For a moment, the child’s eyes met Lucy’s as she stood staring from across the street, and in its small, pained eyes was a wordless plea: Make it stop.

“You got it, precious one,” Lucy whispered.

She closed her eyes and summoned Mr. Hands, then followed the couple on foot until they stopped by a phone booth at the opposite end of the square.

The father went into the booth to make a call while the mother stood outside, adjusting the fluffy collar of her pricey coat because she was cold. The child looked up at her with teary eyes, trying to turn around in its seat, arms extended, wanting so very much to be in Mommy’s arms.

Lucy crossed the street and walked past them just to test a theory; sure enough, as she slowed her steps to smile down at the baby, it reached out toward her, a moment of hope on its freezing face.

Simple human contact, that’s what it wanted, a warm touch from anyone.

Please.

Lucy winked at it, then went to the end of the street and turned around.

This was the part she’d grown to like the best, knowing that only she and those monsters who were about to be dispatched could see Mr. Hands. There was a crack between the walls of the finite and the infinite, and in this place, when she summoned him, Mr. Hands could freeze things—time, perception, matter, she wasn’t entirely certain—but for the few moments it took for him to dispatch a Monster, Mr. Hands, his targets, and herself existed only in that space where the walls of the finite and infinite didn’t quite fit together as tightly as they should have.

It was their little secret, one that she was happy to keep from the chronos-bound world of consensual reality.

It made her laugh sometimes, the idea of consensual reality: why did people think so small?

She called for him again.

And there he was, looming over the phone booth like a curse from heaven, a soldier of SHIT. Lucy noticed the quiver-like basket that he’d recently fashioned from tree branches and roots that was slung over his back, held in place by a strap that she suspected was constructed of equal parts sinew, sticks, and flesh.

Protruding from the rim of the basket were a couple of arms and part of a leg.

Mr. Hands did not leave the body of every dispatched monster behind; he kept a few for his own amusement. What that amusement might be, Lucy didn’t care to imagine.

He looked at her and she made a small pushing gesture with her arms.

Balancing on his stumps, Mr. Hands reached out and gently, silently, without the mother even noticing, moved the child out of harm’s way. Aware not only that it was being pushed, but that it was being pushed by something unseen, the child’s face lit up with mystified glee.

This pleased Mr. Hands to no end, and with one of his fingers he tenderly mussed the child’s hair, which sent it into another fit of wondrous giggling.