“If it’s that blatant, your writers weren’t soft enough.”

“Our writers are fine. You’re trying to assign blame when there’s no need. We all knew this would happen sooner or later.”

“We expected later.”

“And it’s happening now. Can we have our pawn?”

“My pawn. What for?”

“The Old Man. He’s one of our unwitting eyes,” Cell Manager Thrift said.

“I know that. We use him too. We have the cell with the second-highest coverage, we use everything. I don’t see how I can supply a distraction, delay, or deniability in six minutes and change.”

“We need him dead.”

“You want me to sacrifice my pawn?”

“There’s no choice,” Thrift said.

“Assholes. You drop the ball and I take the hit?”

“We’re all in this together,” Miltona answered.

“On paper. But you didn’t spend weeks on assets only to have them deleted,” the C.M. from the other cell said.

The Overseer descended from the Decagon, approaching the C.M. She found one of the boards with metal shavings that faced the C.M. that stood beyond the cluster of cubicles, and she reached out.

“Work together,” she said, quiet.

Her movements were not simple ones. When she reached out, her hand was a touch a hundred times softer than that of a feather, but that hand filled the space like water from an opened sluice rushed to occupy lower ground. Her hand moved, to strike with one side of the hand, with fingertips, with nails. Her position was fluid, and her face was close to the board, her breath even less substantial than her fingers, but still something that could influence the movement of single particles.

She observed thousands of individual specks of metal dust with a hundred faces, above, around, and near.

DO IT, spelled out with the letters barely visible, light gray against darker gray.

The C.M. who had been complaining paused, then looked away, scowling. “Can’t argue that.”

“What?” Howe asked.

The target personality analysis agent in the cubicle picked up the board, turning it around for the Decagon to see.

“Thank you,” Howe said. “Thank you, Overseer.”

“Sacrificing my pawn. We’ll message you as soon as we’re signed off on this move. Stand by,” the C.M. said.

“Thank you for your assistance,” Howe said.

The Overseer was a thousand inverse statues filling a vast space, limbs entangled, hair touching shoulder and back, toes on shoulders, knees against the side of heads, all propped up against one another. Statues, except they were in constant motion, they could not be seen or represent anything, they tended rather than require tending, and they had as much substance as a solid concrete statue had air pockets. When she pulled away and up, to better see the cell and the other cells, she filled space above, building on a collective mass, while figments at the edges fell away, crumbling into nothing.