Carlyle’s breath sped to the edge of panting. “That’s your revenge? You’re trying to expose the truth about the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash’?”

“And the Canner Device. Don’t imagine for a moment that Andō isn’t the worst of all! The three-way assassination alliance wasn’t enough for Japan, they had to develop something they could use against their allies too. That’s what the device really is! Using the tracker system like the transit system. I had the device for years and I could barely tap its simplest functions. You can’t blame it on your predecessors, Andō, not when the set-sets trained to use the device all call you father!”

Wrath-blush rose in Andō’s cheeks as he felt the others’ stares.

“The tracker system…” Carlyle broke the hush. “They were tapping it, today, the Mitsubishi kids, I saw them! They were tracking me through it. And they were asking about the Canner Device too. Julia said they had a name for themselves… Oniwaban set-sets?”

Shock held them all, but I saw a different kind of shock and hurt on golden Ganymede. “O.S.…”

“My children are not set-sets.” Andō was too dignified to bellow, but his words had the same shock-force. “They were deprived of that, ripped out of training by rabid Cousins, Lorelei Cook and their Nurturist zealots. The children were torn from their computers, their senses half remapped, scattered to the corners of the Earth.” He had a black look for Kosala. “A child has a right to grow up with its ba’sibs. I gave them that, gathered them back together when I learned how my predecessor, who ordered their training, had abandoned them to the false mercy of your Cousins. As strat-leader, I owed those children nothing less than the home you stripped them from.”

Carlyle was breathing even faster now. “They asked Julia to help them find the Canner Device. No, Canner’s prototype, that’s what they called it, like there was another. You’ve been using your own Canner Device!”

“No one can use the Canner Device!” Andō shot back. “No one ever has, and no one ever will, the training process was lost when Lorelei Cook’s Nurturists destroyed the training bash’. Kraye is just trying to spit every kind of poison they can here, lie or truth. They’re trying to splinter us. They know we can still turn the tide back if we work together.” Andō faced Perry-Kraye head on, his gaze as black as ash. “Trying to tear down three Hives because you were too cowardly to face an honorable duel.”

“Not three Hives! The world!” the Outsider shrieked back. “This whole world is rotten to its heart! Look at yourselves! Madame has sucked us all into playing these idiotic roles humanity should have outgrown centuries ago!” Kraye was in his element now, strutting like an actor who had rehearsed his lines too long. “I haven’t been plotting revenge for twenty-eight years for nothing. The first five years I was in a blind rage, working my way back from nothing, through crime, through politics, all so I could earn entrance back here, kill Andō and Ganymede in front of Danaë, then hack out the bitch’s heart. But then I realized they aren’t the cause. It was Madame who made us into this. Look at you, prancing around in skirts and holding the door for ladies! Even you!” He faced Carlyle at last. “The most powerful administrations in the world did everything in their power to keep you out of all this, yet here you are in a monk’s robe running errands in a salon. You were born here and you should have died here, and that’s not the worst! The worst is us.” He waved to Andō and seething Ganymede. “The leaders of three of the seven Hives caught up in a stupid love revenge cycle. It’s absurd! Madame’s turned me into the fucking Count of Monte Cristo, and there’s nothing I can do about it except to make sure my revenge doesn’t just destroy my betrayers, but also the system that did this to the world!”