Papadelias: “Suicide on cue, that’s perfect! Stay there! Stay exactly where you are. Don’t move! Don’t touch anything! Don’t move anything! Don’t alter the chemical composition of anything! I’ll have forensics there in ten minutes, just hold still!”

Foster: “I will. I’m ready.”

CHAPTER THE NINTH

The Visitation

It never seems to stop, this long night of the twenty-seventh. Here in Paris it has already been March twenty-eighth for some hours, but no mathematician’s prescription will ever force the mind to call those stifling hours of black before the dawn ‘tomorrow.’ I did not want that night to end. With Saladin around me, the universe outside our cage might have melted away with me uncaring. Only the coat around us reminded me of the present, Griffincloth heavy like womb-water, but on every second or third tossing or turning my elbow would nudge a weapon nested in the coat and remind me that, at least once upon a time, there were members of the human race beside we two.

“Mycroft? Mycroft?” This part was not a dream, I think, though as I dozed in the ambrosia of Saladin’s arms, it seemed one. “I’ve come to get you.”

“Leave me.”

“Your friend looks hurt.”

I stroked the bandages; Saladin has always been the deeper sleeper. “I don’t know what I was hoping for. It was inevitable Saladin would get caught up in this someday, I just thought maybe they’d get killed first, fighting a monster somewhere. That would’ve been a good end. There are monsters in the world these days, more than just the two of us.” I raised my eyes now, seeking the visitor’s shadow in the shimmering dim that darkness makes of Madame’s gilded halls. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“And you should?”

“Yes, I should.”

“Why?”

“Because there are important people here who need the things that I can do, and it’s my fault that I’m the only one left who can do them.”

The voice drifted closer, confident, and a gust of dry air moved with him, like birds’ wings or old breath. “Then why shouldn’t I be here too?”

“I wish you could be.” Our whispers could not wake Saladin, but I feared my breath might, silent sobs against his side. “I wish you could have been here all this time, but you’re too dangerous. The things you would have made us do. You were going to destroy the world.”

A pause. “I don’t want to destroy the world, I want to help it.”

“No, you don’t. You’ve never been looking at this world, only at the future you see stretching on and on.” I pulled the coat tight over me, afraid to see his blue eyes peering down. “I remember when we were in the garden with Geneva. You asked if we would destroy a better world to save this one. I would. I did, I destroyed the world that had you in it. But I always knew, for you it was the opposite. You would destroy this world to save a better one. You tried to.”