“You’re not . . . a lot alike.” I’d been probing for info, but this was a surprise bonus.

“Yeah, well.” Dark Boy—still couldn’t call him Julian—retrieved the waste pail and took it to the window. Pushing aside the drape to let in more light, he picked through the contents, held up a paper or two, shaking each gently.

“So why aren’t you concerned?”

“About what?”

“Daniel! Your so-called brother!”

“Are you deaf? I said he’ll be fine.”

“Don’t you care about anything?”

“What’s the point? They’ll only take it away from you.”

Hard to deny. I sighed. “I’d give anything for family.”

“Take mine. I got more than I need.”

“How can that be?”

“Try being the youngest. Dan freakin’ woke me out of a sound sleep to save your ass.”

“But you came.”

He sucked in like he’d tasted something sour. “Not doing it ain’t worth the nag.”

The notion of mild, smiley Daniel ordering this snarky wildling around made my brain itch. Never mind how he could go up against the posse from the future. Well, either he could, or he was dead. Pretty simple. The law of the streets.

But I felt lied to. No, misled. My wrong assumptions encouraged so that I misjudged them both. Couldn’t blame Dark Boy. His wildling persona was his armor and camouflage in the streets. That he actually answered to someone made him less of a threat. But if Dark Boy was uptown, wouldn’t his brother be uptown, too?

I’d let Daniel become a kind of hero-saint in my mind: the Book Dude, standing up for peace and decency in a violent, amoral world. Saints aren’t supposed to get down and dirty with the villains. It put me off-balance, like a trusted walkway had gone wobbly beneath me.

The room felt overcrowded now. “If the Soukies are really gone . . . I’m due at my den.”

“Give it ten, just to be sure. And I ain’t riding you home, so don’t get any ideas.”

Like I might actually want to ride with him again? “I stashed a kayak over east . . .”

“I got you here. You’re on your own.”

“Do you have anything but a totally aggravating tone of voice?”

“You’re no stroll in the grass yourself, den rat.”

Whatever was left of the churlish adolescent in me, Dark Boy brought it out in spades. So we both sulked for a while, he at the table by the window sorting through the damp contents of the bucket as if nothing could be more interesting, me cross-legged on the couch, rearranging the even damper contents of my mind, with an eye to making sense of the last several hours. There had to be a through-line, if only I could grab onto it.