“Larger than five.”
“One hundred thirteen million, six hundred and four.”
“Color?”
“Silver-gray.”
They gave a little gasp, as when a judge sees the first good touch in a fencing match. “You were a Humanist but considered Europe, and it was . . . murrrrr—yes, murder, interesting . . . not too long ago, either . . . and Su-Hyeon thinks you wouldn’t do it again but you’re . . . pretty sure you would.”
It took some moments for me to parse that as a question. “Correct.”
“And Vivien Ancelet . . . I see, you’re moderately puppyish about them but not enough to get pulled Humanist . . . no, there’s someone . . . something . . . someone . . . something . . . more than one something . . . and you’re in grief shock . . . recent loss, but complicated . . . ah! Canner, of course. Condolences. And what do you call J.E.D.D. Mason?”
This time I paused, just for a breath’s length, but I had to. All the universe flashed through my mind, the black, the sea of stars, the Visitor, the war and all the war’s fire, Their Host’s bloody Hello, and pain, the pain I had seen in the words and black eyes of the Kind and precious Stranger, pain I couldn’t stop, so powerless, so precious, here impossible and real, our Guest. “The Prince.”
Now Speaker Jin paused, which made me somewhat proud. “Derivative yet original. That’s good.” A nod at Su-Hyeon. “And you two have slept near each other on the same floor, or in the same bed, repeatedly, slumber-party style, but never dated or had sex or interest therein?”
I straightened, keeping the Speaker’s eyes off poor, shy Su-Hyeon’s flustered flush. “Correct.”
“Then I’ll trust Su-Hyeon’s vouching for you. Is that enough for you, Carmen?”
I didn’t understand the name ‘Carmen’ at first; only when Charlemagne Guildbreaker answered did I realize that even Earth-shaking Masonic patriarchs have nicknames. “I trusted them when they entrusted me with the identity of the Anonymous.”
With that, and Su-Hyeon’s glowing smile, our four-person Triumvirate began. It’s not that oxymoronic—I can be a fourth Triumvir if ‘Tai-kun’ can be a Tenth Director.
We told the others more about us then, and for the reader’s sake I suppose I should explain a bit of how things stand between myself and Su-Hyeon. ‘Quasi-sibling’ is the best descriptor, though we’ve only known each other for three years. We are each inheritors of half Vivien’s kingdom: Su-Hyeon the next Censor, I the next Anonymous. Our introduction was awkward, the same day I realized Mycroft was the Eighth Anonymous and so became the Ninth, when a giddy, hyperactive Vivien took me to their bash’house to meet everyone, but Bryar and Su-Hyeon above all. Bryar was instant warmth, of course, but Su-Hyeon was closed and intimidating in their uniform, and has that kind of beautiful face, with high cheekbones and riveting dark eyes, that, when it was new to me, felt severe and authoritative, and made me paranoid they were going to turn me in for breaking some intricacy of my Servicer parole that I’d foolishly forgotten. But then we got talking about name statistics, and the next thing we knew, it was dawn. That night was perfect, one of us starting a chain of inference only to have the other jump right to the end with us and then go further, and soon Mycroft and Vivien fell quiet and just listened as we both took off the brakes we use with everybody else.
Su-Hyeon is the child of a Korean threesome within the Kosala bash’, one of twelve bash’children raised in Mumbai in that fountain of energy which passes for a bash’house. Su-Hyeon and the others were half grown before Bryar and Vivien’s late marriage grafted their two bash’es together; actually, it’s more accurate to say that the twenty-one boisterous Cousins invited the five nervous, scholarly members of Ancelet’s quiet French Graylaw bash’ over for dinner and drowned them in home cooking until they forgot to leave. I’m told that Su-Hyeon as a child was nervous and scholarly too, at least compared to a village-sized mass of buzzing Cousins, but one look at the math puzzles with which the Ancelets fill their nights and Su-Hyeon was a vocateur. They apprenticed in the Censor’s office at once, and became the strongest link between the bash’-halves, apart from the True Love which drips from Bryar and Vivien. It turns out Su-Hyeon and I studied at the Quirinal Campus at the same time, but we never crossed paths there, and now my sentence is an iron wall between us and any talk of bash’ or family. Quasi-siblings, then, inheritors of two separate but equal titles, apprenticed to the same amazing mentor. Servicer life and Su-Hyeon’s vocation don’t give us much time together, but what we have we savor. And there is one other wall between us. Not envy—my head for math is a notch less superhuman than Su-Hyeon’s, and Su-Hyeon’s knack for rhetoric is several deciciceros short of mine. It’s the unshared past, the bits of our Venn diagram that don’t overlap but come up sometimes suddenly and remind me that, in some respects, I barely know Su-Hyeon, or Su-Hyeon me: Korean, Greek; Cousins, Humanists; the Senate spotlight, Servicer drudgery; the first twenty years of both our lives; life in that famous bash’ in Mumbai and my bloody homicides. And Su-Hyeon barely knows the Prince. All that puts our friendship on thin ice, as if we’re marching arm in arm but with any step either of us might punch through into the frozen, dark unknown.
Or it used to put it there, I should say, because now we are together, every day, working and collaborating, planning and talking, and making everyone believe that the Alliance is still real. A lot of it has been issuing Executive Consults (equivalent to a Senatorial Consult except that we made it up) when some opinionmonger makes the kind of ripples that make mobs. Meanwhile, Papa’s office—or what was poor Papa’s office—is our headquarters, issuing warnings based on Su-Hyeon’s calculations (or Brillist calls), alerting Mitsubishi landowners when talk turns hostile, guiding set-sets to hiding places, and alerting minorities that they are minorities, and what that means. It’s all information games, not force, trios of distant agents dispatched on bicycles when we think calm words backed by the Alliance crest will be enough. Graylaw hubs aside, we were lucky if we started with a dozen real Alliance agents in any given city, since they were never more than Police of Last Resort to advise local systems when Hive laws got too tangled. Su-Hyeon has quintupled that force in two weeks, offering sofas and office attics to the stranded if they’ll sign up (and pass Jin Im-Jin’s makeshift vetting process), but it was only four days ago that we celebrated finally having eighteen officers for every city on our Worry List, which means we can finally go from twelve-hour shifts to eight. The really scary part was making the Worry List in the first place, pinpointing the cities where the mix of flags and partisans was most foreboding. The most helpless people are the small minorities surrounded by seas of hostile other, but at least they know they’re in danger and are taking precautions. The true powder kegs are the places where the sides mix most: Hyderabad, whose treasure markets draw so many mixing peoples; Singapore; Toronto; francophone Kinshasa where the Reservation border looms so close; or bull’s-eye-covered London. Jokesters in HQ asked Su-Hyeon to wait to post the Worry List so they could open a betting pool on which would be the most endangered city. Su-Hyeon killed the joke dead: “Romanova.” I said there was a difference now between a window and a screen.