Safe behind her invisible guardian, Madame pulled his hood back and patted the hairless scalp above the hairless face which the vizor still made seem half Apollo’s. “Good boy.”

Wrath more than combat winded Caesar. “You let that monster out of its cage?”

“Stay where you are, Papadelias,” Madame warned, her quick eye catching the Commissioner General as he leapt toward his quarry like a child toward a mound of birthday presents. “He’s legally my guard dog now, and you’re no dogcatcher.”

Papa stopped at Caesar’s side, the gel-cuffs hungry in his hands. “I think a judge can resolve the species issue easily enough.”

Madame shook her head, today’s modest wig shining in the hospital light. “If you push to have him declared a human being, before you can get a judge to issue an arrest warrant I’ll have him certified mentally incompetent, not responsible for his actions past or present, and remanded to my custody as guardian, beyond your reach. Alternatively we can leave him legally my dog, and if he ever hurts anyone you can force me to have him put down. Which do you prefer?”

The Commissioner General did not answer, but his slack face declared touché.

“Both of them?” Wrath’s quake hardened MASON’s fists. “You want me to let Saladin run free like Mycroft?”

“Not free, Caesar. In my custody.” Her voice grew syrup sweet. “Saladin’s a good dog, he won’t run off, will you?”

Saladin slid back behind Madame, the Utopian coat settling over him until only a trained eye could track him by the shadows between the hem and floor. “No, ma’am! Are you kidding? First time I’ve ever had a mentor I could actually learn from, I’m not quitting.”

“A mentor?” MASON repeated.

Saladin laughed. “All these years I thought the only thing for a Cynic to do when we realize all the social rules are crap was to go live free like an animal, but Madame’s learned better. They didn’t have to cut themself off from society to keep from getting tangled in the puppet strings. All they had to do was genuinely not care.” He prowled toward me around the circumference of Madame’s skirts. “I don’t get it, Mycroft. We thought Cornel MASON was a keen mind, but you and I can spot a predator at fifty yards—how come they can’t after sleeping with one for twenty years?”

My chest did not have strength enough to laugh, but the attempt gave anesthesia’s gradual withdrawal an opportunity to highlight my incision with lines of pain. Madame did it. One night, sitting by his cage with tender musings and philosophy, and she made a convert even of my Saladin. Diogenes the Cynic was our childhood mentor, Saladin’s and mine, the first of our wretched race to realize that honor, glory, ambition, wealth, success, all are artificial things, and that pursuing them only makes us miserable. True happiness is to live as Diogenes and Saladin dared, like a dog by the side of the road, eating when the urge comes, pissing when the urge comes, saving all one’s energy for the happy exercises of the mind, which no tyrant can deprive you of. Legend tells us that Alexander himself visited the wise old man, offering Diogenes anything in the world the Conqueror could grant; the Cynic asked only that the Great King stop blocking the sunlight so he could keep reading. Saladin never expected to find a living teacher closer to Diogenes’s model than himself, but Madame too drew kings to her silk-lined barrel with rumor’s allure. It is true that, unlike Diogenes, Madame took advantage of how much one can exploit a king’s offer when one doesn’t care if one actually gets anything, but she who could play the puppet web like harp strings was still undeniably closer to Diogenes’s ideal than Saladin, who dared not touch the strings for fear of being snared. When we first committed ourselves to the Cynic path, we had lamented that there was no master of the School to guide us eager novices. This was not a wish Saladin had expected Providence to grant.