"I can understand why you'd be nervous about ditching your suits, but they're just that, suits. At some level, they're all interchangeable, mercenary parts. You want someone to watch the bottom line, but not someone who'll run the show. If that's not these guys, hey, that's cool. Find a couple more suits and run them." "Jesus, you really *are* Yoko, aren't you?" Lester was wearing his boxers and a bleary grin, standing in the living room's doorway where Hilda had stood a minute before. It was past 6AM now, and there were waking up sounds through the whole condo, toilets flushing, a car starting down in the parking lot. "Good morning, Lester," Hilda said. She smiled when she said it, no offense taken, all good, all good. "You fired who now, Perry?" Lester dug a pint of chocolate ice-cream out of the freezer and attacked it with a self-heating ceramic spoon that he'd designed specifically for this purpose. "I got rid of Kettlewell and Tjan," Perry said. He was blushing. "I would have talked to you about it, but you were with Suzanne. I had to do it, though. I had to." "I hate what happened to Death Waits. I hate that we've got some of the blame for it. But, Perry, Tjan and Kettlewell are part of our outfit. It's their show, too. You can't just go shit-canning them. Not just morally, either. Legally. Those guys own a piece of this thing and they're keeping the lawyers at bay too. They're managing all the evil shit so we don't have to. I don't want to be in charge of the evil, and neither do you, and hiring a new suit isn't going to be easy. They're all predatory, they all have delusions of grandeur." "You two have the acumen to hire better representation than those two," Hilda said. "You're experienced now, and you've founded a movement that plenty of people would kill to be a part of. You just need better management structure: an executive you can overrule whenever you need to. A lackey, not a boss." Lester acted as though he hadn't heard her. "I'm being pretty mellow about this, buddy. I'm not making a big deal out of the fact that you did this without consulting me, because I know how rough it must have been to discover that this wickedness had gone down in our name, and I might have done the same. But it's the cold light of day now and it's time to go over there together and have a chat with Tjan and Kettlewell and talk this over and sort it out. We can't afford to burn all this to the ground and start over now." Perry knew it was reasonable, but screw reasonable. Reasonable was how good people ended up doing wrong. Sometimes you had to be unreasonable.