“Once the drones smell you, they follow no matter how fast you run,” Slightman’s boy said eagerly, “or how much you twist and turn. Right, Da’?”

“Yer-bugger,” Slightman the Elder said. “Then sprout blades that whirl around so fast you can’t see em and they cut you apart.”

“All on gray horses,” Roland mused. “Every one of em the same color. What else?”

Nothing, it seemed. It was all told. They came out of the east on the day Andy foretold, and for a terrible hour—perhaps longer—the Calla was filled with the thunderous hoofbeats of those gray horses and the screams of desolated parents. Green cloaks swirled. Wolf-masks that looked like metal and rotted in the sun like skin snarled. The children were taken. Sometimes a few pair were overlooked and left whole, suggesting that the Wolves’ prescience wasn’t perfect. Still, it must have been pretty goddam good, Eddie thought, because if the kids were moved (as they often were) or hidden at home (as they almost always were), the Wolves found them anyway, and in short order. Even at the bottom of sharproot piles or haystacks they were found. Those of the Calla who tried to stand against them were shot, fried by the light-sticks—lasers of some kind?—or cut to pieces by the flying drones. When trying to imagine these latter, he kept recalling a bloody little film Henry had dragged him to. Phantasm, it had been called. Down at the old Majestic. Corner of Brooklyn and Markey Avenue. Like too much of his old life, the Majestic had smelled of piss and popcorn and the kind of wine that came in brown bags. Sometimes there were needles in the aisles. Not good, maybe, and yet sometimes—usually at night, when sleep was long in coming—a deep part of him still cried for the old life of which the Majestic had been a part. Cried for it as a stolen child might cry for his mother.

The children were taken, the hoofbeats receded the way they had come, and that was the end of it.

“No, can’t be,” Jake said. “They must bring them back, don’t they?”

“No,” Overholser said. “The roont ones come back on the train, hear me, there’s a great junkpile of em I could show’ee, and—What? What’s wrong?” Jake’s mouth had fallen open, and he’d lost most of his color.

“We had a bad experience on a train not so very long ago,” Susannah said. “The trains that bring your children back, are they monos?”