Time passed.

What had been fast, hard paranoia turned into a slow simmer. Facing a dead end in all available investigation, the twins couldn't start randomly raiding anyone who they thought might be a rogue, because that would make more enemies than it discovered and lead directly to what they were trying to prevent; the rogues couldn't attack again because (most Illuminati figured) they risked discovery and almost certainly didn't have the materiel to make it effective against powerful autocannons, fusion lasers, and engineered reflexes. Cold war. Zugzwang.

Being in an indefinite Mexican standoff was mildly frustrating, but the twins reminded themselves that time was on their side. Every day, the rogues grew older and the young engineereds grew up. As biological immortals, all they had to do was wait, and no fusion laser nor engineered fist would solve the problem for them, but rather heart disease, kidney failure, and brain cancer.

Unless. And there was always an unless. Unless the enemies had their own generation, raised in secret away from Northberg. Unless the enemies were developing their own superweapons, out of sight of the Consortium. Unless the enemies had found a way to make themselves immortal and would come back for more in fifty years, long after the End of Secrecy had been declared and everyone thought they were a distant memory. A Sword of Damocles above the heads of those fast enough to dodge it.

But in the absence of any concrete moves by either side, it became less and less relevant on a day-to-day basis. The twins occasionally requested that Illuminati tighten certain things up to stop rogues from misusing resources, some of the "I can help you" promises turned out to be real help for security in specific settings, and nobody ever started the firestorm of accusations, even anonymously. The two-as-one nature of the Duumvirate was accepted without further protest, with some joking from Levels about how they'd be able to deal with twice the bullshit now. It didn't turn out that way; the twins made all their decisions together and the middle-aged soul manipulators got used to being told what to do by two white-haired preteens instead of just one.

The jet arrived sooner than expected, less than three weeks after they had requested it. Daniel and his father were, as usual, already working on new prototype parts and had originally intended to build something much more grandiose in scope. With the Dominator making formal demands, they immediately crammed down their development and pieced together what they had. The process was an arduous blend of computer simulations, neural-network analysis, Enforcer work, and the truly hard part: testing, testing, testing. Nothing short of absolute perfection would suffice, as if the jet failed on the Duumvirate at a critical moment, the Westhams would be no more and no one would mourn. Eventually they had something worthy of the Duumvirate, Daniel doing Mach 4 barrel rolls with glee before he delivered it to the twins personally. As a combination of luxury craft and deadly fighter, it was similar to their original, but larger, faster, and with more powerful and more focused lasers, with three redundant fusion chambers instead of just one. The seating area was larger as well; a dozen people could be placed in the back before it started getting crowded. They'd send future iterations of their craft to the Duumvirate in the future, but this would serve for now, and they made smaller jet-helicopter counterparts for many younger Levels, Paul and Sarah among them.

The twins agreed that if they were waiting for something to happen, it was probably the best waiting in the history of mankind; they lived on an island paradise with their girlfriend and best friend, ruling the world and doing more or less whatever they wanted whenever they wanted. When they got it into their heads to see the Aurora Borealis up close, they went ahead and did it. When they felt like jetskiing in stormy waters at two hundred miles an hour, their custom-made fusion jetskis were delivered in less than a week from the (now very popular) Westham family. When they wanted any sort of media, they downloaded it in seconds if it wasn't already on their database. When they wanted a movie or game that didn't exist, they suggested an outline to one of the more artistically creative Illuminati and had it in a couple of weeks, with the item being placed on the database as "Dominator-requested!" And, sometimes, when they just wanted to relax, they unfurled a gigantic white towel on the beach and laid there, the four of them swapping anecdotes and laughing at life's daily absurdities. All four had ongoing duties and responsibilities, but generally the days were just packed.

June fifteenth was Paul's thirteenth birthday, and because he was having his party here on the Dominator's island, he was able to invite as many young Illuminati as he wanted and have them drop everything to attend. For fun, the twins and Sarah decided to be somewhere else for most of it; since most of the kids who had showed up really just wanted to talk to the Duumvirate and not the Duumvirate's normal-born fifth-level friend, a few of them were left squirming as they tried to explain away what they were searching for. Paul, smiling in the hypocrisy, explained to them that the personage of the Dominator was not anyone's political tool. Some of the smarter ones truthfully said that they wanted to get to know Paul better, and they played conversational cat-and-mouse as the kids subtly looked for ways to get on the twins' good side. Most of them decided it was a good idea to try to be Paul's friend as well, even if he was just some elevated normal. Paul played the gracious host and the beach was filled with smiling, laughing kids, with a number of beach volleyball games being played. Jeremy's servant played this time, as he didn't last year; he turned out to be better than he thought, even if he got generally demolished. The twins and Sarah walked in while they were eating dinner, and suddenly there was a tumult of greetings; the twins asked how everyone liked Paul's thirteenth birthday party, and refused to answer anything relating to themselves, to their amusement and the attendees' great vexation. All in all, it was great fun, and Paul made a number of real friends.

Summer turned to autumn, and autumn to winter (Sarah, at fifteen, didn't do the birthday thing); a hundred miles from the Oregon coast, all they got for a climate difference was a slight chill with rain and more rain. They didn't mind at all. What normals would consider dreary, they just considered another part of their paradise, climbing trees and sitting on top of the central cliff even when it poured. They watched the American election fiasco with mild amusement, as the de-facto owner of America, Donald Simpson, played with the political system, convincing normals that their votes actually mattered. The twins had more fun discovering that rocket-powered sleds really could be made to work without killing their riders.

They rang in the twenty-first century, and although the Illuminati didn't care for the Christian calendar very much, it was still a reason to celebrate as the organization now spanned four centuries. They'd come a long way from their initial, silly rituals and desperate, often-unsupported normal manipulation. In the modern era, controlling the world had become a science, they no longer had much to worry about, and having flourished so well in the twentieth century they had so many things to be happy for. If it wasn't for the existence of rogues (presumed; no one had heard from them in the past eight months), it would have been perfect.

Winter gave up to spring, and finally a full year had elapsed since the group was unimplanted. The twins joked about chronicling everything they had done in that year; it would have been utterly impossible to write and interminable to read. There was the time one of the island's secret servants utterly fucked up and was standing in the center room dumbfounded as the twins came back in unexpectedly; they told him to "Return to your trainer in shame!" while laughing. There was the time Fido got it into his doggy head to sit at the table; the twins indulged him although he failed to learn table manners and most of his meal ended up on the floor. (To Fido's credit, he never tried it again.) There was a convoluted five-way round-robin of holdings wants and needs, and the twins finally managed to get all five of the unwitting participants to make a mutual agreement. There was the time Sarah had two Illuminati trying to hire her to kill each other's gangs of Russian thugs; she considered starting a bidding war, but realized that technically the requests weren't in direct opposition and so she killed both groups off. And it took almost the whole year for Paul to finally, truly learn to take Wilfred's place.

Then the twins had their own thirteenth birthday, on which they got a variety of useful presents, most notable being Daniel's gift of fusion laser/shotguns, the latter molded on as a sort of grenade launcher to the former, direct microfusion initiation replacing the older plutonium. Since both triggers were next to each other, they could each wield two for maximum devastation. All they didn't have on their birthday was Paul with them; he couldn't be invited because he couldn't possibly keep up with what they had planned. Their friendship was solid enough for them to simply tell it like it was and for him to simply accept it; they were engineereds, after all, and if what they had in mind was a globe-spanning series of adventures in a variety of bizarre and unlikely locations including Tierra del Fuego and the inside of a dormant volcano, he had no business trying to tag along or discourage them. They did what they felt like doing. That was the whole point.

And when they decided that they wanted to drop in on one of their friends unannounced, they did that, too.