The Anonymous peered hard at the Utopian, perhaps wondering whether grief’s red around the digital eyes was real. “You want us to spare Mycroft?”

“I don’t,” Mushi corrected at once. “Apollo did. Collectively Utopia sides with Apollo.”

The Utopian halted in the center of the room, a knife-stark silhouette wounding the salon’s veil of antiquity. Mushi’s Utopian coat fills the world with ants, billions upon billions, the incomparable colony that ants would erect if the whole world were given over to their intricate industry. A lesser imagination would leave it there, but Mushi reads deeper, for ants’ paths, as they weave about their work, may by chance trace the shapes of letters, and with time such letters may by chance form words. While fools wait infinitely for the monkeys at their typewriters to reproduce Shakespeare, Mushi’s coat collects and displays the new, alien poems ants write as they march. But the ants were dead now, the ant world switched off, leaving the coat a block of flickering static, flat and shapeless as if someone had sliced a hole in space. Those who lived through it cannot forget the days after Apollo’s death, when across the globe the coats which should be windows to so many other worlds turned blank. When a Utopian dies before his time, the Hive mourns together, all the coats in the world turning to static for as many seconds as their kinsman lost years—thirty seconds for a centenarian, ninety for someone full of midlife’s promise, a full two minutes for a child. Apollo’s murder was different. For him their mourning would not stop. They left the static for hours, days, four hundred million walking holes in space, their vow that they would catch the killer and end this nightmare where all other Hives had failed. It was terrifying, wounds of static around every corner, everywhere and organized, reawakening a fear Earth had not tasted since the Set-Set Riots. I saved Apollo for near the end of the seventeen because I knew I could not last long once I woke that sleeping dragon, but even I underestimated their speed. Four days is all it took. They caught me with my work unfinished, Mercer still breathing, Tully still free. Poor Papadelias will never stop cursing the fact that they, not he, took down his long-awaited Moriarty. The static stayed, though, for eleven hours after I was caught. The popular assumption has always been that they were waiting for Caesar to carry out my execution. It is half true: they were waiting.

“I side with Apollo too,” MASON pronounced, forcing the words out stiffly. His eyes fixed on me, my first taste of the rage which has not dimmed in thirteen years. “You will live, Mycroft.” I already knew him well, Cornel MASON. I knew his smiling eyes on soft afternoons when he came to see Aeneas, Geneva, or Apollo. I knew his rich bronze face aglow with pride as he showed his capital to me and the Mardi children, as if we and we alone were the posterity who would inherit this greatest of empires. This was a different man. “You will live. You will finish the Mardis’ work: Geneva’s, Aeneas’s, Mercer’s for Faust, Kohaku’s for the Censor, Jie’s for Andō, Leigh’s for Kosala, Apollo’s most of all. All of it.”