God-eater and his friends, however many of them there were or weren’t, must’ve been a cell like that, one of however many units in what they called the Republic of Desire. And if they were really going to go ahead and do the thing for him, he figured there were three reasons: they hated the idea of San Francisco getting rebuilt because they liked an infrastructure with a lot of holes in it, they were charging him good money—money he didn’t have—and they’d figured out a way to do something that nobody had ever done before. And it was that last one that had really seemed to get them going, once they’d decided to help him out.