I didn’t know what to say.

I missed Nickie so bad it hurt. I kept thinking that this time I’d never find a way out of this world and get back home.

Quinn slithered out of his shirt and hopped around while he pried away at his boots and socks. “After I clean up, we’ll have some good food, Odd. You’ll see. This is going to be a great night.”

The redhead went around behind the divider wall and turned on his shower nozzle. “And we got lots to talk about, Billy. Lots and lots.”

*   *   *

Quinn Cahill cooked macaroni and cheese from a cardboard box. He used canned milk and put some tuna and peas in it, too.

I felt bad for Ben and Griffin, thinking about how they were probably hungry, starving, and I decided, sitting there in those baggy PE clothes at Quinn’s small dinner table, that I was going to have to do something about that. And I felt a little bit guilty, too, for acting like such an asshole to the kid all day long. He saved my life. Quinn took care of me, even if I didn’t really care about where Jack would have ended up if the kid never showed in the first place.

I cleared my throat. “This is the best food I’ve ever had in my life, Quinn.”

He looked at me, and I was certain he could tell I was serious. So I stuck my bandaged hand out across the table of food and said, “Thank you. And I apologize. And please don’t spit in your hand before we shake.”

Quinn beamed. He chewed with his mouth open, too. But he took my hand.

“You don’t need to apologize, Odd. No big deal.”

We ate in silence until everything Quinn made had been wiped clean. He washed the dishes in a plastic tub he kept inside the sink, and then he strained the dishwater through a wire screen and poured it back into his still.

I sat there watching. I could tell he didn’t want me to help, like he was trying to teach me some kind of routine or something, show me how he was in control of everything—and it was all perfect. I realized that all day long Quinn and I had been locked in some kind of contest to decide who was really in charge, and though it may not have been determined yet, I was convinced that redhead kid didn’t know anything else but winning, like he’d told me.

So I knew he was plotting out his cross-examination of me while he quietly packed away his kitchen.

When it got dark inside the firehouse, Quinn took out two oil lamps and double-checked his blackout blinds.

“Well, for someone who said we have lots to talk about, you haven’t said a thing, Quinn. So I may as well start by telling you that everything I said to you today is the truth. I really don’t know where I came from.”

“What about that shirt you took off?” he said. “What about that stuff written on the wall at the old man’s house? Do you think I’m stupid, Billy?”

I gulped. Had to think.

The kid really did know things about me.

And he’d found the shirt. He must have known every detail about the stuff inside that house.

Then Quinn added, “Number three-seven-three?”

I felt the blood rushing out of my head. I looked down at Quinn’s spotless table and shook my head slowly from side to side.

“I’m telling the truth, Quinn. I figured I’m in some kind of trouble. I remember waking up inside a garage yesterday. But I don’t know how I got there, and I don’t know why I had that shirt on. But I guessed it had something to do with this Fent person. And I didn’t know anything about the old man’s house. That stuff on the wall was written by a friend of mine, but I don’t know where he is, either. So I was scared and I thought I could just ditch the shirt and be nobody.”

“Your friend’s named Conner Kirk?”

I studied Quinn’s eyes. They were still smiling, but he had a look like a cat that was about to pounce on something, too.

“Do you know anything about Conner?”

Quinn looked away. “Not much. They’re looking for him, too.”

“What about Fent?”

Quinn laughed. “Heh. Bad magic. Anamore Fent wants to kill you, Odd. Don’t you know that?”

I cleared my throat. “Why?”

“When someone tells me, I’ll let you know. How’s that sound?”

“Am I safe here?”

“Do you trust me?”

Fuck you, Jack.

Quinn stood up, and waved for me to follow him. “Here. I want to show you something, Odd.”

In the back corner of the firehouse, opposite the shower stall, a narrow black metal ladder rose up to a square hatch in the roof. Quinn climbed up and pushed the square door open. After he crawled out into the dimming evening, he stuck his face down inside and whispered, “Come on up here. Just be quiet. They’re going to be out soon.”

five

It was awkward climbing up that ladder.

The rungs hurt my bare feet and I could only work with one hand. My bandaged palm stayed hitched on the waistband of those goddamned shorts Quinn gave me. They ended up tangled around my ankles on top of the first step, and that redheaded bastard poked his face in the hatch and hissed a whispered laugh at me.

Balancing with my knees propped against one rung, I flipped him off, and Quinn laughed again.

“Come take a look at this, Odd. Tell me if you never seen it before.”

The roof of the firehouse was a flat deck of some sort, surrounded by a waist-high cinderblock wall that extended up from the perimeter of the station. At one time, I could imagine firemen enjoying a pleasant day up here. Maybe when the world was different.

I sat at the edge of the open hatch, and then brought my feet up onto the roof before trying to stand. The sky was just going to nighttime dark in Marbury, a milky gray, the color of a rotten tooth. Quinn stood back, and faced away from me with his chin tilted upward.

“See that?” he said.

I looked up.

And, in what dark the Marbury night made for us, standing there beside Quinn Cahill on the roof of an abandoned firehouse that had become his sanctuary in hell, I saw the hole in the sky.

Overhead in the east, above the business district where the kid had pushed us in a canoe past Java and Jazz, there was a gash—a knife wound through the gray. The thing bled vacant light that seemed to spill downward like a waterfall and blind out the foggy haze around it; a liquid constellation, some kind of fire that rained down from nowhere and everywhere.

“What do you think that is?” Quinn asked.

I just shook my head.

“Well, I’ll tell you, Odd. Like I said, when it happened things got worse. The Rangers been coming through trying to get anything they can take. Some of them’s even headed out now, just leaving here altogether. Seems like, to be honest, there’s more suckers, more Hunters, harvesters, and more of us dying. And I believe Fent’s crew is getting ready to go too, and leave us all—what’s left of us—to the Hunters. But those next few days after it happened, the Rangers rode through, roughing up all the Odds that were too young to conscript, and you know what some of them do to us who are older, don’t you? They were looking for you. Jack Whitmore. See? I knew your name before you even said it, Billy. And they were trying to find your friend, too. They said you did something to him. Why do you suppose that is? You weren’t just a prisoner, were you?”

When Quinn made his case, something started to connect in my head, but I couldn’t feel it coming together. It was like those times when I’d look back through images—photographs that Nickie had taken of me—riding on a river cruise, touring London, doing things with her while I was in Marbury, while I was here—but I couldn’t quite get the memory to surface.

I leaned my arms on the edge of the block wall and watched as the thing pulsed overhead in the sky. The kid knew things about me and Conner, and he was playing a game, they way you’d play with a hooked fish on a line.

Quinn knew more about Marbury than I ever did.