Su-Hyeon only trembled for a moment. “Take them away. Next, I want every officer you can get assembled in this room ASAP, make sure there’s at least one representative from every major Desk and Division. I have predictive data about the likely faction ratios in every city. I wasn’t prepared to share them while there were spies in here. In these first hours, it’s vital we concentrate on the cities where comparatively equal numbers are likely to result in violence, or where extremely disparate numbers are likely to result in immediate attacks on minorities. I have short lists organized by predicted problem type. I want you all to work with Speaker Jin on assigning appropriate personnel to each short list. Anyone with issues involving Romanova itself, talk to Senator Guildbreaker. Anyone who knows any police officer or other trustworthy Alliance employee who’s in Romanova but off duty, give name and contact to . . . somebody . . . Volunteer?” A hand went up. “Good. Collect names and get in contact, tell them we’ll be calling on them soon. Seconds are precious, everyone. Move!”
Noise erupted, brighter than before, with purpose.
Su-Hyeon spun. “Carlyle Foster, you strike me as someone who could persuade the Sensayers’ Conclave to lend us their Guard.”
The ex-Cousin beamed. “I am indeed.”
“Good. Will you work with Senator Guildbreaker and get them on the streets to keep the peace around the Forum? If anything will seem neutral to people right now, it’s them.”
“Consider it done.”
“Thank you.” Su-Hyeon turned to me next, and plopped something soft down around my shoulders, cocoon-like, warm. Purple. Their old Deputy Censor’s jacket. They leaned close. “You put that on and keep it on, you hear me? Nobody’s going to touch you, not in that, not ever. And you’re not going to take any risks going out in the street without it, looking like a helpless Servicer. Got it? Promise me.”
My promise came in tears. “Mm-hm.”
Shared pain made Su-Hyeon’s expressive face a mirror of my feelings. They hugged me. “I’m so sorry.” They hugged me so tight. I whimpered. Su-Hyeon was with me. It made me shiver, a good shiver. No one had ever seemed so with me before, no touch so solid or so real. And the way Su-Hyeon squeezed back, it felt symmetrical. We weren’t alone. It felt new, but that was natural enough: it was new. We weren’t alone, but for the first time in our lives we could have been. So many others were alone now. The Prince. Papa. Mycroft most of all.
“I’ve logged that you’re permanently assigned to my office until further notice, so you have all the time you need to do your work, no one will ask questions or interfere. You can stay here and rest up for now. Help if you want, when you’re ready, or do your own work, whatever you need, and you can come back with me to the office soon, safe and private. Okay?”
And then it was okay. Not good, not fixed, not better, but Su-Hyeon’s presence gave me that desperate, indispensable minimum of stable ground that catches you like a ledge as you’re sliding down the cliff. That and blood sugar from more chocolate cake made the fog clear. I checked in with Vivien, Bryar, Achilles, and MASON, reassuring each that I was safe. Then I reassured the human race. First I appealed for clemency over the Hâte Anonyme, addressing the cities where things were turning worst. Then I wrote an essay “On Fanaticism” (based on Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique portatif ) in which I argued that war’s atrocities hatch, not from any inhuman machine of war, but from human hearts when we let conviction turn into fanaticism. We are all in danger of dying in this war, but we are all also in danger of becoming authors of atrocities. The first danger we cannot avoid, but the second is entirely in our power, since each of us alone can choose whether we let fanaticism fester in us, or keep our hearts havens of Reason, Reasonableness, and Humanity. I think the essay lent my six billion readers some calm, if only because it felt normal receiving a regular update from the Anonymous. I hoped my own experience as someone who has committed an atrocity made the essay more authentic, but perhaps it was too much. My work complete, I checked in with the Prince, and let myself and all my troubles feel again like one drop in the sea of Their Infinite and Kind Philosophy. They asked me to define the word ‘where.’ Why? Because They struggled now to understand what it can be, this simple-seeming thought-word-thing which somehow forms such very different questions: “Where is My Dominic?” and “Where is My Mycroft?”
CHAPTER THREE
♥
Now I Am in a Place
Written September 19–22, 2454
Events of September 8–22
Written in Romanova
I HAVE NEVER BEEN IN A PLACE BEFORE. None of us has, not really, not like this. We could always fly anywhere we wished in an instant or an hour. Now I am in Romanova. I will be in Romanova tomorrow and the next day. I will walk these streets and only these streets, sleep on this sofa, eat from these shops, and when these shops run out . . . Mycroft was right to say it would feel like being stranded on the Moon.
We are two weeks into the war now. The cars were exonerated, that came right away. What I mean is that we confirmed someone was directing the wild flight which keeps them streaking through our skies, so we no longer curse the cars themselves, as we so often curse the root or stray bag that we trip over. The cars are clustering over cities, whizzing and circling to block urban airspace, while the wilds and seas are clear. This is no chance malfunction caused by autonomous systems malfunctioning; this is a plan. And guilt runs deeper yet. It took no time for antiquarians and tinkerers to roll out their contraptions: air balloons, planes, blimps, helicopters, here in Sardinia a little seaplane with its fat twin skis, which set out for Italy, but a car struck it down, struck them all down, again and again, the crash and now-familiar spilled-ink plume of smoke. Utopia tried too, rerouting their separate transit system to new flight paths higher or lower than the cars’ range, but Saneer-Weeksbooth cars are faster than Utopia’s and chased them down. For one grim day I swear I saw more static in the streets than coats.
The skies are now off-limits. Hate blames O.S., Hiveguard, the Humanists, the Cousins who held the system last, the Mitsubishi who helped design it umpteen years ago, Perry-Kraye, Joyce Faust, but most of all the set-sets. Talk blames all on ‘semi-set-sets’ raised without conscience: Joyce Faust’s creations, the Mardi bash’, Utopia, Mycroft, ‘moral automatons like Eureka Weeksbooth and Sidney Koons.’ Bright Nurturist colors have started appearing on people who aren’t Cousins. Mobs rose in Hyderabad, Durban, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong (they killed Sung Myung, developer of the Rosetta set-set), and worst in Székesfehérvár where set-set rearing is—was—quite an industry, and the violence spread from there to Budapest, where it was barely snuffed by an impassioned appeal from the King of Spain. Anti-Mitsubishi violence didn’t calm so fast. These mobs are smaller but many have set on landlords and their unhappy neighbors, wherever a small Chinatown or Japantown was vulnerable (Korean districts seem to have been spared so far). Dubai was scariest, mass backlash against the slim Mitsubishi majority. It was weird that it felt weird. Vivien’s numbers—or rather Kohaku Mardi’s numbers—foretold ages ago that, when the Mitsubishi owned 67 percent of the land, the Earth would burn, but it still seemed out of place, violence so irrelevant, so unrelated to Joyce Faust, the Prince, the sides the Prince had worked so hard to make. But the Mitsubishi use set-sets, and used O.S., and made the Canner Device, and the Interim Directors still insist they were not wrong to do such things to defend their Members’ interests at the cost of others’, and for any bash’ that’s chafed at rent payments year after year, I guess that’s trigger enough.