Jay Czerwinski, personal assistant to the late Vice President of the European Economic and Social Committee, was, in fact, rocking forward and backward in her chair hugging her knees, an activity only minimally less helpful than those of many others in the office, who twitched and shuddered as they scanned videos of the still-flaming wreck of the European Parliament. On screens around them, lists of the dead and missing were too long to do anything but blur into one horrific alphabet. Seven others remained with Czerwinski: two speechwriters, the personal assistant to the Prime Minister’s Deputy Chief of Staff, a Deputy Counsel, two security guards, and the scheduling secretary for Tuesday through Thursday. The rest of the staff of Prime Minister Perry’s offices were dead with their master in the flames, had fled from the mobs, or were simply gone, empty cabinets and blank hard drives testifying to cold premeditation. Feeds replayed footage from Romanova: DeLupa, Kosala, Heloïse, ex-Censor-Anonymous Ancelet, their desperate faces positively cheerful contrasted with the ashen cheeks of these few who remained in Brussels’s inner sanctum. Wind batted a litter of papers across the office floor, and in and out through the shattered mouth of what had been (before the riot) a most charming window, ceiling-high with a magnificent view of the Parliamentary Hall, whose carcass still belched smoke into the sky.

«This is pointless. They’re all dead! All of them!»

«Shut up!» Courtesy was dead too. «There are hundreds of people in the line of succession, we won’t know until we check them all. Lindy Gaylord?»

«Confirmed dead at Parliament.»

«They’re all dead! They were all at the session, and the ones who weren’t were murdered in their homes. It’s a conspiracy! It’s O.S.!»

«It’s not O.S., idiot, O.S. is on our side. There must be something else we can do, an emergency protocol, somebody we’re supposed to call to summon special forces.»

«I don’t know how.»

«The security database was just deleted an hour ago, can we restore it?»

«I don’t know how.»

«Maybe there’s a hard copy in Perry’s desk. Can anyone unlock it?»

«I don’t know how!»

«The Director of the Registry of Gifts has a copy of the desk key; their extension should be listed in the purple book on the bookstand in the corner under the Picasso. Next call the Brugmann and Saint-Pierre Hospitals, they both have emergency teams trained in case something happens here, and call Professor Erasme Torbert Bordet at the VUB history department, they’ve retired now but they were the officer in charge of emergency forces when I was in office, they should still be able to get us started.»

«Your Majesty!»

A sun-bright angel, flaming sword and all, could not have brought more joy to the tear-streaked cheeks of these survivors than the King of Spain, who alighted straight from his car through the shattered window. Half his old staff followed shortly, some of his cabinet too, former Secretaries of State, Treasury, an ex-Justice, an ex-Auditor, and a pack of seasoned clerks, who found their old desks as comfortable as familiar horses.