The baby she carried was either mine or Charlie’s. Preacher was the preacher, and Pittman, who joined the Rangers when he was fourteen and still looked like a little kid, carried around a string of dicks. And Brian Fields, well, he preferred guys anyway, which explained why he was off with the gamers.

Marbury. This is how things were.

No jealousy. No love. Who could care about anything that wasn’t trapped right there in that very second? But you know that.

To be honest, I was curious to see if it would feel different—you know, the sex—in Marbury.

So I said, “Okay,” and put my bare feet down in the dust on the cool floor. And just when I was about to stand up, a scuffle broke out behind us on one of the platforms.

Then a single gunshot blasted. It echoed so loud between the stone floor and domed ceiling of the big hall. I crouched down and grabbed my shotgun. You never know what could happen at times like this, so I kept my head below the level of the bench backs.

It could have just been two guys fighting over some game debt, but then the shouting started.

Someone screamed, “It’s Charlie. He killed Charlie!”

Fent stayed back on my bench, and I thought, Well, maybe next time. Pittman and I ran toward the tunnel that fed off onto the old platforms.

Crazy shit like this always meant you were more likely to get shot in the head by one of your own guys. I doubted most of those were accidents, too, which is one of the reasons I didn’t give Pittman shit about how he never got laid and how he was the biggest dried-up dick in Marbury.

Because he was just the kind of guy who would shoot someone on his own crew if he weren’t so concerned about shit like “bad magic.”

But if it was true that Charlie got killed, then that would be our fireteam’s first hit, and Pittman would take it as a really bad sign for all of us.

It was like I could count on the little prick making something bad happen.

When I got out onto the platform where the horses were kept, a dozen or so Rangers blocked the way in front of me. It looked like four of them were holding down a thrashing and wild Odd boy while two or three others punched and kicked him.

One of them said, “Charlie caught him stealing horses. This little cocksucker shot Charlie!”

And all I could make out from the angry mass of pumping arms and kicks was some scrawny kid in the middle of it, moaning and trying to cover up his face and head under the steady rain of whack! whack! whack!

Charlie was lying on his side near where the horses had been tied down. The fingers of one of his hands were twisted around the barrel of his rifle, which had somehow been turned with its muzzle pressed against his face. There was a curled river of blood running outward from his forehead and a big spray of what looked like pink peanut butter spouting from the back of his head. His eyes were fixed open, dead.

Pittman carried an automatic with a collapsible stock. He looked down at Charlie Teague’s body and said, “Fuck that shit,” and then he swung his rifle around and pushed toward the guys who were beating on the kid.

Personally, I didn’t care what Jay Pittman or anyone else wanted to do to the kid, but it was going to be Captain Fent’s call, and I knew it would piss her off if she was somewhere back on the platform watching me stand there doing nothing while the rest of these kids made decisions for themselves.

“Hang on, brother.”

I put my hand on Jay Pittman’s chest, not pushing him, just steadying him so he’d calm down and stand back.

He did.

“Stop it!” I yelled.

The guys who were pinning down the kid didn’t ease up. The others kept punching and kicking him.

He was probably dead now anyway, I thought. But I did let off one shotgun blast straight up into the sky. And that’s when a few of the craziest things happened right in front of my eyes, all in the span of a few seconds.

But what’s a second on Marbury, anyway?

The platform went instantly quiet. Rangers didn’t fuck with me. Everyone out there was a private or two-stripe, anyway, so they knew better than to push it. But when I looked up in the direction of my gunblast, that was the first time I saw that thing—it looked like a tear right through the pale night sky, like it was bleeding dust and light down on us.

And, you know how when one guy’s looking up at the sky, all dumbfaced with his mouth open, everyone else is going to look up there too? Well, the other Rangers loosened up, they saw the hole in the sky, and it pretty much shut up every thought that could have been in those dickheads’ dime-sized brains.

They let go of the kid.

He wasn’t moving, anyway.

But I saw he wasn’t an Odd at all. He was wearing the striped shirt of a military prisoner. He had been one of us at one time, probably left out to die during the confusion of the battalion’s breakup. Good chance he had the bug, the disease that turns you into one of those horned Hunters, anyway, like most prisoners.

But no matter what, he had to have done some pretty serious shit for him to end up in prison at his age, because he couldn’t have been any older than sixteen or so.

I pushed through the guys so I could see whether or not the prisoner was still alive. He was facedown with his arms wrapped around his head on either side. I don’t know if that strategy did him any good, though, because there was a gash in his scalp and a puddle of blood oozing out into the dust beneath his face.

So I rolled him over.

And I stood over him, looking face-to-bloody-face with my best friend, Jack Whitmore.

You.

Fucking Marbury.

What could I say?

“Fuck. It’s … just a kid,” I stuttered, because I really didn’t know what I could possibly say to make anything better for you.

Who wasn’t just a kid, anyway?

We were all just kids.

So you opened your eyes, but I didn’t think you could see me. A bubble of bloody snot popped beneath one of your nostrils.

To be honest, I wanted to shake you and hug you. It was Jack. I finally found Jack. I felt like I should pick you up and carry you out of there. After all, it was you, right?

Jack.

And I wasn’t alone anymore.

I put one hand on the side of your face and shook your shoulder with the other. I saw the inmate number that was stitched into your shirt: 373.

Nobody kept prisoners anymore. They had all been executed during the chaos. Some escaped. But, dude, you looked so skinny and starved, and felt so bony under my hands that I figured maybe you just now got out of wherever they’d been keeping you locked up.

I leaned closer to your face. “Hey.”

Then I caught glimpse of Jay Pittman’s rifle barrel pointing down at your forehead.

And Pittman said, “You getting all queer on the kid, Kirk?”

I bit my lip.

Pittman was testing me in front of other guys, and there was no way I could back down. So I grabbed the barrel of Jay’s rifle, and as I stood, I pushed the butt of it into his midsection, hard, driving him backwards to the edge of the platform. He struggled against me, but backwards was no strategy against forwards, and in two lunging steps I pushed Jay Pittman over the edge; and he went out flat, flapping his arms as he splashed down into the deep rainwater that had pooled over the useless train tracks in the storm.

“Son of a bitch!” he yelped, gasping and thrashing around for his dropped rifle, frantically trying to launch himself back onto the safety of the platform. A couple of the guys who’d been previously occupied beating the shit out of my friend helped him up, and Pittman began crazily stripping out of his clothes with all the passion of a man who’d been set on fire.

He must have had about ten of those black suckers on him, all over his body. He looked like he was growing snakes or something. Pittman slapped and swatted at them, cursing.