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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