“What?”

I shook. “Bridger can’t make permanent life from nothing. If they didn’t keep recharging it, the statue would only live a few days before turning back to stone, but we tried it on a cat once: with a costume Bridger can turn one living thing into another living thing, forever. We have Apollo’s coat, Apollo’s clothes. I could die as I deserve, and give this lump of meat over to the person in the world we both most want to live. These hands!” I raised my hands before me, seeing blood upon them even without Apollo’s coat to stain them so. “I can’t look at these hands without wanting to hack them off and give them to Apollo, but I can’t! We can’t bring Apollo back, Caesar! They would just do it again.”

“Do what? Make war?”

I bit my tongue, hard enough to taste blood, measuring in my mind how hard I would have to bite to cut it off and choke and end my life, if I had had the right to.

Caesar seized my hand and pressed it against the statue’s stone base. “Swear.”

“What?”

“Here, with your hand upon Apollo’s tomb, swear to me there are no war plans hidden in that Iliad. It’s just a storybook, the Utopian weapons are just defensive, this chaos a coincidence. Swear!”

Strength left me, drained by that stone where his slim bones make their slow return to dust. It is half your fault he lies here, reader, and half mine. You denied him the Pantheon. I destroyed his chance to join his kin among the stars. The autopsy and chemical tests left what remained of Apollo’s body too contaminated to be processed into that organic essence which, after the rocket journey, will become the soil of Mars. Year after year, those Utopians who could not live to see the terraforming done at least become a part of it, each ounce of powdered flesh another fertile plot of their new world. All his brief lifetime Apollo watched the launches, yet in death he could not even send his dust where dust is precious. That is my guilt. As for yours, only a handful of Apollo’s kind have been buried on this Earth in the two and a half centuries since the Mars Project began, yet, for all Utopia has given you, you would not give this orphan shelter in your Pantheon.

“It’s not the Mardis’ war plans, Caesar. It’s Apollo’s. Apollo was trying to start their own war.” The truth leaked from me slowly, like an infected wound milked of its pus. “Apollo came to Luther and Aeneas, before the Mardi bash’ made up their minds, back when they were first convinced that the length of time that passes between wars was what determines how devastating the next one will be. The others were undecided, not sure whether they should try to start a war now to keep the next one from being so big it would wipe us out entirely, or whether they should believe that the peace was real, that humans could outgrow the violence as we outgrew the trees. They were uncertain, but Apollo was honest, and loved them, and told them point-blank that whatever the bash’ decided, Apollo would make their own war.”