It is no lie, not as they understand the name: a title of honor, Most Wanted, Archfiend, Devil. Those of the underground who are willing to believe that “Ghost” exists have long suspected their monster was this monster. He was too otherworldly, a trackless killer who cared nothing for rank or power, or even sides. He dealt only in barter, accepting food or arms or tradable treasures, and delivering in return, not only death, but terror’s torture, and, if the client requested, bodily tortures too. One who would show his victim Hell hired that Hell here. Only one name in our century has created Hell on Earth, and since Saladin and I shared those deeds, so he deserves to share my name.

「You don’t look like the Mycroft Canner we saw on the news.」

「Don’t I? Here.」 The visible sliver of opening in the front of Apollo’s captured coat wriggles like a snake as Saladin gropes beneath the folds of Griffincloth and loosens the straps of the piggyback harness. He spins as I step down, so the coat lifts from me all at once, revealing my dappled Servicer beige and gray, while Saladin settles in beside me, my wonderful, beautiful monster, his back against my back, invisible except for a slice of grinning face. 「Better?」

I pick up the light and aim it at them now. The six are clustered tight, their faces, some Japanese, some not, all ashen. The archkiller Mycroft Canner might loom dark enough in the media’s memory to be the stuff even of mobsters’ nightmares, but the Mycroft Canner who stood upon the Rostra sixteen days ago is worse, the tool of MASON and of MASON’s Son, and of His other fathers, Andō, Spain, whose resources are matchless, untouchable, and angry. If my Saladin is childhood’s fear, the unknowable evil in the closet’s depths, I have become adulthood’s fear, fear of power, law, illustrious contacts, police resources, covert agencies, and sweet judicial murder. Not only the wounded guards whimper. I know I should not enjoy this task so much, reader. It is sinful of me. April the twelfth is a High Holiday, the highest, Yuri’s Night, the day mankind first broke Earth’s eggshell and touched our rightful Space—a day for hope, for thanks, for recommitment to the Great Project. But I am weak, and it has been so long, reader, so very, very long since last my Saladin and I stood back-to-back and tasted fear-sweat.

「D-did Tai-kun send you themself?」 the protectee asks, almost bravely.

「Others too, but yes. You see why you can’t pay me more than I’m already getting.」 It is Saladin who speaks, more fluent than I in the ways of the mobs, whose need for subtle killings have fattened him these thirteen years with hunts to ease the boredom.

「What do you want?」