“Then we’ll save it, together.”
“No.” There was a special, almost surprised firmness in this ‘no,’ as if Bridger’s young mind was unsettled finding himself exercising this grown-up-like responsibility of choice. “I’ve made up my mind. I’m too dangerous. I can’t handle being scared, or watching horrible things happen. I’ll panic, and snap, and just wish for everything to go away, and then it will.”
“You wouldn’t do that, Bridger. I trust you.”
“Of course you do! Because I want you to!” Sobs broke into a scream. “Can’t you see it? Everybody says you were a completely different person before you met me. What if it’s true? I was scared! I just wanted somebody nice to hug me, and keep me safe, and tell me stories. I turned you into this! You’re not Mycroft Canner! You’re a fantasy, like Boo, and Mommadoll, my fantasy of what I wanted from the first real grown-up I ever met!”
The suggestion struck like lightning. I had not thought of it. Perhaps you, wiser than I, had, reader, but it is far easier to doubt another’s existence than to doubt one’s own. My mind searched itself for proof, dredging up memories, actions, continuity, excuses. It couldn’t be true. “I’m not your invention, Bridger,” I answered, more for myself than him. “I have too many memories of things you don’t understand.”
“Stander-G remembers fighting at Lyrnessus. I don’t know where Lyrnessus is!”
I shook my head. “I have too many other loyalties. You wouldn’t have made a Mycroft that felt like I do about ?ναξ Jehovah.”
“Maybe I only changed the surface, maybe I made you nice and kind and loyal like this, where you should be fierce and free and scary, like your friend!” He paused for breath. “I almost turned them into Apollo, when they first showed up, your scary friend. They looked so much like Apollo. Apollo would know how to fix everything, I thought. I almost did it. Think about how sad you would’ve been. Just like Sadcat, and as long as I exist I might do the same thing, accidentally, anytime, to anyone, to everyone!”
Alarm far worse than fear of Sniper’s bullets set on me like frost. “As long as you exist? What are you doing in there, Bridger? Bridger!”
“It’s like Croucher said, I can’t control my powers. I’m turning the whole world into a war story like Apollo’s Iliad. Just by being so scared of it, I’m making it be real. I can’t stop it! Can you imagine how much worse it’ll be if I go crazy? I can’t handle this power. No one can.”
“Jehovah can. That’s why you’re here together. Providence planned this. Jehovah has the experiences, the thinking of a God. You’re omnipotent, They know how to handle omnipotence. They’ll guide you. You each have half of what you need.”
Conviction’s heat made Bridger’s words strong, not fiery, but like a candle, just strong enough to hold its own. “If that was the plan then Providence would’ve given Jehovah my powers in the first place. They’re not for Jehovah. They’re not for anyone. No one should have them, especially not me!”
Major: <Mycroft, what’s happening over there! We just lost Mommadoll, she reverted to toy form. Is Bridger hurt?>
“Bridger?” I called. “What are you doing?”
“Mommadoll wouldn’t want to see this.” His voice broke, the sorts of sobs that usually come only with pain. “I’m done, can’t you see that? I brought Jehovah proof that God exists, that’s what my powers were for, you said so yourself, so did Jehovah. You don’t need me anymore. Everything else I do just makes things worse.”
“You’re not done, Bridger. We need you more than ever. You can stop the war, all of it, by working with Jehovah—”
“You know that’s not true! I can’t prevent the war, it’s already started! All I can do is pick a side.”
“You can do more than that. You can end it sooner, make it less bad. Win the war!”
“I don’t know how!” His words began to slur, the half-formed syllables of a child speaking more to himself than anyone. “You should’ve raised me as a soldier. That’s what you need now, a soldier, a replacement for Apollo, not someone like me. Then I can disappear.”
“Disappear?” I tugged at the door, remembering now the boxes of old clothes we had hauled from Bridger’s cave: coats, T-shirts, wigs. “Bridger, you’re not putting on a costume, are you?”
“I want the world to be safe. I’m not the one who can make it safe.”
“No! Bridger, we need you!” I slammed the door with my shoulder. “Not Apollo, you!”
“This power shouldn’t exist.”
Tears leaked from me, desperate, but how many more, reader, must have been streaming down his cheeks, a child with such thoughts.
“Apollo’s statue!” I cried. “You don’t have to transform yourself. You can animate Apollo’s statue! Apollo will guide you through it! Come, we’ll go to Romanova together!”
His words could barely break his sobs. “I don’t want to see any more like what’s happening at Brussels and Tōgenkyō. I don’t want to live through this.”
“You can’t, Bridger!” I hurled myself against the flat steel, feeling my shoulder pop, but if we do not care what bones we break when fighting for our lives, what could I care fighting for everyone’s? “You can’t destroy yourself! Everyone on Earth, everyone in history, we’ve been waiting for your power! Waiting for you!”
Aimer: <Mycroft! Can you hear me, Mycroft! It’s the Major! The Major’s reverted! What’s happening?>
My blood spattered the steel as I pounded the door. “Bridger!” I screamed. I learned then that I had never truly screamed before, not to the desperate maximum a body can. “Don’t do it! We need you! I need you! I love you! Bridger!”
I am hardened to many kinds of pain, reader, of body and of mind, but I had no more armor against this new pain than if I had never held Apollo’s body in my arms. Desperation turned to prayer: Don’t take Bridger. Please. Don’t take this child whom I love, not as others before me have loved a son, a brother, a savior, a master, but whom I—strange creature that I am—love in all these ways at once, all rolled together into a new kind of love, abject and irrevocable, that has as yet no name. Do not take that from me too, after taking Apollo. Reader, whatever curses you have for me—worm, monstrosity, unholy brute—I deserve them all, I who, in the moment of humanity’s great loss, raised so selfish a prayer. To Whom? To Jehovah, Who has no powers here? Or to His Peer Who rules This Universe, my intractable Maker, Who had long since Judged that my evil requires more ingenious punishments than death? But my old crimes, weighed against this new one, were like the theft of an apple weighed against a patricide. It would be my fault. All the hopes of humankind lost—my fault. I saw it, even as my fists battered the door, as impassable as the barrier between today and thirteen years ago. I did this. I taught Bridger weakness. I taught him to tremble, flinch, hide, run. Providence made me our savior’s caretaker, and now he proved too weak because I made him so. A new, more fitting prayer bled through me: Don’t let my failure doom everyone. Don’t take away the hope, the better world, the wonders Bridger could conjure for Utopia, for all of us, because of me. Don’t make the living stay mortal and the dead stay dead because of me. Apollo, Seine Mardi, older heroes, Patriarch Voltaire, Diogenes, Odysseus, MASON who will die someday, Papa, good Spain, my Saladin, and every victim of the coming war, they all could walk the Earth another hundred years, five hundred, live to walk on Mars, on Titan, on the ship decks wrought of substances undreamt-of which will someday bear us to the Sea of Stars. If there are still colors in grief’s palette that I—orphan, parricide, traitor, wanderer, fool—have not yet had wrung out of my flesh, then let me suffer them, not all the world. Don’t take Bridger. Don’t leave us here alone to fight Apollo’s war because of me.
“We lost him.” A man’s voice came through the door, rough, where the child’s should have been. But not Apollo’s.