Working for Xoth would make me rich. Rich as hell, in fact. Of course, I’d be getting rich because I’d be helping people much richer than me hang on to their money and figure out who to arrest before the guillotines could be erected outside their walled estates.

I hadn’t created this situation. Even with all I had done, I was still just a bit player on this huge board, and the game had been in motion long before I was born. Vast historic forces had brought this world into being, and I had to live in it with everyone else. If I took vows of poverty or swore myself to revolution, it wouldn’t overturn the order. In a world of winners and losers, choosing the losing side wasn’t going to help anyone, least of all myself. At least my comfortable couch in the outer halls of power afforded me enough slack to reach out and help a little, retail-style, one person at a time. And after all, that’s the only way people came, one at a time, even in a big crowd. We were born as individuals, and we died on our own, and even the tightest, best-coordinated group was just a bunch of singular individuals choosing to work together for a while.

All of this was self-serving, sure—it wasn’t just ethical cover for an expedient way of keeping my skin intact, but also oiled with the most expensive lotions the world’s luxury duty-free stores had to offer. But self-serving wasn’t the same as wrong.