It took some seconds for my eyes to find the speaker, but only a moment for the sight to redden my eyes with rage, renew the wound’s sting, and make my hands twitch hard enough to squeeze Sniper’s fingers hard. The Enemy, Tully Mardi, alive and well and watching us from a stool in a shadowed far corner. Tully Mardi. He must have had an expression, a pose, complexion, some blank, generic clothes to reinforce his claim of distanced objectivity, but I could not see them. I saw Hell, Hell vapors cancerous in the air about him, black claws of cremation ash, and gunpowder, and burning homes, and blood vaporized by technology’s inhuman thunder. I saw the war. Had the Enemy’s throat been within my reach, reader, even with the brace that defended his Moon-weakened spine against Earth’s gravity, I would have snapped his neck.

My squeeze stirred Sniper. “Mycroft! You’re awake!” Such healing warmth was in its voice! Not like fire but like a nice day after drizzle’s doldrums. “How do you feel?”

“Alright,” I smiled. Usually I think harder about that question, but this was the time for reassurance, not for truth.

Keen, dark eyes searched my face for signs of pain. “What happened?”

“Dominic Seneschal stabbed me and left me as bait to lure you into rescuing me, so they could follow our movements, track you down, catch you, and torture you to death, likely over many days, so Natekari’s bill to make it legal to kill you would have a chance of passing before they finish you off.”

Really, Mycroft? Truth is a weapon, and thou givest so much to thine enemy?

And why not? Sniper’s love, concern, and questions were a friend’s, reader. Let us be honest friends for a few minutes, before we must be adversaries again.

“Dominic left you to die?”

I smiled. “They knew you’d save me.”

“We very nearly didn’t. That knife to the back went deep. Our doc’s astounded you pulled through.”

The second stab; I did not think it wise to talk about that now.