Perhaps the speed with which House Hoegbotton and House Frankwrithe & Lewden embraced Nativism proves Duncan’s theory. What better way for the gray caps to protect themselves than by convincing the Houses? (I think this enters the far reaches of that land known as the Paranoid Conspiracy Theory, Janice.) Meanwhile, those of us not as devoted to blind ideology have had to suffer through the Nativists’ huge rallies, their righteous speeches, their letter-writing campaigns when anything the least bit threatening to their worldview has the audacity to step out into the light. I would imagine that even Sabon never realized that Nativism would become so popular, or that it would drive her book sales for so long. (Although, you must admit, the mechanics of the Shift have put a stop to her momentum.)

I had personal reasons for rejecting Sabon’s theory. Sometimes, during my tours of duty, I would see Sybel standing in the nearest available tree behind some mob listening to a Nativist speaker. He’d look back at me and shake his head, sadness in his eyes. After all, he’d been killed by a very specific deployment of the gray caps’ weapons. I’d lost a foot. It was hard to blame either outcome, ultimately, on the random, the unexplainable. At least, I refused to do so.

“But how can we pass on a message from you?” Pestle asked.

“Easy,” I said. “It’s for Mary Sabon. She is, after all, the leader of you Nativist types.”

Mortar had already begun shaking his head, about to protest that they didn’t know Mary, that they’d only read her books, but I waved these objections aside, pulled them both close.

Before the war, before Sybel’s death, before I became a gallery owner, this is what I would have said to them, either in a whisper or a roar: “First, let me point out that if you don’t deliver this message for me, I will have Duncan bring the gray caps down upon you like a plague so you can see for yourself just how motivated they are. So I suggest that as soon as I stop talking, you start searching for Sabon. I want you to tell Mary to stop misleading sycophantic morons like yourselves. To stop making it seem like everything in our lives is under our control, to stop undermining everything my brother has ever worked toward. To stop killing him by degrees, in public. To stop wasting your time and his time with these ridiculous theories of hers that only apply to her personal demons. To stop to stop to stop to stop to stop.”

But I didn’t say that. I was Janice Shriek, former society figure, and I’ll be damned if I let any two-bit tourists just off the slow boat from Stockton get under my skin.

What drove Mary to the cruelty of showing her “affection” for Duncan as mentor by tearing down all he had built up—and doing so after he had already become comfortable as a ghost—I do not know. Perhaps it was not just fear. Perhaps it was out of envy. Perhaps it was to show she could do it all better.