“So ends the life of Hijo Masazumi,” said Sonja. The bright edge of the sword dripped as she hung it downward. “Always looking for threats, and never seeing the one that would kill him.”

Madeleine picked Petrovitch up, and held him to her like a rag doll. “Are you all right?”

“I thought you weren’t coming.”

“Chain. I had a mind to kick him all the way down the stairs to the cesspit that’s ground level. He used the wound on his head to appeal to my better nature.”

“Yeah, Okay. Sonja? Thanks.”

“I did it for me. I did it for my father. I did it because a world without Hijo is a better place.”

“Nice as this is,” said Petrovitch, untangling himself from Madeleine’s arms, “we still have something to do, and only a limited time to do it.”

“Follow me,” said Sonja, and didn’t look back once.

“I’ll get Chain,” said Madeleine, crouching to collect his gun. “It sounds like he’s finished coughing his guts up.”

Sonja led them over the wooden bridge and eventually to the temple. She hesitated at the steps. “Sam, what will you do?”

Petrovitch rested against one of the stone lions that guarded the entrance. “I don’t know,” he answered. “It depends on what’s possible.”

“You said you’d save the Jihad.”

“Funny,” said Chain, wiping red-flecked phlegm from his mouth, “he told us it had to go.”

There was a moment where it was equally likely that Sonja would raise her sword and Madeleine raise her gun. Petrovitch stood in the middle and bowed his head, wondering at the stupidity of people and realizing why he avoided them so much.

“I can do both,” he said.

“That makes no sense,” said Chain.

“This,” said Petrovitch, “coming from a man who had an armored car and Sonja, and still managed to screw up.”

Chain put his hand to his matted hair and showed Petrovitch the blood. “You didn’t have Godzilla chasing you half the night.”

He wasn’t impressed. “We’ve more important things to deal with than your lame excuses. Mainly, a nuclear missile is going to hit this building at dawn. It will vaporize it, and excavate a hole deep enough to destroy the quantum computer below. That will be the end of the New Machine Jihad.”

Chain wasn’t the only one to gape. “How? How do you know this?”

“I have every confidence that my university colleagues will get the message through to the EDF. They might decide not to wait that long, of course, and order an immediate strike. In which case, it’s a race between a bunch of electronics students with soldering irons and me. We can stand here and talk about how I’m a bad person for what I’ve done, or we can get on with trying to prevent disaster. What do you want to do?”