Search & Recovery: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

to suppress. Bastard. Did he just not care about the fact that millions had died? That the Earth Alliance had suffered a serious blow? That this kind of planning wasn’t just a one-time thing?
    Was he all about his job?
    Or did he truly believe that what happened to humans didn’t matter to Peyti?
    She didn’t know, and she wasn’t going to waste time finding out.
    She needed to get her all-human teams on the ground. She needed to do some planning.
    Without him.
    Or the Joint Unit’s resources.
    Still, she’d be offering the damaged governments of the Moon the kind of assistance they needed. And maybe, just maybe, she’d protect the Alliance against further attacks.
    Whether they were caused by humans or not.

 
     
     
     
    TWELVE
     
     
    FRAGMENTED DREAMS OF her mother haunted her. Whenever Berhane closed her eyes, she saw not the images of disaster that filled the screens and poured across the public networks, but her mother’s black hair, with its reddish highlights catching the fake sunlight of Dome Dawn that last morning, the smell of cinnamon coffee in the air.
    The sky was red with early morning light, the shopping district illuminated in copper, everything sharp and clear and focused.
    Berhane would wake up without feeling rested, pressure in her chest from unshed tears. Those months after the bombing, those months when she kept hoping and hoping and hoping that her mother had somehow gotten away, that she had survived and lost her memory, that—ridiculously—she had decided to run away from home and not tell anyone, that she was still breathing somewhere. The “magical thinking,” as her father called it, had trapped Berhane as surely as the sectioned dome had trapped those inside it for just an instant, before their world evaporated into nothingness.
    Then Berhane learned the sequence, realized the bomb had gone off first and the dome had sectioned afterwards, that everyone was dead before Berhane had even known anything was wrong, that her mother hadn’t been trapped, but had walked blithely toward the Shenandoah Café, thinking the morning beautiful and soon she would be talking with her very annoyed daughter.
    Annoyed.
    Berhane still felt the guilt of that.
    She could only handle two or three of those dreams per night. She would get up afterwards, and usually get some coffee or a muffin and sit on her balcony on the dome side of her father’s house. She had moved back in after Anniversary Day because her apartment had too much Torkild in it.
    He had helped her pick out the furniture, had slept in that bed on the final morning of their engagement, had betrayed her there. She was subletting the place to a friend, but Berhane knew she wouldn’t return.
    Besides, she liked to think that this way Torkild couldn’t find her.
    Or maybe he would be too embarrassed to come here.
    He was on the Moon still—everyone was; no private ships had left yet—and he had only tried to contact her once since that awful day. She had told him she didn’t want to think about him anymore, and had shut down all of his access to her links.
    To escape him, and all thought of him, she had moved into the suite of rooms that her mother had remodeled for guests. Berhane’s childhood bedroom remained, but Berhane wanted to leave that as it was—a monument to a person who no longer existed.
    Besides, if she stayed in the suite, she felt like a guest in her father’s home instead of a little girl moving back for comfort. She was already looking for a new place, one that wasn’t as upscale as Torkild liked, one that had a bit of attitude, maybe even a funky groove, one that didn’t show off her wealth, but showed off her personality instead.
    Her father’s house did show off his wealth. He owned a disgusting amount of land at the northern edge of Armstrong. The area had been settled forty years ago, the dome expanded to accommodate, and covenants added so that no one could build a new subdivision on the empty Moonscape