Even the witch blushes at times. “What?”
Papa had the good sense to return Croucher to the tabletop as passion tempted his fists. “Mycroft’s been spending nights here for eight years, we all assumed you were lovers, but you said it was just an excuse to visit Bridger. Have you ever actually had sex with Mycroft Canner?”
“Of course, we—”
“The truth!” Papa seized her wrist.
“They haven’t,” Croucher answered for her.
“Never? Not once?”
“Not once,” the Private confirmed.
Papa glowed, his hand still locked around Thisbe’s wrist, hungry to lock around mine. “Can’t you see it? Saladin Canner is alive!”
“Who?”
“Saladin!” Papa cried, a decade’s climax in his fortissimo. “Mycroft had a dog, a dog we never found. For years after the murders the computers kept picking it up as a stray in random places all around the world, but whenever pet control went after it, it was gone, like a ghost. But it wasn’t a ghost, it was Mycroft’s accomplice, the ba’sib everyone assumed was dead: Saladin Canner! They were childhood lovers. The majority of Saladin’s body was never found after the explosion that wiped out the Canner bash’. We assumed they died with the others, but they must have just lost their tracker in the blast, and Mycroft hid them. That’s how Mycroft seemed to be in two places at once during the murders! Oh, very good, Mycroft! Very good!” His face glowed. “Hiding an entire second person for over twenty years! Hundreds of interrogations and not a hint, not one!”
The witch blinked, more insulted, I think, than surprised. “Mycroft has a lover?”
“It explains everything!” Papa cried, almost dancing. “How they could guard one victim while simultaneously going after the next, how they could beat a Utopian in combat, even why they were so uncharacteristically brutal to Ibis Mardi. That wasn’t Mycroft getting sloppy, it was Saladin punishing a rival! Ibis who wanted to elope with Mycroft!”
Say it, reader. Call me traitor, failure, fool. I deserve it. During our two weeks my Saladin and I claimed victim after victim, untraceable thanks to our iron-fast law: never use the same trick twice. If you use a knife, throw it away; a disguise, burn it; a way to trick the trackers, use it once then never think of it again. Anything the cops have seen once they can recognize; reuse it and you may as well turn yourself in. Perhaps thirteen years of peace made me complacent, but that is no excuse. I failed, recycled our most critical deception, the Pet Registry, and now my folly had given Saladin’s scent to the one hunter who would never stop.
“Saladin Canner,” Croucher repeated. “So Mycroft’s ‘scary friend’ does have a name.”
Papa spun. “You’ve seen them?”
“I think so,” the soldier confirmed, “only very recently. Dominic found Bridger’s cave, so Mycroft sent this ‘friend’ to take Bridger off to a safe house. A savage with no tracker, wearing Apollo Mojave’s stolen coat and clothes, with a killer’s instincts and no hair or eyebrows. He said they burned off in an accident in childhood.”
“Eureka! That confirms it! Hahaha! Saladin!”
How, reader, can I describe the tone, the face, the fervor of Papa here? If Fate had set all the treasures of this world before him, the Golden Fleece, the Holy Grail, the Armor of Achilles, Asclepios’s wand that raises loved ones from Hades’s hall, Papa would have chosen this. In fact, Fate had offered him those treasures, and more, anything he could imagine Bridger might create, but, within the room, only Thisbe seemed to remember that.
“This is all very fascinating,” she began anew, “but significantly less important than a child with the powers of a god.”
“That’s your opinion,” Papa snapped.
She picked at a tangle in her ink-black hair. “I didn’t expect you to actually be as insane as Mycroft makes you out to be. What idiot made you Commissioner General anyway? You’re not good at being a cop, you’re just good at stalking Mycroft.”
“Commissioner?” The others could not hear the timid voice which called Papa back over his tracker, but they could see the Commissioner’s eyes go wide. “Mycroft Canner’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“We moved in on Canner’s tracker signal, but their tracker’s on someone else, another Servicer who’s wearing both Mycroft’s tracker and their own at once.”
“Why didn’t you tell me there was an interruption in Canner’s signal?” Papa snapped.
“What?”
“There must have been an alarm at the change in heartbeat when they slipped their tracker onto another person. You’re supposed to investigate a blip like that coming from any Servicer, especially Canner!”
“Easy, Papa, deep breaths,” one of his fellow cops urged—drugs and doctors may let Papa forget his hundred years, but his men do not. “There was no interruption. I’ve gone over Canner’s recorded heartbeats and there’s not a single blip since yesterday, when you personally verified they put their tracker back on.”
“Then where is Mycroft Canner?”
“I don’t know, Papa. Should I arrest this other Servicer?”
Rage rose in Papa now, deadly as a volcano, worse, for a volcano razes only its neighbors, while no corner of the Earth is out of reach of the Commissioner General. “Yes, arrest them. All. Round up all the Servicers that have been with Mycroft in the last day. Arrest Thisbe Saneer, and take their boots, and, while you’re at it, get some polylaws started working out what legal hoops we have to jump through to arrest President Ganymede, and Director Andō, and Dana? Mitsubishi, and Casimir Perry, for that matter all the Mitsubishi Directors, and every single associate of Perry’s coalition in the European Parliament.”
“Me?” O.S. trained Thisbe to hand out death, but she shivered at the bite of cuffs around her wrists, like any amateur. “You need me,” the witch warned.
“No, I don’t.”
Her glare leaked murder. “I’m the only human besides Mycroft that Bridger will listen to. You need me to stay here so you can bring them back and I can—”
“No, I don’t,” Papa shot back. “If I need to calm the kid I’ll call a shrink.”
“Too dangerous,” she countered. “Bridger wo—”
“Less dangerous than using you.” Papa gazed at her, closely. Do you know that zeal, reader, which true connoisseurs fix on their favorites: a gourmand on some rare spice, an archaeologist on some ship-shard from the sea’s green depths, Papa on me? This was the opposite, sleeplike, a disappointed boredom, as when the spice turns out to be mere cinnamon, the shard some modern log, the murderer a self-important amateur who cannot even understand the leagues of subtlety which separate her from a Mycroft Canner. “If I want you, Thisbe, I’ll have you dragged up out of your little box. Take Thisbe Saneer away.”
He turned his back, our Papadelias, as his men marched the witch away. She struggled slightly, trying to bring the Commissioner’s eye back to her, one last chance for him to see the folly of underestimating she who held even O.S. in fear. It baffled her, I think, how Papa could ignore her. They are both right. Thisbe is an unimaginative murderess, clever but with petty motive and repetitive, not in Saladin’s league. But she is, I remind you one last time, reader, also a witch, and witches fester, and even if Papa’s men did confiscate the boots—her chemical spellbook—I fear she has more hexes yet, and bitterer, as jail and boredom nurture her black heart. It may not matter; we may not last so long.
Papa laid his open palm flat on the table. “All right, Private Croucher. Let’s go catch ourselves a Bridger, a Mycroft, and a Saladin, and stop a war.”
Croucher leapt on, like a knight mounting his steed. “Yes, sir!”
CHAPTER THE SIXTEENTH