There on the screen was that terrible picture. They showed it over and over again: Achilles’s poor broken body lying on the floor in the Hegemon’s palace, looking so peaceful, not a wound on his body. Some on the nets said that Delphiki didn’t shoot him through the eye at all; that if he had, Achilles’s face would have been powder-burned and there would have been an exit wound and blood all over.

No, Delphiki and Wiggin imprisoned Achilles and faked some kind of phony standoff with the police, pretending that Achilles was taking hostages or something, so they’d have an excuse for killing him. But in fact they gave him a lethal injection. Or poisoned his food. Or infected him with a hideous disease so he died writhing on the floor in agony while Delphiki and Wiggin looked on.

Like Richard III murdering those poor princes in the tower.

But when my son is born, Randi told herself, then all these false histories will be destroyed. The liars will be eliminated, and so will their lies.

Then this footage will be used in a true story. My son will see to that. No one will ever even hear the lies they’re telling now. And Achilles will be known as the great one, even greater than the son who will have completed his life’s work.

And I will be remembered and honored as the woman who sheltered him and gave him birth and raised him up to rule the world.

All I have to do to accomplish that is: nothing.

Nothing that calls attention to me. Nothing that makes me unusual or strange.

Yet the one thing she couldn’t bear to do was nothing. Just to sit here, watching the television, worrying, fretting—it had to be harmful for the baby, to have so much adrenalin coursing through her system.

It was the waiting that was making her crazy. Not waiting for the baby—that was natural and she would love every day of her pregnancy.

It was waiting for her life to change. Waiting…for Bob.

Why should she wait for Bob?

She got up from the couch, switched off the television, went into the bedroom, and started packing her clothing and other things into cardboard boxes. She emptied out Bob’s obsessive financial records in order to empty the boxes—let him amuse himself by sorting them out later.

Only after she had packed and taped up the fourth box did it occur to her that the normal pattern would have been to tell him about the baby and then make him move out.

But she didn’t want a connection with him. Didn’t want any dispute about paternity. She just wanted to be gone. Out of his ordinary, meaningless life, out of this pointless town.

Of course she couldn’t just disappear. Then she’d be a missing person. She’d be added to databases. Someone would be alerted.

So she took her boxes of clothing and a few favorite pots, pans, and recipe books and loaded them into the car that she had owned before she married Bob and that was still in her name alone. Then she spent half an hour writing different versions of a letter to Bob explaining that she didn’t love him anymore and was leaving and didn’t want him to look for her.