Mandelbrot sat meatloafed on his chest, purring. He scritched her absently while calling up the morning stats. It had been a relatively quiet night: the only item of note was a batch of remarkably foolhardy refugees trying to crash the North American perimeter. They'd set sail under cover of darkness, casting off from Long Island on a refitted garbage scow at 0110 Atlantic Standard; within an hour, two dozen EurAfrican interests had been vying for dibs on the mandatory extreme prejudice. The poor bastards had barely made it past Cape Cod before the Algerians (the Algerians?) took them out.

The system hadn't even bothered to get Desjardins out of bed.

Mandelbrot rose, stretched, and wandered off on her morning rounds. Liberated, Desjardins got up and padded to the elevator. Sixty-five floors of abandoned real estate dropped smoothly around him. Just a few years ago it had been a hive of damage control; thousands of Guilt-Tripped operatives haunting a world forever teetering on the edge of breakdown, balancing lives and legions with cool dispassionate parsimony. Now it was pretty much just him. A lot of things had changed after Rio.

The elevator disgorged him onto CSIRA's roof. Other buildings encircled this one in a rough horseshoe, pressing in at the edges of the cleared zone. Sudbury's static field, its underbelly grazing the tips of the tallest structures, sent gooseflesh across Desjardins's forearms.

On the eastern horizon, the tip of the rising sun ignited a kingdom in ruins.

The devastation wasn't absolute. Not yet. Cities to the east retained some semblance of integrity, walled and armored and endlessly on guard against the invaders laying claim to the lands between. Fronts and battle lines still seethed under active dispute; one or two even held steady. Pockets of civilization remained sprinkled across the continent—not many, perhaps, but the war went on.

All because five years before, a woman named Lenie Clarke had risen from the bottom of the ocean with revenge and ßehemoth seething together in her blood.

Now Desjardins walked across the landing pad to the edge of the roof. The sun rose from the lip of the precipice as he pissed into space. So many changes, he reflected. So many fold catastrophes in pursuit of new equilibria. His domain had shrunk from a planet to a continent, cauterised at the edges. Eyesight once focused on infinity now ended at the coast. Arms which once encircled the world had been amputated at the elbow. Even N'Am's portion of the Net had been cut from the electronic commons like a tumor; Achilles Desjardins got to deal with the necrotising mess left behind.

And yet, in many ways he had more power than ever. Smaller territory, yes, but so few left to share it with. He was less of a team player these days, more of an emporer. Not that that was widely known...