Those who took Tilden-Crowner came for me, too. I do not resist MASON’s agents unless the need is dire, but I did cling to a railing long enough to grope and find by touch the now-invisible Utopian who had shielded and pinned me in the moments of crisis. I shouted my test. “Delian!”

They spun. They all spun, a heavy whish filling the courtyard as all the invisible Utopians turned as one. I was right. Someone else might have mistaken it for a trick of the coat’s stormy lightning, that sun sigil that had blinded me when the Utopian first appeared—but I knew that shape well, from the flyleaf of Apollo’s Iliad, and from a grimmer source. When Saladin patrols an alley in Apollo’s captured coat, its Griffincloth turns Hive Members’ customary dress to how Apollo imagined their wartime uniforms: Europeans to updated historic uniforms, Cousins’ wraps to nurses’ scrubs in azure and warm cream, Mason’s suits to gray-piped black and purple. From time to time Saladin passes a Utopian, nowhere overlaying nowhere. When he does, Apollo’s program does not replace his comrades’ coats, but instead stamps that blazing sun sigil onto each Utopian’s back. Delos is the sacred birthplace of Ἄναξ Apollo and his sister, deadly Artemis. Apollo’s Delians; Apollo’s army. I released the unseen figure, and said nothing more, not as MASON’s guards sat me beside my Master in the car, not as their medic checked us, not as we flew across the noon-bright sea toward Alexandria’s fortressed Sanctum. What could I have said? It was no accident if Utopia had flashed the Delian sigil before the eyes of the one person on Earth most likely to recognize it. They had their army. While Achilles struggled to turn servicers into soldiers, and Saladin to turn thugs into a commissariat, Utopia wanted me to know that they, at least, stood ready.

“I should not have come to the Conclave.”

Jehovah’s face and voice were still expressionless as He sat beside me, but I could feel His pain, as if my soul were its own sense, able to perceive anguish in another, or in Him at least. Which ancient was it who called the soul a sense? Aristotle?

“It wasn’t your fault, Ἄναξ,” I consoled. “You couldn’t have known what would happen.” I forced myself to use English with Him, playing my part in regenerating His ability to sort languages. “The Chief Sensayer summoned You to help Your Peer’s priests, You couldn’t refuse that. You shouldn’t refuse that.”

“Yet I did harm.”

“It had to happen.” I forced a smile. “You know that, Ἄναξ. There is Providence. All that happens serves the Plan, and Your ongoing Conversation. Or are You afraid that, because His Providence does not dictate Your actions, You might act against the Plan and thereby change or harm it?”