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“Been hot on the Palatine and Venus for years,” Screwface says. “I slipped Atalantia a full dose of methracene, and all she got was a brief bout of bloody emesis.”

The Yellow plods on. “While we cannot divine if he has razor-pattern calluses owing to the burns on his hands, he has never borne a Peerless Scar. There is no sign of facial skin grafting or bone reconstruction to cover an existent one. His wounds are consistent with his story. His brain scans do not show signs of Securitas conditioning; however, his limbic system has some unusual synaptic activity which may be signs of childhood trauma and memory repression but would require additional analysis to render conclusive. Overall, he is an extremely healthy adult Aureate between eighteen and twenty-three years old.”

“So what you are all saying is that he is telling the truth. Or lying very well,” I say. “Let’s find out which. Screw, I want your eyes on this.”

ALTERATION IN VOCAL PATTERNS

, unnatural stillness, timing lag between verbal statements and physical expression, distancing language, linear left eye drift, abnormal gesticulation, extraneous overexplanation, pupil dilation, swallowing, grooming gestures, head canting, pulse rapidity, irregular blinking.

These are some of the most obvious symptoms of lying that are drilled into Securitas agents in order to drill them out. To become a full-fledged Venator or frumentarius, one must have a ninety percent success rate in telling a lie to an instructor. Of course, I passed Grandmother’s exam when I was six.

So it is with droll amusement that I stare down the optic reader of their robotic lie detector and think nothing much of it. It is profoundly large, almost the size of a small man, chrome, spherical, floating, with a hulking red eye. It is grandiosely named BloodHound XTC-1400, a product of Sun Industries, which no doubt cost Skyhall billions in research and development money to old Regulus. I can understand the investment. In a war where each side wields hundreds of thousands of informants and covert agents, it is as good as a guillotine.

But for all this new civilization’s love affair with technology, they’ve been seduced by their own cleverness and fail to understand the simple truth: lying is not a science, it is an art. And art will always be a human language.

I was under observation when we rose over the city wall under heavy fire; when Darrow jumped out with Alexandar bleeding everywhere; when they took me on a stretcher to their medBay; when they treated my burns and wounds; when they asked me questions while I was drugged with narcotics; when I showered; when I ate steak, potatoes, and greens laced with some mild inhibition inhibitor in my saferoom; when armed guards escorted me to be interviewed casually; when I gave a formal interview to two ethereal Pinks; when a handsome Gold Howler interrogated me; when I used the restroom; and when I walked through the hall to sit in this white room for two hours as their little toy investigated my story.

They are not measuring lies now. They are cross-referencing current patterns with “normal” patterns from their recordings by asking a mix of old and new questions. It is a fruitless endeavor.

“How did you come to be captured by the Gorgons?”

“I stepped on a landmine while trying to put your men out of their misery.”

“You killed them?”

“One. Have you ever seen a man impaled?”

“You did not try to save their lives?”

“Have you ever seen a man impaled?”

“How did you kill them?”

“With a scorcher.”

“What type?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where did you get it?”

“It was my father’s.”

“And you do not know the type?”

“It was a pistol.”

“What are the names of your parents?” the machine asks in the fifteenth line of inquiry about my parents. It is the first time it has asked for their names.

“Actus au Salan and Leticia au Vitruvius.” Real people. Real family. Paid off upon the three visits I made to Mercury to substantiate my identity. Thank Jove Grandmother was paranoid of assassination.

I would be concerned if I didn’t know that years ago, when my grandmother died, my godfather activated a protocol which erased the census records of all Golds, fearing the Rising would use the list as an assassination tool. Their sole verifier for my tale is a man wildly popular with the lowColors of Mercury and invaluable to their cause, who is no doubt being questioned in another room in a much less menacing fashion as to whether he knows Cato au Vitruvius.

Glirastes will be shocked to hear the name. But when he does, he will know I am alive. And that man has never wished harm upon me. Even if they press him, a partial truth is hard to detect as a lie, because it comes from memory instead of the creative center of the brain. An entirely different physiological reaction. In any case, artists are fantastic liars.

“When did you first meet Glirastes?”

“In Tyche at his offices.”