She caught him in the schoolyard on Monday and dragged him by one ear out to the marshy part. She pinned him down and straddled his chest and tickled him with one hand so that he cried out and used the other hand to drum a finger across his lips, so that his cries came out "bibble."

Once he'd bucked her off, they kissed for a little while, then she grabbed hold of one of his nipples and twisted.

"All right," she said. "Enough torture. When do I get to meet your family?"

"You can't," he said, writhing on the pine needles, which worked their way up the back of his shirt and p.r.i.c.ked him across his lower back, feeling like the bristles of a hairbrush.

"Oh, I can, and I will," she said. She twisted harder.

He slapped her hand away. "My family is really weird," he said. "My parents don't really ever go out. They're not like other people. They don't talk." All of it true.

"They're mute?"

"No, but they don't talk."

"They don't talk much, or they don't talk at all?" She p.r.o.nounced it a-tall.

"Not at all."

"How did you and your brothers learn to talk, then?"

"Neighbors." Still true. The golems lived in the neighboring caves. "And my father, a little." True.

"So you have neighbors who visit you?" she asked, a triumphant gleam in her eye.

*d.a.m.n*. "No, we visit them." Lying now. Sweat on the s.h.a.g of hair over his ears, which felt like they had coals pressed to them.

"When you were a baby?"

"No, my grandparents took care of me when I was a baby." Deeper. "But they died." Bottoming out now.

"I don't believe you," she said, and he saw tears glisten in her eyes. "You're too embarra.s.sed to introduce me to your family."

"That's not it." He thought fast. "My brother. David. He's not well. He has a brain tumor. We think he'll probably die. That's why he doesn't come to school. And it makes him act funny. He hits people, says terrible things." Mixing truth with lies was a *lot* easier. "He shouts and hurts people and he's the reason I can't ever have friends over. Not until he dies."

Her eyes narrowed. "If that's a lie," she said, "it's a terrible one. My Ma died of cancer, and it's not something anyone should make fun of. So, it better not be a lie."

"It's not a lie," he said, mustering a tear. "My brother David, we don't know how long he'll live, but it won't be long. He acts like a monster, so it's hard to love him, but we all try."

She rocked back onto her haunches. "It's true, then?" she asked softly.

He nodded miserably.

"Let's say no more about it, then," she said. She took his hand and traced hieroglyphs on his palm with the ragged edges of her chewed-up fingernails.

The recess bell rang and they headed back to school. They were about to leave the marshland when something hard hit Alan in the back of the head. He spun around and saw a small, sharp rock skitter into the gra.s.s, saw Davey's face contorted with rage, lips pulled all the way back off his teeth, half-hidden in the boughs of a tree, winding up to throw another rock.

He flinched away and the rock hit the paving hard enough to bounce. Marci whirled around, but David was gone, high up in the leaves, invisible, malicious, biding.

"What was that?"

"I dunno," Alan lied, and groaned.

Kurt and Alan examined every gap between every storefront on Augusta, no matter how narrow. Kurt kept silent as Alan fished his arm up to the shoulder along miniature alleys that were just wide enough to accommodate the rain gutters depending from the roof.

They found the alley that Frederick had been dragged down near the end of the block, between a mattress store and an egg wholesaler. It was narrow enough that they had to traverse it sideways, but there, at the entrance, were two smears of skin and blood, just above the ground, stretching off into the sulfurous, rotty-egg depths of the alleyway.

They slid along the alley's length, headed for the gloom of the back. Something skittered away from Alan's shoe and he bent down, but couldn't see it. He ran his hands along the ground and the walls and they came back with a rime of dried blood and a single strand of long, oily hair stuck to them. He wiped his palms off on the bricks.

"I can't see," he said.

"Here," Kurt said, handing him a miniature maglight whose handle was corrugated by hundreds of toothmarks. Alan saw that he was intense, watching.

Alan twisted the light on. "Thanks," he said, and Kurt smiled at him, seemed a little taller. Alan looked again. There, on the ground, was a sharpened black tooth, pierced by a piece of pipe-cleaner wire.

He pocketed the tooth before Kurt saw it and delved farther, approaching the alley's end, which was carpeted with a humus of moldering cardboard, leaves, and road t.u.r.ds blown or washed there. He kicked it aside as best he could, then crouched down to examine the sewer grating beneath. The greenish bra.s.s screws that anch.o.r.ed it to the ground had sharp cuts in their old grooves where they had been recently removed. He rattled the grating, which was about half a meter square, then slipped his mult.i.tool out of his belt holster. He flipped out the Phillips driver and went to work on the screws, unconsciously putting Kurt's flashlight in his mouth, his front teeth finding purchase in the dents that Kurt's own had left there.

He realized with a brief shudder that Kurt probably used this flashlight while nipple-deep in dumpsters, had an image of Kurt transferring it from his gloved hands to his mouth and back again as he dug through bags of kitchen and toilet waste, looking for discarded technology. But the metal was cool and clean against his teeth and so he bit down and worked the four screws loose, worked his fingers into the mossy slots in the grate, lifted it out, and set it to one side.

He shone the light down the hole and found another fingerbone, the tip of a thumb, desiccated to the size of a large raisin, and he pocketed that, too. There was a lot of blood here, a little puddle that was still wet in the crusted middle. Frederick's blood.

He stepped over the grating and shone the light back down the hole, inviting Kurt to have a look.

"That's where they went," he said as Kurt bent down.

"That hole?"

"That hole," he said.

"Is that blood?"

"That's blood. It's not easy to fit someone my brother's size down a hole like that." He set the grate back, screwed it into place, and pa.s.sed the torch back to Kurt. "Let's get out of here," he said.

On the street, Alan looked at his blood and moss-grimed palms. Kurt pushed back his floppy, frizzed-out, bleach-white mohawk and scratched vigorously at the downy brown fuzz growing in on the sides of his skull.

"You think I'm a nut," Alan said. "It's okay, that's natural."

Kurt smiled sheepishly. "If it's any consolation, I think you're a *harmless* nut, okay? I like you."

"You don't have to believe me, so long as you don't get in my way," Alan said. "But it's easier if you believe me."

"Easier to do what?"

"Oh, to get along," Alan said.