“Four,” Croucher barked.

Thisbe and Papa frowned together. “Four?”

“Dominic, Mycroft, Thisbe, and the Major.” Croucher made the names so dark he could have been listing the Apocalypse’s horsemen. “The Major’s the leader of my army squad. There are eleven of us in all, and the Major rules us like a dictator. The Major’s not like me. I’m eager to be a civilian again, and still able to think like one. The Major’s soldier to the core, a child’s abstract, insane, imagined model of a perfect soldier, only happy on the battlefield, and he and Mycroft raised Bridger on Apollo’s Iliad.”

Papa squinted. “You mean the copy of the Iliad Apollo Mojave left behind?”

An archaeologist poking in the remnants of Khartoum, or the Caspian coast, or Washington, who finds a bioweapon capsule slumbering from the last war, deadly again now that we no longer vaccinate, could not have nodded more gravely than Croucher. “The Iliad with Apollo’s margin notes, bound together with the unfinished draft of Apollo’s new version, the one the Utopians are always bugging Mycroft to finish. It’s not just some storybook rewrite like they told you, Commissioner, it’s also a handbook, based on the Mardis’ research, step by step, of how to return this world to war. That’s the mandate Apollo left to Mycroft in their will, to finish their guidebook for how to start a war, and Mycroft used it as bedtime reading for a child god! When Bridger was little they had nightmares about drowning, and in their sleep the bed would actually turn to water. They don’t need to wish it consciously to transform things. Now that they’re big, they’ve started having nightmares about bombs and armies. It’s happening. This chaos, all around the world, the governments and leaders all unraveling at once impossibly fast, can’t you see? The world is falling apart just as Apollo scripted it. Bridger caused this, making this world follow Apollo’s script without realizing it, and Bridger is the only way to stop it turning into World War!”

I wonder if Papa would have shown more passion, shuddered, sunk into a chair, had he not been aware of his men depending on his calm to keep their own. “Then the Seven-Ten list scandal,” he began, “O.S.’s exposure, Casimir Perry, the CFB, you think it’s all because of this child Bridger?”

Croucher has long practice bracing himself against the folds of a trembling palm. “Bridger’s power works by touch, but if you put a bowl of toy fruit in front of the kid he doesn’t have to touch every piece to make it real, he just has to touch one, and it flows from that one through the others like contagion. The Earth is a very large bowl of fruit. Bridger probably doesn’t even realize he’s doing it, but between them Mycroft, the Major, and the book have Bridger convinced that the world is going to explode into war. Now it is.”

Seventy years on the job were not enough to keep Papa from shivering. “Central, this is Papadelias,” he called over his tracker. “Detain Mycroft Canner, now.”