He points at the inordinately tall Asian man a few meters away.

He’s watching Z take the girl’s hand, silently. The length of the braid down his back suggests he has never in his life accepted a haircut.

It makes him think of the Nazarites.

Camillo nods to his conversation partner and gets up to drift over that way.

"Hi. You're Kyou?"

He nods.

“Someone sent you?”

"Your friend over there told me your name. He said you see stuff."

He glances over at Cato, and then nods again.

“I have visions,” he confirms.

The guy is gorgeous. Camillo tries not to fight, when he notices that kind of thing, tries to say yes, to the greater glory of God and move on. It's not a sin to notice.

"Visions about Z?"

“Almost always.”

Camillo feels a little like he's being stonewalled. Is that a cult thing? The cult thing is lovebombing, right?

"What kind of things do you see?"

A halo is pretty generic. Two people could hallucinate a halo, especially if maybe he'd seen one of those drawings pinned up somewhere and then forgotten about it. Bloody footprints, when you haven't even seen the barefoot guy yet, are very specific.

He turns back to look at Z.

“A disk of fire behind his head. With patterns of long lines and regular shapes, all moving. The shapes lie down to crown his head and then return.”

“…that’s now.”

Okay. So it's just the halo thing, and this guy is obviously lying. That's fine.

"What do you think it means?"

“He’s returned to Earth.”

"Uh. Okay."

Is he on a holy mission to take down a cult?

No. Probably not. Probably he is a normal human amount of suggestible, and ... somehow got suggested before he even saw the guy ... however little sense that makes. Probably this sort of thing never makes sense from the inside.

It looks like Kyou’s about to respond when Z stands up and picks his way through the crowd, still holding the girl’s hand.

“Hey — her mom gets cluster headaches and they live, like, ten minutes away. Can you guys hold stuff down until I’m back?”

“I’ll let them know.”

That was his miracle. He got a miracle, his only miracle -- his only spiritual experience, it's not like most people get miracles, but most people seem to feel the presence of God, okay, and he just doesn't -- and now it's nothing. It's some stupid cult leader.

"Yeah," he says loudly, "I bet you can heal the invisible thing that stops unpredictably."

(It's a sick, shameful feeling. Doing the right thing feels like that a lot of the time. People get mad at you. Any second, now, he'll get the warm rush that comes after.)

“—I don’t pick the emergencies, man. Believe whatever you want for half an hour, ok?”

He exits the scene with the girl’s hand still in his, half-jogging.

He has everyone's attention. This is his chance to say something really clever, to break the cult leader's spell and spur everyone back to Mother Church. This is why he was brought here today.

"Anyone could say that," he says, to Z's retreating back. "That doesn't mean anything."

He doesn't feel clever.

Most of the people who were watching turn back to talk to each other.

A couple of them don’t. Someone who was passing by stops to ask him about the presumptive grift.

Kyou stands, silently, to go talk to Dorothy.

His initial contact, it turns out, is a little more confrontational.

“I felt the lump. I felt it and then it disappeared. Explain that to me.”

The heat of righteous rage is fading into faint nausea.

(This was the right thing to do, no matter how he feels about it. Buying a homeless guy dinner is just the same way.)

"Lumps go away. Cysts. Or you missed it."

Or you're lying.

“I felt it! I looked! If he’d just — popped something, she would’ve been upset, I would’ve seen —”

“This isn’t going to be productive.”

“I don’t care.”