Sniper smiled on Tully, who stood ice-stiff, as if he feared the slightest breath would dispel this apparition at his side. I like to imagine dark ambitions wriggling through Tully’s mind here, scenarios tumbling mechanically like a Jacob’s Ladder, his next five moves, ten, how best to exploit the weapon of celebrity that Chance had thrown him. But Tully is not such a creature. I have so many reasons to hate him, it would be a disservice to the true ones to pretend he is worse than he is. Tully was stunned by Sniper’s presence, dazzled, and if any thought of personal gain pierced the veil of disbelief, it was doubtless no more than a prayer of thanks to whatever Power he believes in.

Marking Tully’s stunned silence, Sniper shifted its smile to reassuring-mode, developed for that fragile genus of love-mad fans who burst into hysterics upon meeting their idol in the flesh. “You’re a very brave person, Tully Mardi. You’re trying to save the world by preventing, or at least preparing us for, what would probably be the worst war in human history if it came. You don’t mind being called a crackpot, you don’t mind sacrificing time and hobbies to be gaped at by ungrateful crowds, and you don’t mind publicly implicating yourself in a plot to kill the most powerful person in the world, if that’s what it takes to drive the warning home.” It offered Tully its hand, clean calluses still soft from swimming. “You’re right, there could be a war, and if there was one I’d like to hope that you and I would wind up on the same side.”

Imagine, reader, a castaway, so long on his island prison that even the hunger for human company has waned, who spots white sails at sea. He cannot at first recognize the answer to the prayer he has long stopped chanting, but watches uncomprehending until, like a fever, hope, pain, loneliness, all the old passions make him charge shrieking into the surf. Just so, Tully accepted Sniper’s hand slowly, gingerly, then clung for dear life. “Mojave, not Mardi,” he corrected. “I prefer Tully Mojave.”

In a kinder world, Saladin and I would have awakened trembling, breathless at this moment, sensing in our bones as the doom that we had sacrificed so much to fight became a certainty. But in a kinder world Sniper would have turned right.

“Nice to meet you, Tully Mojave,” Sniper answered. “I’d like to introduce you to some friends of mine.”

CHAPTER THE TWELFTH

Snakes and Ladders

“Member Hiroaki Mitsubishi, please. Tell them it’s the Pontifex Maxima.”

Julia Doria-Pamphili stretched back across her favorite sofa, copied thread by thread from Freud’s. After a moment her office wall flickered to digital life, showing a suite in the distant Mitsubishi capital of Tōgenkyō, elegant Japanese architecture decorated with Ganymedist paintings, where Danaë’s half-set-set brood lounged around their gaming boards and news feeds. The freshly promoted Cousins’ Feedback Bureau Executive Assistant Hiroaki Mitsubishi is the frailest of the ten adopted Mitsubishi ba’sibs, ancestrally Korean if I guess right from her face. She was thin as a wisp within her spring silk Cousin’s wrap as she crouched on the floor with the delicacy of a folded spider, sitting beside a game board, where Toshi Mitsubishi—whom you last saw with myself and Jung Su-Hyeon in the Censor’s office—faced low-crouching Jun Mitsubishi, who took out her frustration at having failed to infiltrate Faust’s Institute by playing an excessively aggressive game of Go.