“You been there?”

With another quick shake of his head, he backed up so that he could lean against the brick storefront behind him. “I’ve heard they’re like a cult. Rumor is some of them were victims of those attacks, you know? Like what happened in our camp. And now they’ve sort of gone in together and have their own thing going.”

Or, more likely, those victims of the attacks were Mazikin now. They’d become the bad guys. And there were enough Mazikin at this point that they were being noticed by others. It was both good and bad—people knew they existed now, though they had no idea what the Mazikin were. They would assume a cult or gang, when the truth was much more terrible. I looked over my shoulder at Malachi, who was watching the kid with a predator’s concentration. His gaze slid over to me, and he inclined his head in the direction of the Jewelry District. I nodded.

I pulled a ten-dollar bill from my pocket and held it out to the kid. “Nice talking to you.”

He wiped his nose with his sleeve and took the cash with a silent bob of his head. Something about the vulnerability of that movement caught me, and suddenly I wondered where this kid’s mom was. Was she worried about him? Had she thrown him out? Or was she like my mom, stuck in oblivion?

“Take care of yourself,” I murmured, pivoting on my heel, now headed to scope out the Jewelry District. How easily I could have been just like that kid. How close I had been.

“Are you all right, Captain?”

I let out a long, slow breath, wishing he would say my name. I needed to hear it now. “It’s fine. I wish I could have done more for him than just giving him some cash. He’ll probably be shooting it into his arm within the hour.”

“You know a lot about what happens out here,” he said. He put a careless, heavy arm around my shoulders as another cop drove by. We were supposed to be a couple, out for a stroll, and it made me ache.

“I lived a different kind of life than the kids we hang out with at school, that’s for sure,” I said. “I come from a completely different place.”

“I can see that. They are quite privileged, I think.” His arm dropped away from me.

My chuckle was bitter. “Yeah, that’s a nice way of putting it.”