Glances not-quite-right passed among the ba’sibs once again.

“You’re ashamed to tell them, aren’t you?” Julia’s chuckle grew smug. “Afraid of a chewing out? This won’t do, children. If you start keeping secrets within your own bash’, things will fall apart faster than you can say Seven-Ten list.” Her eyes narrowed. “Or are you afraid of something more serious than a chewing out? You told me and your mother that you didn’t plan the Seven-Ten list theft. Was that the truth?”

“Yes!” the ba’sibs answered all together in a chorus.

“Do you know who stole it?”

“No.”

“Really?”

“Cross my heart.” Masami made the gesture with dark fingers stained darker by the archaic inks used at Black Sakura. “I wrote the list but didn’t think to pull a stunt like the theft. I wish I did know who it was. I’d congratulate them on a plot well laid, then deck them.”

Julia smiled sympathy. “I hear Papadelias is on the edge of learning to trace the Canner Device. I’m sure there will be sufficient decking when the time comes.”

“Do you know who has it?”

“What?”

“Canner’s prototype.” Again they all said it together: Masami, Hiroaki, Toshi, Jun, Ran, Sora, Michi, Harue, Naō, Setsuna, all one crisp, inhuman chorus. “We have to find it.”

A narrow smile. “Perhaps I do know who has it, but that’s the kind of information you buy from an opponent, you don’t get it out of the kindness of my adversarial heart. As for Darcy Sok, go to your parents. You made this bed, you get chewed out in it.”

“Please, Julia.” Hiroaki huddled adorably within her Cousin’s wrap. “You could do it so easily, and so quickly!”

“We aren’t asking this for nothing,” Masami added. “We’ll owe you, help for help.”

“Mmm? Anything concrete to offer? Or do I get an open-ended boon?”

“We can help with a certain enemy you’ve made in the last days.”

Julia half rose from her sofa, her oil-black hair unwinding down her back like a waking serpent. “An enemy? Intriguing. Who?”

“Carlyle Foster.”

Julia stared for a frozen moment. “Have you been spying on my little Carlyle?” Her voice grew sweet and ominous at once, a teasing disapproval.

“Not more than normal,” Toshi answered. “But nobody can fly that far out of pattern and not be conspicuous.”

Julia stretched her shoulders. “Good spotting, bad interpreting. I’ve given Carlyle to Dominic as a present.”

The ba’sibs exchanged looks, which a stranger might have read as nervous or questioning, but Julia knows that one who reads too much into the curve of a dog’s inhuman brows gets bit.

“How long ago was it visible?” she asked. “Carlyle going out of pattern.”

“I didn’t spot it first,” Toshi answered. “Jun, you did, right?”

Jun Mitsubishi only now looked up from the Go board. The would-be Brillist member of the brood is always quiet, with little smiles and little shrugs, as if constantly apologizing to the others for being the only one who looks classically Japanese, and drawing an unfair portion of great Andō’s affection. “Who are we talking about?”