“You look gruesome,” Peter comments. “Like you’ve committed murder most foul.” I shake the cloth with wet red paint at him. He jumps out of the way, and Claire laughs.

Skipping in front of the cloth, she shouts, “Paint me! Paint me!” I spatter her with paint. It falls in dots on her arms and princess dress. She swirls, and the paint sprinkles over her. She giggles. “I’ll do you!” She jumps on a stray sock and dips it in the paint. She shakes it at me, and I jump backward but not fast enough to avoid the dollops of paint on my dress.

“If you two are done...” Peter says behind me.

I turn to say—

And he dumps paint on my shoulder. It drips over my chest and back. He is completely unscathed. I look at Claire; Claire looks at me. We both grip our makeshift paintbrushes and chase after him. We race around the junk pile. Circle the house. Run out the gate toward the other houses.

He disappears between two houses, and we collapse against the wall of a brick building, laughing. I don’t know why it’s funny, but it is. I gulp in air.

Suddenly, I hear voices.

There’s no place to hide. We’re exposed on the side of a building. And then I think, Up. Dropping the paint cloth, I turn and hoist myself onto a windowsill. I grab the gutter and scramble my feet up to the top of the window. I climb onto the roof and turn around to help Claire. She’s already up on the roof beside me. We scramble up to the peak as two men round the corner beneath us. One carries a knife, and the other has a rust-pocked saw. Both are in tattered dirty clothes, and their skin is covered in ugly, smeared tattoos that look as if they did them themselves. I hold my breath.

They don’t look up.

I exhale.

“Look at you! Your teacher is proud.” It’s Peter. He’s perched on the chimney. He holds up a tape recorder and waves it in the air. “Ready to record some feral dogs?”

I swallow. My heart is still beating fast, and the palms of my hands sting. I scraped them as I climbed too fast over the shingles. The good feeling, the illusion of control that I’d had when I’d painted has vanished completely. I wish I weren’t here. I hate this place with the strange dust prison wall and the dangers that lurk everywhere.

I don’t know what he sees in my expression but his smile fades. “The Missing Man isn’t back yet, and the townspeople continue to blame you,” he tells me. “You’re still stuck with us.” He slides off the roof. “Come on, Little Red.” He glances back at me, spattered with paint. “Or ‘Very Red.’”

It’s easy to find man-eating dogs if you want them.

On the way into the alleys, we collect stray bits of food: beef jerky laced with dust, half-eaten hotdogs with spots of mold, green meatballs, etc. We carry it in open containers as we walk into the alleys, and then we dump it on the ground and climb up onto the slope of trash and cardboard boxes that chokes the alley.

After that, it’s a matter of waiting.

We hear the snarls in the distance, and Peter switches on the tape recorder.

In a pack, they pad into our alley, three of them, each more muscular than the last. Finding the treasured meat, they leap onto it. They snap and snarl and growl and howl at each other, a cacophony that echoes in the alley.

Peter begins to record.

One of the dogs catches our scent. He fixes his yellow eyes on us and howls. The other dogs notice. All of them begin to scratch and paw at the trash that leads to us. But Peter has picked a place with too steep a slope. They can’t do anything but pace below us, which they do.

I look at Peter and want to ask what the plan is now, but he’s crouched at the edge of the trash, still recording, and I don’t want to mess up his recording and have to repeat this. So I wait. My legs begin to cramp but I don’t dare move. Claire curls beside me and naps.

And wait. And wait.

He settles against the trash, tape recorder resting in his lap, still whirring away. I see his chin droop onto his chest. Both he and Claire sleep.

The dogs keep their vigil below.

At last, the tape recorder clicks—it’s run out of tape. But the dogs aren’t gone. I try to make myself comfortable. I close my eyes and can’t imagine how I’ll sleep through this.

Somehow, I do.

I wake in near darkness to the sound of a woman shouting. Claire and Peter are shadows beside me. Howling, the dogs scatter as gunshots ring out through the alleyway. In close quarters, the shots sound like bolts of thunder inside a room. They echo and rattle deep into my bones.

“You’re both dead,” Peter whispers.

I shut my eyes and don’t move.

He calls down, “I found them like this. Dogs must have gotten them.” I hear him half run half hop down the side of the trash. The pile shakes but doesn’t fall. I try to breathe shallowly. “They must have climbed to safety and then bled out.”

There are several people down there. I hear their voices, murmuring to each other, too low for me to pick out individual words. I concentrate on not moving. My leg is cramped. My shoulder itches. My back is twisted. But I keep myself as still as possible. If it were daytime, the red paint would never be mistaken for blood. In the darkening shadows, I think it must look like dark liquid. I can’t open my eyes to check.

A man’s voice is louder than the others. “But they’re gone, not just dead?”

In a singsong voice, Peter says, “Because they could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for them. The Carriage held but just these two and Immortality.”

“The Missing Man must be back!” a woman cries. “He sent their souls on!”

I hear cheering. Cheering for my death, for the death of a little girl. Peter promises to bury our bodies, but the crowd doesn’t listen to him. They’re racing out of the alley, whooping with joy.

I want to cry.

I don’t.

I want to throw my arms around Peter and thank him. For a little while at least, I’ll be safe, maybe for long enough to find my way home.

But I don’t move.

I lie there until I am certain that the people have left the alley and aren’t returning. Then I sit up. Claire sits up beside me. Wordlessly, we climb down the trash heap. She slips her small hand into mine. Hand in hand, we go home.

Chapter Eleven

Five days after I was pronounced dead, Claire bursts into my bedroom. “He found him!” She bounds onto my bed, and I bolt upright. For an instant, I think, The Missing Man! She’s beaming from cheek to cheek. In her arms is a bedraggled polka-dot bear. “Prince Fluffernutter! Peter found him!”

I flop back onto my pillow.

Peter appears in the doorway. He has a gash in his trench coat. I open my mouth to ask if he’s okay, but he holds up his hand. “I didn’t kill anyone. The thief was already dead.”

Claire cuddles the bear to her cheek, unfazed by the news that the bear came fresh from a corpse. I think of the dead man on the couch and am less sanguine.

“The thief said to say he’s sorry. Your bear reminded him of one he used to have. I told him he’d have to make do with the memory.”

Claire nods as if this makes sense.

“Upside is that he won’t come back here, so we’re safe from him,” Peter says. “Downside is that he knows the Missing Man hasn’t returned. Our thief had the glow, but he hasn’t been sent on. Others have realized this, too.” He points to the gash in his coat. “A few aren’t happy that I lied about your unfortunate demise.”

For five days, I’d almost felt safe.

I’d scavenged.

I’d looked for weaknesses in the void, at least as best I could on foot.

Peter had even left a few times to rescue lost people from the void and, apparently, to continue his search for Claire’s lost bear, and I hadn’t felt in danger, though I had been careful to stay away from town and out of sight of any townspeople. But now...my fake death wouldn’t protect me anymore. “Wait. You talked with a dead man? And what ‘glow’?”