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so … so Gypsy? If anyone saw him, they would assume he was here to steal something.
    “Come in,” Sándor said reluctantly. It was preferable to him hanging around in the hallway.
    Tamás turned a slow circle in the middle of the room, checking it out. The proportions were a little odd because a dividing wall had been put up in what had originally been one large, well-lit room. Now Sándor and his neighbor each had half a window and a greater familiarity with each other’s bodily noises than they would have liked, since the dividing wall was pretty much just painted plywood. But apart from that.…
    “This is nice,” Tamás said. “You’ve got a lot of books, though.”
    “That’s because I’m a student.”
    “Right. And which class did you get these for?” Tamás grinned broadly, pointing to a shelf full of well-worn paperbacks. He pulled one of them down, and Sándor instinctively reached out a hand to stop him.
    “Morgan Kane,” Tamás read. “
The Devil’s Marshal
.”
    “Don’t damage it,” Sándor said. “They’re really hard to come by these days.”
    He couldn’t explain his fascination with the lonely, hard-hitting US Marshal. He was well aware that Westerns were not exactly what Lujza would call “literature,” and he pretended he only ever read them to improve his English. But the books consumed him, and he had followed the entire course of Kane’s life, from vulnerable, orphaned sixteen-year-old to aging, disillusioned killer. Or almost the entire course—there were eighty-three books in the series, and he only had eighty-one of them. He was missing
The Gallows Express
and
Harder than Steel
.
    “Where’s your computer? You have one, don’t you?” Tamás asked, tossing
The Devil’s Marshal
onto the bed. Sándor picked it up and returned it to its place on the shelf.
    “Why do you ask?”
    “Come on now,
phrala
. Are you my brother, or what?”
    Phrala
. He had heard people call each other that on the street in the Eighth District, their voices gently mocking, evoking a sense of community that he wasn’t a part of. Hey, brother. Hey, Gypsy. No one called out to him, though. They could tell he didn’t belong.
    Take care of the girls and Tamás
. But he had only been eight years old. What did she expect?
    “What do you want?”
    “There’s just something I want to find out. Online, I mean. You have Internet access, right?”
    “Yeah,” Sándor admitted, reluctantly.
    S ÁNDOR HAD TO log him onto the university network with his own username and password, but otherwise Tamás needed no help. He clearly didn’t want Sándor looking over his shoulder.
    “What are you searching for?”
    Tamás glanced at him briefly. “None of your business.”
    “Um, hello? That’s my computer you’re using, right?”
    “Okay, okay. It’s a girl. Happy?”
    There was a fidgety energy in Tamás’s compact body, excitement or anticipation of some kind. It worried Sándor and made him a little envious. He had never been young the way Tamás was young right now—there had always been so many rules for him to follow, so many unforeseeable consequences if he stepped out of line.
    “You can’t sit here and surf porn, just so you know.”
    “I’m not! It’s not like that. I’m just going to chat with her a little.”
    “Is she Roma?” Sándor blurted out. Knee-jerk reaction, as if that were the most important thing. It would certainly be the first question his mother or grandmother would ask, he thought.
    “No, she’s a
gadji
.”
    “What does Mom have to say about that?”
    Tamás straightened up and turned around. “Well, it’s really more what Grandma would say. If they knew, but they don’t.”
    Tamás’s hands flew over the keyboard. But Sándor noticed that one of them was flying more slowly than the other.
    “What happened to your hand?”
    Tamás turned it over and studied it for a second, almost as if he hadn’t realized anything was wrong with it until now. The skin