The Emperor’s smile did not feel like Death’s now, but like a living man’s. “I thought Utopia might be the last thing making you hesitate.”

“Second-to-last. You still don’t have Mycroft Canner.”

Caesar frowned. “Is that really enough to make us enemies?”

Homer’s Great Soldier took a long time to answer, “No.”

“Achilles!” I cried.

He turned to me. “It’s not enough. He’s right. I never, ever want to be on the opposite side of a war from you, but I won’t fight against everything in this world that makes sense to me. I’m with MASON, even if you aren’t.”

“But—”

Achilles cut me off. “You love the Masons. You can’t pretend you don’t. You owe MASON your life and your obedience, and you love Utopia, and owe Utopia the same. But I know you love and owe Jehovah, too. If you don’t want this to rip them apart, and rip you and me apart, then you’ll have to help us make Jehovah choose the Empire.”

“It’s not my place to—”

Achilles’s glare struck me silent before his words did. “You could talk the riddle out of a sphinx, and you’re the one person on this Earth who speaks the private, hybrid language of Jehovah’s thoughts. If any creature can do this you can. If Jehovah joins MASON then every cause you serve remains united. If He won’t, we shatter. Do it.”

“Do it.” MASON repeated the command.

“Do it,” urged Apollo.

“Do it,” Achilles ordered one more time. “The side that has the two of us on it will win, and you know it. Make it a side we can respect.”

I could not answer them. I could not answer even myself as duty, hubris, awe, and terror wrestled to stalemate in my mind. In dumb stupor I watched Achilles don the gray Familiaris armband. In dumb stupor I watched brave Aldrin and my salt-sweet Saladin go back inside to the captivity of Madame’s. In dumb stupor, as we rode toward Alexandria, I endured Caesar’s and Achilles’s stares.

“Build me jeeps,” Achilles said at last, as the capital drew close beneath us.

“What?” Caesar answered.

“Build me jeeps. Build me twenty, no, fifty thousand jeeps.”

“You mean the old land cars?”

“You can build jeeps faster than you can breed horses, though horses are good too. We’ll also need some sort of fuel, and trucks, sturdy ones that can cope with the fact that you don’t have roads anymore.”

“The world has moved past land cars. We have better.”

“Do you have better that will still work when the world breaks down?”

MASON’s brows narrowed. “You think someone will destroy the transit system?”

“If our enemies get control of it, I will. If we do, they will.”