“You want to rescue Mycroft?” the Major repeated in a flat, tired tone, neither approving nor criticizing, just listing one more fact in a world which has too many facts in it.

“Yes,” the boy declared. “Mycroft’s always rescuing everybody else, it’s time somebody rescued them.”

Some of these scenes are hard for me to re-create from interviews and stale research, but not this one. The safe house Saladin chose to hide the child from Dominic would be warm and snug, walls stacked high with the sorts of games and entertainments a thug would want when forced to lie low. Mommadoll would have set to work stripping the room of ‘inappropriate’ materials, while Boo nested in the cushions, and the army men pitched cautious camp on the bedside table, ready to leap to instant cover should my Saladin return. I’m happy to say the hostages were free once more; Privates Pointer and Nostand and Lieutenant Aimer, who were captured when Dominic had stolen Bridger’s clothes and backpack from the cave, had been successfully snatched back from that circle of Hell which is Dominic’s desk drawer. Operation Ariadne, as the Major called it, had been planned for three careful hours and executed in forty-seven seconds, a six-man extraction team guided by Looker scrying through the crystal ball, with Bridger at the teleport controls. Success. Medic was now treating the captives’ wounds with Bridger’s potions, their hands and feet where Dominic had pinned them to a slab of cork like butterflies. They bore it bravely, Lieutenant Aimer especially, determined not to cry out with the Major watching. The others ringed them, cheering on the rescued, hailing their endurance in the face of monster Dominic, a heroes’ praise from all except paranoid Croucher, who glared up from a bunker he had built from loose puzzle pieces on the far side of the table, and muttered to the walls.

“You’ve searched it through and through?” the Major asked, nodding to the pocket of Bridger’s recovered wrap, where the lump of the Iliad showed through fabric long since warped to fit its corners.

“Yup,” the boy answered, “it’s all there, no missing pages. The bad sensayer cracked the spine a bit, but nothing’s gone. And they didn’t bug it or anything, I used the crystal ball and everything. I know you’re mad I let it get stolen, and I know it’s really, really important, but it’s safe now, so it’s time to work on Mycroft. You can lecture me after we have them back, okay?” An unsettling resolution tensed the child’s tender brows, as when sculptors give Hermes or Dionysus a child’s face but a man’s expression. When Providence and the Major first granted me the undeserved blessing of Bridger’s friendship he was not yet six years old, that recipe of tiny hands and games and tantrums which awakens the instincts to protect and nurture, even in Mycroft Canner. At first the sheer wonder of helping a child grow was enough for me, but soon moments started cropping up, after a fight over clipping his nails, or when I stumbled reciting a favored bedtime story, when he would glare, and show me for an instant, not infancy, but personality, a flash of the person he would be when he grew up. With time, I began to see him less as a blossom swelling to its proper shape than as a buried statue, waiting for the sand around to fall away. I loved the child, but was waiting for the man to come and wield his power with this kind of confidence. We all were.