<where are sidney and eureka? they must be here.>

“This isn’t the Six-Hive Transit Network,” Aldrin answered, cold. “It’s ours.”

Fresh fear spurred the set-set to finally lift the blinded interface hood from their eyes and look. The walls were the computer, a forest of rod-thin processors glittering within columns of sparkling coolant.

<the utopian network. then you watched? you saw everything i found. you utopians, you’re the ones trying to expose this, aren’t you? the world goes down and you suck up the profits like parasites and shoot them into space!> They dug their fingers into Martin’s sleeve. <don’t let them use you like this, mason! the utopians know the truth already, but they want the announcement to come from you instead of them, so no one will realize it was their plan. when the saneer-weeksbooth bash’ is arrested, they’ll control all global transit, just in time to exploit the chaos!>

“It isn’t the Utopians.”

<of course it is! who else wouldn’t care about the consequences of exposing this?>

“I don’t care,” answered a new voice, tired and cracking as it rose from the depths of a thick grove of computers. “I’m not allowed to. Law and only law, that’s my job.”

<who’s that? who’s there?>

“Police Commissioner General Ektor Carlyle Papadelias.” Papa strolled forward, flexing their work-stiffened shoulders, slim and ancient like a cliff-face tree that keeps its trunk pole-thin as it puts the growing strength of centuries into its roots. “The Mason and the Utopians are both working for me on this one, me and Romanova, and so are you. Now, start from the beginning and tell me what you found. Everything.”

The set-set paused to catch its breath. <i was reviewing old records like the mason asked me to. this database doesn’t just track the cars, it tracks the people, patterns and relationships, everyone on earth, utopian and not, so it can predict when people will call cars. but it can predict a lot more than that. i was looking for times when a single point got deleted and had a conspicuously good impact on the rest.>

“Good impact?”

<the system gets tense sometimes, clusters of internal pulls that make masses of points twist or clash. remove just the right point and millions of ugly tensions vanish at once. what’s a comparison you’d understand? it’s like you’re listening to a symphony, and it’s all tense and agitated, then suddenly one discordant note stops, and all the harmonies fall into place. someone’s been detecting these points, and deleting them.>

“Guildbreaker showed me your initial report from earlier this morning.” Papa shooed a Salamanderfly out of his face. “You’d found eighty-one murders by then.”

<points,> the set-set corrected, <please call them points.>

“Hiding from the label won’t help. I’ve looked into those eighty-one. Half were killed in car crashes, some were suicides, the rest were the kinds of random incidents that look like accidents until you dig too deep, but they were murdered, every one of them. At my age, the nose knows.”