The posters went up on a Tuesday. Hundreds of them, pasted shoulder to shoulder down every wall in the district. GOD HATES A COWARD. ENLIST. The general's finger followed you no matter where you stood.

By Thursday morning, every one of them had been hit.

Same red paint. Same three words dripping where "ENLIST" used to be. Nobody saw a thing. No cameras caught a face. The district woke up to the word RESIST staring back at it from four hundred walls.

Sack Face stood in front of the first one for a long time. Six-foot-five, long and lean like a swimmer, the burlap over his head perfectly still. People on the sidewalk found reasons to cross the street.

Try as you might, you couldn't keep your eyes off this abomination, even though you knew better than to look.

Officially, he was the Order's Chief Investigator. Unofficially, everyone knew what happened to the people he investigated. They just didn't say it out loud.

He had never once asked why. The Order pointed, and he went.

A patrolman hurried over. "Sir, we're scrubbing them now. Should be clean by noon."

Sack Face peeled a strip of the poster off the wall and rolled the red paint between his fingers. Still tacky. "Good," he said. "Then they'll have a fresh canvas tonight."

The patrolman laughed, then saw that nobody else did, and stopped.

The straight razor came out of his coat, folded, the way it always did. He flicked it open and cut the word RESIST clean out of the paper, then folded it into his pocket.

"Find them," he said.

Nobody asked who. Nobody wanted to be the one he looked at next.