“No!” Bryar cried. “You’re talking like they can all be replaced!”

“Of course they can’t!” Caesar bellowed, his full power, which before that time no man had ever heard. Even the World’s Mom fell silent.

“Caesar, please,” cooed the dark Lady whom I did not yet know to call Madame. “My salon is not the place for harshness.” She stroked his black hair, her touch dispelling the electric anger in the Emperor’s stance.

“Apologies, Madame.”

She kissed him again upon the cheek, as if the tender courtesy were her apology for having to be strict.

“And you, Déguisé,” she continued, holding out a slim black mask to the Anonymous, “one must observe the forms.”

“Sorry, Madame.” He donned the mask, and seemed at once more confident and comfortable, more like himself than his fake outside persona. Madame’s quick eye caught mine, saw that I was watching, and she had a smile for me, sweet as a mouse, before she locked the crosshairs of her attentions back on the Emperor. My mind, honed by so many leaders, caught more and more the scent of something rotten.

“Of course they can’t be replaced,” Caesar began again, more calmly, “but the pieces that remain must be picked up. They were all Mycroft’s teachers. Apollo especially spent hours with Mycroft every week, telling them everything from research ideas to what’s supposed to happen in the unfinished chapters of their ridiculous science fiction Iliad.” His eyes locked again on me. “You’ll finish writing that book for Apollo, Mycroft. You’ll finish everything. You’ll work until you die.”

“I refuse.” In those days I was headstrong enough to match Caesar glare for glare. “You think I killed Apollo and the others just to become them? I’m not some psycho lashing out for revenge or lust or fame. I loved the Mardis more than any of you! I know perfectly well what great things they would have accomplished if they’d lived. If there had been better people in this world I would have killed them instead. I’ve destroyed something wonderful just for destruction’s sake, proving once and for all that the human animal can do evil for the sake of evil. I’m not about to undermine that by replacing what I’ve destroyed.”

“You have no choice,” the Emperor countered, Madame’s hands reminding his fist not to slam her gilded chair. Who was this Lady who could chide and temper MASON and Anonymous?

“You’re the ones with no choice,” my young self shot back. “The world won’t rest until it sees me dead. That’s how it ends. They’ll keep chanting my name until I’ve had my day in court, and there the world will see that it’s possible to choose evil over good, over happiness, over family, over love, over the future potential of the human race, and over life itself. When the axe falls, or the electricity turns on, or whatever you decide to use on me, the world will taste again the base satisfaction of getting its hands dirty, as the human animal was meant to do. You can’t avoid it. The world won’t let you, and neither shall I!”