“Your Tocqueville,” Bridger supplied, remembering my code phrase.

“Yes, my Tocqueville.” I caught myself looking at his hands, but a child needs eye contact, reassurance. I tried my best to give it. “There’s a crisis happening, Bridger. I don’t fully understand it yet myself, but it is happening. Apollo and the Mardi bash’ saw fragments of it years ago, and I silenced them because back then I still thought it could be averted. I was wrong. It’s happening. The Censor and Anonymous have realized, and Felix Faust and Papadelias aren’t far behind. I’m sure Madame is at the heart of it, and Caesar…” I paused. “Caesar is finally running out of ways to pretend they don’t see.”

“You mean war, don’t you?” Bridger’s stubby fingers clutched the lump of the book under his wrap. “I’ve read Apollo’s notes. It’s been three hundred years since anyone fought anyone and we don’t know what technology can do now. For all we know the first strike might accidentally wipe out the world. I can stop that.” He tried to smile for me. “I thought hard about it, but I think it’s obvious God put me here to stop that.”

I shook my head. “That wouldn’t take a miracle. If you’re God you can make the detonator accidentally fail, or make a mutation make us all immune to whatever toxin we concoct, or just make us not have this war.” I poked at Bridger’s tummy through the bars, making him smile. “Your Creator could have given you a belly button, Bridger, but They didn’t. They wanted you to be proof of Their existence. I think Jehovah Mason is a big part of the reason why.”

He shook his head, brows tight. “I can’t believe that.”

“You don’t know Him.”

“I don’t need to!” he hissed, almost too confident to whisper. “I don’t believe God would make a miracle for just one person. It’s too unfair. Everybody in the world for thousands and thousands of years has wanted to know the truth about God and the afterlife. The more books you give me the more it seems like nobody in history ever really wanted anything else. If there is a God, I don’t think They’d be so unfair as to show Themself for one person after ignoring everybody else.”

Pride surged in me. The child wasn’t just parroting his teachers’ conclusions, he was making his own. “I didn’t say I thought you were here to give Him proof. I think you’re here because He’s here.”

His young brows narrowed almost enough to wrinkle. “Why? What makes Jehovah Mason so important? No half answers,” he warned. “They have influence over every Hive Leader, I know that, the Major looked up their bio, but that just tells me what everybody knows. I want to know what you know.”

“I can’t tell you.”

He batted at the bars, forgetting for a moment his god-strength, which dented them like butter. “Can’t or won’t?”

I met frankness with frankness. “Won’t. You need to form your own conclusions. I met Jehovah Mason too young. I was seventeen and vulnerable, and He destroyed me and made me into something else. I’m not objective enough to talk about Him, to you or anyone.”