No indication from those eyes of what to expect.

“I look like shit. I feel like shit.”

“Better that than dead,” Bliss said, walking into the room. “Since you’re still alive, I assume the mission was successful.”

“Wouldn’t you know already?”

“The towers will be operational very soon. Then we’ll know. Where’s the piece of metal Shriek used, Finch?”

“You’ve healed well,” Finch said, ignoring him. “Almost as if I never hit you.”

Bliss pulled up a chair next to the map. “I took a vacation. Somewhere remote. Somewhere I expected would be a little less … exciting … than it was.” An enigmatic smile. “I see you are busy changing the map. A little premature, don’t you think?” Bliss’s features hardened. “The mission is complete?”

“Yes,” Finch admitted. “There were complications. But it’s done.” Hesitant to tell him just how many complications.

Bliss nodded. “Nothing ever happens the way we think it will. Now, where’s that piece of metal?”

“I have a few questions first.”

“Questions?”

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,” Finch said. “In between passing out. When I haven’t been pissing blood. About things like whether or not you really work for the rebels. Maybe Ethan Bliss does, but not Dar Sardice.”

A pause, then, as if deciding whether or not to play along with him. Then: “Very good, Finch. Keep going.”

“You share information with the rebels, yes, but you don’t work for them. Even if they think so.”

“Excellent, Finch!” A kind of forced cheeriness. “So who do I work for?”

“You were Dar Sardice before you were Ethan Bliss. It’s the oldest name you’re known by. You knew my father. You said you worked with him. My father was deep in Kalif territory during much of the campaign. Working on engineering projects for the Ambergris army. Often shuttling back and forth behind the front lines. You met him then, I think, not after he returned to Ambergris.”

Bliss gave him a look of mingled regret and triumph. “You’re right, of course. I gave him that, actually.” Nodded at the scimitar on the table behind Finch, beside its scabbard. “A reward for his good service. I was also your father’s control in Ambergris. I ran him, along with other sources. But he was the best.”

“Ran him for who?” Wanted to hear Bliss say it.

“For the Kalif, of course. Always for the Kalif. The Kalif has a long memory, Finch. And the Kalif never forgets anything. We turned your father in the desert, and he stayed turned. But you knew that.”

The question he’d been homing in on, the one he’d never been able to ask his father: “Why did he do it?”

“He never told you? Why does anyone do anything? For money. For love. For our children. Because we think it’s right. Your father, he met a woman. He had reservations about the war by then. He’d seen some of the excesses of the Ambergrisian army, had never felt comfortable with the power of the Hoegbottons before the war. And he’d lived in the desert for a couple of years. Observed the traditions of a culture thousands of years old. He was ready to fall in love—with all of it.”