The memory itself does not feel real. We see images of ruins so often in movies: burned-out houses, castles, cities, Dresden, New York, Pompeii, vivid with fire and artistry, with music and smelltracks to add pathos. What we saw on the screen now was artless, a tumbled, jagged something, dim and badly framed, hard to differentiate from a construction site or unsuccessful art. On either side stood houses, gardens, children’s swings, but the shapelessness between had nothing to prove it used to be a home. Uniformed people were searching through the blackened rubble, and some sort of robot twitched its many probe-arms through the ashes like a crab. Stretchers on their way out testified to some survivors, but I know I must have seen a corpse among the coals because my mind strayed to Chiasa Mardi’s coiled intestines, and sweet hot blood, and Saladin. I do remember the graffiti, smeared across the surviving garden wall: “Set-Set = Slavery.”

Kosala looked to Achilles. “There were six bash’es training set-sets in Odessa, one of the largest concentrations outside Asia. All but one of the six now look like this.”

“You think Cousins did this?” he asked, wide-eyed.

“I think Brillists did most of it, but Cousins helped. Most of the ‘rescued’ children have already turned up at our orphanage doors. Either way, in twenty minutes the world will be full of these images, and in thirty it will be full of Cousins trying to pretend they don’t support it, and feeling guilty that they really do, and getting upset, and making poor decisions while upset, and making enemies. The claim that Nurturism isn’t violent anymore is wearing thin. Everyone’s seen films of the Set-Set Riots, and if these images are called ‘New Set-Set Riots’ the world will panic.”

I took a heavy breath, thinking on the burns Earth suffered last time the Leviathans bared fangs one at another over this. The 2239 set-set kidnapping trial had been a centrifuge which proved that our commingled sand grains could still be sorted into factions, pro and con, red and green, yes and no. Two hundred and fifteen years is longer than even our extended life spans, but today’s elders remember elders who could recount those days of fear and bated breath.

“This could be it, couldn’t it?” Kosala asked, so softly. “What sparks the war?”

Godlike Achilles frowned. “Could be, could calm again. In a way you’re lucky everyone has so many other reasons to be angry now. Your Cousins and the Masons are united in rage against the Hives that used O.S. That rage may be bond enough to keep you from becoming enemies over the set-set issue again. A mutual and present enemy can trump an old feud.”