A faint but all-encompassing shiver passes through the old man like a tree-shaking wind. Then it's gone -- the tree resettles, a few leaves less than before.

That was his last show of fear, now he sucks it all back into himself.

Behind you, a hundred black-and-white faces regard you with the sublime indifference of the dead.

He seems to be perplexed by his own question.

It's hardly news. The Opera did not drag you back into the field to live a long and productive life.

Meat dragged out of the freezer starts going bad the minute it is done thawing.

The images come to you, one by one.

Prison, torture, madness, a bullet to the temple. A variety of fates, and history repeating itself.

Unfortunately, he's right.

No sense in lying at this point.

CARVE THE NAME OF THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLICS INTO HIS MEMORY AND HIS FOREHEAD.

Understanding dawns on his features, and with it something like peace.

An echo from your first meeting with the prisoner.

No mocking inflection in his voice. He's asking honestly.

He's really outdoing us in the mystique department here. We're going to need a sick line before we slab him.

Best to engage your subject first. Get into his soul. You can't rush quality.

Enough fooling around. Drop the false livery. Let the Operant Bureau's anthem play him off the world-stage.

A pointless series of little gestures meant somehow to communicate death-readiness.

Seeing something beyond, or absent from, his immediate surroundings.

Each new sentence is appended to the puzzle of the preceding ones.

SUBVERSIVE MURMURINGS INTENDED ONLY TO CONFUSE THE PEOPLE'S SPY. DISREGARD.

The feeling of a rug being ripped from under your feet. Beneath there is no floor, only void.

He is the hiss in the tapped phone, the thud of boots in the hallway, the unmarked car and the form letter to next of kin with the bill for the bullet.

HERE COMES TECHNO-FASCIST DAREDEVIL.

As the old man speaks, a little bubble of doubt rises up from your subconscious and bursts through the surface of your awareness.

Your would-be asset Ignatz wasn't far off. All's not right in the enemy camp.

Imprint-on-imprint violence. You're in the middle of an old mind attacking itself.

You suddenly picture Melita, Luzian features behind her clipped, trained Kohilan accent, smiling to herself as she manipulates you from a control room just across the Noscorrentes.

Stop, stop, stop. This is getting phantasmagoric. Your controller is right where she belongs, in Novessa, five-thousand kilometres away.

Stay calm. Even if the Opera's purposes dovetail with those of the Weeping Eye, it makes no difference to your mission.

Overdetermined, like so much else in the smashed and leaking world.

This old fool just wants to live. He's just trying to get under your skin.

It makes no sense -- Melita wouldn't have you jumping through hoops to obtain the Lich's itinerary if she had a direct line to the Weeping Eye. And yet...

Simple, obvious. The only way it could be.

With that, one of the final loose pieces slots into place.

The sacrifice. Centrepiece in a ritual orchestrated around it, but not for it.

More than him. His face registers nothing, not even the acknowledgement that he has been shot.

A rustling sound, like a bag of dry leaves.

A soul vacating the premises.

What was that about a 'body double'?

A useless death. A small, fleshy monument to futility.

ONE TECHNO-FASCIST DOWN. THREE HUNDRED MILLION REMAIN.

Just fuck his body off the cliff. Let the boars have him.

There is no 'occasion'. Nothing has happened. All is right with the world.

Say the line again. It will hit harder this time, for sure.

Maybe you can redeem your line from earlier. Maybe this will tie it all together.

No parade, and no funeral, either.

Sky burial by seabirds. The gulls will pick the scant papery skin from his bones.

Milk fills the glass of his eyes.

Distrust. Then relief. Then an even greater mistrust.

Checks