It wasn’t real as long as I was still working, helping Neverland haul bodies from the sea. It wasn’t real as long as my arms burned, and fresh tasks made time blur. It wasn’t real at sunset. It wasn’t real when strong arms dragged me to a bed, and made me realize I was too exhausted to rise again. It wasn’t real when I was carried back to Romanova, and laid on sofa plush, and commanded to eat soup. Mycroft couldn’t drown, Mycroft was Mycroft. It was another trick, a plan. We didn’t have a body. They would turn up again, bruised and salty, or O.S. would call to say they had them, or Madame. But the tracker kept transmitting. Maybe they slipped their tracker? No, they couldn’t anymore. Not even Papadelias has the authority to make prisoner attach a tracker nonremovably, but MASON could have a Familiaris’s head grafted onto a zebra if they wanted, and had granted with vindictive enthusiasm Papa’s request have a surgeon make Mycroft’s tracker permanent. Now that tracker counted out the stages of decomposition. We would’ve sent a diving team after the signal, but there were so many corpses, and so many survivors waiting injured in the depths, we couldn’t waste resources hunting for one body. After seven hours the signal started moving, the flesh still with it, and the tracker registered the belly acid of some fatted sea beast. A few hours later even the flesh was gone.

It still didn’t feel real. If I had seen them die, if we had had a body, a photograph, blood in the water, then maybe, but we had nothing, and nothing felt like nothing. Missing in action. Lost at sea. Mycroft could have walked in through my door anytime, full of excuses. And there were injured to treat, and actions to plan, and I was still working from the sofa when J.E.D.D. Mason came in, with Their suit set to white mourning static like the coats, and walked up to me, and stood there staring with Their black eyes, and said in Their gentle monotone: “Mycroft was.” That was all. They came all that way just to say it to me. They knew I needed to hear it. I needed to hear it. And then I said it to myself inside, and it was real.