The Commissioner General checked his tracker, still functional, since he had stood far from the discharge of the devices we have sinced named Weeksbooth Counterbombs. “Sniper’s long gone, if that’s what you mean,” he answered. “They had a getaway car hidden in the river, flew off to who knows where, and with the cars still haywire we can’t pursue.”

I would smile later thinking on it: the athlete in Sniper, who had shot, fenced, run, and ridden its way to victory today, could not resist completing this last pentathlon with a swim. At that moment, though, I had no spare thoughts for Sniper, or anything besides the mandate which, for once, came equally from This Universe’s God and from Mine. “I must return Bridger to Jehovah.”

The Censor’s soft hands caught me as I tried to rise once more. “Soon, Mycroft, as soon as the doctors say—”

I pinned him in a choke hold, my right elbow crushing his throat while the heel of my left hand stood ready to smash his nose up into his skull. “I’m sorry. I must go at all costs, and if Jehovah’s universe continued safe even while His mortal flesh was dead, then, even if one of you also happens to be a God, I no longer need to fear that I’ll destroy a universe by killing you.”

I felt the bite, though not the snake. Voltaire must have planted it on me, one of his Swissnakes, its syringe-fangs loaded with something which made me limp at once, and summoned sleep’s darkness soon after. I would not waken for five hours, but they were not wasted. Magnanimous Apollo sat with me, as he often does in fever dreams, rambling about his giant robots, and striding across Mars’s soil, and his war, and when I woke I knew, as surely as I knew the task before me, in what hiding place I would find Bridger.

CHAPTER THE NINETEENTH

Seven Surrenders

While I slept, the world spent these five hours trying to make sense of how one woman could have twisted all seven Hives into passing power to a single Youth. Sniper’s evidence flooded the net, even as its horse still thundered through Romanova, with Dominic hot on its heels. I will not give you what Sniper did: birth certificates, bank statements, DNA tests, wills—any truffle pig loosed in the archives can uproot such tedium. I was chosen as historian not least because my presumptive madness makes my testimony inadmissible in any court, so there are deeds that I alone may publicize without endangering those I describe. In evidence’s place, then (and with the facts as purged of sentiment as I can make them), I offer you these seven scenes, scattered in space and time, which seem to me to be the moments at which each Hive fell.

* * *

Humanists first. It took the sweat-drenched Humanist Vice President and Proxy for the Anonymous Brody DeLupa only two hours to set himself up on the Senate steps, a stone’s throw from the police barricade around the Rostra, still wet with Jehovah Mason’s blood. “Murder on top of murder!” he raged, sputtering as he felt the mob hang on his words. “And when we finally expose the truth, they choose as their next victim Tribune Mason, the one good person responsible for trying to end their string of murders!”