“You’re Bridger, aren’t you?” Papadelias laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder, though he admits he half expected the child to vanish like a dream before his touch. “Come on, kid, let’s get you inside somewhere safe.”

“Get away!” Thor’s strength in Bridger’s arm hurled Papa back hard enough to sprain his shoulder. “Don’t touch me! None of you! Stay back!” He brandished his magic wand, pregnant with spells more ominous than bullets.

Violence woke Kosala from her wonder. “What did you do?”

“I won’t let anybody have it, no one!” Bridger clutched the resurrection vial in his other hand, the potion’s residue glittering on the glass like a skin of sparks. “You’re not ready for it yet! You’re barely holding the world together with the people it has now. You think you can handle bringing everybody back?”

Jehovah’s hand, shaking from the agony of circulation returning to fingers recently dead, locked around Bridger’s thin wrist. 「“«¿Why tamdiu Me esperar nado to osshatta dixisti?»”」

Bridger reeled, hurling himself back as if Jehovah’s black gaze burned.

“English, Ἄναξ,” I urged. “Use English.”

Jehovah flinched, as if the task stung like peroxide on a wound. “Why did You make Me wait so long?”

“I’m not God!” Bridger screamed. “I don’t know what They’re doing! I don’t know what I’m supposed to do!”

If you had seen Jehovah’s face as He tried to simplify his thoughts, reader, you would have felt as if you watched the captain of a crowded life raft, threatened with sinking by the mass of those who try to claw their way aboard, whose destructive desperation forces the shaking captain to shoot them, one by one. “As if it were not cruelty enough that change in time cannot create without destroying, once again He makes the agent He sends to bring about His better world love this one.”

Bridger screamed. I never finished telling you the tale of Sadcat, did I? Years ago Bridger tried to heal a maimed cat by wrapping it in the plush fleece of an uninjured toy cat, but the healthy creature his miracle created had no sign of the personality of the original. ‘Sadcat’ we named it, a new creature inhabiting the stolen body of the old, while the original vanished, unmade, victim of a mistake Bridger seemed somehow unable to undo. The child screamed for hours when he realized he’d unmade a living thing, screams I can still hear, his small frame shaking in my arms. This scream surpassed that. Jehovah held fast to Bridger’s wrist, the first full-body effort I had ever seen Him make, but, even with the fire of absolute Will within it, His human hand could not match Bridger’s magic strength. The child pulled free.

“Bridger, wait!” I cried, but the weight of heart attack lead-dense across my chest twisted what should have been shout into dreamlike whisper.

“I don’t want to destroy the world! You don’t know I can really make a better one!”

“Wait!”

He vanished, pulling the invisibility hood over his head, so no eye, nor sensor, nor keen-nosed U-beast could find a trace of him. That did not mean he could not hear me.