the faux leather chairs that Talia had picked out for his office, saying they looked “professional,” whatever that meant. He clicked the link on visual, knowing that Deshin would be able to see his face, just like he could see Deshin’s.

Deshin appeared from the waist up. Behind him, windows showed the curve of Armstrong’s dome over its skyline. The visible part of that skyline included the apartment building where Flint was. Flint wondered if that was a coincidence.

“Mr. Deshin,” Flint said as flatly as he could. He didn’t want to show any emotion, even though he was certain that his exhaustion showed.

Deshin’s square face looked pinched, as if he had eaten something that disagreed with him. He had shadows under his eyes, which surprised Flint. Usually shadows didn’t show on men with skin as dark as Deshin’s.

“Mr. Flint,” Deshin said, nodding just a little. “I need to talk with you in person. It’s important.”

Flint shook his head. “Let’s use the links and trust the encryption.”

“No,” Deshin said. “We don’t dare. I’ve already arranged our usual meeting location. I’d like to see you there in an hour.”

Their usual meeting location, if it could be called that, was the offices of Oberholtz, Martinez & Mlsnavek. It turned out that both Flint and Deshin shared an attorney, Celestine Gonzalez. She had handled Talia’s adoption and a case involving Deshin’s son.

Flint did not want to leave the apartment, not even to go to the law offices for a short time. “I’m not taking orders, Mr. Deshin. I’m in the middle of a family crisis, and I don’t want to—”

“Do you remember speaking to me a few days before last week’s attack? I have information that may help all of us, and I need to run it by you before I take any other steps.”

Flint sighed. He had asked Deshin to use his connections to find out more about the designer criminal clones that had attacked Armstrong on Anniversary Day. The two men hadn’t spoken at all since a second set of clones tried to make a second attack.

“Mr. Deshin, you don’t need my help on this. You know more about this area than I ever will—”

“Flint, listen.” Deshin’s eyes had grown hard. “I already spoke to some people, and came across some information that has me—I need to talk with you. You’ll see why.”

Flint glanced at the door to his office. He couldn’t leave Talia. Would she come with him? He wasn’t even certain of that.

“I’ll do my best,” Flint said.

“Best isn’t good enough,” Deshin said. “You don’t want me to be alone on this information. We need both of us on it.”

Flint’s heart had started pounding. “I can’t leave Armstrong right now.”

“Not asking you to. I’m asking you to meet me in less than an hour. I will see you there.”

Deshin signed off.

Flint stared at the empty spot where Deshin’s image had been. Every time Flint interacted with Deshin, he understood why that man had a reputation for ruthlessness. Deshin didn’t scare Flint, but something about the man put Flint at attention each time they spoke.

Flint ran his hand through his hair again.

Deshin wouldn’t have contacted him if it weren’t important. And right now, important took on a whole new meaning. Important might mean the future of the Moon, or even the Earth Alliance itself.