Achilles did not look at me. Long years of breaking bread together, and wiping Bridger’s tears, were not enough to make him ready to share sentiments more private than his rage, even with me. “Then we have work to do.” He rummaged in Bridger’s backpack, Hermes’s winged sandals fluttering in protest as he jumbled them among folds of cloak, and futuretech, and wands. “I’m keeping Excalibur, and a couple of these.” He pulled healing and resurrection potions from the depths. “Take the rest to your Utopians. They’ll use it right, analyze it, learn from it, maybe reproduce it someday.” He dropped the bag at my side, knowing my arms would be too weak to hold it. “You’re right, the gods didn’t leave us with nothing. We have these, and we have me. I’ll teach you and Jehovah how to fight your war. I know how, any war, all wars. It’s all I do know. The Mardis worried what would happen with no veterans left to teach the current generation what war was like. Their prayer at least was answered.” He paused as if to laugh. “Take me to Romanova. Have Jehovah call your allies in, the Emperor, Anonymous, Spain if you can, Kosala, I’ll brief them all at once. And call your Servicers. Thanks to you they’re closer to a ready army than anything else on Earth.” He frowned finding me immobile, weeping still. “Mycroft?” he tested.

“Yes?”

Achilles took a long breath, ready to move on. “Get up. I won’t win this war without you. You know that.”

The first lesson you will learn when war reaches you, reader, is that our limits in civilian life, the point at which we are too tired, too distraught, too weak to go on, are not really our limits. I rose and saluted.

CHAPTER THE TWENTY-SECOND

Last Prayer

Now I have fulfilled the strict command to give you truth. I bared myself, my secrets, and Jehovah’s secrets, even those which will make you call Him mad. I exposed His mother, His fathers, and many sins and crimes which great and wary rulers would rather have silenced. I showed you Bridger. I showed you the resurrection that you witnessed, but cannot quite believe in. And I told you who this strange man is who now stands often at Jehovah’s side, small as a boy but hero-strong, and calls himself Achilles Mojave. I do not ask you to believe, just play-believe, since often things we play-believe in—superstitions, bedtime stories, luck—still make us feel a little better when hard choices come.

It has been three months since I began this history. In that time the sides have taken shape, the trials begun. MASON’s black hand is now outstretched, the Cousins are reborn as peacemakers, Dominic holds the Mitsubishi together by the skin of his fierce teeth, and more souls every day flock to the bull’s-eye flag of the “Hiveguard” who follow Ojiro Cardigan Sniper, thirteenth O.S. Kind Ἄναξ Jehovah will not let the bull’s-eye be banned, or even discouraged, since for This blinded God (five senses are as blindness to One Who was omnivoyant) each morsel of communication is as precious as desert rain. Earth, while He helps rule it, He decrees, will have honesty, if we cannot have peace. Achilles fears that someday soon a brawl, or street scuffle, or hatemongering word, will be the spark that triggers open war. I pray this book is not that spark.