The guards drew their nightsticks at once.

“Let them through!” I cried, and mercifully Caesar cried it also, for my voice was too weak to reach even the nearest ear. “That’s Bridger! Let them through!”

I wonder what the others must have thought, Martin, Bryar, Vivien, our Utopian guardians who found themselves hurled out of the way by Caesar’s hands as this strange child descended with his play-stained child’s wrap, and winged feet, and tears.

“It’s my fault!” Bridger cried again. I doubt I could have understood words so twisted by sobs if I had not known his voice better than any other. “Mycroft, it’s my… I shouldn’t have… I didn’t know…”

He had the vial already in his hand, potion bubbling like the part of flame that is more liquid than destruction. It had no scent as he uncorked it, but, as he poured it over the wreckage of Jehovah, the air’s taste brightened, as when the Sun, emerging from cloud, makes spring grass tint the air with freshness. The Censor yelped feeling His dead hand awaken, fingers wriggling as the nerves which commanded them rethreaded themselves. The core of the brain regenerated first, blooming within the gore like an ugly orchid. All the nearby cameras were fried, but several spectators on balconies managed to record the restoration, and, with enhancement, one can see individual little arteries branching through the yellow-gray brain mass which swelled like rising dough. The miracle did not rewind the wound, did not draw the blood and shards of shattered skull back in, but grew replacements, the skull reknitting even as it rested blood-drenched on the pillow of its own discarded gore. It was not fast, Jehovah’s resurrection. God can create a cosmos in an instant, but to let us understand, Caesar, Censor, Papa, Kosala, Tully, to etch His miracle into all our memories beyond the possibility of doubt, that took time.

“I’m sorry!” Bridger’s words were shrill, like a cheap flute. “I shouldn’t have let it happen! I just wanted everyone to be okay, but everything I do just wrecks things!” His nose was running, the parent in me noticed that.

I was not strong enough to reach his hand, but managed to brush his knee with feeble fingers. “Don’t let Sniper see.”

Papa understood my warning faster than the boy. He ordered the wall of bodies closed around us, the static curtains of Utopian Coats overlapping to shroud the scene from the assassin, still retreating from a foe it thought well slain.

The rooftops of the Forum were Sniper’s playground now, path after invisible path tying building to building as it zigzagged an escape too tangled for the police to follow. Dominic plowed on, gaining ground as he grew used to the invisible paths, as if the blood he lost with every step just made him lighter. The world’s eyes followed them, not us, missing the miracle as their darling-turned-villain raced for its life. Sniper ran out of roofs in the end, the Cousins’ offices in the Temple of Venus & Rome marking the back limit of the Forum. Here Sniper vaulted down, not to the ground, but onto the back of Almirante, Sniper’s favorite practice steed, a tall, gray Hanoverian gelding, and now the fastest vehicle in Romanova. Some have criticized the lapse in security that let Sniper set this up, but after decades of Sniper’s state-sanctioned antics in the public and private sanctums of every VIP, what guard on Earth would find it strange if Sniper asked to park a horse even in the Emperor’s bedroom?