He was already shaking. “Not dangerous? Mycroft Canner!”
I gave Bridger my kindest smile through the crack of the closet door, then backed to the far side of the room, keeping my empty hands where Carlyle could see them, and my eyes on the floor.
“A Servicer!” Carlyle repeated. “Servicers are supposed to be … not … not…” He turned on me, more comfortable when he could point a finger. “You! You tortured seventeen people to death! You videoed yourself vivisecting Mercer Mardi! You crucified your foster ba’pa! You dismembered a thirteen-year-old child and left them a limbless torso to freeze to death in the Arctic! Ibis Mardi was in love with you, and you beat them until they begged for death, then raped them, and cooked and ate their arms and legs while they were still alive! Are you smiling?”
“Sorry.” I try my best to remain expressionless during such outbursts. “Everyone has one among the seventeen they think was worst. I’d guessed that Ibis would be yours.”
“You ripped out their still-beating heart and ate it!”
“It stopped beating,” I corrected softly. “I tried it seven times, but I could never get the heart out fast enough. I think that art is lost now, in our peaceful age.”
Carlyle’s breath sped as the passions of those days surged back. Carlyle would have been, what … fifteen back then? Preparing to move from his foster bash’ to a Campus, finding his vocation, that impressionable age when we first solidify our morals. I was formative for him, then, the primordial evil of his personal creation myth, my grim two weeks. My rampage. “Mycroft Canner!” He could not repeat the name without a shriek. “You’re the worst … the most…” Words failed but he did not need them; all Earth knows what I am. “You were supposed to be … gone! Locked away somewhere safe forever or … or…”
“Executed?” I finished for him. There was a Mycroft Canner once who would have swelled with pride knowing he made a Cousin call for blood. “When the Hive leaders agreed to let MASON keep my sentence secret so the public could stop obsessing over the matter, you assumed I had been executed. Everybody did. It never occurred to you they would conceal mercy.”
Carlyle had no more words, just horror and its siblings: panic, anger, fear.
“Look, Carlyle.” Thisbe donned her gentlest smile. “I know it’s a shock, but there’s no danger. The Servicer Program handles criminals that aren’t dangerous anymore, to let them serve the public good. Sometimes that means serious criminals too.”
“You knew!” Carlyle turned on her almost as fiercely as he had turned on me. “You knew and you didn’t warn me! You let Mycroft Canner into your … into … And near…”
She gave a tired glare. “You were content enough to sit with a Servicer not knowing what they did. You knew they might have been a murderer.”
“Mycroft Canner is not just a murderer!”
Ockham opened the door now, but with Boo and Bridger safely in the closet there was no further danger. “Thiz, do you have the gag order file on hand?”
“Oh, yes, I’ll pull it up.” Her lenses flickered.
The guardian of the house turned to Carlyle. “Cousin Foster,” he began, “we are not responsible for Mycroft Canner’s sentence, and have no more power to affect it than you do. Chair Kosala personally signed off on Mycroft’s admission to the Servicer Program. If you have doubts, Kosala will give you an appointment, just like they gave us when we discovered.”
Carlyle’s eyes only grew wilder. “Kosala knows? That’s right, Kosala oversaw the trial to make sure it was humane.” In Carlyle’s face, one could see the horrors of those days awakening in phases. Some readers will remember my two weeks, the hush upon the streets, the fear, the dread-zeal with which you watched each morning for the news to bring you some fresh horror. Only the mildest pictures appeared at breakfast time: a stain, a shrouded body, but by lunch or dinner there would be leaked images, real gore, real red, real faces contorted by emotions only torture can awaken. For two weeks no one on Earth walked home alone. I know you remember. Even in old age, when names and precious faces start to fade, you will pass again a corner where your classmates huddled whispering of me, and you’ll remember.
“Kosala always knew…,” Carlyle repeated, only half-believing.
“Found it, Ockham,” Thisbe confirmed with a last lens flicker. “Sent.”
Another flicker as it arrived in Carlyle’s lenses. “What … Servicer Protection order?”
Ockham planted himself before the sensayer, his right hip tipped away so Carlyle would not be tempted to rip the gun from his holster and take the long-delayed revenge himself. “Mycroft’s sentence and identity are confidential. You can understand the high risk of retributive violence if the word got out. This file has details about the offices in charge, and under what circumstances Mycroft’s identity can be discussed. We’re under the same order, and it is not in my authority to change it.”
“They don’t let you warn people? A Servicer, they could go anywhere! People need to know!”
Ockham crossed his arms, his bronzed skin striped with Lesley’s fresh doodles. “That’s for the Servicer Program to judge, not us.”
Carlyle backed away, as if the bedpost and nightstand would shield him from my evil. “I won’t believe for a second that that monster isn’t dangerous!”
I heard (and Ockham may have too) the stir of Bridger in the closet, fighting to keep himself from leaping to my defense. Poor child. The Cousin’s rant was nothing new to me, but the thought of Bridger listening, his sweet heart longing to defend me, that stung. I know your thoughts, reader. Bridger is thirteen, he was an infant or unborn when thy victims appeared day after blood-filled day. He does not understand, so, foolish innocent, he trusts thee. Unforgiving reader, do you think you know me better than the child I raised?
Carlyle thought he did. “Mycroft Canner is the worst criminal in a hundred years! Two hundred years!” My lost self might have called this flattery.
Ockham stood so calmly through the outburst, watching hysteria drain the color from Carlyle’s pale face. It made me think of Alexander, of his force, the human thunder of our Mediterranean sweeping through deserts, through empires, but India, calm, mighty India, fears nothing. “I am not authority over the Servicer Program, but I am authority within this house, and—”
“The cars!” Carlyle cried. “This house! The cars! Can’t you see it? Mycroft Canner near the cars, they’re planning it again, mass murder on a grander scale!”
I am not a mass murderer. I faced my victims personally, one by one. But this was not the moment to correct him.
“I am authority within this house,” Ockham repeated, “and you will control yourself.”
“Mycroft Canner is the most dangerous person in the world!”
Thisbe reached for Carlyle’s shoulder. “You’re being hysterical.”
“Don’t touch me!” he jumped back. “You let them into your bash’! It’s just the same! That’s what they do, Thisbe, they charmed their way into the Mardi bash’ and then…”
“It’s not the same.”
“Seventeen people, Thisbe! They hacked pieces off of Luther Mardigras for five days before they burned them alive in a wicker man! Burned what was left of them!”
It is fascinating which details people get wrong. To be fair, with Luther I had left the least behind for forensics.
“I have to go,” I said without raising my eyes. “I have a call I cannot disobey.”
“Not that excuse again!” Carlyle cried, then cried again, “The Censor’s office! Mycroft Canner was in the Censor’s office!”
“Take a deep breath, Carlyle.”
“Mycroft Canner forced the last Deputy Censor to disembowel themself with a piece of bamboo!”