“Stephen.” Jinadh laid his silverware down and glared at their son.

“What?” asked Stephen, digging out a lump of potato and mashing it with his beans. “There’s no point in it. Everybody’ll hate me. I’ll never get into secondary, not after all this swineshit.”

Jinadh scowled. «You will be respectful when you speak to your mother.»

“Don’t turn all Porachin papu on me,” said Stephen. “You hate that. It’s why you rotten left.”

Jinadh’s mouth opened, but no sound came out. Lillian drew a breath, readying a scolding or an edict of banishment or some other castigation she never got to level, because glass shattering in the front hall cut her off.

“What—?” Jinadh began, half rising. But he was interrupted by a loud series of bangs, like gunfire but not quite.

Stephen was out of his chair before either of them, with the agility of the young and a mix of enthusiasm and relief that put a hot splash of anger through Lillian’s gut. Their house had just been attacked, or something of that stripe, and he was glad to get out of a scolding?

And then she remembered he was thirteen, and a handful, and he would take any excuse to avoid a serious conversation.

Jinadh got out after him and Lillian followed, smelling cordite. Magnusson met them still wearing an apron streaked with soapsuds. Cold wind howled into the front hall through the broken front window, tearing smoke from a set of exploded firecrackers. The tile was scorched, and the rug smoldering, but beyond the window nothing was damaged. Thanks be, the house hadn’t caught on fire.

Stephen was already poking at the husks of the explosives. “Jumbos,” he said, eyes wide. “These are the big kind.”

Lillian remembered a boy in Carmody who’d once stuffed a firecracker into a toad and hurled it after her as she ran. Nausea threatened, filling her mouth with spit.

“Ma’am,” said Magnusson. “I’ll fetch a broom. And some cardboard for the window. Would you like me to ring the police?”

“No,” she said, imagining the scene, the story in the papers, the satisfaction it might give the bomber. The ideas it might plant in other people’s heads. Better to keep this to themselves if they could. “But thank you. Stephen, put that down.”

He had picked up a heavy stone from the center of the wreckage—smoking red paper, crumbling fuses, the tatters of a brown paper sack—and was weighing it in one hand. Soot streaked his palms.

“Lillian,” said Jinadh, and inclined his chin toward the rock as though it deserved closer attention.

It was jagged at the edges, gray and mostly flat. Limestone, maybe, or a chunk of cement. The detonating firecrackers had marked it in places, but not scorched the surface beyond recognition.