Seeing me spot Him, Bryar Kosala called to the Child. “Jed, honey, come away from there. It’s not good for you.”

I shuddered in my bonds of Cannergel (Utopia later named it for me). You had a birth bash’, reader. You know the special way your ba’pas gazed on you, grave and loving, parents even if it was not their blood coursing through your veins. The Powers all looked at Him that way now, the King, Director, Headmaster, Anonymous, even Bryar who is everybody’s Mom was His Mom more. There is no glue like a child to keep a quarreling couple from cutting the knot, so what of quarreling empires?

Madame called now, since the Child did not move. “Jehovah, mon Petit, viens ici.” She made room for Him on the couch between the Emperor and herself.

Still the Child lingered, staring, thinking, crafting His words. For me. “You disappoint me, Master Canner. I thought to see the Liberated Man, but you still hid behind a cause.”

This was the death of what was Mycroft Canner. It was impossible. The Child saw in an instant the hypocrisy that I had not quite admitted even to myself. He was right. I was never strong enough to do evil for the sake of evil. Saladin was the true, free beast. I had merely followed, leaning half on him, half on the crutch of a hidden good that lay beyond the Mardis’ deaths. The Child saw, as if my inmost self were an open book before Him. He was monstrous, with powers humans should not have, and here the Seven leaders of the Earth were doting on Him as on a Son. Panic is too weak a word. Metamorphosis, perhaps? An ant which strays onto someone’s clothes, and is spirited in a car to an alien land incomprehensibly far from home and colony, could not feel more lost. All my strength had stemmed from the conviction that I could read the shape of the future as it unrolled interminably from the present. That present had been a lie, the rivalries, the enmity between Mason and Mitsubishi, the competition among Hives, all lies. Was I wrong, then? Had they not had to die, Luther, Geneva, Kohaku, Laurel, Seine? Apollo? I suffered many injuries during my capture, but only this wound bled.

Spain took the Child by the hand, His small fingers locking around the royal thumb with the speed of habit.

It does not matter what I screamed at that moment, for, through the cage, no one could hear me. I realized who the Boy must be. Everyone knew the Emperor had an adopted Son, but the young Porphyrogene glimpsed in heartwarming shots in newspapers had no more factored in my calculations than the child of any Senator.

“Fili,” Caesar addressed the Boy as He settled on the couch beside him, “what do you think we should do with Mycroft Canner?”

The Child Jehovah looked again at me, and through the glass my eyes begged Him to read me again, to tell the others how deeply He had struck me, how desperately I wished to see more of this new world which proved the old a lie.