I saw red before I registered the sound, circus-bright red like finger paint against the marble, peppered with chunks of yellow-pink as Jehovah’s brain spilled across the platform, Martin, Caesar, and myself. A gunshot. I had not heard a proper gunshot since Saladin had knocked the last weapon from Seine Mardi’s hand, though the quick shocks of our handguns then were nothing to this blast, which thundered from all sides like God snapping his fingers. Jehovah fell, not dying but dead. His limbs, lifeless in life, convulsed as the nerves’ last tangled signals filled his hands and legs with madness, then stillness. Martin and I caught Him between us, the warmth of His blood flowing across our knees. Everyone screamed. Thousands, the Emperor, myself. What mattered, where the microphones were strong enough to pick it up, was what we screamed.

“Jehovah!” That came from the Emperor.

“Jehovah!” from Censor Ancelet as well.

“Jed!” from Kosala.

“Domine!” and tears from loving Martin, faster than the rest of us to move past shock to grief.

Tully screamed, no words, just scream, and I likewise lost my many languages as adrenaline and blood-wind flooded my mind with fever.

The crowd too screamed, erupting into stampede as the Forum drained like a fractured water drum.

“Tai-kun!” This last scream rose from Chief Director Hotaka Andō Mitsubishi, who had not been with the others on the Rostra, but now gave away his hiding place watching from the doorway of the Mitsubishi embassy. “Let me go!” he shouted as his own guards dragged him back into the safety of the doors. “My son is dying! Let me go!”

Guards covered the Rostra, human shields pressing us down beneath a wall of uniforms, Masonic gray, Romanovan blue, Senatorial gold, Utopians too, Aldrin, Voltaire, Tully’s nameless escorts suddenly visible as they leapt into motion. Only Dominic escaped the defensive prison, hurling his would-be protectors bodily aside as he leapt up onto the Rostra’s railing to face the assassin. «Blasphémateuse!»

Sniper, rising, smiled at the compliment. It had lain in wait six hours, motionless beneath a camouflaged tarp on the roof of the law courts which stood to the other side of the Rostra, opposite the bustling Senate House. The proud assassin let its cameras rise around it now, broadcasting to all the world the clean pride on its face, and the twitch of its delicate nose as it scented gunpowder rising from the rifle, enormous in its arms. Sniper’s Olympic medals are in pentathlon and pistol, not rifle, but I have watched it train in rifle too, freezing dead for the instant of the shot, even its heartbeat kept on hold for that immeasurable fraction when the weapon fires. With that skill in Sniper’s arms, eighty meters’ distance, and screaming innocents crowded on a balcony just below Sniper’s rooftop perch, little wonder the guards hesitated before firing back. That vital half-second let Sniper slide from its exposed vantage on the roof’s center peak down to the cover of the flat portico roof.