Vigilantes Read Free Page A

it, made more money than Zhu could even imagine.
    Other people dressed well on this street. The problem was that the ones who went to work early weren’t the well-dressed ones, but the ones heading to jobs that required uniforms.
    Like cops.
    Zhu sighed and adjusted the suit. It fit perfectly. Some employee of the clothing company that S 3 used had arrived at the office to confirm the measurements the holo system had sent. Probably because Zhu had lost so much weight in the last year. He suspected the company was making certain that the person who ordered the clothes was entitled to the clothes.
    He was entitled to a lot through S 3 —or, at least, he had been.
    He’d been a junior partner with the firm for nearly a decade, and six months ago he had nearly been fired. He’d left the S 3 offices to come home to the Moon, and had drunk himself silly. He’d expected to be out of a job.
    Instead, it turned out that he was the only S 3 lawyer on the Moon when the Peyti Crisis occurred.
    He went from being a sloppy about-to-be-fired drunk to running a branch of S 3 in the space of a few hours.
    Of course, the price had been his soul.
    The price in the law was always someone’s soul. Same old story, told since the law became a profession. Zhu had a moment of clarity right after his boss, Rafael Salehi, contacted him. Zhu could either stand by his principles and starve to death (or take some humiliating job for someone of his education and intelligence) or he could get filthy rich by representing thugs, killers, and mass murderers.
    Zhu had said no initially. But his spine was wobbly. He’d changed his mind within an hour.
    He was now representing all of the Peyti clones, the ones who had caused the Peyti Crisis. At least until Salehi got here, which would be Any Day Now.
    Then Zhu could become a glorified office manager if that was what he wanted. Or at least, he could go back to being a junior partner instead of the guy who answered all the stupid questions that the staff was asking.
    The thick yellow light of Dome Daylight covered the center of the street, missing the corner by a few meters. This part of Armstrong had a brand new dome (brand new, as of a few years ago), and its Dome Daylight program was more sophisticated than in other areas of the city. The daylight moved across the dome, mimicking the way that sunlight moved on Earth.
    Right now, they were in the early morning phase of Dome Daylight. The sun was strong, but its reach was limited.
    Zhu actually liked the design of the program. It was different than it had been when he was growing up here, when the transition between Dome Dawn, Dome Daylight, and Dome Twilight happened in a moment, destroying the illusion of an Earth day.
    He swallowed hard. No matter what he did to distract himself, he couldn’t quite make himself walk the rest of the way to the office. He could call one of the new company cars, or he could take a different route.
    But he had told himself he wouldn’t let the fear overtake him. He knew that the harassment would only get worse, as long as S 3 represented those clones.
    The level of hatred in Armstrong was palpable. Which he could understand, given what had happened to the folks on the Moon.
    Even when he tried to think about it, he couldn’t entirely comprehend what it meant to have lost millions of lives Moonwide in less than a year.
    He scanned the street, looking for more cops. They seemed to hate him more than anyone else. They had made that clear the day before. Maybe because they were constricted by the injunctions S 3 filed. Or maybe because they couldn’t get to the Peyti clones any more.
    He shuddered to think what those clones would have been subjected to if S 3 hadn’t stepped in.
    Then he shook his head a little. He didn’t shudder to think, because he tried not to think about the clones at all. They had attempted something awful. And they had perverted his profession to do it.
    If he were honest with himself, he hated