But Bailey’s plan was about to backfire in the most spectacular of ways. Because Lovell had anticipated an attack on his property of exactly this kind and he was ready for them. As the teenager pushed open the shop door, a loud crack went off.

“What the fuck?” said Charlie.

Bailey let out a yell and stumbled forward, clutching his arm. He tripped over the lip of an ancient tin bath placed just inside the door of the shop and fell in, headfirst.

The others heard splashing, and then a strangled cry, followed by sobbing, ugly and raw. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” Bailey was muttering that word over and over again and each time it was striated with fear and disgust.

He tripped out of the shop door backward and swung around to face the three teenagers, pawing at his eyes. He spat on the grass, two or three times. Aster’s flashlight was strobing wildly as she ran forward to help him, but the light touched his face and she balked, backing away from him.

“Help me,” he said.

Bailey’s clothes were clinging to him and his tears were carving tracks down his face.

His skin was no longer pale. Rusty patches were drying across his cheeks and forehead, in the fine hairs of his eyebrows and the folds of his ears. His haystack of hair was much darker and so wet that droplets rolled down his neck and hit the grass in a steady rhythm, like the beat of a heart.

A baptism not of water or fire, but of blood.

They all stared at him, frozen by the sight of the boy in his slowly stiffening clothes, clots sticking to his skin.

“Oh my God.” Marco breathed out all their fears.

Bailey was still holding his arm, still crying. “It hurts.”

“Let me see,” said Aster, waking up. She could not bear to touch him, struggled to move closer, but her compassion would not let her ignore him. And when she stepped nearer, she realized that instead of the animal stink of copper and spoiled meat, there was a familiar, synthetic odor.

Not blood, but red paint.

She touched his arm lightly, just below the sleeve of his T-shirt. And there it was. A hole in the skin, a puncture wound.

“I think you’ve been shot,” she said. “You need to go to the hospital.”

Charlie was there in an instant. “Don’t be fucking stupid. Yeah, sorry, we were setting fire to a shop and our friend got shot. We’ll go back to your place. You’re the nearest. We can clean him up there.”

Aster imagined Bailey trailing paint on the pale floorboards of their new house, Charlie opening cupboards in the kitchen, looking for food, loud and aggressive, Marco, sweet but ineffectual.

“Not all of you,” she said. “Just Bailey.” She turned to him. “Can you walk?”

“Yeah.” But when she looked in his eyes, she read pain in them.