Does it sound rehearsed, reader? It was. I felt giddy in my cage, drunk on the idea of that supreme moment when all men would become killers again, and my Saladin watching, proud. Saladin would live, and hide, and watch what humanity became after we taught it that, with the death of Nations, the supreme predator on Earth was once again Man. That I would be the one to die and Saladin to live had been determined by Providence—which in those days I still called Chance—nine years earlier, when the rescue workers found me after the explosion, but left Saladin for dead. He was out there at this very moment, waiting to see his Mycroft hold his head high in the court, and recite to the world these speeches we had practiced a thousand times. I would not betray him by surviving.

The Emperor did not lighten. “I do what I will.”

“To Masons maybe.” I was tempted to spit, but did not want to smear the precious window of my cage. “I’m no Mason.”

“Silence that monster, would you, [Name]?” Caesar spoke the true name of the Anonymous, which, though you know it, I refuse to use before the desperate day.

“Happily,” the Anonymous answered, though it was Mushi Mojave’s hand which worked the controls, which means it was Mushi’s choice to set the cage so I could still see and hear, though not bark back.

“But I’m afraid Mycroft’s right, Cornel,” the Anonymous continued. “The world wants them dead. I suspect most of the people in this room do too, am I right?”

Mute in my cage I trembled—first names, reader. MASON and Anonymous were supposed to be strangers, two lords in distant citadels who keep a cold and distant eye on one another like Light and Dark Manichean gods, and here they call each other by first names? Curiosity matured to a fearlike itch as it became clearer and clearer that this was not the same political landscape I had studied with Aeneas and Apollo.

“Well, I’m against killing Mycroft Canner,” Headmaster Felix Faust volunteered first. “I’d never have so rare a specimen put down. Spain? Thumbs up or down?”

The King stroked his temples, already graying at forty-six despite science’s efforts; he had been on the throne eleven years now and a widower ten, long enough to begin to gain those character lines which give portraits of older men more interiority than those of youths. “I think, as world leaders, we should not set a precedent by reviving the death penalty when our personal friends are killed. Andō?”

The Chief Director took a long breath. “Mycroft would be useful if rehabilitated. Ganymede?”

The Duke Consul shrugged. “What I’m worried about is how to justify it to the public. We can’t exactly say we spared Canner because they were going to be the next Anonymous, and saying we’re doing it because a Utopian wrote a note on a scrap of paper isn’t going to fly, not with a victim from every Hive involved.”