“Lots of groups don’t trust the queen or her government, or they don’t want to pay taxes that support the police. They have their own economies.”

The queen. Her government. Secret economies.

Paranoid. Tinfoil hat kind of stuff.

When he was done picking up pennies, he walked along the train tracks and I followed him.

Solomon did not smell good. His clothes were sour with cigarettes and scotch—someone else’s; Solomon didn’t drink or smoke. There was also definitely body odor—his own.

“Do you want to come over to my house?” I asked, after a while. “Hang out, eat some food, take a shower?”

He laughed. “I stink, don’t I?”

“How long has it been since the last time you bathed?” And did you know that lapses in physical hygiene are a common symptom of mental illness?

He shrugged. “Couple days. There’s a brakeman’s hut up ahead, where I sleep sometimes. Doesn’t exactly have the amenities of a four-star hotel.”

We walked. I tried out about a hundred questions, in my head, before saying, “Tell me about the queen.”

“She’s an asshole,” he said, then laughed. “But she’s in a difficult position. Half the city is afraid of the other half, and vice versa, and she has to make both sides as happy as possible, even though most of the time they’re at each other’s throats. She still wears all black, even though her wife died six years ago. She rides a white tyrannosaur—the only tyrannosaur allowed in the city. It’s a nod to the othersiders—the people with powers—that she cares for them, too.”

He stopped.

“Sometimes I can see it so clearly—what’s real and what’s not. Like right now, this all sounds crazy, and I know it’s not real. But then something will happen, I’ll hear a bell, or see the color blue, or I’ll doze off, and it’s all of this that seems crazy—these train tracks, this town, these people. You . . . talking to me like nothing’s wrong. That’s what’s not real.”

His make-believe world was getting stronger. He was sick. But maybe he was also . . . special? Able to see things other people couldn’t? What if something real was happening—to me, to the world around us—and he had insight into it?

“You said something was coming,” I said. “What kind of something?”

“Seeds that were planted long ago are beginning to bloom. People are afraid; people are angry. Fear and anger don’t stay silent. They become action.”

I thought of Sheffield. The wave of vandalism.

“Do you remember?” I asked, and this time the question came out without my thinking about it. “Do you know what happened to us? When we were twelve?”