“Thanks. How long have they been missing?”

“Since April fifteenth. The day Ojiro and Tully rescued Mycroft, and we worked out the temporary truce to stop the riots after the mass indictment.”

My stab wounds panged. That day? One answer loomed, grim but easy. Dominic’s trap had worked after all, and these nineteen long days the monster had had the heretic at his lack-of-mercy. When my mind fills with horrors, reader, they are specific. Nineteen days; if Dominic had Sniper that long, the pentathlete would be in no condition to run, or fence, or stand, or likely speak again. But, no. It did not fit. A Dominic who had Sniper in hand would not still brood, claw at his Blacklaw sash, or waste hours on Mitsubishi board meetings and shareholder hobnobbing. Dominic did not have Sniper. I knew it, and from Ἄναξ Jehovah’s face I saw He knew it too.

“And Tully?” I asked at once. “Sniper and Tully were together when I saw them.”

“Tully knows nothing. They parted as normal when they both left you.”

Papa frowned. “Who wrote that letter from Sniper that The Olympian printed?”

“I did,” Lesley answered, helping herself to sport tonic and offering the same. “On behalf of O.S., I heartily accept the offer of a truce until the Olympics, and, as next in line to head O.S. after Ojiro, I am fully empowered to accept—Tully is not, I am. Unfortunately, thanks to the Olympic fever you’ve stirred up, the public is going to flip if we don’t have Ojiro Cardigan Sniper here to light the torch. I can impersonate them at a reasonable distance, but I can’t run a pentathlon at Olympic levels, and I can’t stand up to the quality of cameras you’ll have at the Opening Ceremony.” Lesley took as deep a breath as her disguise permitted. “Either we have to find Ojiro before the Olympics start, or we need a very different plan.”

Many different plans brewed in us in the hush that followed, punctuated only by the churn of exercise equipment from the suite next door. Bad plans, all of them. Mine was the worst. The dolls, I couldn’t think of anything but dolls. If Bridger were with us he could bring one to life, bring ten to life, create a cooperative one by dressing it in a Mason’s suit, or one of Heloïse’s habits, or my own, to make it loyal to Jehovah. It would urge its half of the world to yield to His inexorable rule. No war, and then He would have leisure to rewrite the constitutions of the Humanists, and Cousins, and Europe, all the Hives, and make a world that lives on without murder. No, there would still be the Mitsubishi land problem. New land, then? A new world? A time-ray to make Mars’s terraforming finish overnight? No, Mars is for Utopia. A new Earth, then, create two new Earths in her Trojan points, with prebuilt cities instantly upon them, an Earth for every Hive, a fleet of ships to swarm among the worlds, among the stars, and the Kind, Wise, Divine Mind of our Good Master—Kinder than His Peer—to guide humanity through her glorious transition. All we need is Bridger.