The Mycroft you remember from the news was lean, all muscle like a starving scavenger. That hasn’t changed. The wildest stray goes soft after a year of warm laps and petting, but not Mycroft. I don’t believe Mycroft starves themself only as self-punishment. It could be that they don’t want to taint such a body with whatever unhealthy slop Servicers’ patrons tend to offer, but I suspect it’s just that our predator finds common food hard to choke down after what they’ve tasted. Their famous hat (and even I was surprised to learn it came from Dominic Seneschal) is round, brown, something like a newsboy cap, though more patches than cloth at this point, with only the remnants of what might have been a brim. Mycroft lied to you, you know. They said there was no Beggar King to command the Servicers, but the sight of that hat makes the others snap to attention as surely as a crown. It’s not for the crimes that the other Servicers idolize Mycroft, it’s what Mycroft’s done since. Even in Hell they’re stunned to find an angel among them, willing to be as much a guardian as a fallen angel can.

Today’s Mycroft genuinely is as obsequious in person as they are in print, a self-styled slave in this world which has none. But if you sit with them awhile, and talk, and coax, the formality fades, the hunch which hides the still-strong shoulders loosens, the hands begin to splay like claws, and eventually the beast I call True Mycroft pokes its nose above the surface. It’s not a prisoner in there, not fighting to break free, just resting inside Slave Mycroft like a ship in harbor, saving itself for something. Slave Mycroft has only one expression: apology. As for True Mycroft, their expressions are unreadable, or rather you’re wrong if you try to read them, like when the shape of a dog’s face makes it seem to smile or frown where really you’re just projecting human expressions onto an inhuman thing.

Like most of us, I first laid eyes on Mycroft Canner on the news just after the capture, as the police wheeled them past row on row of emergency forces. Mycroft was so serene then, basking in the procession as if that transparent coffin-cage was a triumphal chariot. We’d already heard Mycroft’s reasons for the Mardi killings from the recorded speeches they left beside the later bodies. This was the supreme act of violence of this century, done not by a government, not a Church, not a tribe, not an army, but by an individual. Ever since villagers first wielded sharpened sticks in their chief’s name, the State had held a monopoly on supreme violence, but the Hive system ended that. Mycroft called their killings a demonstration of a liberty our era had not realized we possessed, proof of history’s progress if seventeen deaths were enough to shock the world; historically, seventeen deaths is a good day. Philosophers had long speculated about Savage Man, whether the conscience is innate or implanted by society, and whether the human mind is actually capable of willing evil for the sake of evil—even the most heinous killers still tend to imagine some goal (revenge, profit, personal pleasure, some mad command). It’s an important question, fundamental really—can we choose actions that purely make the world worse without any perverse perceived benefit?—but we couldn’t discover whether the true Human Beast could exist back when the Beast was like a craftsman in an age of mass production, negligible beside the infinitely greater evils: Democide and War. There before the cameras Mycroft preached that, in these days of peace when we choose our Hive and values for ourselves, human individuals finally have the chance to be the worst thing in the world, and the right to be proud of our choice if we are not. That was the first time I fell in love with anyone outside my bash’.