“Neither do I.” I tried to sound soothing.
“I—hic—I know you don’t, but—hic—at least you can help me think about it.” This was a new phase, I thought, the child learning to suppress sobs into hiccups, almost more mature. “A President—hic—can cause famine and chaos just by making the wrong economic policy, so how—hic—can we possibly protect the world from the changes I want to make?” He leaned his brow against the bars, eyes closed, as if the pressure against his temples let him feel like he was hiding. “I need you, Mycroft. You know more about the way the world runs than any ten people. You know about politics, and history, and economics, and people, everything.”
“I don’t know everything.”
“I know you don’t—hic—but you know as much of everything as anybody can, especially about power.” He glanced sidelong into the gilded dark of the salon. “You say there are important people in this house who you’re working with, who need you, well, I need them. I need you to get them on my side. I need the Emperor’s power, the Utopians’ skills. I need Chair Kosala to organize hospitals and aid workers to distribute the stuff that I create. I need Felix Faust to pick the right people to put in charge of things. I need the Censor to track the impact I’m having, and predict disasters. I need the Anonymous to convince everyone to cooperate. I need the Humanists to get excited about it as a big achievement and work for it, and the Europeans and the Mitsubishi to warn me when what I’m doing sounds like something that went hideously wrong when their nations tried it in the past. I need all that, but I wouldn’t know I need all that if I hadn’t had you to teach me about it.” His gaze seized mine. “I need you, Mycroft. No one could possibly need you as much as I do, and I think you need me too, more than anyone.” He stroked the thick hem of Apollo’s coat, his fingertips disappearing as they slipped beneath the Griffincloth. “Providence gave us to each other.”
I tried to keep my sobs as quiet as I could. “Yes. Yes, it did. There is a reason it was me of all people who stumbled on you all those years ago, and there’s a reason you grew up outside Thisbe’s bash’s house and no other. But there’s a bigger question besides ‘Why me?’ and ‘Why there?’ There’s ‘Why now?’ Why did this miracle come now?” I caught his hand, making my lecture gentler with a squeeze. “There must be a reason you were born in the year twenty-four forty, not thousands of years ago when people first started praying for immortality, and not a thousand years from now when we might have the technology and resources to support all the dead people you can resurrect. I’ve been working on that question, why now, ever since I met you. I think the answer is a person called Jehovah Epicurus Donatien D’Arouet Mason.”
“Your Tocqueville,” Bridger supplied, remembering my code phrase.
“Yes, my Tocqueville.” I caught myself looking at his hands, but a child needs eye contact, reassurance. I tried my best to give it. “There’s a crisis happening, Bridger. I don’t fully understand it yet myself, but it is happening. Apollo and the Mardi bash’ saw fragments of it years ago, and I silenced them because back then I still thought it could be averted. I was wrong. It’s happening. The Censor and Anonymous have realized, and Felix Faust and Papadelias aren’t far behind. I’m sure Madame is at the heart of it, and Caesar…” I paused. “Caesar is finally running out of ways to pretend they don’t see.”
“You mean war, don’t you?” Bridger’s stubby fingers clutched the lump of the book under his wrap. “I’ve read Apollo’s notes. It’s been three hundred years since anyone fought anyone and we don’t know what technology can do now. For all we know the first strike might accidentally wipe out the world. I can stop that.” He tried to smile for me. “I thought hard about it, but I think it’s obvious God put me here to stop that.”
I shook my head. “That wouldn’t take a miracle. If you’re God you can make the detonator accidentally fail, or make a mutation make us all immune to whatever toxin we concoct, or just make us not have this war.” I poked at Bridger’s tummy through the bars, making him smile. “Your Creator could have given you a belly button, Bridger, but They didn’t. They wanted you to be proof of Their existence. I think Jehovah Mason is a big part of the reason why.”
He shook his head, brows tight. “I can’t believe that.”
“You don’t know Him.”
“I don’t need to!” he hissed, almost too confident to whisper. “I don’t believe God would make a miracle for just one person. It’s too unfair. Everybody in the world for thousands and thousands of years has wanted to know the truth about God and the afterlife. The more books you give me the more it seems like nobody in history ever really wanted anything else. If there is a God, I don’t think They’d be so unfair as to show Themself for one person after ignoring everybody else.”
Pride surged in me. The child wasn’t just parroting his teachers’ conclusions, he was making his own. “I didn’t say I thought you were here to give Him proof. I think you’re here because He’s here.”
His young brows narrowed almost enough to wrinkle. “Why? What makes Jehovah Mason so important? No half answers,” he warned. “They have influence over every Hive Leader, I know that, the Major looked up their bio, but that just tells me what everybody knows. I want to know what you know.”
“I can’t tell you.”
He batted at the bars, forgetting for a moment his god-strength, which dented them like butter. “Can’t or won’t?”
I met frankness with frankness. “Won’t. You need to form your own conclusions. I met Jehovah Mason too young. I was seventeen and vulnerable, and He destroyed me and made me into something else. I’m not objective enough to talk about Him, to you or anyone.”
Even a child’s blue eyes can grow cold. “You’re not objective about Apollo Mojave, but you still talk about them.”
“Not freely,” I answered. “Not even to you.”
His brows accused. “You’ve answered every question I’ve ever asked about Apollo. Have you been lying? Lying to me?”
“No, never, Bridger, never.” I stroked his fingers through the bars. “I’ve told you everything about Apollo, every fact, but I haven’t told you my opinions, what I think those facts mean. Even when you read Apollo’s Iliad, I never talked to you about what I think Apollo meant by it. I want you to put the pieces together for yourself, because I know if you do you’ll make a different picture than I would, a better one.”
“But you know more than me! If we have different conclusions I’m bound to be the one who’s wrong.” He grabbed my sleeve. “I trust you, Mycroft, or I would if only you’d tell me things. I want to know.” His free hand crept toward the plastic scabbard at his side. “Don’t make me make you.”
I felt glad that he had grown strong enough to threaten me. “Listen, Bridger,” I began again, “I realized a few years ago that I believe Jehovah is a God, and—let me finish,” I warned as I saw him part his lips to speak. “I don’t believe it because I’ve seen proof, or because I was actively convinced, it’s just that He acts so consistently like a God, and I’ve spent so long around people who believe He’s a God, Himself and others, that I absorbed it, the way if you spend too long with Mommadoll you start thinking of everyone as children. Jehovah will say something and I’ll think to myself, ‘Oh, He thinks that because He’s a God.’ It’s the truth to me now, the way I think, and I can’t stop thinking that way. It’s like how you can’t stop thinking that up is up, even though you know there’s no real up in Space, or how the army men can’t stop thinking that Stander-Y is the enemy even though there never was an enemy, and how I can’t stop being sure that what you’re going to do with your powers is the most important thing that’s ever happened to the human race, even though I don’t know what that thing will be.”