“I know!” the Enemy pressed on, fired with confidence that this day, this hour, was why Fate had spared him. “Many of you still don’t believe in the assassination conspiracy, but I have proof. That’s why Sniper arranged for me to speak here today. This is what the Mardi bash’ studied, what I study, the tensions and forces that make society erupt into violence. I’m certain, and if you read the data I’ve released then you’ll be certain too. Over the past two hundred and fifty years the world has come within a knife’s edge of war a dozen times, and certain convenient deaths are the only thing that nudged us back from that edge. It was a system. We can trace it. It’s real. And it’s over.”

I do not know Tully Mardi. I babysat him as a child, pulled his hair, but of that stage of his life when he became a person I know nothing. To my eye the Graylaw Hiveless sash around his waist was pure pretense, a way to seem a friend to everyone, while in his heart he encourages atrocities which would make the darkest Blacklaw sick, but that is my hatred talking. Perhaps he means it. Perhaps he has his own reasons for continuing his murdered parents’ path. Entrenched as I am on the side which must forever call him Enemy, I cannot know.

“We’re still on that knife’s edge now.” Even Tully sighed before continuing. “We have been for a few years. Peace isn’t natural, not in a world where the Mitsubishi are squatting on all the land, where a half billion Utopians spend a giant chunk of the world’s income on what everyone else sees as their crackpot Mars obsession, and where a growing third of the human race has pledged allegiance to a dictator who every day acts less like the Emperor of Alexandria and more like the Emperor of Romanova! Only the Saneer-Weeksbooth assassinations have kept us from degenerating into war already. Now we’ve lost that, and not quietly, we’ve lost it in a way that leaves us all pointing angry fingers. There have already been deaths: the Salekhard transit system backup crew, some Servicer lynchings; less than an hour ago a guard outside the Mitsubishi Executive Headquarters was killed by a mob throwing stones at the Chief Director’s window. This is my last chance to convince you. You shouldn’t spend the next few hours glued to the newscast from the Senate hearing, you should spend it barricading your doors, checking your fire extinguishers, teaching yourself basic first aid, and thinking about what side you and your family will be on, because there will be sides! Soon! There will be sides, and war!”

At the Rostra’s edge, one could see its keepers exchanging hushed hisses with three Hiveless Senators. What a painful moment for those entrusted with the scheduling of this spotlight of spotlights. The public never stops complaining about how politicians monopolize the Rostra, dooming common citizens to an eternal waiting list. Now that Sniper’s influence had handed the stage to a private citizen for once, the mob would not forgive these guardians if they silenced him, yet instinct urged them, and Senator after frightened Senator as well, to cut off Tully’s stream of words, which seemed less a speech than a shaman’s conjuration, drawing in some waiting doom.