The monk’s eyes flickered. “Thou wishest me to use the formulaic dodges they teach us in sensayer training?” Dominic stretched, sleeves falling back to reveal red-speckled bandages fresh on his arms. “Thou knowest the same tricks, and can spot them if I use them. Isn’t it better that I volunteer to be the hypocrite, rather than making us both pretend?”

Carlyle frowned at the bandages. “Are you all right?”

Dominic’s glance barely acknowledged the injuries. “It’s nothing. Minor bites. I had set a… rat trap on our back stoop, and found instead a rather fierce stray dog.” He leaned toward her. “Thou canst not put it off forever, Carlyle Foster. Choose now: am I thy sensayer, patron, and ally in guiding Bridger’s miracles as thy God intended? Or am I thine enemy?”

Carlyle raised a steady hand, and groped for her tracker’s off-switch.

“Wait, Carlyle!” I cried through the tracker to her ears alone. “You’re asking the wrong question! I used to think the same way, that Bridger was an answer to my prayers, but if the miracle was meant for us, we would’ve been given what we prayed for directly, without a child as intermediary. Providence pays infinite attention to detail. Whatever God is doing requires Bridger’s specific power to make toys real, and it has to be wielded by the child Bridger, and the adult that Bridger will grow up to become. This Intervention isn’t for you, or me, or any one person, it’s for the whole world, the human race, the universe! The real question isn’t ‘Why me?’ it’s—”

Carlyle cut me off, chopped off the monster Mycroft Canner’s words, half said. But I knew Carlyle Foster. She was a sensayer. She had read those volumes that lurk in Dominic’s cell, and hundreds like them, the thoughts and prayers of the dead, pious and impious, so many of whom had prayed as fervently as she to see a miracle. To see Proof. However desperately she did not want to hear it, a true sensayer could not keep herself from following my logic, and arriving at the question, that same question great Achilles asked when gray-eyed Athene appeared before him by the tearstained ships, when war had already swallowed ten bloody years: “Why now? Divinity, child of the thunder-wielding heavens? Why come now?”

CHAPTER THE FIFTH

If Anybody in the World Can

Bridger closed Apollo’s Iliad and slid the time-grayed volume back into his pocket where it always lived. “Next I want to rescue Mycroft.”

Should I not have given him the book? You say I have put a lighted torch in the hands of an infant, but what more do I know than a child of the infinity of the Universal Plan? I had no right to deny what was so obviously meant for him. The book was given to me and I to Bridger—what line of inheritance could be more clear? Thou hast lied to me, Mycroft. Thou claimedest thou wert raising Bridger to be a normal child, then a normal man, so he might grow up to wield his powers on behalf of all of us, but it was a lie: thou art raising him to be Apollo Mojave. No. Thou darest deny it? Thou speakest of the two of them with the same worship, steepest the boy in history and philosophy no average child needs, and now thou hast made him keeper of this little book whose import I can guess if not its precise contents. You are wrong, reader. If I had wanted Apollo back, there was a statue in Romanova waiting to be awakened by Bridger’s touch.