Outlaws of Time #3: The Last of the Lost Boys

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N. D. WILSON

Illustrations by

FORREST DICKISON

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Katherine Tegen Books is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Outlaws of Time: The Last of the Lost Boys Text copyright © 2018 by N. D. Wilson Illustrations copyright © 2018 by Forrest Dickison All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Children’s Books, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007. www.harpercollinschildrens.com Library of Congress Control Number: 2017955886 ISBN 978-0-06-232732-1 Typography by Carla Weise 18 19 20 21 22 CG/LSCH 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ❖ First Edition

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This book is for mi Marisol, sunny seas indeed

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PROLOGUE Death is a departure. A room left empty. A dream dreamed and vanishing. Breath rising on a cold night and disappearing beneath unseeing stars. Death is you, moving on. From this moment. From this day. From this body. From this room to that one. From one riverbank to the other.

Death is a kind of birth. Into another place. Another when. Another you. For those outlaws who leap the boundaries of time, it is the same and, yet, not. One you meets another you, and for a moment, you stand looking into your own eyes. But one of you will depart into the other. The weaker body crumbles, vacant. The stronger body receives and lives on. It is the way of all things living within time . . . even the outlaws. Your soul cannot dwell within two bodies in the same moment and in the same space. One body—one room—must be left empty.

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1

Strange Fire Since yesterday, the world had been ending. Alex was sure of it.

After his mother had gone to bed, his father had fallen asleep, slumping over his typewriter at the kitchen table.

As far back as Alex had memories, such a thing had never happened. Alex had been drifting off to the clack and ding of the old machine for the entirety of his life, and he had often woken to it as well, morning light spilling in through his high bedroom window and across his bunk to the tune of his father’s percussion, punching ink through ribbon and onto scrolling paper. Those finger-fired 3

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hammers marched through countless nights, commanding stories into existence, marking every moment of Alex’s dreams. Even in the big old house, when his father still had money from his writing, and his older sisters lived at home, from two floors down, the faint sounds of the dancing steel alphabet had punctuated the uneasy creak and sigh of night noises. But now, in the little single-story mustard-colored duplex that shared a wall with a Korean family of three, the sound traveled down one short hallway and filled Alex’s room completely, amplified by his lightweight, hollow door.

Which is why, when the typing stopped, so did Alex’s dreams. His eyes jumped open and he was suddenly sitting up in bed. One glance out the window from his bunk and he knew that morning was still hours away. The quiet glow of winter midnight filled Alex’s room, and he recognized every shape and shadow on his floor—his shoes, his basketball, his tipped-over laundry hamper. Darkness wasn’t possible with smooth blankets of snow on every horizontal surface, and jagged rime frost armoring every pole and wire and fence post. Light, any light, bounced and bounced and lived on in such a white winter, but it also arrived in stillness, with none of the traffic and chatter of day.

Alex swung his bare feet over the side of his bunk, and static sparks snapped and popped in the sweatpants 4

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he had worn to bed. The elastic hems slid up over his calves and stuck beneath his knees as he dropped onto what, in daylight, would have been his worn and matted pea-green carpet. By night, the color was slate gray, like concrete. The worn plastic feel under his toes was just the same.

Shirtless, Alex slipped out into the hall and blinked at the harshness of the kitchen light. The air was cold.

Too cold. And he could see his father’s back, rounded forward, his right arm dangling awkwardly by his chair.

“Dad?” Alex attempted a half whisper, but the word caught in his throat. Shivering, he moved forward, rolling his shoulders as prickles erupted up his spine. The muscles in his chest and arms trembled beneath his skin.

Pausing in the mouth of the hall, Alex took in the strange scene. To his left, the small living room. Couches his mother had partially reupholstered, bookshelves, old TV, and a straggly long-needled Christmas tree—dense with homemade ornaments, fat colored lights glowing.

To his right, the tiny dining room and kitchen—four chairs, round table, sewing machine and stool, typewriter, and his unconscious father.

The front door was gaping wide open. From outside, a trail of snowy footprints marched across the brownbronze carpet, past the saggy couches and the tree and the old TV with the bent antenna, arriving in the kitchen, 5

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beside the table where his father’s curly head rested on the keys of his typewriter. The snow tracks were oozing small puddles on the linoleum by his father’s chair, but they still hadn’t completely melted. The snowy feet hadn’t been gone long.

With his eyes on the front door, Alex moved quickly to his father. There was no paper in the typewriter and not a single sheet on the little table, where his father usually stacked the finished pages as he worked. His freckled left arm was stretched out on the table, palm up, callused fingers curled in. His sleeve was bunched around his upper arm and a stripe of blood ran down from the soft skin inside his elbow into a dark pool the size of a half dollar on the table top. Still sticky. Not scabbed.

“Dad,” Alex said again, and this time he rested a palm on his father’s back. Ribs rose against Alex’s touch as his father’s lungs expanded. Not dead.

Alex’s relief didn’t last long. The tracks, the blood, the missing pages. He couldn’t leave the front door open and just go back to bed.

Up on his toes, avoiding the snow prints with his bare feet, he hopped quickly to the door, ready to slam it tight and throw the lock.

But he didn’t.

Burnt and burning pages were scattered across the yard, marring the perfect whiteness of the snow with 6

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black, fluttering char and uneven orange. The fiery pages hissed and popped on the snow, and the icy air smelled oddly like bacon. Flames danced at their own funerals, shrinking as the pages did, and as the melting snow doused them.

Alex forgot to shiver. He forgot all about his chilltightened skin and his bare feet, and he stepped outside onto an icy concrete step. The flames dotted across the yard were dwarfed by the aurora in the sky.

Blue and green fire pulsed across the winter stars, streaming down like impossible burning waterfalls while seething eruptions of the same strange light leapt up to meet them.

The streaking cosmic fire formed a flickering tunnel above Alex, a tunnel above the entire world, and for the first time Alex felt that what his teachers had told him in school might be true. He was standing on a sphere hurtling among the stars. He was glimpsing the flaming track, the fiery railroad of planets, and it was dancing and leaping to music that he could not hear and a beat he could not catch, at speeds he could not comprehend.

Snow squeaked beneath a boot behind him, but before he could turn a thick arm slid around his throat. Strong fingers gripped the back of his head, and all around him, the snow, the sky, the crazy cosmos vanished.

Two men stood in front of a small duplex with an 7

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open front door. One was tall and lean with short white hair. One was thick and bald. A barefoot boy slumped unconscious on the icy sidewalk at their feet. Fragments of burning pages tumbled across the snow.

“We should have read it all first,” the lean man said.

“And burned it later.”

“There is no later,” said the bald man. “We read enough. It was a message. To someone. Reading. Sometime. About our mistress’s plans.” He looked up suddenly, as if startled by the wintry sky. “Quickly, now. Before the birds return.”

Alex jerked and blinked, shivering. But the chills weren’t real. He was warm. In his bunk. Bright morning was spraying in the window, lighting up his untidy desk, strewn with pencils and crumpled sketches, his pea-green carpet, his tipped-over hamper, the tattered poster of the one great player on his favorite football team. He heard toast spring and bacon hiss and pop. His parents were laughing quietly, talking in the low voices they always used when they were trying not to wake him.

The strange events of the night before didn’t feel at all like a dream, but he had no memory of returning to bed, or even to the house. Moments ago, he had been standing outside watching burning pages flutter across the snow and green and fiery northern lights fall from the sky, and 8

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then the sudden grip on his throat. That was it. Next stop, right now. Normal. But his body was hanging on to the dream—the smoky smell of burnt paper, the icy-cold concrete beneath his feet. . . .

Alex jerked his blankets off, swung his legs over the side of his bunk, and sat up, hunching slightly to keep his head clear of the low ceiling and the sharp, tiny stalactites of plaster that had been dotted with gold glitter for some inexplicable reason.

The entire sky had been full of strange fire.

Alex pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. He could still see the falling light with his eyes shut. Could a dream give you afterimages, like staring at the sun?

Maybe. Shifting his fingers to his scalp, he attacked his thick black hair, loosening up his bed head and his mind along with it.

The real world was right in front of him, all in order and right where he’d left it when he’d gone to sleep. His life.

The bedroom was small and every inch was worn, from the carpet in the corners to the hollow closet doors that were losing their stain. When the duplex had been built in the 1960s, the builders clearly hadn’t been thinking long term. The interior walls wobbled when Alex pushed on them, and drafts of cold air poured in around the outlets on the exterior wall and in the exterior corner 9

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behind his bookshelf. Layers of frozen condensation had built up knobby ice knuckles on the inside of his metal window frame, and the sill was constantly damp beneath it.

Alex had few possessions, and as a result, he cared about all of them, even the ones that he had outgrown years ago. His bear, his small stuffed rhino with wings, and his stick horse (a brown velvet head his mother had sewn onto an old hockey stick) all lived on the bunk below him with a homemade (ripped) dragon, a lopsided one-eyed killer whale, and a one-eyed shark puppet. Both eyes had been lost battling his older sisters in pillow wars in the old house. Since the whale was as heavy as a sandbag, and the shark puppet was just a plush boxing glove, his sisters had banned both weapons as entirely unethical.

But when attacked or tickled, Alex had used them without apology and to great effect. A dozen surviving army men (some with bullet holes created by match-heated needles) were arranged in gruesome defeat on a small hanging shelf next to an old paint can full of mismatched yard-sale Lego pieces. They hadn’t been touched in years.

The desk was where Alex spent his time, with a shelf wedged in beside it. Above the desk, hanging on a nail, he kept a four-year-old calendar from 1978, each month adorned with a vivid painting of hobbits or orcs or elves.

It was little use in tracking days through 1982, but it 10

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took him to different worlds and times whenever he sat beneath it with a pencil in his hand. He switched months at least once a week.

The top half of the bookshelf held his most-visited volumes—three westerns, four sci-fi epics, two spy novels, and a stack of Sam Miracle comics, all authored by his father, along with a fraying Narnia box set, The Hobbit, and a paperback set of the Lord of the Rings books with yellowing pages that smelled—Alex was sure—exactly like Middle-earth. That trilogy was stored next to a thick, sacred bundle of typed pages bound in unlabeled blue.

Written for Alex and Alex alone, it was the tale of a boy (who shared his name) questing through dozens of mysterious portals alongside a cast of young characters and heroes who were all far cooler than he was. Those characters had become Alex’s closest friends in the world—real or imagined. His father had written it for him, and it was the only copy in existence. Alex had read it at least twenty times, and he loved it with a fiery but regretful love. He wished that his father hadn’t made the main character so completely like him. It was embarrassing, even reading it alone. When fictional Alex stood next to the other boys—Cyrus, Henry, Tom, Charlie, Cotton, Zeke, Howard, Sam Miracle—he seemed so pathetic. He couldn’t fly a plane or throw fireballs. He’d never discovered ancient treasures or battled swamp monsters or 11

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faced a soul-sucking witch with nothing but a baseball bat. He definitely didn’t have rattlesnakes in his arms like Sam, and he couldn’t imagine stepping through time. In his dad’s pages, he was just Alex with the dark hair and the slow smile, Alex who always asked the obvious questions and worried about every possible disaster. And next to the girls in those pages, Alex felt even worse about his character. They were fearless adventurers, time-walkers, and legends. And not one of them ever seemed impressed by fictional him.

He wished his father would write him a sequel, but he also wished that his father would make his character cooler. He would have asked . . . if such a request hadn’t been so awkward.

Alex slid down to his floor and grabbed his Star Wars T-shirt from the hamper pile, pulling it on as he staggered into the hall. At thirteen, he no longer cared to breakfast shirtless.

At first, his parents didn’t notice him. They were side by side in the tiny kitchen, heads down and hands busy.

His father was scraping butter onto his mother’s homemade seedy bread, and his mother was scrambling eggs and hash browns and peppers and cheese all together in a frying pan. Bacon was already on the table, cooling on a plate beside his father’s typewriter . . . and a towering stack 12

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of finished pages that had obviously not been burned in the front yard the night before.

“Does it feel accurate?” his mother asked.

“Doesn’t matter how it feels,” his father said. “It’s everything they told me and everything I remember. I’m finished. I’m not touching it again unless I have to. I’m moving on. If they don’t like it, they can come return from wherever they vanished to and give me some more details.”

Alex plucked the thickest bacon strip off the plate and folded it into his mouth.

“Finished what?” Alex looked at the stack of pages.

“A new book? Can I read it?”

“Good morning, Alexander,” his mother said, smiling. “I hope you slept up an appetite. Grab a plate.”

Alex lifted up the top page, reading the title aloud.

“The Song of Glory and Ghost. Is it spooky?”

“In some ways,” his father said. “And I’m sorry, you can’t read it. Not yet, anyway.”

“But you just said you were finished,” Alex said. He thumb flipped the stack open and a single typed name jumped out at him from the middle of a sentence.

Sam Miracle “Dad! Sam? Seriously?” Alex grabbed the heavy stack up off the table. “You have to let me read it now!”

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Jude tugged the pages out of Alex’s hands. Alex stepped back, startled, looking straight into his father’s gray-green eyes. Normally bright with laughter and suited to the sharpness of his face, they were instead saddled with dark weariness. His curly hair was still wild from the night before.

And then Jude Monroe stepped around his son and disappeared down the hallway toward his bedroom.

Alex looked at his mother. “I’m sorry, was that supposed to be a Christmas present or something? Did I just ruin it?”

Millie Monroe shook her head, her mouth tight, and her eyes uneasy. Her long blond hair, almost always kept in a thick braid, had only just begun showing strands of snow among the gold, and her strong, veined hands, always flushed from kitchen work, were sprouting creases faster than the corners of her eyes.

“Mom?” Alex asked again. “Did I ruin something?”

“No, honey,” she said. “It’s just something hard your father has been working on for a long, long time. Something he has to do, not something he wants to do for fun.

Some of the things your father writes are made up. And some are more like . . . messages and lessons and predictions from very particular people in the future, for very particular people in the future.” Done waiting for her son 14

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to bring her a plate, Millie pulled one out of a cupboard and scooped a mound of steaming goodness onto it.

“I don’t understand,” Alex said. “Messages? If it’s about Sam . . .”

“You don’t need to understand,” said Millie, handing him the heavy plate. “Not yet. But you need to eat.”

“You can read it,” Jude said, reentering the dining room and dropping into the chair behind his typewriter.

“But not for a long while yet. Not until I’m sure no one has changed anything and the story is done shifting. I’ll get you something else from the library if you’ve run out.”

“I’m always out,” Alex said, poking his eggs. “Tolkien is dead.”

Jude laughed. Millie smiled, but not a smile of understanding, more a smile of gratitude that the conversation was moving on. Alex knew she couldn’t understand why anyone would want to read about orcs and goblins and imaginary hard things when so many real hard things were readily available for the doing. Sometimes he wondered what she thought of his father’s books . . . if she liked them as much she liked cooking. No, that wasn’t fair, not even close. She didn’t like anything as much as she liked cooking. Except for her people . . . and she even seemed to like them best when they were hungry.

Alex sure didn’t mind. He had seen the contents of his 15

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classmates’ sack lunches. He’d eaten at their houses, and he knew that his mother was unique among women. He couldn’t remember the last time there wasn’t a fruit pie in the fridge, and his mother would have died before using factory-made bread from a plastic sack, or paying some company for jammed raspberries when she could jam her own and beat the store-bought flavor silly.

Peanut butter, however, was a different thing entirely.

She adored Extra Crunchy. And she was always amazed by oranges in the winter. And bananas and avocados and oversize grapes. These were things that brought her joy, because they had been impossible for her family when she’d been young.

When Millie had described the old family farm to Alex, the brutal winters, her struggle to survive after her parents had died, he had begun to understand why their funny little grocery store was his mother’s favorite place in the world. Even if it did have an entire aisle of factorymade bread in baggies . . .

As the warm weight of breakfast perfection filled Alex, all thoughts of his father’s loose pages began to fade.

Along with the cobwebs of his strange dream. Today would be a good day. He would draw. Maybe plan a story himself. Read.

“If you’re done,” his father said, “get the front walk shoveled and I’ll take you to the library.”

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“Shovel? Did it snow last night?” Alex slid his fork across his plate.

“It dumped,” said Jude. “Half a foot at least.” He pointed at Alex’s arm. “What happened there?”

Alex looked down at the skin inside his elbow. An uneven stripe of dry blood emerged from a prick at the center of a bruise smaller than a dime. Just like what he remembered seeing on his father’s arm the night before.

Alex rubbed it, startled.

“I don’t know.” Alex glanced at his father’s arm, but Jude was wearing sleeves.

Millie swooped in, grabbing Alex’s hand and pulling his arm straight.

“It’s fine,” Alex said. “It doesn’t hurt. I don’t know what happened.”

His mother tested the bruise with her thumb and then focused on his father. Alex watched her blue eyes, fierce with fury. Wide. Lids trembling.

“If someone took your blood . . .” She trailed off.

Alex stood up quickly and eased his way out of the kitchen toward the front door. “I’ll shovel,” he said. “Right away.”

He slipped his bare feet into his father’s wool-lined boots—already small on him—and stepped outside.

Voices erupted behind him.

“Jude!” his mother said. “This can’t be happening.

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You know that woman is still out there somewhere.”

“Out there,” his father replied, “does not mean she was here.”

Alex pulled the door shut. His father’s voice was audible but muffled, punctuated by his mother’s.

“Right,” Alex said, looking at the bloody prick on his bare arm. Goose bumps already surrounded it. He was coatless, and his T-shirt wasn’t much better than nothing. Bouncing his weight foot to foot, squeaking fresh powder beneath him, he grabbed the old snow shovel from beside the doorway and focused on the sidewalk.

His father had been wrong. The fresh snow was at least a foot deep.

Alex hated shoveling snow. The truth was that he hated most things that were physically demanding, things that left him aching and sweaty, with blistered hands and his pulse kicking against his eardrums.

“Well,” Alex said. “At least shoveling will keep me warm.”

He attacked the sidewalk in a flurry, heaving fluffy piles in both directions as he marched forward, carving a path with precarious and crumbling walls.

Instantly, he imagined himself in a story. Alex Monroe, working frantically to dig out after an avalanche.

Working to dig out his buried brothers in arms. Or hobbits. He wasn’t just a timid kid growing up in a tiny duplex 18

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with no friends and no life. He was needed. People would die without him.

“Hang in there,” Alex said to his imaginary buried friends. “I’m coming. I’m almost there.” His arms pumped faster. His shoulders and lower back ached. His palms burned. He was halfway to the street, breathing hard, beginning to sweat. Snowstorms could not defeat him.

“Alex!” The shout belonged to his middle-aged Korean neighbor, Chong-Won. Alex slowed slightly, but he didn’t stop. “You need a coat?”

“No thanks!” Alex yelled, and reaccelerated, grunting and gasping. He was almost to the street. He had almost conquered. No need to travel through the Mines of Moria after all. He, Alex Monroe, with the strength of his back and arms, with his raw determination, would lead Gandalf and the hobbits safely over the mountains.

A final scoop. A final heave. The flying snow whumped down beside the walk. And in it, something black caught Alex’s eye. Wheezing, puffing clouds of breath, Alex leaned on his shovel. In the cold dry air, steam was rising off his bare skin. Normally, that would have made him feel heroic, but right now he was distracted. With bare fingers, he picked through the loose snow beside him and plucked out a charred page fragment, frozen stiff. It was shaped like a tiny flattened 19

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Texas and only the burnt edges were black. The typed letters were dark red, and all of them were bleeding pink clouds from the moisture.

Five partial lines were visible. vicious tal blind and bloody, Alexande Glory lunged but couldn’t er Miracle kn s dead.

Alex looked up at the morning sky, gray and cool, dotted with blue pools. Countless questions were boiling over in his mind, but all of them were caused by one very uncomfortable fact.

Last night had not been a dream. From the snowy footprints on the carpet to the falling sky fire, to the arm around his throat. He held the proof in his hands. Had someone taken his blood? But why would they?

His world was ending. Of this, Alex was certain.

And he wasn’t wrong.

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2

The First Shadow Alex was pushing the shopping cart for his mother.

Which meant that he was draped facedown over the handle and shuffling behind her, staring into the cart while she occasionally added to its contents. His puffy coat rustled every time he breathed, and the rubber toes of his borrowed boots squeaked as he dragged them on the linoleum floor.

His mother didn’t seem to mind. She didn’t even seem to notice. In the grocery store, the contents of the shelves required her full attention. Normally, that attention was joyous and eager, even when money was short. Not today.

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Today, Millie was twitchy, whispering into the red scarf that was wrapped around her neck and chin or pulling on her long braid as she scanned prices, and glancing up and down the narrow aisle every time she heard another cart.

The store was decorated in shades of orange, from the humming tangerine lights to the cream-and-rust floor.

Pumpkin and brown banners weren’t just for Thanksgiving, they were a year-round thing, and right now they wore green and red tinsel garlands to reassure the shoppers that the store knew Christmas was coming and that the tiny and terrible speakers in the ceiling weren’t playing “Here Comes Santa Claus” by accident.

Alex had spent his morning at the library with his father, but their time together had been just as silent on both sides of the outing as it had in the middle. A silence sandwich. Jude had picked out a stack of books for himself and then had settled into one of the two easy chairs in the old Carol Ryrie Brink children’s wing with the Alamo architecture, right beside the fireplace. Alex had perched in the other chair, flipping pages in comic books and trying to find the right question to get his dad to talk, along with the courage to ask it. Who burned one of your books in the yard last night? Can I see the inside of your left elbow? Did we get our blood stolen? Do you ever type in red ink? These were the things Alex had wondered, but they seemed crazy and he hadn’t had the courage to ask.

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A squeaking cart crossed the end of the aisle and Millie looked up, practically holding her breath. When the cart passed out of sight, Millie tugged her scarf loose and let it hang around her shoulders. Her face was flushed.

The problem with winter, Alex knew, was the heat.

Everybody dressed for the few minutes that they would spend in the cold, but then they spent hours wearing wool and down outer layers in the fully heated indoors. He could feel sweat all over his torso, but he didn’t even think about taking his coat off. Where would he put it? He had other things to worry about.

“Did anyone come over last night?” he asked his mom. “After I was in bed?”

Millie picked up a large box of raisins. She paused, but didn’t look at her son. Alex hated raisins, and he knew she knew it.

“Why don’t you tell me?” She asked, studying the ingredients. “Did they? I was asleep.”

Alex didn’t answer. His mother turned and faced him.

“I don’t like raisins,” he said, nodding at the box in her hand.

She tossed it into the cart in front of him. “On a quest, raisins could save your life. Or on a desert island. Just ask Robinson Crusoe. Learn to like them. Now tell me why you’re asking. Is it your arm? What do you remember?”

Alex hadn’t meant to put himself on the spot. He 23

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straightened slowly, gripping the cart handle.

“It might have been a dream. I don’t know what happened.”

“Do you usually bleed in your dreams?” Millie asked.

“I know your father doesn’t, and he dreams whole novels.

I’ve seen him sleep-write, but I’ve never seen him sleepbleed.”

Alex took a deep breath and bit his lip.

“Dad was out cold,” he said. “Asleep or unconscious.

On his typewriter. And his pages were missing. Like he hadn’t been working on anything, but I know he had been. And the front door was open.”

Millie searched her son’s eyes. “Did you see anyone?

Anything? Did you go outside?”

Alex didn’t know how much to say. Definitely nothing about the arm around his throat. Not because he didn’t trust her. He did. More than anyone. Just because he didn’t want her panicking, and he knew she would.

With enthusiasm.

“Do you know Dad’s stories?” Alex asked suddenly.

Millie blinked. “What do you mean? Of course I know them. Why?” “Have you read them?” Alex asked. “Especially the Miracle stories. The ones about Sam.” Millie raised her eyebrows high. “I think I know those stories even better than your father does. Except for the 24

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comic books. Those got a bit silly. Why are you asking me this?”

Alex shoved his hand in the pocket of his sweats.

The page fragment had thawed. Now it was soggy and crumpled.

“There were footprints,” Alex said. “Inside the house.

And a bunch of Dad’s pages were burning outside in the snow. And there were northern lights. And then someone came up behind me, and when I woke up, I was inside. I figured it was a weird dream until I found a piece of one of the burnt pages when I was shoveling. It was a story about Sam. And a character in it had my name.”

Alex pulled out the scrap and gave it to his mother.

Millie smoothed it quickly on her palm.

“The ink is red,” Alex said. “And the paper feels really weird.”

A voice coming over the store speakers interrupted the Christmas music. Someone was being paged.

“It isn’t paper,” Millie said. “And it isn’t ink.” She looked up. “Does your father know about this?”

“Well, he typed it, didn’t he?” Alex was confused.

“Maybe,” she said. “Does he know that you found this in the yard? That someone saw it before you did?”

“I . . .” Alex trailed off and then shrugged. “I didn’t tell him.”

The lights above the aisle flickered and Millie yelped, 25

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grabbed Alex’s arm, and crouched, ready to run. She was panicking. Alex sighed. He shouldn’t have said anything.

“We have to go,” Millie whispered. “Right now. Leave the cart.” She dragged Alex down the aisle, race-walking toward a jog. “We have to get home. I have turkey jerky.

Fruit leather. Jam. Pears and peaches and applesauce.

We’ll be fine. We can fill backpacks.”

“Mom, what are you talking about?”

“Hush! No.” Millie shook her head. “We can’t leave!

Your sisters! They’d never understand. We can’t just leave them! They’ll get married. They’ll have grandchildren, and they’ll all be here.”

Alex locked his knees and braced himself. His mother jerked to a stop.

“Mom!” He hissed. “Calm down. What is going on?”

“Someone found us,” Millie said. “That’s what’s going on. They were never supposed to find us. This was supposed to be a better time. We chose a time that didn’t matter. A place that didn’t matter. We were never supposed to move again.”

Alex’s brain could find nothing but confusion. Along with everything else, his mom was going insane. Or his parents were criminals. Or spies?

A voice crackled its second announcement through the speakers.

“Millicent Miracle, phone call at register two. Millicent 26

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Miracle, you have a phone call at register two.”

The Christmas music returned.

Millie looked up at the ceiling. Her eyes were wide and her mouth was hanging open.

“Mom?” It was Alex’s turn to grab his mother’s sleeve.

“Mom!” A shadow with razor-sharp wings flashed just below the lights. Needles of cold air and a barnyard smell billowed into Alex’s face.

“We can’t go out the front! They’ll be waiting.” Millie turned and began to run for the back of the store. Alex ran behind her, trying to see what they were running from. To catch a glimpse of what had thrown the shadow.

The dairy section was along the back wall, and beside the cartons of milk and bricks of margarine, there was a door to the stock room. Millie hit it with her shoulder and plunged through. Alex smiled at two startled shoppers and followed after her. The back room was dark, with large naked light bulbs hanging above wet concrete floors. Millie wove between a pile of rotting produce and a pallet of glass-bottled soda, her braid swinging and snapping behind her. She was heading for an employee entrance.

“Hurry, Alex!” she shouted, and then hit the door and barged out onto the snow and ice, flailing her arms and scrambling to keep her footing. Alex slid out behind 27

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her, but he had his feet spread and was ready. Grabbing at his mother, he barely managed to save her from falling.

“Shoplifters?” a boy asked behind them. He was pimply, redheaded, and wearing a stained brown apron under his puffy vest. He flicked ash from a cigarette. “Don’t matter,” he added. “I’m on break.”

“No,” Alex said. The smoker looked his own age.

“No, not shoplifters. My mom just got startled. You know? That’s all. C’mon, Mom.” Gripping his mother’s arm, Alex helped her shuffle along the building toward the parking lot out front.

“You shouldn’t smoke!” Millie yelled. “You really shouldn’t. You’ll die!”

“But I look good living,” the pimply kid countered.

He waggled his eyebrows.

“No,” Millie said. “You don’t! You look stupid.”

“Mom,” Alex said. “Let it go. Do you still have the car keys?”

Millie Monroe sat in the car, breathing as evenly as she could manage. The old brown Rambler shook slightly with the idling engine, and the air blowing out of the vents was barely warmer than the great frigid outdoors.

The inside of the windshield was covered with continents of frozen condensation, but there were a few clear holes in front of Millie, and her eyes were focused through one of 28

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them, locked on the front of the grocery store. Her heart rate was almost back to normal. No one had exited the store. No one was in pursuit. Yet. Maybe it had just been a phone call. But that shadow . . . and her old name.

“What just happened?” Alex asked.

Millie looked at Alex. He was too young to be so big already, wasn’t he? Already taller than Jude. His dark mop of hair was touching the saggy upholstery in the car ceiling. His dark eyes were forward, studying the storefront.

She’d done her best with him, hadn’t she? But had she spoiled him? He’d never slaughtered a chicken or milked a cow. He probably had no idea how to make butter. And why would he? She’d raised him on margarine. The stuff had seemed like a miracle, even if it tasted a little like gasoline and carpet.

Alex probably couldn’t even start a fire without matches. But that was Jude’s area, and he was hardly outdoorsy himself. Never had been.

No, Alex wasn’t exactly tough.

But did he need to be? This was 1982. Was a mom supposed to make life harder for her kids just because?

One hundred years ago, the world had killed anyone who wasn’t tough. Of course, it killed all the tough ones, too, it just usually took a bit longer. Toughness had mattered way back when Millie had been his age.

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