“Not what, but who,” Philby said.
“Okay. I’ll play along. Who is it?”
Philby looked to Willa, who couldn’t take her eyes off the screen.
“Who is it?” Philby asked Willa.
“It’s Chernabog,” she whispered.
Maybeck lived with his aunt above Crazy Glaze, her paint-your-own-pottery shop. It was old, in need of some repair, and located on a busy street with a fair amount of traffic. As he arrived, he could see through the front windows that business was booming, as was nearly always the case after school got out. He headed around back and bounded up the stairs and into the kitchen, which was just behind a storage room that held two small kilns and steel shelves of fired and unfired pottery. He yanked open the refrigerator and found the remnants of a cooked chicken that he devoured in minutes. He drank milk directly from the carton because his aunt wasn’t there to scold him and made a peanut butter and banana sandwich—with honey—then strapped on his Crazy Glaze denim apron and prepared to help out front.
He wouldn’t think about homework until after the shop closed and they cleaned up; after they cooked and ate dinner together. He and Jelly—his aunt’s nickname—were quite the team. While he struggled through geometry, she would watch Jeopardy! in her recliner, beating most contestants to the answers in a loud and enthusiastic voice.
The storage room had a lot of freshly painted work on the shelves. Before he went any further, he took several minutes to stack the left kiln to the limit, close it, and set its timer. It was going to be a busy night. There were bigger items that would require the outside kiln. Maybeck began making a mental list of all that had to be done, trying to fit his homework into it. He was dog-tired from the Base patrol the night before—when the Keepers crossed over to their holograms, their sleep was so disrupted it barely counted.
“Bathroom?” he heard a boy’s voice say from the main shop. He experienced a brain fart and forgot what he was doing. The voice had triggered this. A familiar voice, he thought. But familiar in the same way a rattlesnake’s rattle tells you to jump.
Maybeck didn’t hear Jelly tell the boy that the bathroom was off the storage room because his mind was already engaged—defensively. The small room was wall-to-wall steel shelves, with a big worktable in its center like a kitchen island that left extremely narrow aisles between it and the shelves. Every square inch was stacked with breakable pottery. Maybeck was stuck at the horseshoe end with the kilns. Past the table and to the right was the store. Past the table and to the left was the kitchen, and next to it a door to the small customer bathroom. A primitive instinct surged through him the moment he heard the voice: fight or flight. He knew it was no normal customer. Whoever belonged to the voice was after him.
Greg Luowski stepped through the curtain, spotted Maybeck, and smiled grimly.
Maybeck had gotten Finn’s text. This was the same creep that had tried to poison his friend.
“Hey,” Luowski said. “Bathroom?”
Every nerve in Maybeck’s body was tingling as a second boy came through behind Luowski—another boy with green eyes, just like Luowski. They meant trouble. He was outnumbered.
“Right there,” Maybeck said, indicating the door, but never taking his eyes off Luowski.
Luowski in turn did not take his eyes off Maybeck as he reached out and spun the somewhat smaller boy around in order to access the boy’s backpack. The kid was unfamiliar to Maybeck—small but sturdy with narrow, deep-set eyes. From the backpack, Luowski withdrew what looked like two water guns. He handed one to the other kid.
“What’s with the water guns?” Maybeck said, thinking he’d misread the situation and that Luowski simply wanted to fill a water pistol in the bathroom. “I don’t think my aunt would appreciate—” He caught himself as Luowski raised the pistol.
Not a water gun after all.
* * *
Maybeck had already taken several steps toward the kitchen door after picking up on the familiar voice. As Luowski reached for the backpack, Maybeck reached for an unfired platter—some kid’s attempt at becoming the next Picasso—and raised it like a shield when the water pistols (that weren’t water pistols) were aimed at him.
Luowski pulled the trigger and fired.
Not a normal gun. No sound to speak of. No bullets. A vapor trail flickered, like animation.
No, not a vapor trail, he realized, but wires.
The platter broke into colorful pieces that rained down onto the floor along with the projectile: two shiny metal points like the ends of knitting needles. A stun gun, he realized. Luowski had tried to Taser him.