Since he could not scowl at the side of his own head, Achilles scowled instead at the Blacklaw sash which now hung around his hips, still smelling of the gyro shop beside the tailors’ shop where we had bought it. In deference to the public eye, the hero had consented to new clothes, still army green but no longer patched from thirteen years of wear. It made him feel more real. He had the tools of existence now: Law insignia, modern clothing, the ubiquitous tracker. He could walk into a bar without seeming an alien. He was still out of scale, a man’s frame compressed to a boy’s height, yet that suited him somehow. In a museum, a pharaoh’s tiny coffin is still magisterial, as is our lithe Achilles.

“You can hit skip once the recording starts,” I answered, “but only when going to places you’ve already been in the past year. You can also set it to text mode.”

The Great Soldier snorted, impatient as a bull. “Talking car. There’s good reason horses don’t talk.”

Did you chuckle, reader? A guard beside us did, but I could not, for fear has long since made me memorize my Homer. One of Achilles’s horses spoke once, granted speech by white-armed Hera, and prophesied the hero’s coming doom, before the beast was struck mute by those same Furies who will claim me when my own turn comes to face the famous horseman Death. It was no joke to us.

Kosala: “Get Jed to talk to me, Mycroft. Now. They will if you ask them.”

The Cousin Chair called over my tracker, her voice raw after many hours of conferencing; certain calls a Servicer does not have the legal right to decline.

I: “I don’t think this is an appropriate use of your call override as head of the Servicer Program.”

Kosala: “I know you’re trying to turn my Servicers into your own private army.”

I: “They… they need to be able to defend themselves. Uniformed scapegoats walking the str—”

Kosala: “That isn’t why you did it, and you know it. I never should’ve left you free to mix with them. I should’ve locked you in a box to never see the sun again, and I still could.”

I: “Servicers are supposed to be at the service of humanity. Right now humanity needs—”

Kosala: “Everything but soldiers.”

I: “I’m sorry, Chair Kosala, but you’re wrong. There will be war. Ἄναξ Jehovah won’t retract their declaration.”

Kosala: “I wouldn’t ask them to. This is the chance we needed.”

I: “When the Olympics end—”