Vigilantes by Kristine Kathryn Rusch Read Free Book Online

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