She was there, Thisbe, soft in her house clothes, black hair sparkling shower-wet as she leaned her elbows on the table, sipping her fresh-brewed oolong. “Gas masks?” Subtly, within her throat, she laughed. “You look like giant fleas with those stupid rubber noses.”

“No fast movements, Thisbe.” Papa’s voice sounded nasal through the filter of his mask, old technology which has needed little honing during our long peace. “Take your boots off slowly and set them on the table. You’re under arrest. The charge is murder.”

Her eyebrows twitched. “My boots?” Beneath the table, her toes played with each other, the landscapes traced on the metallic surfaces of her boots eclipsing each other like colliding layers of mirage.

“That’s where you keep it, isn’t it?” Papa accused. “It has to be.”

“Keep what?”

“Your ‘witchcraft.’ We found smelltrack chemical residue on Carlyle Foster’s clothes last night, and in the crashed car that killed Aki Sugiyama’s fiancé, and on the late Esmerald Revere. You’ve won two Oscars for driving crowds to tears, I can’t imagine suicide’s much harder. You made Cato Weeksbooth design the delivery system, I assume. Buttons in the toes?”

The witch smiled. “That doesn’t matter.”

“Take the boots off, Thisbe. Now.”

Gloves and guns creaked as the police tensed.

Thisbe swished her tea. “You realize this is a Masonic coup, right? Guildbreaker’s manipulated you so they can wrest the transit system out of Humanist hands.”

Papa nodded for his men to approach Thisbe, weapons primed. “I didn’t say anything about the transit system. You’re under arrest for the murders of Luca Cormor, Quinn Prichard, and Alex Limner.”

Now the witch flinched. “What?”

“Your ex-lovers. Three of them. You made them kill themselves, just like you did to Revere and almost did to Carlyle Foster. And you didn’t do it for O.S., either. I think you made them kill themsleves for fun. You like playing around with death, just like you like to play around with Mycroft Canner.”

Thisbe’s smile refreshed its darkness. “Jealous? Mycroft loves you too, you know. More than they love me, I think. Except when I make them love me more.”

The Commissioner General, who marks my every heartbeat through his tracker, stood his calm ground.

Thisbe stroked her teacup’s hot rim, smiling, as calm as if the weapons and guards were mere illusion. “None of this matters. Only one thing in the entire history of the world matters.” She locked her eyes on Papa’s. “You think I’d wait around here for you to arrest me if the world weren’t at stake? In the name of your oath of office as Commissioner General to protect and serve the peace and happiness of all humankind, I demand that you drop everything else and help me find the child named Bridger.”

“Bridger?” Papadelias repeated the strange name dryly. “Who’s that and why should I care?”

“Because they have the powers of a god, and right now they’re being fought over by Dominic Seneschal and Mycroft Canner.”

The old Greek stiffened. “The powers of a god?”