“Calm down!” Brilliana held up her hands in surrender. “Yes, I’ve seen her in the past couple of days, and she’s fine. She just needed to go underground for a bit. Same as you, do you understand? I met up with her when you left me in Boston with Paulie and nothing to do. After you shot your mouth off at Angbard, I figured he needed to know what had you so wound up. He takes a keen interest in her well-being, and not just because you threatened to kill him if he didn’t. So of course I went over to see her. In fact, I visited every couple of days, to keep an eye on her. I was there when—” Brill fell silent.

“It was you with the shotgun,” Miriam pushed.

“Actually, no.” Brill looked a little green. “She kept it taped under her chair, the high-backed one in the living room. I just called the Clan cleaners for her afterwards. It was during your first trip over here when she, she had the incident. She phoned your office line, and I was in the office, so I picked up the phone. As you were over here I went around to sort everything out. I found—” She shuddered. “It took a lot of cleaning up. They were Clan security, from the New York office, you know. She was so calm about it.”

“Let me get this straight.” Miriam poured the kettle’s contents into a cafetiere. Her hand was shaking, she noticed distantly. “You’re telling me that Iris gunned down a couple of intruders?”

“Huh?” Brill looked puzzled. “Oh, Iris. That’s right. Like ‘Miriam.’ Listen, she said, ‘it gets to be a habit after the third assassination attempt. Like killing cockroaches.’”

“Urk.” Miriam sat down hard and waited for the conceptual earthquake to stop. She fixed Brill with the stare she kept in reserve for skewering captains of industry she was getting ready to accuse of malfeasance or embezzlement. “Okay, let me get this straight. You are telling me that my mother just happens to keep a sawn-off shotgun under her wheelchair for blowing away SWAT teams, a habit which she somehow concealed from me during my childhood and upbringing while she was a political activist and then the wife of a radical bookstore manager—”

“No!” Brill looked increasingly annoyed. “Don’t you get it? This was the first attempt on her life in over thirty years—”

Miriam’s walkie-talkie bleeped at her urgently.

“We’ve got company.” Miriam eyed the walkie-talkie as if it might explode. My mother is an alien, she thought. Must have been in the Weather Underground or something. But there was no time to worry about that now. “Is that thing loaded?”

“Yes.”