And the day was perfect. A gray blanket of cloud completely obscured the sun. There would be no harsh shadows, no tricks of the light to get in the way. The air was cold. The wind had a smoky edge to it. Each boy would stand before me in his team T-shirt, as I’d specified in my instructions, bare arms exposed and goose bumped, shivering. My sense of triumph as I came to a stop was complete.

And then I saw him. Sheffield. Standing beside his car, waving at me.

“Shit,” I said.

“Shit,” Solomon said.

“What the hell is he doing here so early?”

“Same thing as you,” Solomon muttered. “The first to arrive controls the space.”

“I’ll let him think that,” I said, and remembered that Sheffield had assigned Solomon as Connor’s target. “Don’t talk to him, okay? Like, at all. He’s a manipulative little shit and he’ll get inside of your head.”

“He’s a punk,” Solomon said, getting out of the car, smiling, waving at Sheffield. “And he’s smaller than me. He won’t do shit, not without his army behind him. He’s weak. That’s why he’s a bully.”

I nodded. Sometimes Solomon lived in a fantasy world full of horrors, and other times I could see that he understood our world way better than I ever would.

I got out, and took a picture of Sheffield, grinning, leaning on the hood of his car. His proud smile shrank, the slightest bit. Weird shapes swung through the air around him.

Past the theater, there were only woods. Walk through them far enough and eventually you’d come to the freight train tracks.

Sheffield shook hands with both of us. “Good to see you, Solomon. What’s shaking?”

Solomon glared down at the shorter boy, then made a low snickering sound. “Have fun, Ash,” he said, without breaking eye contact, then stalked off.

“Strange dude,” Sheffield said to me.

“Everybody’s strange, if you really get to know them,” I said, and busied myself with setting up my equipment. He tried chatting me up a couple more times in the hour until the rest of the team started arriving, but I deflected each attempt.

Where had Solomon gone? Into the theater, like he said? And what would Sheffield do about his being there—since he’d already hung a target around his neck? Would he tell the others? Would he tell Connor? Would he call off the shoot? Or—the more likely scenario—would he do something worse than anything I could think to anticipate?

But then I couldn’t think about it anymore, because the shoot was underway. I had light tests to do, sample shots to make. Finding the right balance of ISO and shutter speed and aperture. I decided to err on the side of a longer exposure, to allow a smaller aperture, which would give me greater depth of focus.