A new light kindled in Sniper’s eyes, comingled curiosity, intrigue, aggression, pain, as when a child, used to crossing wooden swords with a younger ba’sib, suffers his first seriously bruising blow, and awakens to the fact that he faces no toddler now, but an opponent. “Jehovah. Do we have a deal?”

“We have.”

Their efforts took many hours, and equipment which apparently the next room had, leaving me alone with my wounds. Sleep, with less death in it than before, visited me in spurts, but it is no use to you hearing how the mobswell looked to me in fever’s dreams. You want reality. Their efforts worked; this possible version of war died unborn, but not quickly. Censor Jung Su-Hyeon dispatched predictions to Romanova’s forces with electric speed. Papadelias made hard, brave choices of where to send his few, brave men. Two thousand, three hundred and thirteen people, by our last count, died that night. Hundreds of buildings burned. Millions of tons of food and kitchen fertilizer disappeared from shops and warehouses. All capitals became police states. The transit network closed all flights, except those away from danger areas and toward hospitals, shelters, or home. Authorities dismissed rumors that organized packs of servicers had separated crowds in Athens, defended set-set bash’houses in Los Angeles and Mexico City, and put out a flaming barge that threatened Chongqing harbor. Utopia hid. Kosala pleaded for calm, Spain for dignity, Ancelet for patience, Jehovah for humanity. MASON told the world to go to its room. Sniper pleaded for, of all things, strategy: “This situation needs a single bullet to the head, not a flamethrower into the crowd. These riots are unworthy of Humanists.” Tully made public his predictions of the real consequences of what the mobs were doing, and once he made his numbers public, Censor Su-Hyeon released his own, not quite identical. The world went to its room.

It was Martin Guildbreaker who came for me in the end: Martin, the world’s most trusted man. He is trusted of Caesar, of Papadelias, of our dear Master, of the Senate, of the Senate’s grandmother his own grandparent Charlemagne Guildbreaker Senior, trusted of Ancelet and Faust who read men well, and of Andō and Spain who watched this young Mason grow up at their Son’s side. In my delirium, Martin later told me, I started listing aloud his many trusts and merits, as if drafting in my head some brief biography which might have made it into my first history had sleep not claimed the memory. Caesar had sent Martin for me, with Cannergel cuffs and the order that he manacle my wrist to his to prevent escape as he escorted me back to Imperial custody in Alexandria. Seeing me bandaged and barely able to stand, Martin cuffed me all the same. Only as he helped me to my feet did I realize a goodbye kiss from Sniper had likely not been a dream.