Page 81 of The Man Made of Smoke

But then the young man looks away.

“Keep up,” the man tells him.

The flower van first. The woman working inside is young and pretty, and she has a kind face.Help me, James thinks. But not only does she avoid looking at him, she even turns away. And the same thing happens when they go inside. The student behind the food counter is too distracted; the man at the amusement arcade is too angry; the boy in the shop watches him with open hostility. Person after person, the horrible realization settles inside James that nobody is going to help him.

Everything the man has told him is true.

Nobody sees.

And nobody cares.

And then, finally, the bathroom at the end of the concourse.

The man locks himself away inside a toilet stall, whistling to himself. James is suddenly alone and untethered. He feels the air beginning to sing with tension.

Run, he tells himself.

But his body won’t respond. It’s the same sensation he remembers having on the beach—a lifetime ago now—but it’s so much worse. He is long past the point of helping himself; he is only a little boy, one whosomehow feels even younger than he was back then. What he needs is for someone to take his hand and lead him to safety. Away from the man. Away from the boy waiting back at the farm.

All it would take is someone—

And then James hears the door open behind him.

He turns slowly. The boy who walks into the bathroom a moment later is about his own age, and the sight of him takes James’s breath away. It is like staring at his own reflection—or into a mirror that shows what he could have been if things had been different. They stare into each other’s eyes for a second. And the boyseeshim—he’s not like the others here. The boy knows instantly that something is wrong. Perhaps it’s because he’s a child too. Maybe it takes someone who hasn’t quite grown out of their own nightmares yet to recognize when they’ve just walked into someone else’s.

Help me, James thinks.Help us.

Because if you won’t then nobody will.

The boy stares back at him, and the hope in James’s heart flickers a little more brightly. Even just the eye contact, just beingseen, gives him courage, and he starts to take a step forward. But then the man stops whistling, and James stops and glances sideways at the closed door. Doing so breaks whatever spell exists between him and the other boy. When James looks back again, he sees the boy is already ducking into the far stall.

Pulling the door closed.

Locking it.

Hiding.

And that last little flicker of hope inside James gutters out.

The man emerges from his own toilet stall a moment later. Even after all this time, James still knows better than to look at the man’s face, but he can sense the expression of triumph there right now.

The man ruffles his hair as he walks past.

He stops briefly outside the stall where the other boy is cowering. James walks past it afterward, dutifully following the man out, and he reaches out to the door as he does. His fingertips touch the wood sosoftly that the boy inside cannot possibly have heard, and yet James senses him flinching.

You could have saved us, he thinks.But you didn’t.

And after a moment’s hesitation, he takes the photograph out of his pocket and places it on the floor.

So that’s yours now.

When they arrive back at the farm later, the man takes James to the house. A few of the chickens flutter about frantically in their cages, but the man seems indifferent. He doesn’t look down the patchy yard either. Past the pens of animals, to the enclosure at the far end, where the slumped shape of the boy waits in the early evening gloom.

But James does.

Inside the house, the man leads him through to the dirty kitchen at the back, then unlocks the heavy padlock on the door there. It opens onto a set of flimsy wooden stairs descending into absolute blackness below. James has never been down here. The man’s heavy boots tap solidly on each step as he descends. James’s own land more softly behind as he follows him down into this cold, dark space underneath the world.

At the bottom, the air smells of mold and earth.

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