“Dear, modest Mycroft!” Madame cried, hiding her expression with her fan. “All these years thou hast pretended to be evil, when really thou didst it to prevent another World War! Our secret hero.”

It burned hearing so much of the truth at once. Jehovah had sensed a hidden good behind my actions, but He was merciful enough not to voice it. “Don’t praise me, Madame,” I pleaded. “I did it to keep violence in the hands of individuals. My solution was for us all to turn back into beasts and kill each other one-on-one instead of en masse. I wanted…” Even in His absence I could feel Jehovah’s eyes forbidding me to lie within His house. “I also wanted to prevent the war. But it doesn’t matter, I was wrong, and the Mardis were wrong too. This place, Madame, Ἄναξ Jehovah, He’s a tie between Caesar and Andō, between all the leaders, too strong for war to break out between any of the Hives. Kohaku’s numbers mean nothing. As long as this place exists, and He exists, the war the Mardis were afraid of can’t begin.”

Madame dared chuckle. “Flatterer—now I’m the one preventing the next World War?”

“And Apollo?” The Emperor had to release me now, for fear he really would forget himself and strangle me. “What about Apollo?”

I looked at the coat in Caesar’s arms, Dominic showing through it, his monk’s habit replaced by another modern uniform of black and blue. “Apollo’s only concern was that Utopia survive. War now, war later, the important thing was to prepare. That special Utopian coat and those weapons were developed for defense.”

“They work, too, the weapons. The rest of the Mardis were sitting ducks, but Seine and Apollo very nearly killed us instead.” I thought for a moment that my dead past self had risen to speak this boast, but it was Saladin’s voice from behind me, dark and proud.

MASON turned cold eyes on the caged beast. “You were Mycroft’s partner in this?”

“In everything.”

I spread myself as a wall between Caesar and Saladin. “Please don’t listen to them, Caesar. They’re mad, developmentally disturbed, they don’t know what they’re—”

One blow knocked me from my knees to the floor; a second kept me there.

“Who are you?” MASON demanded.

A serpent smile spread across Saladin’s hairless face. “Mycroft Canner.”

“It’s practically true, Caesar,” Madame cooed, lace fluttering about her elbows as she restrained MASON’s poised fists. “We ran a skin sample, it’s a genetic match, and the tracker system refuses to admit this is a human being at all, it thinks he’s a dog. Isn’t that delightful?”

“I won’t ask again.” The Emperor loomed. “Who are you?”

Saladin still smiled. “Nobody. A wild dog. A ghost.”

I saw a computer search flicker in MASON’s lenses. “Mycroft had a ba’sib named Saladin who died in the explosion twenty-two years ago. There was a fire; you did a skin graft and used Mycroft’s skin as the source.” It was fast guesswork, but Caesar is no fool. “So, which of you two killed which of the Mardis? Or did you do them all together?”