They found an appropriate mission for the servants in short order.

Carlos Abello was a social butterfly, the son of a rich businessman, and generally personable. He had a knack for social relationships, putting together his own maps of who dealt with whom when. He tended to talk to everyone, in multiple social circles, being generous overall and rubbing as many elbows as he could. But he'd made a mistake; he'd sent e-mail to one of Paul's servants, asking direct questions about the relationship between Paul's servant and the normals that servant influenced. Reading his e-mail outbox revealed that he'd sent a number of other such messages to other somewhat powerful functionaries in the region, in both the Colombian and Venezuelan governments as well as local trade organizations.

From his abilities there was the temptation to make him an Illuminatus, but the most basic psychological review suggested that he couldn't keep this kind of secret. In the old days he probably would have either been killed, driven subtly insane, or (most commonly) simply fed plausible misinformation and left to rot. With action-control implants it made sense to take him instead, particularly since Paul intended to expand his dominion over the local area and could use another decent schmoozer.

But shortly after he had sent the e-mail, he'd been kidnapped, and satellite recon had traced his captors to a compound thirty miles east of Yopal, in the Colombian state of Casanare. Paul had his locals, even a retroviral or two, but they weren't assassins by profession and it would take almost as long to get them appropriate gear as it would to send the personal servants. The timing was good for a pre-dawn raid; by the time the servants got there, it would be 3 AM local time. Paul and Sarah chose to send them alone, to drive home the point that they were the ones being relied upon and couldn't always look to their masters for help. Giving them lots of help and backup may improve the chances of this raid proceeding well, but it wouldn't help the next one or the ones after that, and those might be of much higher priority than some gang and some would-be servant.

Besides, this was normal stuff. Ruby only worried about one thing, which she asked directly the moment they stepped into Paul's aircraft: "Are you going to try to hit on me out there?"

He gave a casual shrug: Maybe. He went for what he thought was the emotional jugular: "Little girls remain chaste."

She looked at him with contempt emanating from her face, narrowing her eyes and shaking her head. "You'll say anything to try to get into my pants, won't you?" He dropped the subject.

They took the time to review their gear and the target. Their nightvision was not made of goggles, but rather a mostly-transparent layer of plastic over their faces, letting every color pass through except a certain spectrum of orange that it absorbed. That particular wavelength was lit by tiny LEDs in the plastic in response to infrared, giving them an effective way to see heat. Their suits were not only camouflaged, but matched the color and reflection of the local foliage, various leaf-like projections coming from their bodies to break their outlines, not quite a ghillie suit but serving the same purpose. Ruby had brought along a wide variety of knives. Luke had the conductive baseball bats he'd wanted, with the addition of being able to turn them into a large electromagnet. He doubted he'd make use of them today, but they were lightweight and good in a pinch. They left the nuclear weapons at home; strange burn patterns and very long-ranged projectiles would pose too much of a secrecy risk. Normal raiders would have used an assault rifle, but the engineereds wouldn't need long-barreled weapons as they didn't plan on doing any sniping themselves today. Accurate semiautomatic pistols and high-capacity magazines served their purposes much better.

The target was surprisingly fortified. The tiny village of Duncan had once been blessed with electricity, telephone service, and something resembling plumbing, but it'd been abandoned and taken over later; water was pulled in from a different source and the electricity was from a diesel generator, and they used cellular phones because the landline service was long gone. Some buildings were demolished, some foliage was clear-cut to provide fields of vision, and the entire complex was surrounded by a seven-foot fence topped with razor wire, occasionally merged with the walls of existing buildings to save money. This gang was serious and had been at this a while, then, possibly affiliated with FARC; the intelligence wasn't very clear. But it was certain that they would barely be missed if something sudden and violent were to happen to them.

They went to the Atlantic to swap jet and helicopter modes, and came in low, slow, and comparatively quiet, landing the vehicle in a dry creekbed. A cloudy day was bad for satellite reconnaissance, but they had their own sensory equipment to tell them that nobody was here. They left the Enforcer pilot to guard the vehicle and went with the other four Enforcers, silently hiking the uphill mile and a half between themselves and the target, slipping through the thick jungle of long-abandoned coffee farmland. The four Enforcers found sniping positions in the foliage, making a perimeter. They could snipe inwards, but that wasn't how these raids worked; for maximum speed and efficiency, Sarah's ideas always put the fast, dangerous engineereds heading to the center to exterminate, and the Enforcers to the sides to kill anyone who made it out.

They couldn't hide their own heat signature entirely, but their combination of superior binoculars and infrared-sensing faceplates let them see the guards long before the guards could possibly see them. They looked bored, but attentive; the fact that they weren't sky-high or drunk said something for the gang's overall morale. One man even looked worried, as if cursing himself for doing something stupid earlier. But they were just human, and relied on their own eyeballs, lacking nightvision equipment. There was also wind at the engineereds' backs; the combination of visual and aural cover meant that they might be able to evacuate their new target and make it look like he escaped on his own. Less cleanup that way. They turned on the cellphone jammer and started to sneak in.

There was a sense they had forgotten about, one not normally used by humans, and the loud, high-pitched bow-wow-wow-wow let them know what they forgot. Normally, when dogs bark, they are ignored; someone might call the dog back in, a few people might get annoyed. This compound instantly lit up in the first few barks, house lights turning on, the searchlight wavering back and forth. Ruby and Luke shared a sigh. There were things to make them scentless, they just hadn't taken the time to use them, not expecting this kind of response. These people really were serious. It didn't matter; there was always Plan B.

The generator went first, the armor-piercing projectile blasting through the engine block, and the burning machine ground to a halt, shutting down everything that wasn't battery-powered. Bullets proceeded to enter and exit heads, anyone in sight simply eliminated the moment they came into view. Ruby pyrojumped over the fence and Luke took a half-second longer to vault over it, the jagged wire utterly unable to catch on or cut through his clothes.

Doors were opening, now, and through one two men and the barking dog were vislble, the dog rushing out and the men looking for something to aim at. Luke killed the men with headshots, and the dog with a single neck-snapping kick to the throat, which he didn't like doing. He could kill human beings all day every day, but killing a Doberman whose only crime was being loyal to the wrong side made him feel cheap.

They had both been trained in situational awareness. Every sound signifies something, every motion has meaning. There is a difference between the clicks of a telephone, a firearm, and a grenade lever being released. In the immediate chaos, they knew what each sound symbolized. And they could hear everything of significance: panicked footsteps, magazines being shoved into firearms, screaming which threatened to drown everything else out. Ruby tore open the door to the building full of whores, and solved the screaming problem. Now she could better hear where the shots were coming from: men terrified and shooting at nothing, although their AKs were starting to penetrate the building. She left the building the way she had come in and methodically shot them dead, her own steady fire providing rhythm to the cacophony.

But Luke, moreso than Ruby, knew what most of the sounds were from: aggressive males, led to careers of violence by their testosterone, their personalities, and the culture in which they lived. He had been one himself since he was eleven. He found himself predicting what they would do next, seconds before they did it, by their movements and the sounds of their breathing. That guy behind the two houses over there is going to open the gate and run- there he goes, the perimeter Enforcers have him- those three guys are going to blindly shoot from behind cover, but their wooden cover was no match for Luke's penetrating ammo. And that guy in that house over there just gasped in relief as he opened a hinge, which meant that he either found a way out or a larger weapon. Luke kicked the door down, laughed as he realized the hinge was to a somewhat hidden closet, and fired a few rounds in the direction of the faint breathing. Blood oozed out from under the door and the breathing stopped. There was the sound of something being unscrewed outside an open window on the other side of the small house, and the long zzzziiip of a cord being pulled. What the hell was that? Luke dashed to the open window and heard the throw- aha, that was one of those old-style potato-masher grenades. Luke caught it and smiled at the thrower; the young man inhaled and opened his mouth to scream, which was a perfect time for Luke to throw the thin end of the grenade, dart-like, into his open mouth, then immediately dive-roll away. He could hear both the sounds of the explosion and the ensuing tik-tik-splash of human brain and bone.

He kicked open the remains of the damaged wall and swiftly got involved in another gunfight. These people were actually able to put lead in his direction. But it wasn't comparatively fast lead, and he could move away from it before it reached him. The five normals could not do the same with his.

There was another round of screaming, and the sound of a large bonfire. No point in investigating; Luke knew what that was from. Ruby was having a Colombian cook-off. More men were running in that direction, and Luke chose to meet them, surprising them as he left the building. They barely turned before their brains were splattered, Ruby stopping her rush in his direction. Two more were running behind him, sure to fire, and he heard another two running from behind Ruby. Smiling, he decided to aim and fire at the two behind her, so she would fire at the two behind him; he ran at her, and then with a quick step that didn't register as a threat, he was between her arms, and her between his, and then he hugged her tightly, pressing her breasts against his chest. Her first reaction was to aim the guns at his head instead of breaking away, but she had accepted Sarah's training thoroughly and did not fire at allies; he used the opportunity to kiss her, full on the lips.

Perhaps it was the undischarged voltage coursing through his body, but his kiss actually tingled.

Then the moment was gone.

"In the middle of a mission? Really?" she asked.

"So what, they're all dead." Nothing moved.

"Not this one."

She had broken both of the man's arms with one bullet; instead of running he had feigned death, hoping that the strange assassins (who he thought might be American robots) would pass him by. Instead, Ruby grabbed him by the head, and asked where the target was, getting a flood of unintelligible Spanish for her trouble.

"Come on, asshole, you're the leader here, we know you speak English. Where is he?"

Another flood of Spanish, apparently littered with profanity and idioms, in an agonized, accusatory tone.

She sighed. "Donde esta Senor Abello?" she asked, not even bothering to pronounce it properly.

"Es muerto! Estabamos.," he gibbered. One hole in the head later, he became muerto too.

"'If the target's captors say he's dead, attempt to find evidence to verify or disprove that if possible before taking final secrecy measures.'", Ruby intoned. That was the direct colloquial interpretation of one of the guidelines, although she really should have left the guy alive to help prove it.

"I don't think that'll be very hard," Luke said, gesturing to a mound of dirt with a small cross on it, quite visible by the firelight. It looked like the work of people who don't usually bother with burial, but felt they had to this time. Shovels were lain neatly next to the ground. Ruby wanted to bring up something related to secrecy, but knew it would be just an excuse and got to work, wanting but not daring to bring a perimeter Enforcer in to help.

Digging is hard work, even for engineereds, particularly engineereds going as fast as possible. Fortunately the grave was shallow and filled with rocks; apparently they had intended to dig him up later, too.

They were expecting to find his head, and got his feet; the corpse was mostly Caucasian, the feet were well manicured, and the DNA sample quick-checked as him. Luke and Ruby looked at each other, shrugged, and were about to start secrecy procedures when a quick tap-tap came from their communicators: someone is coming.

They pushed the rocks back in with one smooth motion and dragged most of the dirt back in with three more, and retreated to the jungle, Luke reminding himself that he'd pushed his luck already and touching his co-worker's ass right now would probably get him unexpectedly immolated in a couple of days. There are no sexual harassment lawsuits in the Illuminati.

Three minutes later, a man and four Enforcers stepped out of a truck just inside the perimeter.

Javier Garavito did not notice the corpse in the grave. He was too busy looking at the burning buildings and corpses not in graves, forcing down panic, reminding himself that it could have been any number of things. The entire excuse they gave him for Abello's death (and he knew it was just an excuse- they had him) was normal-on-normal violence, after all. Maybe someone here insulted someone's sister. Maybe it was a case of mistaken identity, his group being confused for another. Damn it, and after he'd spent so much time cultivating them, too. He'd given them military weapons, leadership, money, even taught them to train their dogs to bark only at people and not animals. Who the hell could have done this?

Headshots. There were just too many goddamn headshots. He looked around at the corpses, trying to remember if he hadn't seen any of them before- they all looked the same to him, who was he kidding- or possibly blood splatters without an associated body. That would mean that his people had at least scored a hit. Maybe some hero type, someone with training, some bunch of British ex-pats or something, had decided to take the law into their own hands and slipped under the Illuminati's radar.

Besides, he reminded himself, an Illuminated group out here wouldn't leave without torching the evidence first. Maybe they decided not to, this time- or, his face froze in horror when he thought of it- maybe they were still here.

He had just considered what a bad idea bringing his Enforcers out into the open without infrared goggles was when one shot in four places rang out, hitting each of them in the back of the head and splattering him with Enforcer brains. Even before the two grinning teenagers rushed him, he knew he was well and truly fucked, and pressed the 'Oh shit' button he carried.


"Hey Paul, we got you a present!"

Oh, great. Paul was reminded of cats, who would gleefully bring all manner of small rodents to their master's feet. 'Look, look, a dead chipmunk! Aren't you proud of me?'

But Luke had brought home a rather large man instead. 'He's over the limit, throw him back', Paul almost said. Ruby was with him, so there had to be some purpose to this, right? Paul looked between the servants, raised his eyebrows, and shrugged. You two have an explanation, or are you just bringing normals home for dinner? Paul still had no desire to try long pig.

Javier started with bluster. "Illuminatus, I would like to know why I was brought here, of all places, for doing nothing but attempting to acquire a servant."

"Okay," Paul replied, pausing a bit. "Was this servant named Carlos Abello?"

"Yes."

"That's curious. Why didn't you report the acquisition?" Paul's voice was growing more and more inquisitorial. It inspired terror, but Javier kept his bluster up.

"Why didn't you tell me that you'd have people out there?!"

"Carlos was to be an independent acquisition of the operatives' group. Their leader took an interest in him. Since no one else ever made a note regarding him, he was deemed fair game. Had you never attempted to acquire him, you would never have known he was there. But now you're going to make arguments about how it was your area," Paul said, before he could get a chance to say just that. "So I'll let that slide. Luke, I know you're enjoying this interrogation, but tell me more."

"Abello is dead. He was buried by some death squad when we got there. We just found out when this guy showed up."

"Really? Wait, let me make sure I have this right. Did you know he was dead?"

"No! Well, not until they called me, that's why I came!"

"But you knew he was there. Was this death squad directly commanded by you?" It struck Paul that using a death squad for anything other than death was a bit of a misnomer.

"I have no servants in it. They're not owned by me. I use traditional finance methods. They think I'm a businessman." Was 'this is the way we have always done it' really a good argument against secrecy-break accusations?

"They're not registered to him at all," Ruby said casually.

"So instead of doing things the modern way, you ordered a normal group to acquire you a servant, not telling anyone, and not even letting us know you had a relationship because they were 'not owned by you'. And they fucked it up, and killed him," Paul said. He paused a moment. "How many Enforcers do you have?"

"I had four," he said. Luke smiled, and Paul got a pretty good idea of what happened.

"You could have ordered them to do it. It's like you're making a special effort not to let other Illuminati know what you're doing. I wonder what you have to hide?" The clear answer was something. Most Illuminati can keep poker faces pretty well, but as a retroviral Paul saw the tenseness and the facial tics. "You know, this is the Island of the Dominator. Not many people get invited here." No expression of relief in that, no happiness, not even an acknowledgment of the ironic humor.

"He was even more scared when we found him," Ruby said.

"There was dead bodies everywhere, you would have been scared too! Listen, I don't care what you think might be the right way to do everything, but I've been an Illuminatus a lot longer than you have and this is the way to-", he blurted out.

"Shut up," Ruby said, and sent a jet of fire past his eyes. He gasped and shut up completely. "And his Enforcers made no contact moves."

"Really? That's trained and automatic. You must have commanded them not to make contact," Paul said. "I wonder why?"

Sarah got bored and walked out of her room, having listened to the entire exchange. "You know, listening to this was pretty fun for a while, but I have a better question. What were you doing in Bavaria, three hours after you were captured?" she asked.

The look on his face was unmistakable: Oh, shit. Okay, so they were monitoring him, it's cool, he'd rehearsed this in his head. "I have a clone."

"You do? With the same apparent age and everything? Where was he created?"

"It was a deal I had made with Peter Gritzl." He proceeded to go into about two and a half minutes of utter bullshit, involving long-term dealings of which the clone was a small part. It would almost certainly match their publicly-recorded dealings, but there was no fucking way Gritzl or any of the other rogues wouldn't demand loyalty up front for something like that.

William decided that confrontation was the wrong approach and pretended to buy into it, and his brother joined in, all six engineereds hiding their disbelief. They asked him questions which he happily answered with more and more plausible bullshit, managing to avoid contradictions. No, he had absolutely no idea the guy was a rogue, he just thought that he was ahead of the curve with the cloning thing. Well, so what if Northberg didn't have any idea about it, surely there could be more than one medical facility, couldn't there? The location of the medical facility? Why, he had no idea, that was Gritzl's secret. Javier was so glad that the twins understood, but a mutual breaking of the facade was done when Howard grabbed a needle from a small fridge in the closet, handed it to Luke, and said that Javier had earned the retrovirus. Smiles shifted to disbelieving looks; disbelieving looks turned to head shaking; and then a final look of horror was on Javier's face as he realized his bullshit hadn't even been taken seriously.

"It isn't retrovirus, is it," Javier said slowly. He had a strong suspicion it would cause him a great deal of pain, and having seen (and dealt some) torture, he had no interest in experiencing any of it.

"Luke, don't bother," Howard said, as Luke was about to inject him anyway. "This is why there are suicide implants- but you don't have any of those.. do you?" The horror turning to resignation on Garavito's face was enough.

"No, those are only for the servant," William said, a wry smile on his lips. "And you send the servant to the meetings, functions, and committees you don't want to go to, so you can do what you love."

Paul looked at Javier as a man regards a cockroach. Now that they were all telling the truth it was inviting to cut loose. "Why the fuck did you go traipsing around in my backyard? Didn't you think I'd have security measures to deal with your species of nitshit? Did you somehow think it wouldn't reach you? What, did you think I'd stop at a national border or something? Do you think Sarah would? Who the hell do you think you're dealing with, asshole?" Luke started chuckling. Paul turned to the twins. "Duumvirate, your birthday is coming up, but he's my present." Paul slid down the railing. "C'mon, Luke; I'm going to show you how implants work."

"Dominator, this sets a precedent you can never take back!"

"No, trying to kill one of us with a railgun sets a precedent that can never be taken back," William said chillingly as Luke dragged him away. "Implanting the Dominator sets a precedent that can never be taken back. This is just icing on the cake."

"Is it just me, or did we get something handed to us for free?" Howard asked his brother. "Because that, itself, raises suspicions. What was he doing out there?"

"No, it was completely what they were talking about," Sarah said. "They caught him with his pants down, pretty much."

"Or, rather, you caught him in another guessing-game operation," William said pointedly.

"Would you believe it wasn't? I had no idea he was out there until Ruby told me. It's been nearly four years, guys, and Karl and I have been running operations this whole time- and almost ran into someone like him a couple of times, but at least their Enforcers made contact. Don't be so surprised that we find the one that doesn't is a rogue."

"Such idiots. Like that wouldn't raise suspicions," Howard said.

"Oh, I don't think he's that stupid," Sarah said. "He's just used to his own environment. Nobody tells anyone anything, they are laws unto themselves, and controlling normals through bribery is reliable enough for daily use. From his point of view, having Enforcers make contact would be like a beacon saying 'I'm here, come kill me'."

"No no no. Not anymore, Sarah," William said. "The autonomy is fine, the bribery hasn't caused anything but background noise problems, their normals in conflict can be good for secrecy, but we have ordered them to cooperate and talk to each other. Many, many times. Even if they hate each other, we are a group. Anyone who doesn't follow that gets the short end of the stick."

Howard touched his brother's shoulder gently, shaking his head. "They don't see it that way, Billy. Some of them have stopped coming to us because of it. They don't accept each other as allies or even friendly neighbors. They can't help each other up; they're too busy standing on each other's necks," Howard said softly. "And in that region, Paul makes it worse by being socially untouchable. They fight each other, one of them goes to him because they fear us, he gives them an equitable solution and scrapes some off the top, they go back to fighting each other. Retarded, isn't it?"

"C'mon Howie, don't get depressed. Isn't the whole point of having a Dominator so Illuminati don't do too much stupid shit to each other?"

"The problem isn't that they're doing stupid shit; the problem is that they're Illuminati at all. Even the ones who aren't rogues. Paul called it, so let's watch him rip the shit out of this guy's head."

Paul didn't bother with the same kind of theatrics the twins had used on Osama, implanting the man exclusively to himself, giving him the standard commands as if the guy really would be his servant forever. He played the interrogation by the book, gladly spending hours asking questions Enforcers would normally ask, exploring every nook and cranny of the man's knowledge, taking time to deviate from the standard paths when he thought the man might know something else. He used no torture and allowed Javier good food, clean water, and bathroom use; Javier accepted Paul's mercy and answered above and beyond what the implants demanded. The most obvious question of "Who else is in the rogues" was answered with only three names (other than Gritzl, who Javier really had known; Javier's alias was the 'Jack' that 'Bob' had talked about to Sarah) and a lot of pseudonyms; 'Bob' turned out to be another pseudonym and the other two had vanished the moment he had been captured. (Sarah immediately ordered teams to investigate the inevitable empty dwellings, expecting and getting nothing.) The pseudonyms of most of the other rogues were as varied and as well-thought-out as AOL screen names. The leader of the rogues referred to himself as the Black Wizard, a thing that made Paul and the twins laugh in surprise; considering the Illuminati's devotion to science and its color scheme, he was effectively calling himself the Double Nigger.

Other questions such as locations and plans were answered in detail, but most of the information was outdated or useless. The rogues, Paul figured, had suffered a surprising amount of stagnation over the last four years. Most of their plans were never acted on. There was some talk about organizing subgroups to devastate the holdings of engineereds and conventionally seize greater power, but those plans either risked the rogues' secrecy or resulted in one of the rogues losing something of his own and he'd never go through with that. What they really wanted to do was an insurgency, but there was just no way to bring that dynamic to the Illuminati. Javier told him that there was a base, somewhere far and remote, but since he didn't choose to go there he wasn't told where the base was. The implication was that it was somewhere jets and helicopters simply didn't go, and whether that was an underground Antarctic base or somewhere beneath the sea was anyone's guess. 'Bob' had used the word "up" so it might be the Himalayas, a very good place to hide things.

The location of the rogues' server was effectively random and very old school. Every day someone, somewhere, would hook up a server to some part of the normal Internet. Every day, each of the rogues would receive an encrypted message on their own normal-world email address, from a different random source, telling the central server's new location. Since Javier had pressed his 'Oh Shit' button, he was known to be captured and so had all his access instantly revoked and would no longer be sent anything, the server instantly taken offline until it was set up elsewhere.

Paul asked why the 'Oh Shit' button didn't kill him as well, and Javier said he had no intention of killing himself for anything at all.

Then there was the business of the clone. Gritzl really had gotten him that clone, but he had no idea where the clones were manufactured or who had done it, and he didn't even think Gritzl had any idea where they came from even if he hosted a brain copier. Odds were, only the Black Wizard knew, and he gave nothing away. But they learned what the clones were and something of how they worked; somehow the data from Gritzl's reader was copied, neuron by neuron, into the new being. In the process, a sort of biological implants were grafted into the new clone's brain, forcing it to be loyal to its original. At least now they knew how to identify rogue clones, but Javier was quite convinced that there was no way to scan people for them while they were still alive.

Paul had him answer Sarah's questions about the calls he had made, comparing them to Richard Flynt's database. She was satisfied when he confirmed everything as genuine, and more satisfied when he told her the rogues had no idea they'd gotten a hold of the call logs.

It was swiftly agreed that since the rogues knew the engineereds knew some of their secrets, there was no sense in not letting everyone else know too. Publicizing the information would, according to Javier, be devastating to some of the rogues' mentalities. "Hey, Javier? If we tell them that we learned who you were from Bob and not your own stupidity, think that might break them up a bit?" Paul asked.

"It.. could, if you knew their personalities and how to talk to them.."

"Well, you do! So you're going to help us write a press release telling everyone exactly that, in words they'll believe. Not right this instant. See, Javier, I like what you have, and although your rogue friends might know you're taken, they're not talking. So I'm pretty sure I can take your holdings before anyone else jumps on them, because I now have somebody who knows all about them and can take care of them for me. You don't get anything for guessing who that is."

"You can't do this," Javier said faintly.

But Javier was a rogue. They could do anything to him without any real risk of retaliation. "Just so you know," Paul said in a very gentle and kind voice, patting Javier on the shoulder, "you and your old friends aren't in a position to tell me what I can or can't do. Luke! Escort your new co-worker back home and help him integrate with my structure, and he can help write that release on the way out. Oh, and Javier? Unless it contradicts me, do what Luke says." Crestfallen, the new servant shuffled along as Luke, grinning, led him out of the room. "Good boy." The other engineereds watched the two leave, Luke hoisting the man into the jet-helicopter easily.

Sarah started clapping and gestured for her servant to start doing the same. The twins followed shortly thereafter. Paul turned and looked at them in startlement, his eyes widening as they clapped with inhuman speed nearly as hard as they could, creating a cacophony even through their gloves, for fifteen seconds straight before dying down.

"It's still bad politics to promote you, but that was a first level performance," William said.

"If you worried about your skills before, know this: You are doing it right," Sarah added.

"I'm sure you won't publicize all of this, but that should be in a how-to manual," Ruby said diffidently.

Howard just smiled at him. No more words were needed. The rogues were humiliated, the twins had gained ground in their war, and Paul was finally what he had strove to become.