“I want the world to be safe. I’m not the one who can make it safe.”

“No! Bridger, we need you!” I slammed the door with my shoulder. “Not Apollo, you!”

“This power shouldn’t exist.”

Tears leaked from me, desperate, but how many more, reader, must have been streaming down his cheeks, a child with such thoughts.

“Apollo’s statue!” I cried. “You don’t have to transform yourself. You can animate Apollo’s statue! Apollo will guide you through it! Come, we’ll go to Romanova together!”

His words could barely break his sobs. “I don’t want to see any more like what’s happening at Brussels and Tōgenkyō. I don’t want to live through this.”

“You can’t, Bridger!” I hurled myself against the flat steel, feeling my shoulder pop, but if we do not care what bones we break when fighting for our lives, what could I care fighting for everyone’s? “You can’t destroy yourself! Everyone on Earth, everyone in history, we’ve been waiting for your power! Waiting for you!”

Aimer: <Mycroft! Can you hear me, Mycroft! It’s the Major! The Major’s reverted! What’s happening?>

My blood spattered the steel as I pounded the door. “Bridger!” I screamed. I learned then that I had never truly screamed before, not to the desperate maximum a body can. “Don’t do it! We need you! I need you! I love you! Bridger!”

I am hardened to many kinds of pain, reader, of body and of mind, but I had no more armor against this new pain than if I had never held Apollo’s body in my arms. Desperation turned to prayer: Don’t take Bridger. Please. Don’t take this child whom I love, not as others before me have loved a son, a brother, a savior, a master, but whom I—strange creature that I am—love in all these ways at once, all rolled together into a new kind of love, abject and irrevocable, that has as yet no name. Do not take that from me too, after taking Apollo. Reader, whatever curses you have for me—worm, monstrosity, unholy brute—I deserve them all, I who, in the moment of humanity’s great loss, raised so selfish a prayer. To Whom? To Jehovah, Who has no powers here? Or to His Peer Who rules This Universe, my intractable Maker, Who had long since Judged that my evil requires more ingenious punishments than death? But my old crimes, weighed against this new one, were like the theft of an apple weighed against a patricide. It would be my fault. All the hopes of humankind lost—my fault. I saw it, even as my fists battered the door, as impassable as the barrier between today and thirteen years ago. I did this. I taught Bridger weakness. I taught him to tremble, flinch, hide, run. Providence made me our savior’s caretaker, and now he proved too weak because I made him so. A new, more fitting prayer bled through me: Don’t let my failure doom everyone. Don’t take away the hope, the better world, the wonders Bridger could conjure for Utopia, for all of us, because of me. Don’t make the living stay mortal and the dead stay dead because of me. Apollo, Seine Mardi, older heroes, Patriarch Voltaire, Diogenes, Odysseus, MASON who will die someday, Papa, good Spain, my Saladin, and every victim of the coming war, they all could walk the Earth another hundred years, five hundred, live to walk on Mars, on Titan, on the ship decks wrought of substances undreamt-of which will someday bear us to the Sea of Stars. If there are still colors in grief’s palette that I—orphan, parricide, traitor, wanderer, fool—have not yet had wrung out of my flesh, then let me suffer them, not all the world. Don’t take Bridger. Don’t leave us here alone to fight Apollo’s war because of me.