“What did you actually do?” asked Stephen, pouring a dozen or so tacks into Cyril’s palm. “Nobody’s ever said outright. Not to me. I think I’ve got about half of it from books and the news and things, but they leave the real bits out. You know. And it’s no good trying Mummy.”

What did that question mean? And where even to begin?

“Nothing good,” he said, and began placing the furniture tacks one by one into the powder.

There was a part of him that knew it wasn’t true. Three months ago he’d pulled a girl no older than Stephen through a minefield after her leg was blown away below the knee. Before that, run a dangerous comms mission for a man whose wife had just gone into labor. Gotten a family out from under the falling heel of a republican platoon on the march, in the very nick of time.

But that part of him was sealed away under glass, so that its mouth screamed silently. If he didn’t look at it, he didn’t notice it at all.

“This blast won’t be very big,” said Cyril. “It’s just proof of concept. Normally you’d want phosphorus, or ammonal. Lay out some of those rolling papers. Overlapping.”

Stephen did as he was told. Cyril constructed the fuse quickly, wrapping the paper around the contents of a few more shotgun shells. One end, twisted tightly, fit into the hole they had drilled. The top of the pipe he capped delicately, wary of sparks.

He stood from his preparations. Movement made his cold joints ache. “What do you think I did?”

Stephen looked down at the bomb: half nervous, half impatient. A clear trail of mucus marked his upper lip, where the hair had just begun to darken and grow thick.

Cyril did not move to light a match.

“I think,” Stephen said, “you did some kind of work for the Ospies. And whatever you did, it was really bad. So bad nobody wants to know you.”

Cyril struck the light. Stephen opened his mouth to say something, but Cyril cut him off. “Get back to where we marked.”

Sprinting across the clearing, he stumbled on a root, then hopped over the rotten log that had been decomposing since the Spice War. Cyril bent to the fuse, lit it, and walked at his normal pace. He’d left it long enough for leisure.

Stephen flinched at the blast. Cyril, too, though his was less awe and more ingrained reflex. His hands began to shake, and he stuck them in his pocket. Bad as Aristide, with his DTs.

“That was it,” said Stephen, scrambling back over the log. “There’s tacks everywhere. It blew the pipe to bits! Rotten tops!”