It is only thanks to the recordings that I can include these words, reader, for I heard none of them. Sniper had chosen its bullet well, explosive, scattering Jehovah’s skull and its precious contents across the stone like storm’s detritus abandoned on a beach. Ἄναξ Jehovah’s warm blood drenched me, pouring like rain from the wreckage of His head as His heart kept up its duty, pointless now. My own body failed, wracked by pain and panic more physical than mental as I felt the vital core within me stop. As a long run makes even simple breathing a challenge, now an unimaginable pressure made everything impossibly hard: seeing, hearing, sorting touch from pain, supporting Jehovah’s lifeless weight, supporting my own. I collapsed on the stone, my vision fading into neither bright nor dark, just fading. All I could think was that my fears were true. The Will Which Rules This Universe had sentenced me to death thirteen years ago, but Jehovah pitied me and made me His, and from that moment it was He, not This Universe’s God, Who gave me life. Now He was dead, and all He made would die with Him, including me. His universe must be dying too, somewhere unreachable, those marvels He had half explained to me in shards of failing language: gradients of complexity, sentiences reveling in themselves without the impediments of Distance or of Time, a better universe, infinity of Good and Kindnness such as we will never know, lost. He had been so careful all His life, no sports, no unhealthy food, no rough play, riding only Utopian cars, not out of knowledge of the assassins, but fear that an accident, however improbable, in claiming Him might claim all His Creation. I wanted to pray that it not be so, that the true Jehovah might continue in His own world, He and His creations, separate and safe despite the death of flesh, but only This Universe’s God remained to hear, and what could He do for us?

“Mycroft!” Martin did his best to catch me as I fell, and I remember wondering why the motion of his face was pale and slow.

“Their pacemaker!” The Censor was the first to realize. “The blast shorted Mycroft’s pacemaker!” Strong hands caught me from all sides, good Vivien’s strongest, like sun-warmed wood among reeds. “Lay them side by side.” I saw him lean over me, angry, and I remember thinking he must want numbers from me, that I was late for my shift, or dozing in the Censor’s office, drifting off halfway through an article. “Stay with me, Mycroft!” he cried. “I won’t lose both of you, not in one day!”

“Then get out of the way!” Bryar Kosala shoved her husband aside, the arts of first aid ready in her hands. Flocking Utopians supplied all she needed, drawing medicine’s clean tools from their coats, their many nowheres reduced to static, short-circuited by Cato’s genius devices which Sniper had used to cripple MASON’s guards, the Rostra’s guards, and me.