“Last chance, DeLupa.”

Brody DeLupa refuses absolutely to be interviewed. I do not know why he attempted what he did, whether he was a simple traitor, or whether deep down he believed that the Anonymous would want the Humanists dissolved. Beneath that grotesque shell he might be any kind of man, an innocent appalled to find himself surrounded by murderers, or a viper of Madame’s positioned to backstab Ganymede should the Duke President turn rebel. It hurts not knowing, but you feel this all the time, do you not, reader? Frustration’s itch as you boil with questions which I and my peers, distant or dead, cannot be made to answer. For your sake I did manage, at least, to ask the Anonymous why he picked DeLupa as his Proxy in the first place. He answered that, of the ambitious young Humanists he had found flocking Buenos Aires, DeLupa had seemed the emptiest.

The Proxy stepped aside, a few steps, just enough to let himself get both Papadelias and the crowd in line of sight. “I am the voice of the Anonymous. I am the one chosen to share their wisdom with the world, not you or anybody else. Dissolve the Humanists. That is the Anonymous’s wish, not mine.”

I have rarely seen Papa let himself look so tired in public. “MASON, if you would?”

I think the Emperor’s silence was plain grief. Most would read rage or Stoic dignity into the hush as he set chisel to stone, but a man with so few peers, and without ambition’s poison in his veins to make him hate them, must mourn seeing one fall. Technology sealed the secrets, layers of ingenious keys and detectors, but the lowest layer was still the simplicity of mortar sealing stone, which crumbled ashlike across MASON’s cuffs as he lifted the page within. “On this, the third day of May in the year twenty-four thirty,” he read aloud, “I, the Sixth Anonymous, appoint as successor, and Seventh in my line, Vivien Ancelet.”

“The Censor?”

No one moved at first, but murmur did not take long to turn its focus on the Censor’s office, just out of shouting range along the street behind. Vivien Ancelet emerged, closing the doors behind him with a quick stroke of the old bronze. The crowd was too stunned to part around him, but let him slide between them, so the Censor’s Guard struggled to keep pace with him, shoving back the crowds, many of whom reached out for a last touch of his dreadlocks or purple uniform, as this higher office lifted him away. He bent as he reached the steps, taking up the long scroll of the Wish List.