It was not the common reaction. By then the words ‘He chose a Mason!’ were ricocheting like shrapnel through the streets outside, and within minutes media speculators would weave conspiracy out of it: Was Ockham threatened? Blackmailed? Bribed? No one could believe O.S.—or any defendant!—would willingly choose the Hive that always handed down the harshest sentences. Offered any member of the family, would you choose severe Father over a manipulable sibling or doting uncle, or the kindly fallback Mom? So famous is the Cousins’ tendency to sympathize with all, and to think of sentences as rehabilitation more than retribution, that it is a rare day when any defendant chooses anything but a Hivefellow and a Cousin. But a Mason? The mob outside reels, baffled. Are you baffled, reader?

Reader: “Insult me not, Mycroft. It is easy enough to see why the former O.S. would choose the Hive that already believes its leader has the authority to kill.”

Hobbes: “Quite so. Your Empire will commit hypocrisy, Mycroft, if this Mason dares argue that President Ganymede had not Capital Powers when he defended his Leviathan in Time of…”

Reader: “It was not wartime, Thomas. Not in the years O.S. was working.”

Hobbes: “Friend reader, Leviathans are wild humans made macrocosmic, so all Leviathans live in a state of constant War: the war for resources, for land, for subjects. President Ganymede did not trust Civilization’s pledge to keep the Peace between Leviathans, no more than does MASON, or any who has sat beneath the sword of Damocles.”

Apologies. I had forgotten that the reader now has so expert a companion. Apollo too knows Hobbes well, but most in my era never learned to think so bloodily, so could not see how Prospero’s choice here put the Empire on trial too.

“Don’t relax yet, Mycroft,” keen Apollo warned. “The prosecutor could still choose Utopia.”

“Never,” I told him, and myself. “Over so many berserking Cousins and Brillists?”

“It would make the trial much more just. Three Hives on trial for killing members of another three. With six compromised, the seventh should be a judge.”

“Utopia must keep its hands clean.”

“They aren’t clean.” Apollo said it so serenely, without passion, without emphasis even on the fact that there was no emphasis, a turning point so far behind him that he no longer wasted time remembering the sting.

“But they must seem clean!”

He rolled over so he could face me on his elbows, the coat turning his outline into a hole in MASON’s palace, smoking rubble. “Mycroft, I know what chapter you—”

“They’re announcing it! The third judge!”

We both held our breath as the feed relayed the prosecution’s choice: Gordian. The word warmed me like winter tea. “Providence wants you out of the limelight.”

Apollo blinked, his eyes resetting to their calm blue keenness—or was it the vizor that reset them? “I know what chapter you’re avoiding.”