Major: <I feared you’d take much longer. Where are you?>

I: <East side service entrance of the Sniper Doll Museum. Are you inside?>

Major: <I am. Croucher’s deserted, and they still have Stander-G, but the rest are with me, including Mommadoll. We’re in the main showroom, pinned down under one of the dolls. There’s someone here with very keen eyes. Whenever we try to move they shoot.>

I: <Has Bridger come back yet?>

Major: <No sign.>

I: <You’re sure?>

Major: <What do you know that I don’t?>

I: <You came here before because Bridger said they needed something from the toys they left here. If they didn’t get it, then I thought they might come back for it.>

Major: <If so, I wouldn’t know it. No visibility.>

I: <I’m moving in now.>

I dove full speed from the door to the cover of the nearest doll. No shot. Then, when I thought I was in cover, a bullet proved me wrong, grazing the pad of fat behind my left kidney. Sniper. It knew I would know the spot, clean skin until now, framed by the scars left by the explosion and those from where Seine Mardi shot me. Time and again, when Sniper and I rested after sparring and the athlete listened bright-eyed to the stories I could tell of every scar, its fingers would tickle that spot, as if marking out a patch of brick to add its own stroke to the graffiti. Sniper asked me once who I thought was the most dangerous person in the world. It was an impossible question, since in those days of secrets I could not mention any of the true contenders: Madame, the Major, Saladin, Tully still mongering the Mardis’ war, Dominic, Danaë, who with a broken heart could bring a curse down on her enemy to rival Hera’s, and, of course, the two true rivals: Bridger and Jehovah. I tried to sidestep, answering that it depended on the circumstances, for there could be no worse political adversary than the Anonymous, but if the question is being murdered in my bed I would dread no one more than Cato Weeksbooth. Sniper insisted on the abstract, and, succumbing to a slave’s instinct to please, I answered that the most dangerous person in the world must be either Sniper itself, or me. I thought I was lying.

“I won’t let you take the kid, Mycroft!”

Sniper’s voice rose unfindable from somewhere in the ranks of hundreds of Snipers posed on their chairs and stands and pedestals, modeling all the fashions, costumes, and expressions coveted by a lustful world. The darkness of the closed museum did not do them justice, but in light they are a panorama of obsessions: aristocratic Snipers, slobby Snipers, so shrewd-seeming in a Mitsubishi suit, so strict in a Mason’s, mild in a Cousin’s, eerie in a Utopian coat which, like some perverse Geppetto, turns all passers into jointed marionettes, complete with strings.

“Why don’t we let Bridger decide which side to take?” I called out, sheltering behind the bulk of a space-suited Sniper.