Kyle scanned the cars doing laps around the common. A yellow one had a child’s safety seat in the back and, in it, a child—it went by too quickly for Kyle to be able to tell whether it was a boy or a girl—who looked no more than three or four. The child was patting his arms up and down on the padded shelf of the seat and appeared to be wailing.

“Jesus,” Kyle said under his breath. “Jesus.”

The kid will be okay, he told himself. As long as the car just keeps wandering around, what could happen to the child? The youngster was safer in the car than outside.

Right?

At some point, someone would be able to rescue the kid. So, okay, the child would be hungry by that time. There’d probably be a load in the kid’s pants. Briefly traumatized. But that was survivable. Kyle didn’t need to worry himself about—

The Arrival with the child on board began to swerve sharply. The wheels turned hard left, then hard right, then left again. It was going down the street like a sidewinder snake moving at high speed.

As the car made another pass, weaving wildly the entire way, Kyle caught a better glimpse of the sole passenger.

A little boy. His head was bouncing from side to side in sync with the car’s movements. And his crying appeared to be more frantic now than on the last lap. What the hell was the car doing?

Kyle knew.

The car was toying with him.

“Shit,” he said. A few more laps and the kid would end up with—what did they call it?—shaken baby syndrome.

He glanced at his watch. Derek should be to the harbor by now, waiting. He needed to get to the other side of the common, which he figured could be done by taking a circuitous route behind the stores.

“Stop it!” the woman screamed at the car. “Stop shaking him!”

Out of nowhere, a young man with shoulder-length, scraggly black hair, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, ran into the street with a metal chair from one of the restaurant patios. He stood in the car’s weaving path, and when it was no more than thirty feet away, he tossed the metal chair directly at it, then leapt out of the way.

Despite the Arrival’s inherent skills at accident avoidance, it was not able to swerve in time and ran over the chair, which instantly became caught in the vehicle’s undercarriage. The chair sparked as it was dragged across the pavement. The car, its right front wheel now suspended several inches off the road, came to a wobbly halt.

“Yes! Yes!” the woman cried, watching with her palms welded to her cheeks.