The child swallowed hard. “How long will you stay?”

“Not long, I promise. Jehovah never keeps me for long stretches at a time. He knows a lot of people need me.”

“I won’t promise not to come back.” Bridger crossed his arms. “I’ll watch Jehovah, but I’m also watching you, and I’ll snatch you away if I decide I should. You know I can.”

I nodded acceptance. “I know you can, and I can’t stop you. But I trust you, Bridger. You’ve grown up a lot, and you’re ready to make hard choices like this. I trust you not to come back for me unless you’re sure you should.”

He smiled. “Do you want me to set your scary friend free?”

I stroked the underside of Saladin’s bruised arm. “You can’t, not anymore. The need to know will just bring them back. It’s all right,” I comforted quickly. “It’s not your fault this happened to them. It was inevitable.”

His frown did not believe me. “This is why kids grow up, isn’t it?”

“What is?”

His words grew timid, sensing goodbye’s approach. “It’s probably special for me, since I’m pretty sure if I don’t want to grow up I just won’t, I can decide that. But things like this, where you see what’s happening in the grown-up world and realize that you have to do something, you can’t keep out of it, this is what makes kids want to grow up, so we can become able to make a difference.”

I gave his fingers one last squeeze. “I don’t know, Bridger. I never really grew up, I was made into what I am now all at once. Don’t let that happen to you. I don’t have the right to pray for anything, but if I did pray it would be for that to never happen to you.”

He gathered the cloak’s invisible folds around him. “You don’t have to pray, Mycroft. I’m prepared. I’ve been prepared for years. I’ve had you as an example. I realized a long time ago it would be a disaster if something like that happened to me, transformed me into something bad, or unstable. I won’t let it happen.” Bridger curled against the bars, holding my arm around him. “Mycroft, can I lie here like this?” he asked softly. “Just for a little bit? I know I have to go, but—”

“Of course you can.” I drew my hat from my habit and offered it as a pillow as he snuggled against me. “Nap for now. I’ll wake you when it’s time.”

I tucked the cloak tighter around him, and tucked Apollo’s coat around Saladin and myself, so between the Griffincloth and the invisibility magic the two of them vanished, and I seemed to lie alone on the cage floor in the soldier’s uniform, sandy tan and gray, which Apollo’s coat made of my habit. Am I still alive then, Apollo, in your prediction? As we fall one by one in your computer’s simulated battles, so we vanish from your nowhere, and your coat, passing across a street, reduces crowds, half to soldiers, half to emptiness. Saladin has been dead to you these thirteen years, and profited well from a ghost’s invisibility, but how can I be still alive? You knew I would have been like you, a frontline soldier, doomed to fall in the first months of your young war. Has chance spared me in every calculated battle? Or, when you programmed the coat, had you somehow already recognized the conspiracy of Fate which dooms me to survive?