Alvaro Benedetto

One way or another, we are leaving this place tonight. And I think it will be my way. Andreas is helping me for his own motives, and I'm not stupid enough to have missed that. But ask me if I care, right now. We will be in Britannia tomorrow.

I cannot believe I didn't recognise Signorina Leffoy when I first set eyes upon her. The Process should have made that impossible. But of course, she has been through a version of the Process herself, albeit before she was born. And she is very much the child of Starn and Gloriana Dee, though in a sense, she is more Donal Macmillan’s child than either of theirs. She is brighter and more competent than either of her parents. But not appreciably saner.

She reminds me of Antonetta Sforza. She has a sense of morality, and she accomplishes her goals. But she is just as badly damaged. She was a brilliant harmonic theorist before she became a gunslinger. The world will need that woman again when the war is over; I do believe that she may understand what was done to us. How do I keep her from getting her brains blown out over card games before then? I couldn't even control my own daughter.

an'ti•cli•mac'tic (-klī-māk'tĭk) adj.: the feeling one gets when arriving in Tsaritsyn only to discover that von Thorwald's men have done the better part of the job that you went there to do.

It was a shame that Andrei and I couldn't have that conversation I'd been putting off for a while now. The house had been thoroughly looted of silver and crystal and expensive bric-a-brac, but the contents of the filing cabinets had failed to impress whoever took out the inhabitants. Some of the papers had been creatively fouled, but all the information I could have got from the files was still there. I didn't even have to fire my weapon.

Apparently von Thorwald's men have not been informed that I've terminated my employment. They were using the house next door as a base of operations. I might have suggested to them that Andrei's house had better defences, but I seem to have triggered a few of them. The collateral damage was rather impressive.

The Académie de Ker-Ys was less disappointing, but de Valois is gone, Callebaut was full of mystical crap like he usually is, and all the really promising students have been transferred. Miss Juliana de Marigny—whom I had hoped, once, to protect—is of course long dead.

Albrecht really is a fucking idiot.