It took Papadelias’s curses over my tracker to make me remember it was my job to make sure Mycroft didn’t run away. I ran three useless paces. What could I do? There lay Mycroft’s hat in the dust beside me. Could I call Huxley? Make them bring Mycroft back? Huxley’s parting mutter had been a curse, I realized; Mycroft had evaded them, too. Martin, Papa, and I had debated whether to handcuff Mycroft to one of us as usual, but decided for the ceremony, just this once, that it was safer to keep Mycroft mobile, ready to dodge, and help. And there they went to help. I should help too. That was the solution: catch up with Mycroft at the shore. There would be a rescue mission, nurses, decompression tanks, boats, blankets, and I would find Mycroft again. I babbled the situation to the Prince, Who digested it in masklike silence, which somehow awoke dread’s first traces in me, like the first scent of some deadly gas.

The Prince called a special car to take me to the coast as quickly as was safe with the airspace full of wonders. I was to meet Achilles there, who had hitched a giant bat, and was shouting commands to all Myrmidons to follow as we could. I thought about it more now. Atlantis was defenseless. At MASON’s order every aquatic U-beast had been on the far side of the sea chasing the Sanctum Sanctorum violators, every hippocampus and seahound and panoctopus and plasma-ray and kraken, absent in this moment that the billion arrows of complacent Earth flew, just as Mycroft feared. That was the thought in my mind when my tracker bleeped the tsunami alert.