She wasn’t sure she wanted to now.
First, she would find out what had happened to the five. Three had been hurt so badly no one thought they would live. The other two might have pulled through.
It took a while to dig through the database on a case this old. She found lots of legal jargon and lots of codes she didn’t entirely recognize.
Each of the injured clones was treated separately, and each went to medical centers in different parts of the sector. She would trace them first, and figure out what happened to them. If all else failed, she could go to Thirds.
But she really didn’t want to see him again. He hadn’t lied to her, per se, but he had played her. And in her entire career, almost no one had played her.
Even now, just remembering him unnerved her.
This whole thing unnerved her.
She knew she was missing something. But for the life of her, she couldn’t tell what it was.
She needed answers. She needed to know if, with a little more diligence, she could have stopped the attacks on the Moon. She also needed to know if she could help resolve those attacks—find the perpetrators, and maybe prevent another such attack.
Mostly, though, she needed to know what had gone wrong in the Alliance system of justice.
She needed to know that when she completed her job, other people in the system would do theirs.
Otherwise, there was no point in all the risks she took, all the meticulous care she used.
Otherwise, she had wasted not just her entire career, but her life as well.
TWENTY-THREE
ZHU MIGHT HAVE missed the case, if he hadn’t flagged everything to do with Anniversary Day. Even then, he might still have missed it because the language was odd: injured prisoner, beaten because of resemblance to Moon assassins, claims unfair imprisonment. Claim rejected. Will trade information for freedom. Requests attorney.
Requests attorney.
Those weren’t the words that Zhu stared at the longest. He stared at “resemblance to Moon assassins.” No mention of Anniversary Day, no real mention of the attacks. The only reason his system flagged the case at all was because of the link between “Moon” and “assassins.”
No other reason.
Yet the entire thing made his heart rate speed up.
Will trade information for freedom.
Zhu poked around the edges of the notice on the pro bono information board, but he couldn’t find out any more about the case. Nor could he find where it hailed from.
He searched for “Moon assassin” “resemblance” “clone of PierLuigi Frémont.” He found a lot on the latter listing, all of it inaccessible—case sensitive, and only available to an attorney with a legal interest in the subject.
In other words, the files were closed, and only an attorney certified by a court could get the proper information.
He spent two days doing his due diligence while working on other cases. Most of his caseload at the moment was light, partly because he had been gone so long. No one had known when he would get back, so his court cases were pushed back—not that he had many. He tried to settle whenever he could.
He had several negotiations this week between interested parties, but nothing that prevented the level of work he needed to do to figure out what was happening here.
He could have given the work to one of his clerks, but he hadn’t. He wanted to handle this himself. It all felt…personal.
He didn’t know any other word for it. This was the first case he had ever had that had real meaning to him. Not that he had this case. He didn’t. He was just snooping around the edges of it.
He finally understood a few moments he’d experienced when he was serving in the Impossibles, where some family members in court cried when a client got remanded or his not-guilty plea was denied. It didn’t matter how much Zhu had warned them such things could happen: they were still heartbroken when the worst occurred.
He would be heartbroken if no one was ever brought to justice in the Anniversary Day cases. He would be devastated, and he hadn’t even lost anyone.
For the first time in his life, he truly understood Berhane. No one had been brought to justice in the first Moon bombing, in Armstrong. No one had even been accused of the crime.
Berhane’s mother had died, and no one had ever gotten punished for it.
Maybe there was a reason his former fiancée had lost herself in scholarship. Maybe she preferred the life of the mind to what was actually happening in her real life.
Maybe he had been the worst kind of partner, the kind who hadn’t even tried to understand.
These thoughts haunted him continually. He kept turning them over and over again in his head, unable to shake them free. A few times, he’d tried to contact Berhane, only to get a block on her links, saying that she didn’t want to talk to him; he could leave a message.
He never did. He had nothing of importance to say.
Except maybe I’m sorry. And he should have said that—and acted on it—a long time ago.
Finally, after the second frustrating day in which he tried to find out more about the case, he realized the only way he would learn about it would be to actually become one of the attorneys involved.
A note in the file mentioned that the client would want a meet. Which meant that if Zhu took the case, he would have to leave Athena Base and go to whatever prison housed this particular criminal.
He couldn’t just disappear from his practice, no matter how much he wanted to do this. Plus, any case that involved the Anniversary Day attacks would have to be approved through the partners. There were so many potential conflicts from so many different clients that everything needed approval.
He asked for a meeting with Rafael Salehi. Zhu figured Salehi would understand. After all, he was the one who had advised Zhu that at some point he would have to reconnect with his own personal sense of justice.
Although Zhu was wondering if he’d ever really had a personal sense of justice at all.
He expected to get his meeting with Salehi in a few days, but oddly, Salehi could see him within the hour.
Their offices were one floor apart, but they rarely saw each other. Once in a while they spoke in the firm’s cafeteria—if, indeed, a restaurant of that quality could be called a cafeteria. Usually both men had been on the way to something else when they were grabbing a bite for lunch. After Zhu had become a full partner, neither man had time to talk with the other except for some cursory checking in.
Zhu took the stairs to Salehi’s office rather than the elevator. Ever since Anniversary Day, Zhu had done a lot more exercising. He told himself he did it to keep in shape, but if he were honest with himself, he really did it because he had realized that day that he might need to run for his life at some point, and he was in no condition to do so.
He didn’t want to use enhancements to improve his physical condition. He felt a deep-seated need to do it himself.
Salehi had half of the fifteenth floor for his office. The other half served some older partners, who weren’t name partners. Salehi had promised Zhu an office on this floor when one of those partners retired.
The fifteenth floor had a hush that Zhu’s floor did not. Many of Zhu’s floor-mates liked music, and they liked sharing that music. He could close the door to his office, which sound-proofed it, but as he walked to that office every day, he heard a cacophony of sounds, from ancient Uscri tribal chants to modern Scree music, both of which sounded like screaming to Zhu. He preferred the melodic music of Old Earth, which fortunately many of his colleagues did as well.
No music played on Salehi’s floor, not even overhead to “relax” clients. Salehi’s office area had an almost religious hush.
He had no human assistant, preferring to use a data-based system that he claimed had a more personal touch. He monitored everything, because, he said, he was a control freak.
Zhu believed him; the desire for control was so strong that Salehi once admitted the real reason he didn’t wa
nt a human assistant was because he couldn’t control another person’s expressions and tone every hour of every day.
As Zhu walked down the brown carpeted hallway, a door opened in the back. Salehi leaned against the door jamb. He was a slight man, with close-cropped dark hair and eyes that always seemed a bit too big for his face.
“You look too serious, Torkild,” Salehi said. “The universe hasn’t ended.”
“Not yet,” Zhu said.
He always felt overdressed when he went into Salehi’s office. Salehi spent his days in white linen shirts, khaki pants, and sandals, unless he was going to court. Then he wore shiny brown suits that looked both expensive and tacky. His purpose, one of the other name partners said, was to stand out, and he certainly did that.
“Anniversary Day?” Salehi asked.
He didn’t have to say more. He clearly understood that Zhu’s response had come directly from his Anniversary Day experience.
“Yeah.” Just answering the question made Zhu feel even heavier. It was as if he had gained twenty pounds since he had come back, even though his actual weight hadn’t changed.
Salehi tilted his head toward the room behind him. “C’mon in.”
He didn’t wait for Zhu’s response. Instead, Salehi went deep into the room, pulling back curtains to reveal a sunny desert covering the wall. The sunlight made Zhu’s eyes hurt. He had forgotten that while everyone else in the firm seemed to prefer views of Athena Base and the space beyond, Salehi liked manipulating his wall screens so that it looked like he was anywhere but here.
Zhu had always thought it a strange habit from a man who claimed he didn’t like to travel far from home.
“I suppose you want me to cool it down in here,” Salehi said, and as he did, Zhu noticed that the temperature was several degrees warmer than he was used to. The floor had lost its carpet as well. It had some kind of covering that mimicked sand.
The lights on the ceiling were as bright as the sunlight emanating from the walls, and the air here smelled both dusty and spicy. Zhu frowned, and again, Salehi seemed almost like he could read minds.
“Sagebrush. I’m enjoying a high desert today, even though I do have the light properly filtered so that we won’t get sunburned.”
Or light-burned as the case might be. Zhu was about to lower himself onto one of the nearby chairs when Salehi stopped him.
“Not yet,” Salehi said. “Let the sunlight fade a bit.”
The brightness had eased, and a cool breeze came from the area of the wall. Storm clouds now covered the desert skyscape.
Zhu looked at it warily. “I hope that you’re not going to make it rain in here.”
Salehi grinned. “No. If I truly imitated a high desert cloudburst, we’d have to deal with flash flooding.”
“Oh, fun,” Zhu said.
“Ah,” Salehi said, waving his hand dismissively, “if you can’t control your environment, what’s the point of living in space?”
Zhu decided that the question was meant rhetorically. Otherwise, his answer would depress both of them. People like them lived in space because that was where the jobs were. The court system had its own network of bases precisely so that it could remain neutral, and not be subject to any culture within the Alliance simply because it had its courts on that culture’s property.
“You look morose, Torkild.” Salehi put his hands on the arms of a nearby chair and eased himself down, as if testing the temperature. He finally sat all the way. “Temp’s are back to normal.”
Which was as good an invitation to sit as Zhu would get. He sat on the chair he’d been about to sit in before. Its smooth, leather-like surface was still a bit too warm, but not as hot as it probably had been a few minutes earlier.
“Lawyers aren’t meant to see death and destruction up close,” Salehi said. “Especially defense lawyers.”
If Salehi had sent those words across a link, Zhu would have thought them flip. But Salehi’s tone was serious, his expression more so.
“You hit the dark night of the soul, didn’t you?” Salehi asked. “I told Schnabby you weren’t the guy to handle our Moon-based clients, given their culpability—and you didn’t hear that word from me.”
Schnabby was Salehi’s private nickname for one of the other name partners. Zhu wasn’t sure Salehi had ever said it to Schnable’s face.
“But,” Salehi continued, “Schnabby was convinced that it wouldn’t bother you. Balls like rocks, Schnabby had said. Zhu always knows how to keep his emotions in check. But I told Schnabby that guys like you—and me, for that matter—are the ones you got to watch out for. We do great until we don’t.”
Zhu managed a rueful smile. Balls like rocks, eh? That was the perception of him? It explained how he hit partner so fast. But those words didn’t really describe him. Not after Anniversary Day, and maybe not before.
They actually described Berhane.
“So,” Salehi said, “you want to drop everything and go to some prison somewhere to rescue somebody. I didn’t get it all, but I assume this has something to do with Anniversary Day?”
“You told me once that I would need reminding—”
“About the difference between what’s legal and what’s right, and why our clients need defending.” Salehi leaned back in the chair and placed one ankle on the opposite knee. “I give everyone that speech, you know.”
“I know,” Zhu said.
“Only the good ones listen,” Salehi said.
Zhu really did smile now. “And you tell everyone that too so that they feel better, don’t you?”
Salehi’s grin had faded as Zhu spoke. “Actually, no. Most of the lawyers in this godforsaken place don’t really care about the difference between what’s right and what’s legal. They care about billable hours and advancing to a bigger office and maybe handling a case in front of a Multicultural Tribunal. They’re all about themselves.”
Salehi tilted his head just a little, then rested a hand on his calf, bunching the leg of his pants.
“I was beginning to think you were one of them,” he said. “I’ve been wondering for about a year now if I misjudged you.”
“Maybe you did,” Zhu said.
“And Anniversary Day shocked you into sense?” Salehi shook his head. “Those clowns who truly care only about the office or the job would’ve handled all the Moon-based cases without a qualm. You didn’t have the stomach for them, did you?”
“No.” Zhu’s cheeks had grown warm.
“That’s the guy I championed,” Salehi said. “I knew there was a heart in there somewhere.”
Zhu shook his head. “This isn’t about heart. This is as self-focused as it gets. I gotta get back to what I do, to what I know, and you said this might work.”
“I said that you would someday need to remember the difference between justice and what’s right,” Salehi said. “That’s not you?”
“I was very proud of my office two months ago,” Zhu said.
Salehi’s mouth twitched, almost as if he were repressed a smile. Then he nodded, as if conceding a point. “Tell me about this case.”
“I don’t know anything about the case,” Zhu said, “except that this guy claims he knows something about Anniversary Day, even though he’s been in prison for years. He also looks something like the assassins.”
“Which means he’s a clone,” Salehi said.
“We don’t know that,” Zhu said. “I can’t get information.”
Salehi nodded. “Probably just as well. I honestly thought clone law was the next frontier in the legal system. Discrimination and all that, those pesky definitions about what’s human and if being human even matters in the Alliance. Then this tragedy happened, and it probably set clone law back a hundred years or more.”
His gaze narrowed, and Zhu could almost feel the question. He answered it before Salehi asked it. “I don’t care about making precedent.”
“So you think this case will solve the mysteries of the Anniversary Day bombings,” Sale
hi said.
“I think it might help,” Zhu said.
“Whatever you figure out, it won’t change what happened. All those people will still be dead. All those domes will still be damaged.”
“I know,” Zhu said.
“Yeah, that’s right.” Salehi’s tone was dry, maybe even a bit sarcastic. “You would tell your clients the same thing.”
“Actually, no,” Zhu said. “I’d tell them there are no heroes.”
Salehi crossed his arms and leaned back, studying Zhu. “Do you believe that now?”
Zhu had seen a lot of people act heroically that day. He’d seen others step up since. But did that make them heroes? He wasn’t certain.
“I’m not sure what I believe in,” he said.
Salehi sighed. “Would a rest be better? You know, a year off to regroup?”
And be alone with my thoughts? No. Zhu had to stop himself from blurting that. Instead, he managed to edit it to, “Let’s reserve that as an option. Let me try this first.”
Salehi frowned. He stared at Zhu for several minutes, then finally said, “You realize you’re never going to be the man you were. And you can’t solve the Anniversary Day cases all on your own.”
“Yeah,” Zhu said. “I know.”
And he did. He knew both things. He didn’t care. He still wanted this case.
“The case might be nothing, just some con trying to get out of a life sentence,” Salehi said.
“I know that too,” Zhu said.
Salehi raised his eyebrows. “And you still want to go.”
“I still want to go,” Zhu said.
Salehi nodded. “You realize a case like this, if it’s what you imagine, might make you into someone else.”
“I’m already someone else,” Zhu said.
Salehi’s expression vanished. It was as if he had no emotions at all. Zhu realized he shouldn’t have responded so quickly.
“I’m sorry,” Zhu said. “You had a point.”
Salehi nodded, and the warmth returned to his face. “My point is that you might not want to continue with the law after this.”
A Murder of Clones: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel Page 14