The council is uninterested in his beetles. That is the first lesson.
Instead, they, having gathered along the rectangular table with the duke—no, no, he holds a cigar; this is his double, surely, but what was his name again?—at the head like a reluctant patriarch, plan out the future of the city, dividing up it ruthlessly. The right throat is cut after their meeting, a knife in the dark for another. Pins on a map, all falling into place. A fortune opens up to be seized by the city; a stubborn nobleman, blocking the control of land development, falls, drunken, from his balcony and no one thinks the better of it.
Kirin finds the quarrels, squabbles really, between Paolo and Vice Overseer Byrne hilarious, but at the corner of the table, at the hard edge, Breanna looks as though she'd like to stab them both. Byrne matches her with a glance of disdain every time she speaks: a matter of raised eyebrows and lips twisted in disgust. Oh, they'd sooner kill each other, but only the knowledge that they'd be quickly found out stays their hands. Thus, an uneasy alliance between Breanna and Paolo forms.
"Byrne would purge the city at a moment's notice," Breanna tells Kirin, not as an equal but in the way one would tell a pet, secure in the knowledge that her confidence would not be broken. "And then he'd sleep easy. Would that I could only get few strands of his hair! I could give him a ceaseless waking nightmare. Turn his flesh against him, into a creature of my own bidding. But the bastard knows all my tricks."
Kirin pauses a moment, as all her words slip through his fingers. Only creature lingers: perhaps, it's time to talk about the beetles! Finally. He's been waiting so long. "The beetles in the park," he begins eagerly, "they have shiny green shells."
She gives him a rare look of pity, one of many to come.
Hypatia tries to steer the next meeting away from Paolo and Byrne's power struggle in favor of addressing the health crisis among the population, particularly the undernourished. It's clearly a topic she'd decided on with the woman from the Miners' Family Committee. (What was her name again? Kirin has never cared before, and no matter how many times she tells him, he simply can't recall it.) Paolo casually lists out the names of those blocking reforms, counting them out roughly on his fingers as he does so.
Hypatia shakes her head, half in disbelief that it could be so easy, half in horror at the prospects.
"How many lives will be saved in return for those few?" Paolo asks, propping up an elbow. "I send my men to... do a little cleaning, then distribution goes easier." At her reluctance, he surveys her carefully. "You choose how many die now. Make it count."
"People are not a matter of numbers," she protests. "There must be a better way."
The woman from the Miners' Family Committee remains quiet, uneasy in her form as she twists the papers in front of her. "You don't need to kill that many," she says at last. "I know the count. A little intimidation goes a long way with that crowd."
"A flayed rat on the nightstand," Breanna offers, a faint smile on her lips.
Kirin laughs at the ridiculousness of the gesture—like something out of a penny dreadful, how silly they all are!—but he goes unnoticed. They have already learned to ignore him. Instead, Byrne gives her a sharp look, but Paolo waves the idea aside. "Nah, the rats have never done me any harm."
"You'd think differently if you'd lived in Dunwall during the rat plague," Breanna replies smoothly. "Perhaps, you are too young to remember it."
The not-duke leans forward, keen on disrupting their tussle in favor of something more productive. "How many do you think, Lucia, could we spare?"
The woman from the Miners' Family Committee pauses, knowing that her words are tantamount to a death sentence. "Four, five at best."
"Out of twelve," Hypatia whispers in horror to herself.
"We'll save thousands," Paolo replies.
"It must be done," the not-duke says as Hypatia puts her head in her hands, defeated. "It will be done."
Karnaca is dying, despite itself.
Its connective tissue fray from the surgical cuts; the people watch each other fearfully in the streets. The maid—Kirin doesn't know her name; he doesn't know any of their names—can hardly bear to look him in the eye. He doesn't particularly mind this, nor does he bother himself about anything besides his beetles. He methodically pulls off their legs in the courtyard. He doesn't know if they die. Perhaps, they remain in some horrible limbo, paralyzed. The thought bothers him for a reason he can't name, and he kills the beetle not out of a newfound mercy, but of a desire to make the thought end.
But something remains trapped in the formless corpse, all little parts that won't fit back together again.
"Kirin," the maid says, at last, "let's go back inside." She guides him with her hand on his back, her own life-sized doll. Only, she touches him with her fingertips to minimize contact, as if his predicament were catching. She thinks he doesn't notice, but this is only one of the numerous details of his life that have changed.
Inside, the Clockwork Mansion is slowly crumbling: levers stick fast, cogs rust, rooms become inaccessible. Only a handful of staff stay behind to maintain the facade. The rest have fled to other parts of the island and beyond. No one can bear the knowledge that this will all end faster than they can imagine, and so the maid twists her fingers until she comes to a resolution.
"My sweet little lamb," she says to him with tears in her eyes, but he feels nothing for her in return. "My addled little thing, you understand, right? You won't be mad with me?"
He watches her, somewhere between confusion and a placid acceptance of this terrible world, and she takes this for a confirmation.
"I knew you'd understand," she replies, squeezing his arm. "I knew you would." A pause. "You'll be good, won't you? For me?"
Her words come as a small plea, but he simply don't understand what she's going on about as he drags a crooked beetle leg across the floor with his finger.
She doesn't return in the morning.
This, too, is part of his life now.
"If the duke had any sense, he'd put him away somewhere," the remaining valet says, as Kirin stares at the sunlight on the walls. (The sunlight is solid like a river, as it crawls across the walls. Is it a living thing? Can it be touched? But as it falls onto the back of his fingers, it eludes him. Everything does these days.)
"It would have been kinder if he'd died," the last maid replies. "Not to live like this." She glances at him, half in horror, half disgust. "There's nothing left that you could call a person."
The valet lights up a smoke. "What could they get out of having a vegetable on the council?"
The maid shrugs. "Probably the same as that witch and the overseer. It's all entertainment to them."
"We should just drop him off at Addermire." The valet exhales deeply and taps the ash from his cheap cigarette. "It would be the right thing to do."
Her arms crossed, the maid watches Kirin as if he were a half-wild thing. "Who's to say," she replies cryptically, and in the morning, she and the valet are simply gone.
Kirin is not lonely, though.
He has his beetles. They sparkle in the jar, only when he opens it up (there's no one left to ask permission to do so now), he cannot remember how the lid goes back on. He tries one way, then another, but he cannot get the lid to fit again. He struggles briefly, then the jar slips from his hands and smashes onto the floor with a sudden high-pitched crack. The beetles shrug themselves free from the broken glass, flutter their wings, and mill around.
He looks for another jar to keep them in, but as he's searching through the cupboards, he can't remember what he was doing in the first place. He's tired now, and his head hurts again. He tries to find his bed to lie down in, but he's in the photography studio for some reason. (Why are the shutters closed? Who closed them?) He tries a few more levers, and then getting nowhere, gives up and sits down in a corner.
He knows he built this place—that at least, he's keenly aware of.
Time slips past him there in the corner. There's no one left to bring him to meal times or to take him on a walk or to tell him when to go to bed. He hasn't the slightest idea how to find the kitchen, let alone cook for himself. The lights go out in the place beyond the windows, and Kirin has no idea how to turn them on inside his house. He can no longer find his beetles; they've simply slipped from view.
Hypatia finds him later that evening, when he fails to show to the council meeting. Her face is pained. "Come with me," she says. "You can stay with me and Lucia until everything is sorted out."
Holding her hand as she guides him through the Dust District, he wonders if he'll ever see his beetles again.
From here on out, his life is merely a repeat of what has come before, passed from one council member to the next—just a dried beetle shell that the wind pulls and rolls along. Hypatia has him sleep on the sofa. He doesn't mind, but the apartment is small with the three of them and the look of pity from the woman from the Miners' Family Committee whenever he tries to tell her anything. She only shakes her head every so slightly in confusion, her dark eyes searching him, until, finally, he gives up trying to talk with her. (Hypatia is much too busy.)
Vice Overseer Byrne prays all night on the cold floor to resist the dark forces of the Void, and his fervent pleas keep Kirin up at night in his small allotted corner of the Vice Overseer's office. Kirin presses the pillow tightly against his ears, but it doesn't help and the burning incense makes him nauseous. He lasts only a night with the Vice Overseer before being passed onto Paolo.
Paolo holds court long into the evening with loud cheers and resolutions, and even a friendly bar fight or two. A nice blonde woman finds Kirin a quiet bedroom far away from all the ruckus, but she leaves before he can get his bearings. Something runs and scratches behind the wall, before making several precise rhythmic knocks. Sitting in from of this strange wall, he returns the gesture. Another series of knocks follows, but Kirin has by this time forgotten what was going on, and resolves to go to sleep. He no longer dreams, this has been taken from him, but when he wakes up the next morning, lazy fog settling in at Karnaca's coast, he almost remembers thick smoke and an inhuman cold.
Next is Stilton's beautiful mansion. Kirin is largely left on his own there, and so he spends time next to the pinned butterflies. They remind him of his beetles, what little he remembers of them anyway. Sometimes, an insect will crawl onto the tiled floors, but someone yells at him when he tries to catch it. In an apology, Aramis shows him around the pavilion in the backyard, but he's still not allowed to touch any of the insects—he cannot articulate that he envies them now for their freedom. They move as they please, and they don't constantly displease the others. He cannot figure out what will get him yelled at and what will not, so in the end, he decides to do nothing at all—and even that doesn't work out.
"What are we going to do with you?" Aramis says to him over a stack of telegraphs and sealed letters, detailing the riot suppressions, the dockworker strikes, the refugees pouring into Dunwall, the foiled plots against the council and against the emperor, the public executions.
Kirin watches him cut the letters open again and again, wishing he could read them too, or at least wishing until he forgets again. (Again, and again, and again. His mind is an interrupted kaleidoscope.) He tells Aramis about the beetles he saw today on the windowsill (saw and did not touch!), but he doesn't recognize the distraction in Aramis as the man reads through the increasingly distressing letters.
Finally, Aramis, with his polite murmuring to Kirin's haltering recounting, reaches the final letter. He pauses and then folds the letter again, as if by doing so, he can contain its message. Then, he closes his eyes with a sense of finality. Of course, the situation in Karnaca had come to this.
Corvo has returned.
Kirin meets Corvo at the Grand Palace, as the man sits out on one of the many sharply angled balconies. The duke (not the real duke, Kirin knows this even as he doesn't know how he does) had given him some grandiose explanation of why the balconies were designed so, but like everything with Duke Luca, the extravagance had come first and the explanations last.
For this first time in his life, desire moves in Kirin at the sight of this terrible man, and the sentiment is shared. Corvo guides him through their coupling, his breath feverish against Kirin's skin. Then, it is over in sweat and undulating pleasure.
Corvo—terrible, brutal Corvo—pulls back from him.
Kirin watches him for a moment, before turning away. He decides that he should get dressed again. That seems like a good idea. Only, as he tries to button his shirt again, he cannot seem to work out how precisely to do that. He frowns as his fingers fumble, artlessly, against the smooth buttons.
A realization moves across Corvo's face. Corvo grasps at him in some futile search for absolution, but Kirin has none to give him—surely, he must know that. And this man, this great and wretched man who has left his only daughter safe in stone, who even now recalls how her features have begun to lose its sharpness (he has ruined his homeland for nothing, a stranger in a strange land, made strange by his own hand!), begins to cry in great, shaking sobs and half breaths. Kirin can only watch him, not in amusement, not in schadenfreude, but in his blank way that others find so unnerving. Whatever passes from Corvo's lips goes unheard and unheeded.
Kirin is bored with this strange upwelling of emotions.
He wriggles out of Corvo's hands, not understanding the way they cling tightly to him and then, in a slow shudder of realization, slip away to bury their master's face. Instead, he moves to the balcony, the painfully bright, dusty sunlight cutting sharply across his face, and looks back out on the burning city.