“I won’t live in it.” The hero’s words fell gently, but with force, as a boulder shifts just an inch, and all in earshot tremble at the whisper-creak that could so easily have been avalanche’s thunder. “I am Achilles. I don’t win the war, I die in it.” He turned to me. “You’re not asking me to live in a world shaped by someone who doesn’t honor the ancients. You’re asking me to be dead in it. You know why I care what shape it takes.”

I did, and choked some moments as again the shades of Ajax and Agamemnon rose before my eyes. “The Masons aren’t the future, Achilles. You know that.”

No one said anything. No one would, but glances crisscrossed among us all, Achilles, Aldrin, pale Apollo, Death, cautious glances, edged with suspicion, and with something lighter.

“MASON, why do you oppose the Set-Set Law?” Achilles asked at last.

Death spoke warily now, “Why do you ask?”

“Because I don’t think you care about set-sets. I think you care about the right of parents to rear strange children, and not just your own son.” Achilles’s gaze strayed to Aldrin’s false digital eyes. “Am I right?”

MASON nodded. “I will die for it if I must, as Mycroft MASON did before me.”

“Why?”

Caesar drew strength as Apollo, still beside him, squeezed his hand. “An Emperor may use their power how they will.”

“Not you.” Achilles shook his head. “Not you. You want me to think it’s for the memory of your Apollo. I do believe, as Mycroft paints it, that Eros’s arrow pierced you as absolutely as it may pierce any man, but I still think duty rules love in your heart.”

The Emperor stood tall. “This is my duty. The Utopians are one of the wonders of the human race, and since that race is mine to guard and guide, I will protect its wonders. Utopia will strike out and found new colonies, new worlds, as many have before them, and MASONS will link those colonies into our Empire.”

Achilles’s glance, at once playful and accusing, passed across me to silent Aldrin. “Have you had a secret alliance with each of us,” he pointed to himself and Caesar, “all this time without telling the other?”

Aldrin’s lips parted, but Caesar cut in too fast. “My arrangement with them is not an alliance.”

“What, then?”

“My own policy, unilateral and unreciprocated.”

Utopia’s nod confirmed.

“Then what do you intend the Utopians to do in the war?” Achilles asked.

“Nothing,” Caesar answered at once. “They’re uninvolved, neither guilty nor victim in the O.S. scandal, the assassination plot, the land mess, the set-set mania, any of it. Let them stay uninvolved.”

“Even though they’d make such valuable allies?” Achilles tested.

“I’d rather see them home safe than beside me on a battlefield,” MASON replied.