Search & Recovery: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel (17 page)

“Not even after Anniversary Day?” Deshin asked. “They didn’t come back here? They didn’t think it strange that your father died the way that the mayor died, only one week earlier?”

“They probably haven’t even noticed.” Her voice shook. “Or maybe they just don’t care.”

“You didn’t contact them about it?”

She shook her head. “They’ve been mostly working in Sverdrup Crater. And they already made it clear that they weren’t going to do anything about my dad. So what’s the point of trying?”

One of the tears dripped off her unblinking eye. She wiped at the tear, then shook her head, and blinked. More tears fell, and she brushed at them furiously, as if they had betrayed her.

“You still haven’t told me how you knew that one of the clones killed your father.”

“Because we have security here,” she snapped. “He bought zoodeh from Dad, then tested it on Dad. I watched it all. More than once. Those clones are brutal, Mr. Deshin. They’re not just robots doing a job. He seduced me, and attacked Dad, and it took a lot of thought. I mean, Daddy didn’t even throw him out of here when he asked for the zoodeh. He told Daddy that he wouldn’t see me again, and he apologized and said he never meant for it to happen, and Daddy
believed
him. Daddy doesn’t believe anybody.”

She hiccupped, and shook her head.

“Didn’t,” she said. “Didn’t believe anybody.”

Deshin let out a small breath. He hadn’t expected any of that. “Let me see the footage,” he said.

She shook her head. “Don’t you understand? You’re doing what he did. You’re convincing me to trust you, to let you into the back, to let you close. You’ll just kill me too.”

Deshin smiled, his real smile this time. “I don’t kill people,” he said.

“If that were true, you wouldn’t know my father,” she said, and there was truth in that.

“I’m a respected businessman now,” Deshin said.

“Who came alone with one bodyguard.” She was smart, for all of her naiveté. But she didn’t have time to learn her father’s business, no matter how smart she was. And she was grieving, which made most people even more careless.

“I came alone to talk with your father. I know how little he trusted people,” Deshin said.

“You came to him why?” she asked.

She’d been honest with him. Deshin had no doubt about that. Under other circumstances, that would have made Deshin more likely to tell her why he was here. But with Pietres dead, it didn’t matter what he told her.

“Old business,” Deshin said. He was unable to confess that he was searching for information on zoodeh. “Nothing I can tell you without you digging into ancient files, and even then, it’s probably not worthwhile.”

“It seems worthwhile,” she said. “You came alone.”

Deshin sighed. “Look, what I wanted from your father doesn’t matter anymore. If you can send me the footage, I’d like to see it. I don’t have to get near you—and you don’t have to get near me. All right?”

She nodded, then shook her head a third time. “Ah, hell,” she said, and waved her hand.

The screen she had been looking at before became visible. On it was one of the clones as Deshin had not seen them. He was dressed in an expensive black jacket with matching pants, his hair combed back. He looked wealthy and comfortable and exotic, precisely the kind of man that women who liked danger would find attractive.

I came down here to apologize
, the clone said to Pietres.
I met your daughter, and found her very appealing. I didn’t realize she was
your
daughter until last night’s dinner. Which makes this all so awkward. Because I prefer to keep my business life and my personal life separate. Unfortunately, my time is not my own this week.

A mixture of truth and lies, the way the very best con men worked. Deshin frowned. He’d never heard one of the clones speak. He was surprised at the slight hint of an accent—one he couldn’t place—and the clipped, educated tone.

He glanced over the top of the screen at the girl. She was wiping her face with the back of her hand, the tears still flowing, much to her obvious exasperation.

You do business with me or you speak to my daughter,
Pietres said, with a menace that would have made Deshin think twice about doing either.
You do not do both.

I know, sir, and I’m very sorry. I’m afraid I’m going to have to complete the business, since I’m not here on my own behalf. I’ll apologize to your daughter—

You won’t speak to her again.

Deshin watched the corners, the edges of the security video. He saw nothing out of the ordinary. The store looked the same.

The men discussed business. The clone asked for a small amount of zoodeh and a delivery and storage system. Before they settled on a price, Pietres told the clone about all of the difficulties in using zoodeh—from its instability to the fact that many assassins who use it often accidentally kill themselves.

The girl didn’t seem distressed by any of this. Either she had heard the security recording several times or she knew about zoodeh. Her tears had slowed. Now she occasionally rubbed her thumb underneath her eyelids, and tried to surreptitiously watch Deshin and Jakande.

Deshin returned his gaze to the screen. Pietres had a bot retrieve the zoodeh from the back of the store. The zoodeh was in a small, double-protected vial; the delivery system in a flat box with several tiny needles glinting in the light.

The clone leaned forward, hands floating above the supplies. He and Pietres haggled over money, and then the clone sent him money—which surprised the crap out of Deshin. He hadn’t expected that.

He glanced at the girl, but she didn’t seem to notice. He wondered if she had tried to trace that money or if it still existed.

He would worry about that later.

Instead, he watched the screen. The clone thanked Pietres profusely, then apologized, seemingly for the incident with the daughter, and extended a hand.

Deshin’s stomach tightened.

Pietres shook the clone’s hand and smiled. Then Pietres started to frown, looking confused. A grayness seeped through his entire body, and he toppled backwards, like a statue that had been pushed.

Sorry
, the clone said again, but he didn’t seem to be speaking to Pietres. Instead, the clone seemed to be speaking to the room—or maybe the security cameras.

Deshin frowned. This was strange, no matter how he thought about it.

On screen, the clone slipped off gloves that had covered his hands, then put on a different pair of gloves—obvious gloves this time, where the original gloves had matched his skin perfectly.

He picked up the zoodeh and the delivery system, put them in a bag he had brought with him, and then pocketed them.

After one last look around the room, he left.

“Do you still have the money?” Deshin asked.

The girl looked at him, the blood leaving her skin. “Are you accusing me of something?”

“No,” he said, but assigned that thought to consider later. “I want to know if you ever checked to see if the money made it into your accounts.”

“I—yes, it’s there. I don’t know what to do with it.” Her voice trembled.

Deshin nodded. He glanced at that screen. The whole interaction seemed strange. Or maybe that was hindsight.

After all, criminal interactions were often odd.

“He never gave his name,” Deshin said, “at least not on your security vid here.”

“He called himself Syv,” she said. “I thought it was short for Sylvester or something.”

“But you don’t think that now?” Deshin asked.

She shook her head. “I looked that up at least. In one of the Earth dialects, it means seven.”

Deshin shuddered despite himself. “Which Earth dialect?”

“Norwegian,” she said. “It’s spoken in places where the natives are pale and blond, like the clones.”

Was that a coincidence? Deshin didn’t know.

But he would try to find out.

TWENTY

“I FOUND HER in the garden.”

The voice belonged to Rahim Visso, the advanced math teacher. He sounded both worried and winded.

Pippa Landau felt dizzy. Her knees ached, and so did her head. She was supine, eyes closed, mouth dry, her back resting against something comfortable, pillows beneath her neck.

“Pippa?” A hand touched her face. The hand was soft and smelled of lavender. Pippa didn’t recognize the voice or the hand or the lavender scent. “I think she fainted.”

“I know she passed out,” Rahim said, not hiding his sarcasm. “I did a medical scan. Her vitals seem fine, but I’m wondering if we should call for help of some kind.”

“I’m all right.” Pippa managed to speak, even though her lips didn’t part well. She forced herself to open her eyes.

The room—the teacher’s lounge—spun. She closed her eyes again. She wasn’t really all right.

She sent a message through her system.
Repair equilibrium
.

Sometimes she felt like she should add a
please,
just in case some perverse part of her was holding back.

The dizziness ceased. She couldn’t tell the staff here that her medical implants were less sophisticated than theirs. They’d want to know why, and she couldn’t tell them the truth about her childhood.

She hadn’t told anyone.

She opened her eyes again, saw the recessed lighting, the sketch of the Mississippi flowing along the ceiling. The room smelled of coffee and cinnamon, and the oval clock on the wall—a historic curiosity that everyone wanted to keep—said she still had half an hour before the students arrived.

“Are you all right, Pippa?” Rahim leaned over her, his narrow face constricted with worry. He had the nicest brown eyes. She had always thought that, but he was young, as young as her eldest child. Not, Rahim had said one day, that age should matter when humans lived so long.

“I think so,” she said, and struggled to sit up.

“What happened?” he asked.

What lie could she tell? She wasn’t thinking clearly enough to come up with one. Her brain was full of cloned men, made from a serial killer, marching out of her nightmares and onto the Moon.

She settled for, “I don’t know.” Then she gave Rahim a weak smile. “I’ll be all right.”

“If you need someone to take your classes…” the woman spoke.

Pippa looked at her, saw a heavyset woman with black hair threaded with gray, knew from the handmade clothes that the woman was one of those anti-technology types who had settled near the Amish communities west of here.

“I’ll be fine,” Pippa said. It was the first day of summer session. Her favorite. She had to remember that. “Just give me a few minutes.”

Rahim shot her a worried look, but stepped back. He took the woman’s arm and moved her out of the way as well.

Pippa sat up slowly. The question wasn’t whether or not she would be all right. The question was should she talk to someone in authority? She had been running from those clones for her entire life, it seemed, even though she hadn’t seen one since she was twenty-five. An entire lifetime ago.

She ran a hand over her face.

What could she tell anyone? That she had seen the clones more than thirty years ago? But the ones she had seen were dead now, and she had known nothing about them. They weren’t even in the Alliance at the time, and they certainly weren’t a threat to anyone.

Although the woman at the Disappearance Service had recommended a full Disappear, because she said someone could come after Pippa, and she would be easy to find under her real name. Since Pippa hadn’t known what the clones wanted in the first place, she had had no idea if they would find her.

If they wanted to find her.

If they wanted to hurt her.

But clearly, this group hadn’t thought of her. They had been on a mission, just like the clones she had seen so long ago.

She wanted to ask if they were fast-grow clones. But they had been laughing and interacting and traveling like cousins heading to a party. Fast-grow usually didn’t engage each other like that. They would have been concentrated on the mission—if there was a mission, which these clones clearly had had.

She took a deep breath.

No one knew who she was. Not a soul on Earth, literally. Not her children. Not even her husband had known.

She had hidden effectively.

If she talked now, she could be found.

And as the woman at the Disappearance Service had said so long ago,
Do you want to test how badly they want to find you? Because we can give you a small package. If they find you, though, it’ll be because you’re searchable. We can make you impossible to find
.

Except for a Retrieval Artist
, she had said, voice shaking.

They never succeed
, the woman at the Disappearance Service had said.
They run scams. You have to worry about Trackers because they have access to government information, but Trackers can’t find anyone we give a full Disappearance to either. I think your situation warrants it, but it’s your choice. Remember. It’s always your choice. And if you break your silence, you’ll be easier to find.

“Pippa?” Rahim asked, that frown on his face deepening. “Are you sure you shouldn’t go home?”

It took her a moment to parse his sentence.

“I’m going to teach,” she said. That was what she did now. What she had done for decades. She was Pippa Landau. She had a life here. A long life here.

Her family was here, she had lost no one, and nothing, in these recent attacks.

She had nothing to share except old, probably worthless information.

And that wasn’t worth risking her entire existence for.

“Help me up,” she said to Rahim, extending her hand. “I want to go back to the garden.”

Where she was in charge. Where she could think about plants and ancient roses.

Where she would be safe.

TWENTY-ONE

EVEN THE TRAINS out of the Port of Armstrong were crowded.