“Stop this, DeLupa.” The bronze Senate doors behind him opened, revealing a wall of Senatorial guards, so polished, so ready, and so adrenalized by the day’s danger that one might almost call them soldiers. Ektor Carlyle Papadelias stood at their head. “You don’t have the authority to—”

“No one does!” the Proxy shrieked up at the Commissioner General. “Only the crawling, tiresome Senate has the authority to expel a Hive, but it has to be done fast! Now! And if the Anonymous is the only person in the world who dares to try, then—”

“You know the Anonymous has nothing to do with this.” Papa scowled. “This isn’t their idea, it’s yours.”

“What are you—”

Papa used his own tracker now to play aloud to the crowd a rough voice, garbled by computer modulation to sound more inhuman than not. “Friends, do not be deceived. I am the Anonymous. DeLupa has been my Proxy in the past, but I did not write the speech they just delivered, nor do I support their call to disband the Humanists. DeLupa is exploiting my name to trick you.”

DeLupa sputtered like a rabid thing. “Don’t listen! It’s a trick!”

Papadelias sighed through his wrinkles like an old birch. “Don’t try it, DeLupa. I’m Commissioner General. Everyone knows I know who the real Anonymous is; I have to for security reasons. Just give it up.”

The Proxy stumbled as he turned toward his accuser. “Ridiculous! I’m the one who speaks the Anonymous’s words! You’re just abusing your office so you can prop up a fake Anonymous for your own ends!”

“I will stop you, DeLupa,” the digital voice warned, “at all costs. If that requires me to reveal myself, so be it.”

“You wouldn’t.” The Proxy’s eyes sought the crowd’s support. “Did you hear that? The real Anonymous would never—”

“You think I’m bluffing?” the computer warned. “I won’t protect the office of Anonymous at the expense of shattering a Hive. You know there is a protocol if I need to reveal myself. I have already called MASON.”

Papa’s face reflected the black tone which the Anonymous’s distorted words could not convey. “It’s true,” Papa confirmed, “MASON’s in place in Alexandria, at the Sanctum Sanctorum, ready to open the vault, and furious that your antics have dragged them away from the hospital where their child may still be dying. I don’t think the Anonymous is bluffing. If you push this they’ll come out here, slap you across the face, and call you a liar in front of the entire world. Back off, or it’s not the Humanists you’re going to destroy, it’s the office of Anonymous.”

One of Papa’s men held out a screen which showed the lighthouse tower of gray stone rising in the harbor of Alexandria. A gilded ziggurat crowned the tower, small but flashing angry in the overcast as sunset fired the bellies of the clouds. The guards, ba’sibs of MASON or past MASONs, had already unsealed the vault chamber, a round sanctum, no more than ten paces across, which formed the hollow heart of the gilded pyramid. In this heart’s heart, a waist-high block of glass-smooth black technology held in its impenetrable womb the Masonic Oath of Office, and the name of the one who will be next to read it. Not a few of Earth’s other Powers prefer sharing the Emperor’s security to paying for their own. Earth’s other great secrets slept in a ring of vaults nested in the round wall like a columbarium: the list of Gag-genes rested here, the Registry of Sensayers’ Beliefs, logs of Censors’ Office predictions, the wills and marriage contracts of Earth’s remaining monarchs, and in Vault Four the true names of the Seventh Anonymous and their six predecessors. Here, with Jehovah’s blood crusting his black left sleeve with brown, the Emperor waited.