“Give me one?” Cyril asked. “A toffee, I mean.”

Stephen handed one over. Cyril examined it, almost put it in his pocket, and then remembered he wouldn’t need to save it for later. There wouldn’t be much of a later, for him. He unwrapped the candy and put it in his mouth. It was slightly stale, and hard, so it went into his cheek to soften while he unloaded the mouse-eaten game bag he’d brought along.

“What’d you bring those for?” Stephen asked, as he removed a short length of copper pipe and a sack of furniture tacks liberated from the pantry, a hand drill likewise swiped from the garage, cigarette papers, and a box of the old shotgun shells he had discovered in the shed.

“These,” said Cyril, shaking the tacks, “are shrapnel. This—” the pipe, “—a housing. We’ll use the papers to make a fuse. And these?” He picked up a shell and pulled the brass cap from the tube. Gunpowder escaped in a fine spray across his fingers. “Explosives.” Then, a loaf of bread, some cheese, and two leathery keeper apples came out of the bag. “This is just lunch.”

“Temple bells,” said Stephen, eyes huge in his skinny face.

Cyril shrugged, and sat down on the frozen ground to get to work. “I told you I would teach you how to build a better bomb. No time like the present.”

“Why don’t you want to go?” asked Stephen, when they’d finished emptying the shells—very carefully—into a piece of parchment paper.

“Hold this steady,” Cyril said, handing him the pipe. “And I mean steady.”

Stephen gave him a very teenaged look. When Cyril didn’t yield, the look shifted briefly to concern and then to concentration. Cyril picked up the parchment paper at either edge and placed the narrowest point of its curve on the lip of the pipe. One end was sealed already with a cap. The other cap sat by in a nest of copper shavings they had made drilling a hole for the fuse.

Both of them held their breath as the gunpowder hissed against the metal, the steady stream of it building slowly to a solid layer of black.

“Stop,” said Cyril, when they’d filled half the pipe. “Tacks.”

Eyebrows relaxing beneath the brim of his cap, Stephen said, “Really, why don’t you want to go? I’d leave.”

“You’re smarter than I am,” said Cyril. Cold had seeped through his body, turning him pleasantly leaden and impervious to small pains. He had heard that freezing to death was the easiest way to go—that hypothermia induced euphoria so sweet you met your death with a smile.

But that would be too easy. More than he deserved.