Jake thought about it. It made him sick to think about it, way down in the pit of his stomach, but he thought about it anyway. “Dunno. If there’s seventy, I guess I’ll have to try to get ten.”

He found himself thinking (with a mild sense of wonder) of Ms. Avery’s English class. The hanging yellow globes with ghostly dead flies lying in their bellies. Lucas Hanson, who always tried to trip him when he was going up the aisle. Sentences diagrammed on the blackboard: beware the misplaced modifier. Petra Jesserling, who always wore A-line jumpers and had a crush on him (or so Mike Yanko claimed). The drone of Ms. Avery’s voice. Outs at noon—what would be plain old lunch in a plain old public school. Sitting at his desk afterward and trying to stay awake. Was that boy, that neat Piper School boy, actually going out to the north of a farming town called Calla Bryn Sturgis to battle child-stealing monsters? Could that boy be lying dead thirty-six hours from now with his guts in a steaming pile behind him, blown out of his back and into the dirt by something called a sneetch? Surely that wasn’t possible, was it? The housekeeper, Mrs. Shaw, had cut the crusts off his sandwiches and sometimes called him ’Bama. His father had taught him how to calculate a fifteen per cent tip. Such boys surely did not go out to die with guns in their hands. Did they?

“I bet you get twenty !” Benny said. “Boy, I wish I could be with you! We’d fight side by side! Pow! Pow! Pow! Then we’d reload!”

Jake sat up and looked at Benny with real curiosity. “ Wouldyou?” he asked. “If you could?”

Benny thought about it. His face changed, was suddenly older and wiser. He shook his head. “Nah. I’d be scared. Aren’t you really scared? Say true?”

“Scared to death,” Jake said simply.

“Of dying?”

“Yeah, but I’m even more scared of fucking up.”

“You won’t.”

Easy for you to say,Jake thought.

“If I have to go with the little kids, at least I’m glad my father’s going, too,” Benny said. “He’s taking his bah. You ever seen him shoot?”

“No.”

“Well, he’s good with it. If any of the Wolves get past you guys, he’ll take care of them. He’ll find that gill-place on their chests, and pow !”

What if Benny knew the gill-place was a lie? Jake wondered. False information this boy’s father would hopefully pass on? What if he knew—

Eddie spoke up in his head, Eddie with his wise-ass Brooklyn accent in full flower. Yeah, and if fish had bicycles, every fuckin river’d be the Tour de France.

“Benny, I really have to try to get some sleep.”

Benny lay back down. Jake did the same, and resumed looking up at the ceiling. All at once he hated it that Oy was on Benny’s bed, that Oy had taken so naturally to the other boy. All at once he hated everything about everything. The hours until morning, when he could pack, mount his borrowed pony, and ride back to town, seemed to stretch out into infinity.