When the police stormed my vivisection room and caught the murderer, still elbow-deep in Mercer Mardi, they dosed me with more drugs than even my preemptive antidotes could counter. I awoke in my coffin-cage, arms locked behind me in a gel, as gentle as water against my skin but inescapable as steel, which the Utopians, in their rage, had invented in those few days, just for me. Within the cage was silence, the walls clear from the outside but opaque to me, so I knew nothing of the crowds past which the police paraded me, though I could feel the gentle bumping of the box, and peace when I was set down in what I assumed must be my prison. I would guess I had two hours’ peace before a switch turned the speakers on and made the walls transparent, leaving me squinting at the sudden light and bare as a lab rat before the red-faced and panting Anonymous.

“This letter, is it yours?” Rarely have I heard words so urgent. “Tell me!” He slammed the tired green sheets against the glass, youth-arrogant scribbles dating from the days when Saladin and I, fourteen and giddy with the power of our intellects, had begun many ingenious little projects to show the adult world our brilliance.

“Yes. Yes, it’s mine,” I answered.

“Who helped you?” he barked at once. “Was it Kohaku? Did Kohaku Mardi know I’m the Anonymous?”

“No one helped me,” I answered, almost too quickly. “Not Kohaku, not anyone. I figured it out myself.” If Saladin and I are one flesh then I spoke the truth, for we had deduced it together, and written this letter, addressed to the Anonymous’s true identity, to boast that we had guessed, but we never sent it. We realized mid-draft that such a stunt might endanger our greater project, so we left the letter in the negligible clutter of my adopted bash’house, scraps which only Papadelias would think to go through.

“They knew you’re the Anonymous?” It was the King of Spain who asked it, striding forward to frown beside the Anonymous like a teammate after a bad game, the blue and gold sash which marks Europe’s Prime Minister set aside for mourning black.

The Anonymous nodded, grave. “It even gives the reasoning they used. It’s brilliant.”

My eyes adjusted to the dazzle slowly. I took in the room: silk-paneled walls, sofas of gold and velvet, and figures lounging over brandy like friends drawn close by troubled times. I did not recognize most of them at first, but seeing the Anonymous answer to his secret title with eight people watching was enough to make me doubt the structure of the world. How many knew? How many people here were privy to what was supposed to be, after the name of MASON’s successor, Earth’s second-strictest secret?

“Canner figured it out?” It was Ganymede who asked, still the Humanist Co-Consul, not yet President. I knew him only slightly then, and it was a strange aesthetic privilege seeing Ganymede in his mourning clothes, that shade of midnight blue that chases the sun toward sunset, so the dark cloth made the translucence of his skin glow bright as moonlight. For mourning, should it not be black? It should, reader, but remember that, however deeply the others mourned the Mardi bash’, it is unlikely the Duke actually cared.