Ori had a memory. Something in him flinched from an understanding, unsettling, that veered close and was gone again and then was back. Ori saw others remembering, not sure what it was they remembered, not threading things together.

"It was hard to find out the true name behind a nom de jure," Toro was saying. "But I did it. Took me a long time. Tracked him down." Ori heard through gauze.

"This is the house…" Ori said, and then said nothing more. No one heard him and he was glad of that. He did not know what he wanted to do. He did not know what he felt.

This is the house where the old couple lived. That I heard about, the job you did, months ago, soon after I gave you the money. That the papers railed at. You killed them, or Old Shoulder did or one of us, and it weren’t that they was militia at all. They was rich, but you wouldn’t do them for that. It weren’t because they was rich but because of where they lived. You needed them gone so you could buy this house. That’s what you did with Jacobs’ money.

Ori felt gutted. He swallowed many times.

He sat hard on his own instincts. Something welled in him. All the uncertainty, the desperate lack of knowledge, then the weight of knowledge but vacillation of ideas, the shameful hash of theory that had sent him to the Runagaters, to all the different sects and dissidents, looking for something to ground him, a political home, which he had found in the anger and anarchist passion of Toro. His uncertainty came back. He knew what he felt-that this was a dreadful thing, that he was aghast-but he remembered the exhortations to contextualise, always to have context, that the Runagaters above all had always stressed.

If one death’ll stop ten, ain’t it better? If two deaths’ll save a city?

He was still. He had a sense that he did not know best, that he had to learn, that he was a better man in this collective than out, that he must understand why this had happened before he judged. Toro watched him. Turned to Old Shoulder. Ori saw the cactus-man set his face. They can see I know.

"Ori. Listen to me."

The others watched without comprehension.

"Yes," Toro lowed. Ori felt like a schoolchild before a teacher, so disempowered, so ill-at-ease. He felt truly sick. Toro’s thaumaturged drone felt through his skin.

"Yes," Old Shoulder said. "This is the house. They were old, rich, alone, no one to inherit, it’d be sold. But no, it ain’t good. Don’t presume, Ori, that there’s no guilt and pain.