Her blink glittered with tears. “I said he was our son.”
“It’s the truth, Merion,” Headmaster Faust interrupted, signaling me to refill his sherry. “I ran the DNA myself, twice. Has it not occurred to you that, thanks to modern science, there are ways a sperm and egg can meet other than the customary dick up vagina?”
Kraye froze a moment. “No. No, it was Ganymede, their incest…”
Faust rolled his eyes. “Look at the child, you idiot. The twins are genetic duplicates. Except for one Y-chromosome swapped in, Dana? and Ganymede are the same lifeform. Their child would be practically a clone of Ganymede. Does Carlyle Foster look like a clone of Ganymede to you?”
Kraye’s flinch was painful to see, doubt flaring torture-sharp where doubt had seemed impossible. I knew that feeling. “Artificial insemination?”
“True love would have stayed true, Merion.” Dana? held his eyes with hers, as deep and deadly as the sea. “I said I was with child, and a true love would have sworn to keep on loving me regardless, to the world’s end. Then I would have revealed that the child was yours after all, and we would have had our happily forever. That’s what I’d planned. But I mistook the false lover,” she practically spat the words in Kraye’s face, “for the true,” a warm squeeze of her steady husband’s hand. “I never claimed you tried to force yourself upon me, Merion. I said you tried to kill me, which you did. And our child. And when they stopped you, you went mad with rage, and swore to burn the whole world down.” Dana? rose to her feet, and faced her former lover with so calm and strong and fixed a gaze that all within the circle held our breaths. “You stole the Seven-Ten list, didn’t you? You climbed the ranks enough to learn about O.S., and now you’ve exposed it because you want to see my husband and my brother burn, and you don’t care if you burn with them.”
Threat to her own woke Chair Kosala from her shocked silence. “Is this true?”
The Prime Minister slouched within his stiff suit, like a man relieved of an old weight. “The Japanese Mitsubishi made the Canner Device, by the way. It’s not just a stealth device, it’s designed to remote access the Tracker System’s main computers.”
“You did it?” Kosala stepped forward. “You stole the Seven-Ten list? You admit it?”
Perry-Kraye laughed as he relaxed at last. “Why shouldn’t I admit it? I’ve done the world a favor! While you hypocrites are here debating how best to cover this up for the public good, I’ve scattered enough proof that the lot of you together can’t even slow it down. The world will know. The Humanists are guilty, the Mitsubishi, the rotten heart of Europe, guilty! The four of us, Andō, the twins, and I, and all our filthy allies, we’ll all go down together as we deserve, the rest of you will suffer through the aftermath, and no one can stop it, no one!” He raised his eyes to MASON, past MASON to the subtle, silent matriarch hiding behind her fan. “Not even you, Madame.”
Carlyle’s breath sped to the edge of panting. “That’s your revenge? You’re trying to expose the truth about the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash’?”
“And the Canner Device. Don’t imagine for a moment that Andō isn’t the worst of all! The three-way assassination alliance wasn’t enough for Japan, they had to develop something they could use against their allies too. That’s what the device really is! Using the tracker system like the transit system. I had the device for years and I could barely tap its simplest functions. You can’t blame it on your predecessors, Andō, not when the set-sets trained to use the device all call you father!”
Wrath-blush rose in Andō’s cheeks as he felt the others’ stares.
“The tracker system…” Carlyle broke the hush. “They were tapping it, today, the Mitsubishi kids, I saw them! They were tracking me through it. And they were asking about the Canner Device too. Julia said they had a name for themselves … Oniwaban set-sets?”
Shock held them all, but I saw a different kind of shock and hurt on golden Ganymede. “O.S.…”
“My children are not set-sets.” Andō was too dignified to bellow, but his words had the same shock-force. “They were deprived of that, ripped out of training by rabid Cousins, Lorelei Cook and their Nurturist zealots. The children were torn from their computers, their senses half remapped, scattered to the corners of the Earth.” He had a black look for Kosala. “A child has a right to grow up with its ba’sibs. I gave them that, gathered them back together when I learned how my predecessor, who ordered their training, had abandoned them to the false mercy of your Cousins. As strat-leader, I owed those children nothing less than the home you stripped them from.”
Carlyle was breathing even faster now. “They asked Julia to help them find the Canner Device. No, Canner’s prototype, that’s what they called it, like there was another. You’ve been using your own Canner Device!”
“No one can use the Canner Device!” Andō shot back. “No one ever has, and no one ever will, the training process was lost when Lorelei Cook’s Nurturists destroyed the training bash’. Kraye is just trying to spit every kind of poison they can here, lie or truth. They’re trying to splinter us. They know we can still turn the tide back if we work together.” Andō faced Perry-Kraye head on, his gaze as black as ash. “Trying to tear down three Hives because you were too cowardly to face an honorable duel.”
“Not three Hives! The world!” the Outsider shrieked back. “This whole world is rotten to its heart! Look at yourselves! Madame has sucked us all into playing these idiotic roles humanity should have outgrown centuries ago!” Kraye was in his element now, strutting like an actor who had rehearsed his lines too long. “I haven’t been plotting revenge for twenty-eight years for nothing. The first five years I was in a blind rage, working my way back from nothing, through crime, through politics, all so I could earn entrance back here, kill Andō and Ganymede in front of Dana?, then hack out the bitch’s heart. But then I realized they aren’t the cause. It was Madame who made us into this. Look at you, prancing around in skirts and holding the door for ladies! Even you!” He faced Carlyle at last. “The most powerful administrations in the world did everything in their power to keep you out of all this, yet here you are in a monk’s robe running errands in a salon. You were born here and you should have died here, and that’s not the worst! The worst is us.” He waved to Andō and seething Ganymede. “The leaders of three of the seven Hives caught up in a stupid love revenge cycle. It’s absurd! Madame’s turned me into the fucking Count of Monte Cristo, and there’s nothing I can do about it except to make sure my revenge doesn’t just destroy my betrayers, but also the system that did this to the world!”
“Leaving what behind?” Carlyle stepped forward, bold, though not without glancing to silent Dominic—for what, reassurance? “What’s supposed to happen to the world after you destroy it? You haven’t thought about that, have you, Father?”
“Don’t call me that!” Kraye snapped. “I have no interest in talking to the poison that started all this.” He knocked Carlyle aside. “This is about us, Andō. Me, and you, and your mad, psychotic whore, and their whore brother!”
“Kraye!” The Duke broke free of Andō’s grip at last. He seized the Prime Minister by his embroidered lapels, and pressed the hairpin’s point against his throat. “You can’t have thought this would end any other way.”