Ockham and Lesley watched the broadcast together from the sofa, silent before the screen’s cold glimmer, like refugees watching their last candle burn down. I work here from very incomplete testimony, but my mind’s eye knows those two well enough to see them, sharing a blanket which Lesley’s doodles had turned into a labyrinth to baffle Daedalus. Even in the dark their skin tones never blur, the tints of India and Africa, distinct like different hearty trees.

“You know what really gets me? Hearing people call these three brave.” It is the Proxy for the Anonymous they watch, Humanist Vice President Brody DeLupa, fastest to rouse the rabble on this hottest of nights. “You’re thinking it takes some guts to plead guilty to mass murder, but if they had any guts they wouldn’t have gone along with it in the first place. The real shock here isn’t that three members of Perry’s coalition came forward, but that dozens of others have not.” The screen showed DeLupa at the Rostra in Romanova, sweat dribbling down his cheeks whose stubble clumped like mildew. “Even outside Perry’s coalition, they’ve all suspected what this ‘Special Means Committee’ really was. As far as I’m concerned, every last person who’s sat on Europe’s Parliament in a generation is as complicit in these murders as President Ganymede!”

Where are the others, you ask? As O.S. and the bride whose favor made him O.S. watch the doom alone? The set-sets are sprawled as ever on the floor, watching the same explosions in their digital world. The thumps and screams of the twins float from upstairs, comforting like a dog’s familiar bark, while the stairs down to Thisbe’s room are blocked by the old rope Ockham strings across to warn the others when his deadly sister is in too dangerous a mood. One can hear poor Cato pacing in his lab alone. As for Sniper, it was waylaid an hour by the doctor, another by the President, another by its fans, but arrives home now, limping half broken down the empty trophy hall.

“¡Cardie!” Lesley was the first to spot the living doll. “¿Are you okay? ¡We saw the fall!”

“I’m okay. The doctors patched me up fine, don’t get up.” Sniper can always force a smile. “¿What’s happened since?”

Ockham’s eyes stayed on the broadcast. “A couple self-serving European MPs have gone public about O.S.”

“¿What?”

“Three snitches: Goodall, Kovács, and Korhonen.” Lesley helped Sniper onto the sofa at her side, frowning at the splint plastered around its left shoulder, aglow with subtle heat. “They must have got wind that Papadelias had proof, and are trying to get ahead of the tidal wave.”

Lesley’s worry-red eyes held a thousand questions for Sniper, but they sat stunned before DeLupa’s press conference as the Vice President drew floating cameras as carrion draws flies.