No taunt could divert Sniper’s momentum. “The Humanists and Cousins are too democratic to be controlled, so Madame’s trying to destroy us outright. Utopia’s too small to stand alone when all the other dominoes go down, and, as for Europe, I thought you were planning to tear Europe down too, until I snagged a hair sample.”

Dominic’s lunge grazed Sniper’s arm. “Enough, worm!”

“With Casimir Perry and the whole of Parliament hauled off as criminals, Europe will be left traumatized, leaderless, hungry for a savior. Madame expects they’ll come to heel as soon it comes out…”

“Enough!”

“… that Jehovah’s real father is the King of Spain!”

Dominic flailed, not caring if the epée pierced his shoulder so long as his rapier bit back at the blasphemer. It was not Sniper tipping Madame’s hand which spurred this rage, I think, but seeing damage done to the honor of one of the few men Dominic had been conditioned to respect. No one imagined that His Majesty Isabel Carlos II had lived a widower these many years without some company, but to have his indiscretion exposed so basely, a mistress of ill repute, a bastard Son already come of age, the King’s intimate secrets shouted across Romanova’s rooftops like some schoolyard scandal, that made the courtier within Dominic burn. Doubtless you, progressive reader, see little crime in His Majesty’s transgression. To the contrary, you admire the King’s steadfastness in refusing to marry any other woman while Jehovah’s mother lived, and admire too the care he took to see the Son he could not rear at least be raised as another monarch’s Son. So thought the crowd, the world, looking, not at the shattered corpse, but at the photo archives, videos, the shape of Jehovah’s lips, His hair not quite black, the royal resemblance, unthinkable before, now obvious. Chaos feeds that species of love we call nostalgia, nostalgia for trust in this case, for honor, for good leaders who were also good men: Thomas Carlyle, Mycroft MASON, and the many Spanish Kings and Queens who had served and protected the Hive system since its beginning. How proud would that proud ancestry have been to see a Prince of their blood, even a Bastard, deliver to the Senate the long-overdue truth about the assassinations, and so end centuries of murder. Now He would not. Across the Forum, fear’s quick breathing, which had kept the cowering crowd mute, gave way to tears for the King He would have made.

“Where’s the ambulance?” the Censor screamed, half to the guards, half to the heavens. “Where are the police?”

The ring of guards, clustered like cypress roots around the Rostra, wondered the same, trying trick after trick to awaken their dead trackers and contact the cars which should have come by now to spirit their charges to safety.

“Look at the sky!” someone cried. “The cars!”

Even in my state I saw them, hundreds, thousands, wild, round, pregnant like bombs, too chaotic in their courses for the eye to distinguish flight from falling. The lowest of the mad cars nearly grazed the Romanovan rooftops, stripping flags from flagpoles with their winds, while higher swarms sliced the clouds into grids. The sky was full, not a layer of steady traffic, not flocks of cars dispersing after a game, but full of cars, from the ground to the highest fringes where atmosphere gives way to dark.