“But you lied. Tribune, all of you lied to everyone, making us think Canner was dead.”

Jehovah seemed the dead one now, as still as stone between Tully and me as we both shook. “The public in its wisdom did not ask My Imperial father what happened to Mycroft Canner. All these years you trusted them to have dispatched justice. I hope you will not now feel that they, or I, betrayed you by substituting mercy. Is My hope wrong?”

My other guilty patrons, Caesar and Kosala, mounted the platform of the Rostra now, the Cousin Chair sharing the Emperor’s security on this most tumultuous of days. Caesar’s stone poise never changes. As for Kosala, her dark Indian hair worn loose hid most of her expression, but one could guess her feelings well enough from her husband, Censor Vivien Ancelet, who followed a cold and careful distance from his wife. He fidgeted with his dreadlocks, not daring to look at her, nor at the human sea summoned here by the Senate session he had been forced to call. The mob he had predicted, even minimized through careful calculation of the best moments to freeze the market and announce the session, but he had not predicted Tully.

“What Jed says is true,” Chair Kosala confirmed. “The Servicer Program—”

“Get off the Rostra, puppet!”

“Charlatan!” Shouts rippled through the crowd.

“We all know what J.E.D.D. Mason’s about to report!”

“The CFB is a lie!”

“The Anonymous controls the CFB, and you, Kosala!”

“Why don’t you send Brody DeLupa up here, have them tell us what the Cousins think they think!”

The Emperor moved to intervene, but Kosala stopped him with a glance, harsh-seeming from a distance, in which only we beside her could see the glint of tears. “The Servicer Program,” she continued, “exists to keep the potential good that convicts can do from being thrown away. There has never been a better use of it than sparing Mycroft Canner. Over the past thirteen years Mycroft has served as rescuer, laborer, translator, guard, continued what could be continued of their victims’ works, helped with Brillist studies, the Censor’s calculations, research, they even helped Papadelias and Guildbreaker uncover the Saneer-Weeksbooth conspiracy, saving who knows how many hundreds or thousands of people who would have been assassinated in the future. Surely everyone here can agree this is better, not just for Mycroft but for the world, than execution.” She opened her arm toward me, the long trail of her Cousin’s wrap sweeping out like a robe. “Mycroft, do you have anything to add?”

The gathered masses had surprising patience. I would have expected shouts and curses, but they waited, distant, like parents watching their infant take its first unaided steps, as the strength to speak gathered slowly in my shaking frame. I did shake, though I did not know it at the time. The video shows me, a sickly pale skeleton, digging my fingers into the tired brown hat that I clutched, as if by squeezing it enough I could shrink myself and disappear.